Chinga La Migra

It's hard not to think America isn't engaged in a spot of "ethnic cleansing".

I happened on this surprising and not-at-all-dour bit of polling over the weekend.

Just 58% of Americans say they’re “very” or “extremely” proud to be American — down from 85% in 2013 and the lowest ever recorded by Gallup.

(Dig down into the specifics of the full Gallup poll here.)

What I find so compelling and surprising about these numbers is the degree to which I find them not even a little surprising.

If I’m honest, I am squarely in that un-described 42% for whom neither very proud nor extremely proud cuts the hubristic mustard in response to this whole “being an American” business.

There’s no great mystery about what’s happened in the last 12 years. The “what’s happened” — which accounts for the nearly 30% decline in our national readiness to sing (or even hum) along with the next cheese-drenched chorus of Lee Greenwood’s saccharine cringe-o-rama — maps perfectly onto where and when and with whom you’re most likely to hear “Proud To Be An American”.

I am not proud of being un-proud to be an American. I find nothing rewarding or pleasant about it; there’s no frisson of chic, no breezy anti-establishment cool in the day-to-day experience of national identity which is not functioning to spec — an identification that could be and should be rewarding.

But lack of national pride is not America’s biggest problem. It doesn’t even rank in the Top 100.

Which is not to say that I think we — Americans, and hence America itself — don’t have a “biggest problem”, a singular, most significant dilemma.

Far from it. With each passing hour of each passing day, I’m progressively more certain that we do.

Our superlative “big trouble” has maybe been easy to miss, obscured by the constant barrage of “news”. It is difficult to parse the melody of the MAGA tune buried within the pummeling onslaught of buzzing and static that makes up the modern media signal.

If you’d have asked me about this “one biggest problem” last fall on election day or in the months leading up to Trump’s inauguration, I’d have said it was anti-pluralism — America’s most dooming modern failure and, by far, what is now it’s gravest mortal sin, is the popularity among 2024 voters of a political dogma holding that human beings ought not endeavor to live and prosper in proximity to more or less dissimilar others. It’s a movement which believes that, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” wasn’t just a neat idea that got abandoned too soon but, now that you mention it, sounds like an all-around better way to view… well, all the things, offering a nifty organizing principle (or dangerous myth of perfect control) for Marie Kondo-ing the crap outta this untidy country we live in.

Separation, by any means, is the desirable, good, right and true birthright of Real Americans™: white, Christian, heterosexual, and male Americans (Oh, and gosh, that pesky “but equal” part at the end? Absolutely negotiable. If that “equal” was a person, Trump would say he’d never met “equal”, know’s nothing about “equal”, but many people, very strong people, with tears in their eyes, have been telling him that “equal” is a loser.)

The primary and radical ethos of those empowered by American voters to control all the levers of government is this: the erasure of human abberance. It was and is their entire sales pitch — one framed in an emotional, adolescent rejection of late-capitalism’s free-moving culture. With a few edits, a philosophy which is (arguably) appropriate for teenagers was whipped into shape for populist electoral success: “you can’t make us eat yucky vegetables accept others” and it’s corollary “others are boring and stupid the enemy”.

At any given moment, “others” — those who should not feel safe, welcome, or secure — may include: weirdos, oddballs, geeks, feminists, trans people, trans athletes, people described by any part of the acronym LGBTQIA+, the disabled, stutterers, sub-Saharan Africans, North Africans, Kenyans, Haitians, El Salvadorans, Mexicans, university professors, Jews, Jews that don’t act like Real Jews™, Muslims, vegetarians, vegans, and those who eat “weird” meat, George Soros, pregnant women, unpregnant women, women who miscarry, childless women, “masculine” women, college educated women, the college educated, college students, the college bound, effeminate men, liberals, leftists, Marxists, socialists, communists, Democrats, independent minded Republicans, moderate Republicans, RINOs, people under arrest but presumed innocent, people with office jobs, the unemployed, the unhoused, the poor, the middle class, the “politically correct”, Disney, Antifa, Black Lives Matter protestors, protestors on days other than January 6th, community organizers, people who speak a language besides English, people who correct others’ English usage, pacifists, naturalized citizens, people who wear masks, people who think federal agents shouldn’t wear masks, black people, brown people, immigrants, ActBlue, Ukrainians, the Chinese, whistleblowers, journalists, civil servants, asylum seekers that are not white South Africans, environmentalists, people who drive electric cars, people who own/use/install forms of alternate energy production, Asian-Americans, Californians, blue-state elected officials, blue-state residents, vaccinated people, scientists, scholars, medical doctors, judges, Medicaid recipients, the insured, the uninsured, people in the military, military veterans…

