Immigrants Have Probably Made More Valuable Contributions To America Than Every Republican In Mississippi Combined

Anyone think they don't come from immigrant antecedents? Even "Native Americans" just got here-- from Siberia-- before the rest of our ancestors. They probably came looking for a better life... or maybe they were feeling from oppressors. My grandfather came from the Pale with his family when he was a young boy, fleeing Cossacks and tsarist pograms. The U.S. turned his family away but-- for some reason I never quite understood-- allowed my grandfather and an older sister to enter the U.S. The 11 other members of the family wound up in northwest Brazil. I only met any of them once-- when as just a child, and because I could speak a little Spanish (a relative of Portuguese, their language)-- I was their guide at the 1964 World's Fair. They told me most of the extended family lived in Salvador, Belém and Recife. They were generally successful-- penniless when they arrived, like my grandfather, devoted to education, hard work and entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty generationally.

My grandfather, my idol, was a socialist and a successful small business owner. His first grandchild-- me-- was the first to go to college, embraced his socialism and his ethos of hard work and entrepreneurship. A few years I sighed when I realized I had paid over a million dollars in federal income taxes. Who likes to pay that to the federales? Well... I didn't, but I thanked God that I had done so well for that to be my share. I may have been grumpy about paying that much but I was also glad to be able to and to contribute (especially after having gone to a free state university and having needed to avail myself of food stamps when I was getting on my feet at one time).

So what made me blurt that out today? I read a report from New American Economy: New American Fortune 500 in 2019: Top American Companies and Their Immigrant Roots. Although I wound up running a division of a Fortune 500 company, an AOL-TimeWarner record label, my own company-- the one I founded-- like my grandfather's was far from a big company. I sold mine to a big company though. "Immigrant entrepreneurs," the report began, "have long been an important part of America’s economic success story. Some of the largest and most recognizable American companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, including household names such as Apple and Costco, as well as newcomers to the Fortune 500 list like Broadcom and Intuit. Even Levi’s was created by two immigrants, Levi Strauss from Germany and Jacob Davis from Latvia, who invented that now iconic staple of the American wardrobe-- blue jeans... [M]ore than two out of every five Fortune 500-- the 500 largest corporation by revenue in the country-- had at least one immigrant or child-of-immigrant founder. This pattern has continued over the years since. This year, we find that an even higher share-- almost 45 percent-- of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children."

This year they found that "44.6 percent, or 223 companies, in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. Of those companies, 101 were founded directly by foreign-born individuals while another 122 were founded by the children of immigrants. Of this year’s crop of New American Fortune 500, several notable new companies made the cut.

New American Fortune 500 companies brought in more than $6 trillion in revenue.

These New American firms make important contributions to both the U.S. and the global economy. In fiscal year 2018, the 223 New American companies on the 2019 Fortune 500 list brought in $6.1 trillion in revenue. To put it in context, that figure is greater than the GDP of many developed countries-- including Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In fact, a country with a GDP equal to the revenues of the New American Fortune 500 firms would be the third largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and China.

New American Fortune 500 companies employ 13.5 million people.

These companies are a strong driver of job creation. On average, each New American Fortune 500 company employs 60,629 workers, 10.7 percent more than the average number of workers at non-New American Fortune 500 firms. Together, New American Fortune 500 firms employ over 13.5 million people-- a population that would rank as the fifth largest state in the country, just after New York but easily beating Pennsylvania.

Seven states have at least ten New American Fortune 500 firms.

When we compare companies at the state level, New American Fortune 500 firms are significant players in some states’ economies. Among the states that have 10 or more New American Fortune 500 companies, New York, America’s original immigrant gateway, leads the pack with 35 firms. California comes in second with 29 New American Fortune 500 companies, followed by Illinois with 21, Texas with 18, Virginia with 12, and both Florida and New Jersey with 10 each. Given their number and size, these New American companies have an outsized impact on each state’s economy. For example, in New York, the Fortune 500 companies brought in revenue that equaled 56.3 percent of the state’s total GDP and employed almost 2 million people around the world. In Illinois, New American companies brought in combined revenue equal to 70.3 percent of the state’s GDP.

