Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  David Treuer, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, lives on Red Lake reservation in Minnesota. In his book Rez Life, he describes the texture of life there.

  There aren’t really any farms on Red Lake Reservation, and there are only a few backwoods businesses advertising welding, small-engine repair or logging. There are only four convenience stores I know of . . . Other than these, there is no place to buy gas or food. There were no hotels until 2010, when Red Lake opened a casino . . . Until the new casino was built the biggest building on the rez, except for the hospital, was the BIA Jail.

  There are no hair salons, Starbucks, Einstein Brothers Bagels, cell phone stores, Radio Shacks, Jiffy Lubes, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Rent-A-Centers, car dealerships, Gaps or Old Navy stores. There aren’t even any real billboards. What signs do exist are often small, hand painted on plywood, as often as not propped against a tree rather than planted on the ground . . . All of this—this nothing—on a reservation the same size as Rhode Island.

  Since nontribal members are not as a rule allowed to live on the reservation, Treuer turns his attention to a strange sight on the highway leading up to the reservation, which he calls the Compound. The Compound, he writes, houses what he terms the “foreign” workers—government officials, welfare bureaucrats, research teams, medical personnel, teachers and administrators—a veritable army of overseers who help oversee the reservation but don’t belong to it.

  Many native Indians are hostile to these “foreigners,” whom they associate with “the white man.” Many of their complaints seem to be legitimate, given the atrociously low levels of education and opportunity. Some native Indians, young and old, demonstrate their resistance to the white man by refusing to learn his language. Remarkably, they speak no English. I wonder what school conducted in English must be like for students who speak no English. The students who endure this must experience it as surreal.

  But interestingly the overseers of the reservation do nothing to fix these problems or even to combat the racial resentment. Indeed, they encourage it. Treuer doesn’t know the reason, but a pretty good guess is that they know it will keep the Indians clustered together on the reservation, under their supervision. Otherwise they may get the crazy idea to leave and make it in the white man’s world.

  Native American life at Red Lake, Treuer informs us, is bad as measured on a whole train of indices, in line with the situation facing native Indians on most reservations. The only affluent tribes are the ones that operate successful casinos, such as the Seminole in Florida. Red Lake has a casino, but since the reservation is in the middle of nowhere, attendance is relatively sparse. Average household income in America: over $50,000. Average household income at Red Lake: $21,000. The unemployment rate is in the range of 50 percent, and teen unemployment approaches 100 percent.

  Treuer movingly describes the cultural pathologies of life at Red Lake, again quite similar to those at other reservations. Family life is chaotic, as suggested by the remarks of a native Indian policeman, Steve Hagenah. “As you know,” Hagenah tells Treuer, “families are all broken up . . . Sometimes when I’ve got to interview someone, a witness or whatever, I go to three or four, sometimes five places before I find who I’m looking for. Kids are floating all over the place and their own families don’t know where they are . . . These kids are like motor pool cars. No one takes care of them until they’re broken. And then it’s too late.”

  In confirmation of an old stereotype, there are serious problems of drugs and alcohol. Suicide rates are high. A major cause of death is traffic accidents, which apparently occur much more frequently here than anywhere else. Violence is epidemic, occurring at ten times the rate it does in the rest of the country. Treuer notes that in one town called Bena, population 140, one in six residents has done more than ten years in prison.

  Sound familiar? I don’t know if Treuer or Whiteface has ever been to Baltimore, Chicago or Oakland, but if they visited those places I think they would see how the federal government has wreaked the same havoc on them as it has on Pine Ridge and other Indian reservations. On the urban plantation, as on the reservation, no one seems to do much, but there is one thing that they do reliably. Red Lake Indians, according to Treuer, are conscientious voters. “More than 90 percent of Red Lakers go to the polls. Of these, 90 percent vote Democratic.”15

  THE MULTICULTURAL PLANTATION

  The Democrats’ new plantation, just like the old Democratic slave plantation, must expand in order to survive. Let us see why this is so. Blacks are 12 percent of the population, so with 90 percent of blacks voting Democratic, the Democrats have locked in 10 percent of the vote. American Indians are less than 1 percent of the population, and the Democrats get most of them. Asian Americans are just under 5 percent and the Democrats get around 60 percent of them. Still, this is less than 15 percent of the total population.

  But there is another group, Hispanics, or Latinos, who are even more numerous than blacks, 13 percent of the population. These terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” are not racial. This group includes light-skinned and dark-skinned people who typically have a mixture, in varying proportions, of white, black and Asian heritage. “Hispanic” is linguistic, referring to people from the Spanish-speaking countries south of the border. “Latino” is a wider term, encompassing people of Central or South American descent, including, for example, Brazilians who typically don’t speak Spanish. Since both terms are in popular use, however, I use them interchangeably.

  Hispanics are the nation’s largest minority and, being a young population, also the fast-growing. Some demographers estimate they will make up 25 percent of the population by 2040. If the Democrats could get 90 percent of Hispanics, this would add at least 10 percent to their current vote, raising them to a guaranteed base of 25 percent of the national total with the promise of an even greater harvest in the future.