Whoa, hoss…whaddya say we wrap this up and move on before we max out the word-count-o-meter? (And yeah, it is no secret that I …umm, let’s say I have issues with brevity and concision. Like a certain fictional TV President, I tend to think "anyone who uses one word when they could have used ten just isn't trying hard.”)

So, while I’d have been absolutely correct last year in centering MAGA anti-pluralism, in those moments, America’s “biggest problem” was only vibes. However, since the 20th of January, those vibes have been embodied, given form, breath, and life.

The blood-dimmed tide has been loosed. Molded from the clay of cheap bigotry and racism, an army of rough beasts are now unleashed and waging multiple fronts in a terrible war: in Congress and state legislatures, within government agencies and scientific laboratories, on campuses and in the streets. The widest front in this war against American pluralism has already become so obvious (at times laughably so, if you’re the sort to laugh at black comedy) and explicit that the truth of it is no longer worthy of debate by serious people. It is the brutal and sanguine desecration of American communities, workplaces, churches and homes by masked assailants, traumatizing individuals and families for little more discernible principle than that of genetic Powerball and cultural keno. More pointedly, it is, this very minute, the policy of American power to victimize those who fail to be descended from white European Christians.

I’m referring to the enormous machinery of cosmetic surgery at a national scale that goes by the name “mass deportation”. What was once the campaign promise of candidate Trump (and likely viewed by some as just one more exaggeration from a man known for urinating in the ears of listeners) is now an all-to-real reason to lose pride in America.

The vast majority of this pogrom’s victims are hispanics and Latinx people, with Mexico topping all the charts over at ICE, though nowhere in Central or South America is spared. But like any good genocidal panic in history, it is a pretty equal-opportunity affair and questions of origin, heritage, and final destination may soon be moot, as the Trump plan calls for more than 1 million forced deportations each year and a goal of expatriating, remigrating, denaturalizing or otherwise erasing somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million current US residents. Twenty million also happens to be the nice round number of people that Trump accused Joe Biden of purposefully importing for the kooky “Great Replacement Theory”, the tin-foil fairytale I can only guess is used by racist Mommies and Daddies to scare their kids into good behavior — or else a Jewish Columbian drag queen with they/frog pronouns, all torqued-up on government-subsidized Illuminati fentanyl, will come in the night to replace them at the polls, using their vote to make AOC simultaneously POTUS, Chief Justice, and Secretary General of the United Nations.

“Mass deportation” is just one name for this season’s Big Bad.

Here’s another:

The government of the United States of America is fully and openly engaged in ethnic cleansing.

That is, something akin to the imprisonment, expulsion, or killing of a minority by a dominant ethnic majority in order to bring about a state of local homogeneity.

Trust me when I say I’m not deploying this terminology lightly. There’s a lot of weight to saying that the US is engaged in “ethnic cleansing”, and it is a weight we must be accountable to, if for no other reason than that, as non-MAGA Americans, we represent the last remainder of the polity with an active commitment to the proposition that words mean things, as nutty and wildly idealistic as that proposition may be. And you can, if that sort of thing floats your boat (and you have a top-of-the-line, platinum-level library card), go really deep into the proverbial weeds on whether “ethnic cleansing” is meaningfully distinct — as a concept, term of art, or matter of law — from “genocide”, a word not only overflowing in meaning for us regular folks, but flush with institutional definitions and legal consequence. That conversation gets all the way hairy, with as many folks ready to dump either “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” or both. I find Martin Shaw, a sociologist who studies genocide, pretty compelling on the question:

How could ‘forced deportation’ ever be achieved without extreme coercion, indeed violence? How, indeed, could deportation not be forced? How could people not resist? How could it not involve the destruction of a community, of the way of life that a group has enjoyed over a period of time? How could those who deported a group not intend this destruction? In what significant way is the forcible removal of a population from their homeland different from the destruction’ of a group? If the boundary between ‘cleansing’ and genocide is unreal, why police it?