Immigrant entrepreneurs play an indispensable role in our economy.

The New American Fortune 500 is only one example of how immigrants and their children create American jobs and drive our economy. Medium and small businesses are also vital to the U.S. economy, employing many more millions at neighborhood stores, restaurants, professional services, and other local businesses. Immigrants have a significant role to play here, with nearly 3.2 million immigrants running their own businesses. Data from 2017 also shows that immigrants continue to be more likely to be entrepreneurs than their U.S.-born counterparts. This increased propensity for business creation among immigrants is crucial for the U.S economy, as research shows that nearly all net job growth in the United States is attributed to new firms and startups.

Stef Kight explainedfior Axios readers why this matters: "The share of the most successful and globally recognized U.S. companies that have immigrant founders is growing, according to NAE's Hanna Siegel and Andrew Lim, while the Trump administration has tried to make it more difficult for immigrants to come to the U.S., often claiming that they take American jobs and lower wages."

Generally this welcoming attitude towards immigrants has been a shared American value, although there has also always been an ugly minority-driven racist, nativist, xenophobic strain-- stain-- as part of the country's polity-- even a Know Nothing Party that these ideas were based on. But now we actually have one of them in the White House.

Pelosi Still Didn't Condemn Trump, Just His Tweets-- What Will It Take?

Auschwitz Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

Last night the House voted on this Resolution of Disapproval, condemning Trump's racist comments (though not condemning Señor Trumpanzee himself-- nor even referring to him as a racist-- since Pelosi is still absolutely determined to continue protecting him from any such thing):

RESOLUTION Condemning President Trump’s racist comments directed at Members of Congress.

Whereas the Founders conceived America as a haven of refuge for people fleeing from religious and political persecution, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison all emphasized that the Nation gained as it attracted new people in search of freedom and livelihood for their families;

Whereas the Declaration of Independence defined America as a covenant based on equality, the unalienable Rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and government by the consent of the people;

Whereas Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional convention, "When foreigners after looking about for some other Country in which they can obtain more happiness, give a preference to ours, it is a proof of attachment which ought to excite our confidence and affection";

Whereas President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists";

Whereas immigration of people from all over the Earth has defined every stage of American history and propelled our social, economic, political, scientific, cultural, artistic and technological progress as a people, and all Americans, except for the descendants of Native people and enslaved African-Americans, are immigrants or descendants of immigrants;

Whereas the commitment to immigration and asylum has been not a partisan cause but a powerful national value that has infused the work of many Presidents;

Whereas American patriotism is defined not by race or ethnicity but by devotion to the Constitutional ideals of equality, liberty, inclusion, and democracy and by service to our communities and struggle for the common good;

Whereas President John F. Kennedy, whose family came to the United States from Ireland, stated in his 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants that "The contribution of immigrants can be seen in every aspect of our national life. We see it in religion, in politics, in business, in the arts, in education, even in athletics and entertainment. There is no part of our nation that has not been touched by our immigrant background. Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.";

Whereas President Ronald Reagan in his last speech as President conveyed "An observation about a country which I love";

Whereas as President Reagan observed, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors, and it is the Statue of Liberty and its values that give us our great and special place in the world;

Whereas other countries may seek to compete with us, but in one vital area, as "a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close";

Whereas it is the great life force of "each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed" through the 21st century and beyond and is part of the "magical, intoxicating power of America";

Whereas this is "one of the most important sources of America’s greatness: we lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people-- our strength-- from every country and every corner of the world, and by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation";

Whereas "thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge", always leading the world to the next frontier;

Whereas this openness is vital to our future as a Nation, and "if we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost"; and

Whereas President Donald Trump’s racist comments have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives

(1) believes that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger, and that those who take the oath of citizenship are every bit as American as those whose families have lived in the United States for many generations;

(2) is committed to keeping America open to those lawfully seeking refuge and asylum from violence and oppression, and those who are willing to work hard to live the American Dream, no matter their race, ethnicity, faith, or country of origin; and

(3) strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color by saying that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should "go back" to other countries, by referring to immigrants and asylum seekers as "invaders," and by saying that Members of Congress who are immigrants (or those of our colleagues who are wrongly assumed to be immigrants) do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America.