  Now it’s just a matter of getting to 51 percent, or more accurately, to the electoral vote total needed to win elections. To their locked-in ethnic base the Democrats expect to add in other reliable Democratic voters—professors, journalists, artists—as well as other identity groups—feminists, a group mainly composed of single women and unmarried mothers, and homosexual and transsexual activists—and there is the Democrats’ electoral majority. At least, this is the strategy of the Democrats today.

  So now we turn to the Hispanic plantation, otherwise known as the barrio. Right away we confront a puzzle. We might expect that Democrats would be energetically courting Latino citizens, making the case for how wonderful the barrio is, for how much they are doing for the barrio and so on. But we hear none of this. Instead we hear about DACA “dreamers” and illegal immigration.

  Dreamers, according to a series of recent tweets by Democratic senator Charles Schumer of New York, are America’s best citizens. In 2018 Democrats briefly shut down the government in angry resistance to Trump’s refusal to go along with their DACA “fix.” This political allegiance to illegals is bizarre in that, with the possible exception of some cases of voter fraud (where illegals show up and cast a ballot), in general illegals can’t vote. What, then, explains the priority of this issue with progressive Democrats?

  Leading Democrats say that they sympathize with illegals as much as they sympathize with blacks and other minorities. I suspect this is true, and I interpret it to mean that they sympathize with all these groups to the extent that they prove to be politically useful to them. Progressives also declare that America needs illegals; without them—as Hillary Clinton suggested a few years ago—who will do the menial jobs like cleaning hotel rooms and picking fruit that illegals routinely do?

  Leave aside the racist condescension of this statement, which closely mirrors the views of pro-slavery Democrats like James Henry Hammond, who defended slavery on the grounds of a so-called mudsill theory: in sum, there was dirty, degrading work to be done, and therefore we needed a dirty, degraded class of slaves to d
o it. In reality, between 1942 and 1964 America had a guest-worker program for Mexican Americans, the Bracero program, which allowed them to work legally in this country without becoming American citizens.

  Nearly five million Mexican contract laborers came to the United States under this program, mainly as agricultural workers. Despite periodic complaints about farmers taking advantage of these foreign workers—there was even a television exposé, Harvest of Shame—on the whole the program was profitable for growers and beneficial to the workers, which is why the workers kept coming. Yet in 1964 a Democratic Congress with President Johnson’s approval shut down the Bracero program.

  Why? One of the strongest proponents of closing down the guest-worker program was the Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez. Chavez believed that Mexicans coming to America as guest workers and working for low wages would prevent Hispanics in this country from unionizing farm labor and pushing—with government backing—for higher wages from the growers. And in fact Chavez’s farm worker movement only took off, and was able to secure 40 percent wage increases for grape pickers, once the Bracero program was terminated.16

  As we might suspect after considering the fate of the Bracero program, the progressive focus has always been on recruiting citizens who can vote onto the Democratic plantation. With Hispanics today, the left is trying multiple initiatives. The first is to make the case that America stole the upper half of Mexico from Latinos and therefore Latinos should “take back their country” by rallying together as Democrats. This argument has limited validity in that the Mexicans who ended up on the American side of the border prospered far more than their counterparts in Mexico. Even so, this progressive pitch resonates with some young Latinos who like to think of themselves as aggrieved victims.

  A second approach is bilingual education. Here the left emphasizes that it is not necessary for Hispanics to all learn English in the mode of earlier generations of immigrants, who shed their native languages and adopted the American lingua franca. The point of bilingual education is not merely for Democrats to show appreciation of the native language of Hispanics but also to maintain Hispanic group solidarity. The Democrats need Hispanics and Latinos united as a class in the Democratic camp.

  Bilingual education is typically part of a more comprehensive progressive ideology, the ideology known as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a doctrine of culture, of the equality of all cultures. The basic idea here is that all ethnic cultures are equal and none is better or worse than any other. “Each human culture is so unique,” writes Latino anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, that “no one of them is higher or lower, greater or lesser than any other.”17

  The point of this is not merely to teach ethnic pride or self-esteem. Nor is it, as usually advertised, a campaign to defeat “hate.” Rather, it is to teach Hispanics—along with blacks, Native Americans and Asian Americans—to each affirm their ethnic identity and, even more, to define it in resistance to a white identity or even a unified American identity. While posing as a benign neutral doctrine of the equality of cultures, multiculturalism is an aggressive expression of the us-against-them ideology. Far from resisting hate, it is actually a form of hate—hate directed against what is derisively termed the “dominant culture.”

  Now on the face of it, the notion of the multicultural premise—that cultures are merely different, and no culture is superior or inferior, better or worse, than any other—is manifestly silly. To make this point, I don’t need to prove that the American Constitution is superior to the Iroquois Charter or to raise the question, “Where is the Proust of the Papuans?” Rather, I can simply appeal to immigrant experience. Every thinking immigrant—including every thinking Hispanic—knows that all cultures are not equal.

  How so? The reason is that immigration itself is a walking refutation of multiculturalism. As an immigrant myself, I know that we have a natural attachment to the place where we’re born. When I left India I left everything I knew and loved: my birthplace, my family, my school, my friends. This is not easy, and no one makes lightly the decision to permanently leave.