Whatever you call it, it is ever more obvious that America is going about it. I wrote a little about ICE atrocities here last week, and rather than cataloguing four-score-and-seven more…

• like the kid with leukemia that an ICE agent decided to flash his gun at, terrifying the child so badly that he urinated on himself

• or the children as young as 4 years old being forced to serve as their own immigration attorneys, in a system where 96% of those without counsel are deported and a lawyer brings that chance down to 23%

• the pregnant woman given cockroach infested food and denied healthcare, finally driven to a stillbirth and left to carry the dead child for three days

• adult detainees so thirsty that they’re forced to battle children for rare water bottles, and patterns of deprivation including gross lack of food, medicine, warmth, and the most basic sanitation

• ooh, then there’s the doors to family homes blown open with explosives, like in this video

…I’m going to suggest you type ICE RAIDS into your search engine of choice and bask in the splendor of reputable sources that should make the extremity of the situation pretty plain.

And you’re definitely gonna want read about the $170 billion that the forces of ethnic cleansing will rack up under the Big, Beautiful Bill and spend some time pondering what else ICE might get up to with all that money and staff — y’know, aside from more Call of Duty cosplay, grinding lives and families into dust, torching the dreams of what may be millions of human beings, kidnapping gay hairstylists with no criminal history and frog-marching them, sans due process and weeping for their mother, to distant foreign torture-dungeons where they will never once leave the one shared room where they live, eat, bathe, defecate and die, and doing all of it at immense expense and for absolutely zero demonstrable return-on-investment except that it assuages the infantile rage of conspiracy-addled bigots who feel betrayed by an existence that, for some damn reason, looks nothing like Ward Cleaver’s life on Leave It To Beaver.

“But hold on, Milo,” some might say, “it can’t be ethnic cleansing when the subjects of mass deportation aren’t all the same ethnicity. This is about illegal immigrants. Ethnicity isn’t the issue, it’s about getting rid of lawbreakers and dangerous criminals!”

Lies. And pretty thin, chintzy lies, at that.

First things first, as all sentient beings on the planet should now be aware (we’ve certainly written about it more than once), immigrants of any stripe or status commit far, far less crime of any kind than native born American citizens. Give no quarter and extend no mercy to those who still assert otherwise. They are not serious people and there is no excuse for remaining that perversely ignorant. What’s more, the often heard refrains of Trump, Steven Miller, Border Czar Tom Homan, wide swaths of GOP electeds now fully complicit in MAGA ethnic cleansing — that they are going after the “criminals, “killers, “rapists”, “monsters” and “worst of the worst” — are unadulterated hogwash.

All of it. Pure, USDA-Choice crap. As Philip Bump noted Monday in a great piece for the Washington Post,

The number of criminals and accused criminals who have been arrested by ICE and remain detained by ICE is up 128 percent over a year ago. But the number of immigrants with no criminal record arrested and detained by ICE is up more than 1,400 percent — there are more than 15 times as many now as there were then.

A previous piece by Bump detailed the shifting justifications of the Trump admin and concluded that, more and more, “‘Criminal immigrant’ means whatever the administration says it means…”

That definitely seems to be the case when trying to make sense of the growing number of migrants who’ve found themselves suddenly kidnapped by masked agents in the midst of doing their level best to move peaceably through the legal system — a system which once offered knowable, stable processes. Like so much of American governance since the ascendancy of Donald Trump, that sense of stability — really any measure of the consistency and predictability which has for decades marked the bare minimum of good government — is another casualty of leadership by imperial whimsy and caprice.

But here’s the more consequential bit, the important ethnic in America’s ethnic cleansing is our own. The Republican Party under Trump believes hard in a weird notion: that “American” denotes an ethnicity. From that simple idea follows the pogrom in which whomever (they decide) is not ethnically American should be erased, swallowed by the maw of genocidal trauma.