Yesterday, before the vote, Pig-Man-Enraged went on another racist tweet-storm as soon as he woke up:

As Politico's morning team wrote yesterday, "Republicans now have to vote on whether they approve of Trump's comments. Most are likely to stick with Trump, even while they say privately he’s a boor for thinking and voicing these thoughts. It will be very instructive to see whether Republicans like Rep. Paul Mitchell (MI), a member of House GOP leadership who has criticized Trump over the tweets, end up voting with Democrats. Monday evening, senior Republicans told us they expected 10 or fewer Republicans would vote to condemn Trump. A question for Republicans to ponder: What would you tell your child if they sent those tweets? Would you say it was OK?." Noting the packed press conference AOC, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib-- all of whom pop up on that Worthy Incumbents thermometer on the right-- he'd Monday afternoon, Politico pointed out that they "found a way to explain succinctly why they believe Trump is a racist and why he should be impeached. They were able to tie this incident to a set of immigration policies that Democrats of all stripes believe are wrongheaded and criminal. They also highlighted, perhaps unintentionally, what the Republican Party has become on Capitol Hill: a bastion of mostly white men who are unable or unwilling to criticize a white president who has targeted brown and black women."

So the resolution passed 240-187, primarily along party lines. Every single Democrat voted for it, even the worst of the Blue Dogs and New Dems who hate and fear AOC and Ilhan and wish them both all the worst.

Four Republicans voted with the Democrats-- Susan Brooks, who is retiring, Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents a swingy Philly-area district and often votes with the Democrats, Will Hurd, the Republicans' only black member and who represents a 70% Latino swing district in south Texas, and Fred Upton, who's represents a swing district in the southwest part of Michigan and senses he's all but doomed this cycle-- as did Independent Justin Amash. 6 Republicans didn't vote, including some who were in the room.

CNN analyst Ron Brownstein tried explaining why Republicans don't worry much about Trump's overt racism. The acceptance of Trump's Know Nothing approach to race and immigration "underscores his transformation of the Republican Party into a coalition centered on the voters and places in America most hostile to immigration in particular and demographic change in general."

This latest flurry of activity continues the drive by Trump and other Republicans elected mostly from the parts of America least touched by immigration to impose a restrictionist agenda on migration over the nearly undivided opposition of Democrats elected by the areas where most immigrants, both undocumented and legal, actually live. Though greeted without complaint by Republicans in Congress, Trump's promised raids provoked astoundingly open resistance from the mayors of virtually every large American city, from New York and Los Angeles to Chicago and Houston.

Trump's divisive tweets opened an equally imposing divide between the parties. Democrats were unvarnished and united in flatly describing Trump's tweets as racist and nativist, words that elected officials have rarely applied so unabashedly to the remarks of a sitting president. Only a tiny trickle of Republicans that widened slightly as Monday progressed raised objections and the vast majority tried to avoid comment altogether. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina obliquely suggested Trump "should aim higher" but then compounded the President's slur by calling the Democrats "communists" who "hate our own country" and are "anti-America."



...[A]ttitudes toward demographic, cultural and economic change have become the central fault line between the parties. Republicans mobilize what I've called a "coalition of restoration" centered on older, blue-collar, evangelical and non-urban whites who polls show are uneasy or frightened about the fundamental demographic, cultural and even economic trends reshaping America in the 21st century.

Democrats counter with a competing "coalition of transformation" revolving around the groups-- young adults, minorities, singles, secular voters, and college-educated whites, mostly concentrated in large metropolitan areas-- who are most comfortable with the change.