  And yet, immigrants do. In doing so they are casting a decisive vote. And what is the immigrant doing if not voting in the most telling way possible, which is to say, with his own feet, against his native culture and in favor of the new culture to which he is relocating? And why would anyone do this if they weren’t confident that the new culture would provide not merely a different life but a better life?

  Despite its absurdities, multiculturalism is indispensable to progressive Democrats because it is a necessary alternative to assimilation. Democrats saw what happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Irish, the Italians and the eastern Europeans assimilated. Suddenly these immigrants, who previously saw themselves as Irishmen, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks and so on began to think of themselves generally as “Americans.”

  Their identity shifted, and this shift helped dissolve the whole ethnic urban machine system that Van Buren and others had so painstakingly assembled on behalf of the Democratic Party. When Irishmen and Italians became Americans, they were no longer reliable Democrats. By FDR’s time, Democrats had to move from a system of ethnic allegiance to a new national system of worker allegiance through the labor unions. Even this new system proved fragile over time as unions lost much of their power.

  Imagine the catastrophe that would face the Democratic Party if African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic Americans stopped thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans and thought of themselves simply as Americans! Democrats cannot afford for these groups to lose the collective solidarity that is the basis for the pact that the Democrats seek to make with them: “We will take care of you if you agree collectively to vote for us.”

  So multiculturalism is a way to defeat assimilation, at least for the black, brown and yellow people. It is a way to undo the historical process of Americanization and substitute for it a new formula in which each group affirms its own ethnic identity and agrees to deposit itself on its own ethnic plantation, which is then run by the progressive Democrats. Far from being an ideology of empowerment, multiculturalism is in fact an ideology of ethnic resentment toward whites that is, in the end, aimed at reconciling minority groups to their own enslavement and dependency on the Democratic plantation.

  Yet none of this—not bilingualism, not “conquest of America” rhetoric, not multicultural mantras—has delivered Hispanics fully into the clutches of the Democratic Party. Hispanics do vote Democratic by substantial margins. Obama, for instance, won more than two-thirds of the Hispanic vote. But Hillary got a few points less than Obama, which could be the result of her personal flaws, or it could mean that Hispanic support for Democrats is now holding steady or even trending down.18

  This is not good for a party that wants and needs a heavy Hispanic vote—something close to if not in the same range as the virtual monopoly that it has over the African American vote. To understand the Democrats’ Hispanic problem better, and what the party hopes to accomplish by raising the banner of the illegals, let’s turn to the story of my wife’s cousin, Ellen Martinez, who grew up in a family of migrant workers.

  DEPLOYING THE BIG LIE

  Ellen and my wife Debbie grew up in the south Texas region of the Rio Grande Valley, close to the Mexican border. Debbie was born in Venezuela. Her dad was Venezuelan but her mom was Mexican American, actually a fifth-generation Mexican American from the valley. When her parents divorced Debbie moved to a barrio on the outskirts of Harlingen, Texas. Her cousin Ellen lived with her twelve other siblings and their parents, Raul and Maria Elena, in nearby La Grulla.

  Yet Debbie has very few memories of Ellen, for the simple reason that Ellen’s family was always gone. They were migrant workers. This meant that every summer, and often through the year, Ellen’s parents would pack up the family and drive halfway across the country in search of manual labor. Typically they went to Cal
ifornia or Oregon or Washington State, where both parents worked picking onions, apples, raspberries or asparagus at pay rates ranging around $4.25 to $4.50 an hour.

  “We’ve had our lives in boxes for so long, it’s natural for us,” Ellen’s mother Maria Elena told journalist Isabel Valle, who profiled the Martinez family for a book about migrant labor, Fields of Toil. Work hours are from 4 a.m. to sundown. The migrants live in temporary trailers in work camps that have been set up for them. Amenities are very limited, the smell of Mexican food fills the early morning and late evening air, and the only sounds of recreation are the Tejano songs blasting out from portable radios on the fields and in the camps.

  The migrants share food and appliances; children from different families even share clothes. “You always have to think of others who have less than you do,” Maria Elena says. “We may be poor but we have a lot more than other people, so we share what we do have.” Since money is scarce, the Martinez family only buys what it absolutely needs. Ellen and her siblings never went to the movies, to the mall, nor did they participate in any athletic activities that cost money.

  “I didn’t like migrating,” Ellen told Isabel Valle. “I didn’t like that life. I kept telling myself I would make sure I would never marry anyone who migrated. If there is anything I liked, I guess it was the traveling. But once we got to our destination it was always work. We never went sight-seeing or anything.” Only in her senior year in high school did Ellen stay back in La Grulla while her family went north to pick fruits and vegetables.

  Ellen’s family has done this for as long as she can remember, actually for more than four decades. Raul is an old man now, but he still can’t sit still. “That’s the way he is,” his wife says, “he always has to be busy.” In an interview for the book, she told Valle, “What really makes him happy is that he’s earning some money. Right now we only have enough to buy food. We still need money for the road, and we’d like to have a little saved up for the winter, when there is no work.”19