You see, it has recently become über-fashionable in the pseudo-intellectual fever swamps of the populist-right to proffer deep-sounding arguments, often carefully de-neonazified, that America is “not an idea, it is a nation.” That’s important. It’s a way of invoking all the emotional content of volkish nationalism, the emotional current behind the more gruesome atrocities of fascism, without, y’know, looking like Elon Musk doing worrisome salutes on election night or otherwise encouraging one’s neighbors in their suspicion that one has more than 10 or 12 swastikas in one’s basement.

These arguments assert that, contrary to any popular, colloquial narrative histories of America as a “melting pot”, “great experiment”, or set of ideals that we may stumble upon while still aspiring to embody — like, that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights — this nation is… well, not that. Instead, to the “America First” brigade, America is “a way of life” and “a particular people with a particular culture and traditions—a nation, in other words, with a shared past and a common future.” And it is just common sense, they reckon, that desirable migrants, the good ones, ought to possess a similar “way of life” — a white, northern European way of life.

Check this purulent dreck from right-wing stalwart The Federalist, in a recent manifesto titled “America Is A Nation, Not An Idea”:

We don’t want the Afrikaner because he is white, we want him because of his many cultural ties to America.

The plain fact is that an Afrikaner farmer, a descendant of Dutch Calvinists who settled in South Africa more than three centuries ago, will assimilate to our American way of life much faster and more easily than a Muslim from the Middle East or a villager from the Peruvian highlands—or even a computer programmer from India.

Some foreigners, like Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University grad and pro-Hamas activist who was arrested over the weekend on charges he was providing support to Hamas, are so far removed from American culture and ideals that they might never really become Americans, even if they are allowed to stay. Our immigration system should reflect that reality. That means it should not take the Afrikaner farmer nearly as long to become an American citizen as it might take someone like Khalil. So far from being racist or xenophobic, such a policy would simply reflect the reality of assimilation and prioritize social cohesion over fake process neutralism.

Take note of that phrase “far from being racist or xenophobic”. Also, how it’s not whiteness that makes them “want the Afrikaner” — as if that whiteness was something solely visual or chemical and not, in fact, absolutely everything about being white. The article is chock full of these insipid defenses.

In exchange for a little bit of your soul, you get plenty of classic variations on the always awesome “I’m not racist, but…” apologetic, like:

It’s not racist or bigoted to say this…

And,

…it’s not about race or ethnicity.

Ooh, and this choice nugget of totes-not-racism:

We need to find our way back to being able to talk about these things without incessant accusations of racism and xenophobia.

Man, are anti-racists always such busybody dorks or what? Total buzzkills, incessantly going on about the racist stuff we like to say and xenophobic things we like to do. Won’t they ever just shut their pieholes?

Hey, might you be wondering if they managed to get any time-honored antisemitic tropes in there? Don’t despair, dear readers! Over at The Federalist they got mad skills. Their bigotry game is tight. See how they pack several kinds of white power into single-serve paragraphs of home-cooked blood-libelin’ deliciousness:

Some will object to this entire line of reasoning about cultural points of contact. They will argue that American culture isn’t really derived from Christian Europe, that America is just a mish-mash of different things from all over the world that has inexorably led us to the multiculturalism of our time. Hence, prioritizing Afrikaners (or any other group) based on a shared ancestral or cultural heritage is at best simply wrong, and at worst is cover for racist immigration policy.

To this argument, one can only reply that multiculturalism is a polite fiction that’s been foisted on us by liberal ideologues beginning in the 1960s. It was and is part of a broader program of cultural revolution that aims to dismantle western civilization, destroy the Christian faith on which that civilization depends, and replace it with a flattened globalist corporatism that uses process neutralism to reduce people to economic units and nations to GDP output. The policies multiculturalism inevitably produces are those favored by global corporatists…

Lest you think I’m unfairly picking on The Federalist (but Lord help me, if anyone anywhere deserved to picked on), here’s more of the same from a screed titled “America is Not an ‘Idea’” at Chronicles, a rag that loves ‘em some “Western Civilization” (also Pat Buchanan… they really, really seem to love him, too):

Countries are not “ideas,” but places where citizens or subjects live. Ideas are thoughts, not the experience of intergenerational communities and their participants. History textbooks have been pouring off the presses in recent years that present the U.S. as an “idea” or an “experiment.” When I went to school in the 1950s I was still living in a settled country with widely shared cultural beliefs. I don’t recall either my contemporaries or my parents referring to this land as either an idea or an experiment.