"Clearly we're headed down a path where there is one party for older white Americans and then there's another party for people of color and immigrants," says Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican US representative who was defeated last fall in a heavily diverse Miami-area district. "And this is very dangerous. It divides our society in a dangerous way. It paralyzes our political system."

These trends trace their roots back all the way to the civil rights revolution in the 1960s and have significantly accelerated since the closely divided election of 2000. But Trump's open appeal to the portions of white America most uneasy about cultural and social change, from immigration to gay and transgender rights and the changing role of women, have elevated these trends to an entirely new level.

The result is that hardly any Republicans at any level now represent urban constituencies with the large immigrant populations that Trump has threatened with intensified ICE enforcement or demeaned with his calls for four liberal House Democratic women, three of whom were actually born in the US, to"go back" to where they came from before criticizing America.

"I don't see any serious plan or strategy to grow the party in urban America," said Curbelo, who was one of the few House Republicans to represent a seat with large populations of immigrant and non-white voters. "And I see very limited effort to grow the party among the Hispanic community which was a major priority during the George W. Bush years and even afterwards during the Obama presidency. That is now virtually non-existent."

Instead, Curbelo said, Trump "uses cities to intensify the culture war and agitate his base."

Trump's victory in 2016, and his consistent support in polls from about 40-45% of the population, shows there is a significant audience for his hard-edged message on immigration and demographic change more broadly. But there is also a clear cost. In effect, Trump's bruising racially-infused nationalism is forcing the GOP to trade support among younger voters for older ones; secular voters for the most religiously conservative, especially evangelical Christians; diverse voters for whites; white collar whites for blue-collar whites; and metro areas for non-metro areas.

Since Trump's emergence Republicans have consolidated their control of small-town, exurban and rural communities. But that has come with significant losses for the GOP inside metropolitan areas even in red states, like Texas and Georgia.

The trade Trump is imposing on the GOP was apparent in 2016 and enormously intensified in 2018.

In 2016, Trump lost 16 of the 20 states where foreign-born residents constituted the largest share of the population and won 26 of the 30 states where they represent the smallest shares. Even in the relatively more diverse states he won, he lost the vast majority of the big urban centers where immigrants and other minorities generally concentrate. Overall, Trump lost 87 of the 100 largest US counties to Hillary Clinton by a combined margin of over 15 million votes, according to calculations by the Pew Research Center. Trump offset these losses by amassing the largest margins for Republicans in decades in small-town, exurban and rural areas.

In 2018 House races, Republicans suffered only very modest losses outside of metropolitan area districts. And they gained three Senate seats in states with large populations of white voters who are rural, blue-collar, or evangelical Christians: North Dakota, Indiana and Missouri. But the party was routed in metropolitan House seats that contained significant populations of minorities, immigrants, singles, college-educated white voters, or all of the above. After sweeping losses in suburban districts from coast to coast, the GOP under Trump has been almost completely exiled from the dynamic metropolitan areas that account for the nation's vast majority of job growth and economic output.

Democrats now hold over four-fifths of the House seats where minorities exceed their share of the national population and nearly 9 in 10 of the House seats with more foreign-born residents than average, according to a CNN analysis of census data. In the Senate, Democrats partially offset the Republican gains in older and rural Midwestern states by adding seats in the diverse, younger, rapidly growing Sunbelt battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada. The result is that after the 2018 election, Democrats now hold 32 of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states with the highest share of immigrants in their population while Republicans hold 45 of the 60 in the 30 states with the fewest. In 2020, the top two Democratic Senate pick-up opportuntiies are among the top 20 immigration states -- Arizona and Colorado, with Georgia, another high-ranking state, presenting a more difficult chance. Democrats are also targeting about a dozen of the GOP House members remaining in high-immigrant seats.

