Ancestry and Immigration in the US and UK

 

The United States is now being run as a dictatorship. That this would happen was pretty clear the moment Trump won his second term, and the Republicans won majorities in both the Senate and House. There are essentially three reasons for this. First, Trump and the Republicans have taken control of the Supreme Court, and that Court is in the process of neutering attempts by lower courts to stop Trump exceeding his authority as President. To do this they are making some very strange legal judgments: essentially the law is being rewritten to legalise a dictatorship. Second, Congress and particularly the House under the Republicans have made no attempt to oppose Trump, even when that involved Trump taking powers away from Congress. Third, Trump is much better organised than he was during his first term, both in terms of being able to place yes men or women in key positions, and also because he now has an organised movement, MAGA, behind him.

The US now has many of the ingredients of a fascist state. Large sections of the population are at risk of being kidnapped by the state, imprisoned and deported to a random country (sometimes to another prison) without due process. Tourists risk being detained for long periods. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is set to become the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. The Trump administration is seeking ideological control of US universities, and has already largely tamed what was once called the independent media. Opposition politicians are assassinated and Republican politicians use the occasion to score political points. The government supplies Israel with the weapons and almost complete political backing to what more and more people are describing as a genocide against the Palestinian people, and sanctions international judges and agencies that call this out.

An earlier version of this post was entitled ‘US democracy is now in Trump’s hands’. It was intended to convey not only the extent of Trump’s ability to end US democracy, but also that democracy could still survive because of his obvious incompetence. I now think that is a little too pessimistic. If the Democrats can win back the House in 2016 (winning back the Senate is much less likely) by a sufficient majority, then it could become the centre of an effective resistance to Trump. For that reason, as those elections approach we will see more attempts by Republicans to ensure that they are not fair. These attempts have already begun, and merely represent a scaling up of long standing Republican gerrymandering.

What I wanted to do in this post was highlight one particular current on the US far right (i.e. the Republican party), and link it with developments on the far right in the UK (i.e. Reform and the Conservatives). Part of MAGA thinking is straight political and economic nationalism: a wish to enhance America’s military and economic power. The latter has a strong nostalgic element to it: a fondness for manufacturing jobs, and when there was more economic self-sufficiency and less globalisation. Another key element in MAGA is what some call a return to ‘traditional values’ and which I will call social conservatism.

Part of this can be simple racism, but it is more general than that. It involves antagonism to minorities based on sexual orientation as well as race, nationality or religion, and returning to more traditional gender roles, for example. It involves returning to the social values of the past, sometimes quite distant past. However social conservatism has psychological foundations that go beyond nostalgia for past social values, and are related to wanting conformity (disliking ambiguity) and having a closed rather than open outlook.

This tends to make social conservatives identify with a particular group within society, and feel threatened or uncomfortable with those outside that group. That makes them not just nationalistic, but also antagonistic to nationals who are not like them. They are attracted to right wing populists not just because they like authoritarian figures, but also because those figures talk about, for example, ‘real Americans’ rather than ‘all Americans’. The more far right politicians can focus public discourse on these minorities as outsiders, and portaying them as a threat (calling them criminals etc) the more successful they will become at attracting the votes of social conservatives.

As John Ganz points out, this viewpoint is very different from words set out in the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, whatever meaning they might have had at the time they were written.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”

To be very simplistic, I suspect most social liberals believe in that statement even though they don’t always act as if they do, while many social conservatives do not believe in it at all.

But how to define ‘real Americans’. Race is an obvious way, religion may be another, particularly for evangelicals. Geography may be another, with small town agricultural America eulogized and large cities feared. What I find interesting about some in the US government and MAGA leadership is that they are promoting ancestry as the key to defining who ‘real Americans’ are, and crucially who are not real Americans.

Vice President J.D.Vance has for some time pushed the view that it is ancestry that defines true Americans. He talks of past generations being buried in US soil, and of a feeling of homeland felt ‘in their bones’. This sounds very similar to Matt Goodwin in the UK, who sees being English as about being able to trace your roots back generations to people who lived here. For both, a piece of paper giving citizenship is not going to suffice in defining nationality. For other right wing politicians expressing similar sentiments, see Ben Ansell here, or Sam Freedman here

Is this just code for skin colour? I’m not sure it is. After all, Goodwin himself and the far right press in the UK seem happy to talk about the dangers of white people becoming a minority in the UK at some date in the future. The days when racist sentiments like this could not be expressed openly have long gone. Instead the focus on ancestry can be seen as representing a ‘blood and soil’ type of nationalism that has a long and often terrible history. It fits with seeing the rural as representing the nation and cities as more alien. Crucially, it is exactly the kind of thinking that fits with an obsession with immigration.

If nationality is all about ancestry, then immigrants by definition can never become true nationals. They automatically become outsiders for those with socially conservative views. As immigration is increasingly viewed as inherently bad in so much public discourse in the broadcast media, this plays into the hands of those who would promote an ethnic type definition of nationality. This dehumanisation has already been achieved for asylum seekers, where the manufactured term ‘illegal’ has provided an additional way of ostracising them, and where the broadcast media showed little inclination to resist using that term.

Is Goodwin and Jenrick’s focus on ancestry just another example of the UK far right copying their US counterparts? Maybe, but it certainly involves a focus on ethnicity that only a few years ago would have been considered beyond the pale to a Conservative party led by Rishi Sunak. Moving the definition of outsiders away from just race or religion towards ancestry may have advantages for far right politicians, for two reasons. First, most people in the UK do not see race or religion alone as barriers to citizenship or being English. Second, a key part of Brexit was about excluding Europeans, who could be very white and Christian. [1]

Increasingly the Trump administration in the US is seen as a template by the two major far right parties in the UK, and much of the UK press. Newly elected Reform councillors attempt to end diversity roles even where none exist. Reform tries to mimic Musk’s DOGE. Both parties have become anti-science with their antagonism to achieving net zero. The Conservatives want to increase deportations.The converse of this, which no one should be shy of pointing out, is that this amounts to copying the policies of a fascist administration.

There is a good reason why Reform don’t like being called a far right party. It is the same reason that Trump denies he is a fascist. In both cases the labels convey much of what these politicians are really about, but which they would rather hide from public scrutiny. With their adoption of blood and soil descriptions of what it means to be English or American, we have one more parallel between them and past dictatorships that they really don’t like being compared to.

[1] In contrast, for a country like the UK, those from ex-colonies who can trace their ancestry back to the mother country can still be regarded as English or British.