This author, too, manages to include some “I’m not racist, but…” bona fides. You get a dollop of golly, slavery was bad but we were so much nicer to our slaves. And there’s an extra scoop of segregation was also bad but, damn y’all, isn’t desegregation just the pits? There’s even this lovely nugget:

If we assume (which I don’t) that George Floyd was the victim of a “horrific police killing,”…

Perhaps, since the author identifies as a boomer growing up in the 1950’s in “a settled country with widely shared cultural beliefs” — a more nauseating declaration of freakishly white myopia you’re unlikely to find — we might assume that he (of course it’s a he) has not quite figured out this whole, new-fangled www.com and it’s confounding system of tubes.

And again, just in case you’re thinking I’m cherry-picking a couple of cranks working at crank outlets, here’s a final example. This time I’ll up the stakes. How about the current Vice President of the United States and noted Casanova of fine furniture, J.D. Vance? (Note that, these days, there is no “far right” or “fringe” in the GOP. Those cranks? They are the Grand Old Party.) Here’s the same rationalization for ethnic cleansing, given last summer in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty—things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Across the MAGA universe, this argument justifies every act of pointless, white nationalist cruelty and the panoply of grotesque dehumanization visited upon everyone that fails to pass as whatever the executive branch may decide is “ethnically American”— within our borders, and without, where “America First” isolationism is projected to kill 14 million people by 2030.

The stormtroopers and brownshirts over at The Federalist sure seemed to pick up what Vance was puttin’ down.

…we have to recover the idea of American nationhood and shed the false notion that America is just a series of propositions open to every person from every corner of the world. In his RNC speech last summer, Vice President J.D. Vance described a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky near his family’s ancestral home. He knows he will be buried there among his family and his people, who “love this country, not only because it’s a good idea. But because in their bones, they know this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.”

We need to guard it carefully…

Guarding the homeland carefully is a shibboleth that The Federalist and it’s readers understand: challenge our narrow, tribalist vision and you will be on the receiving end of the wanton destruction and violence such fascist formulations inevitably unleash. Violence and destruction, “native citizens” lashing out in genocidal fury are, in this vision, the common sense outputs of accelerating the rightful, sanctified rage of the true American tribe.

There’s a reason anti-immigration parties are gaining traction across the continent: the native citizens of these countries, who must live with the disastrous effects of mass immigration, are realizing that their leaders have prioritized the needs of foreigners over the needs and wellbeing of their own people. They are rightly enraged by this betrayal, and the conflict it has engendered is only going to grow as time goes on.

Enraged by betrayal, conflict can only grow. And the only option — which is never for people just to grow the hell up and act like competent adults — is turning the conflict inward, unleashing the rage safely against the least protected, the vulnerable enemies within, channeling nativist anger into the violence and destruction of ethnic cleansing.

Vance concludes his graveside reverie, “That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” MAGA ethnic cleansing is to be expected if Americans are, by that logic, defined as those who fight for blood and soil.

The always brilliant Adam Serwer writing in The Atlantic provided this corrective rejoinder to Vance’s graveyard poesy and it’s explicit “homeland” nationalism and “die fighting” promise of violence.

As a historical matter, this is false, but it is also not special. Human beings have been willing to fight for “their homeland” for their entire existence, from prehistory to the present day. To say that Americans are willing to fight for their plot of land is to say that they are like every other group of people that has ever existed and that exists now. It is to say that there is nothing particularly special about America or American ideals at all. But the ideals that have animated the American project have exercised such a powerful appeal around the world precisely because they speak to more universal aspirations. And the notion that some Americans are better than others is a rejection of those ideals.

It’s in the America of those ideals that I’d be ready to say I’m “extremely proud” to be an American.

Until then, I think we’d best start pondering what we are prepared to do to live there.

I’m Milo Baynes. Thanks for trusting me with your time.

@milobaynes.bsky.social