Because undocumented immigrants tend to flow largely toward communities with large existing immigrant communities, that means the places most threatened by Trump's threat to increase ICE enforcement are almost all places that have already demonstrated hostility to him and the party he is reshaping in his image.

The non-partisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are at least 70,000 undocumented immigrants in 34 US counties; cumulatively those counties account for about 5.6 million undocumented immigrants, about half of the estimated US total. (The top 10 counties alone, all of them major metropolitan areas, account for nearly one-third of the total undocumented population.) In 2016, Trump lost 31 of those 34 counties and in 2018 two of those he carried-- Maricopa, around Phoenix in Arizona, and Tarrant, centered on Fort Worth in Texas-- broke for the Democrats in Senate races.

...Trump "has been able to convince folks that their way of life has been impacted primarily by the presence of undocumented immigrants in this country and I think that that message resonates more than anywhere else with the communities that just don't have close contact with them," Elorza said. "I personally live in a community where I know for a fact there are undocumented immigrants around. I see them. And if you get to know them you see they are not a threat to you. When you are not exposed to them you are more susceptible to buying this (negative) narrative, because you have the President of the United States telling you this is the case."

Conversely, Curbelo says he sees signs that too many Democrats are abandoning the hope of forging connections in less diverse, less urban areas generally more skeptical of immigrants. "Obviously Republicans are not doing enough to change (the divide) and frankly Democrats aren't either," he says. "You hear some Democrats say we don't want a white presidential candidate; that's just as improper and scandalous. The bases of each respective party have too much of a gravitational pull."

Trump's unrelentingly divisive agenda and language-- and the sharp Democratic response it has generated-- seems guaranteed in the 2020 election to widen the chasm between diverse, white-collar, immigrant-friendly urban America, where opposition to the President is centered, and his strongholds in preponderantly white, blue-collar, heavily Christian, non-urban America.

This week's repeated use of openly racist language from the White House-- like the new policy battles over ICE enforcement and asylum seekers, and the earlier struggles over Trump proposals to measure citizenship on the census, build a border wall, separate children from parents at the border, punish "sanctuary cities," and slash legal immigration by the largest amounts since the 1920s-- show how committed the President is to mobilizing his "coalition of restoration" even at the price of inflaming the Democrats' "coalition of transformation" and potentially alienating swing voters.

The racially incendiary conflicts of the past few days have provided perhaps the clearest preview yet of what's approaching as the places that represent what America is becoming square off against the places that reflect what it has been in next year's epic struggle for control of the nation's direction.

The Republicans are trying to redefine the Democratic Party as "socialism," AOC and Ilhan and Trump's tweets reinforce that. Virtually every e-mail from Republican groups and candidates mention socialism, AOC and Ilhan. Here's one I got yesterday from some douche bag mayor of Laguna Hills campaign against Katie Porter.Republicans hate Porter because she is effective in holding banksters accountable but most CA-45 voters would agree with her on that, so instead...

We are running against an extreme AOC-backed, self-described Elizabeth Warren protege who doesn’t just whisper about being a radical liberal, she embraces it. While Porter’s campaign is stuffed with socialist cash from members like Ilhan Omar, Sedgwick’s campaign is people-powered from everyday Americans who believe in family values, capitalism and the American Dream.

"People-powered" if corporate PACs are people and "family values" if those values have been redefined as racism, xenophobia and the total trashing of Jesus' message to mankind-- with children in cages and Trump and his cronies raping children. Meanwhile, if you can stomach it, here are the clueless congressional leaders of the American Nazi Party doing a press conference yesterday before the vote, apparently trying to rally their troops and their racist base. Note the venom dripping out of the Cheney daughter's mouth:

Tom Cotton, David Perdue And Josh Hawley Introduce Trump's Anti-LEGAL Immigration Bill

3 modern day Know Nothings-- Cotton, Trump, Perdue

In 2017 two virulent Republican xenophobes, Tom Cotton (AR) and David Perdue (GA), tried drastically cutting back on legal immigration with their RAISE Act (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment). It failed to get out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, so Cotton introduced it again six months later with a big public push from Trump and his two neo-Nazi pals, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. (It was before Bannon was fired for being mean to Ivanka.) The bill was meant to cut legal immigration in half and to severely limit the number of refugees the U.S. admits. (Remember, Trump thinks the country is "full"; it isn't.) Although 3 right-wing Democrats-- Donnelly, Machin and Heitkamp-- backed it, it was defeated 60-39, with Republicans Barrasso (WY), Collins (ME), Cruz (TX), Daines (MT), Enzi (WY), Jeff Flake (AZ), Inhofe (OK), Kennedy (LA), Lee (UT), Moran (KS), Murkowsky (AK), Paul (KY), Sasse (NE), and Thune (SD) crossing the aisle to vote with the rest of the Democrats.

Cotton and Perdue and back with the bill and they found another bigot, Missouri GOP freshman Josh Hawley, to co-sponsor it. Last time, the bill was panned by economists who predicted it would slow growth and have a negative impact on the GDP.

Immigrants are responsible for nearly half the population growth of the United States, and by extension that also means they are a sizable part of the growth in the U.S. labor force.

“It’s half of labor force growth today. Going forward it’s a bigger drag. We have yet to meet the critical mass of baby boomers retiring. That’s still ahead,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at DS Economics.

Statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau on assumptions about population growth and immigration are rolled into economists’ forecasts for GDP. Economists say there are already worker shortages in some areas, and the problem could get worse quickly.

Macroeconomic Advisers co-founder Joel Prakken says the economy should grow at about 2 percent next year, but already it could see a dent if immigration is slowed. “What’s behind that projection is the assumption of labor force growth and productivity growth ... that is a combination of assumptions about the participation rate and the growth of the population. Our assumptions of the population come from the Census Bureau,” he said.

“If you cut the labor force growth in half you probably take two to three tenths of a percentage point off GDP growth every year over the next decade,” Prakken said. He said that would also impact the 3 percent growth pace the Office of Management and Budget is forecasting for 2020 and beyond. The Trump administration forecasts 2.4 percent growth next year.

Prakken said immigrants are probably a bigger portion of the growth in the labor force, since the U.S. population is aging, immigrants are generally younger and many come to the U.S. specifically to work. Industries that could see big impacts would be agricultural, leisure and hospitality and construction, he said.

“There would be spot shortages,” he said.

He said one adverse impact could be that companies in some industries could move operations outside the U.S. if they can’t find enough workers, which would be opposite the Trump administration’s efforts to attract more jobs.

“It’s another one of these cases where [a law] could have adverse consequences that move in the opposite direction of some other initiative the administration is trumpeting,” he said.

...“The real issue is what would it do to potential growth in an economy where we need more people to replace retirees,” said Swonk. “You’re closing another door to offset the drag from an aging population.”

Speaking for most Democrats, Richard Blumenthal (CT) noted that Cotton's bill was "nothing but a series of nativist talking points and regurgitated campaign rhetoric that completely fails to move our nation forward toward real reform." Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a former member of the Gang of Eight, also attacked the bill-- which he later voted for anyway, saying it would be "devastating" to South Carolina's economy.

The Anti-Defamation League was one of dozens of groups to come out against the bill. Their CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt issued a statement: "This proposed legislation is cruel, anti-family and un-American. These are the types of policy markers that exacerbate immigrant bashing and nativist attitudes in this country. We support an immigration policy that is comprehensive, protects our security, reunites families and improves our economy while honoring our values as a nation of immigrants. Diversity is our country’s strength and immigration has made America great."

The U.S. has a long sordid history of nativist bigots in the political realm. In 1855 the Native American Party changed it's name to the American Party and made some real headway, particularly in the South, of course, where, known as the Know Nothing movement, they preached hatred, racism and xenophobia. Cotton, Hawley and Perude come straight out of the strain of American politics. The #1 target of the Know Nothing movement were Catholics. The Know Nothings even elected dozens of congressmen (52 at their high-mark) and one, Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, served as Speaker of the House for one year, from February 1856 to March of 1857, although after he switched the become a Republican. They also had 5 U.S. senators at their peak. In fact at that point, nativism became a new American rage and with it came Know Nothing candy, Know Nothing tea, Know Nothing toothpicks and a 700-ton freighter christened Know Nothing. Like Trump supporters today, they were proud of the bigotry and proud of their stupidity. They even had an American president in their camp, Milliard Fillmore. You thought Trump was the first?

Is It Fair To Blame Trump? You Bet It Is!

The drawing above, by Nancy Ohanian, is entitled Spineless-- The GOP. There's no doubt Paul Ryan was foremost in her mind when she came up with and executed the concept. Yesterday, on Face The Nation, John Dickerson asked Ryan outright if he thinks Trump's rallies sow division in the country. Ryan replied: "Sometimes, yeah... not always but sometimes." Dickerson followed up by asking him if Trump practices a kind of politics that unifies the country. "Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't," answered Ryan with a smirk on his face like a child who had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Come on, honestly," prodded Dickerson, somewhat dismayed that Ryan had decided to portray himself as spinelessly as that. Ryan then listed ways in which Trump had unified the country-- like "tax reform," an issue Ryan cannot be unaware how most of the country understands what a scam Trump's (and his own) "tax reform" is.

Trump's only partisan goal is unifying the right for his own benefit. Anything trans-partisan or in the national interest is beyond his ken. Yesterday, after the Trump-inspired #MAGAbomber sent a pipe bomb to Democratic activist-- and billionaire-- Tom Steyer, Trump painted another target on his back, ridiculing him as a "stumbling lunatic" and calling him crazy and "Wacky Tom Steyer."

If Ryan can't give a straight answer to a simple question, Adam Serwer certainly can. He doesn't beat around the bush in connecting Trump and his rotten regime directly to right-wing terrorism. He pointed to bullying tweets about the "Caravan," they hoped to use to scare morons into going to the polls. Señor Trumpanzee: "The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!" and "We have today informed the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that if they allow their citizens, or others, to journey through their borders and up to the United States, with the intention of entering our country illegally, all payments made to them will STOP (END)!," He forced Pence to do likewise.

"The apparent impetus for this outrage," wrote Serwer, "was a segment on Fox News that morning, which detailed a migrant caravan thousands of miles away in Honduras. That caravan began sometime in mid-October, made up of refugees fleeing violence in their home country. Over the next few weeks, Trump would do his best to turn the caravan into a national emergency. Trump falsely told his supporters that there were 'criminals and unknown middle easterners' in the caravan, a claim that had no basis in fact, which was meant to imply that terrorists were hiding in the caravan-- one falsehood placed upon another. Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered more troops to the border. A Fox News host took it upon herself to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen whether there was 'any scenario under which if people force their way across the border they could be shot at,' to which Nielsen responded, 'we do not have any intention right now to shoot at people.'" A real liberal!

The Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account “confirmed” that within the caravan there were people who are “gang members or have significant criminal histories,” without offering evidence of any such ties. Trump sought to blame the opposition party for the caravan’s existence. “Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws!” Trump tweeted on October 22. “Remember the Midterms! So unfair to those who come in legally.”

In the right-wing fever swamps, where the president’s every word is worshipped, commenters began amplifying Trump’s exhortations with new details. Representative Matt Gaetz wondered if George Soros-- the wealthy Jewish philanthropist whom Trump and several members of the U.S. Senate blamed for the protests against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and who was recently targeted with a bomb-- was behind the migrant caravan. NRATV, the propaganda organ of the National Rifle Association, linked two Republican obsessions, voter fraud and immigration. Chuck Holton told NRATV’s viewers that Soros was sending the caravan to the United States so the migrants could vote: “It’s telling that a bevy of left-wing groups are partnering with a Hungarian-born billionaire and the Venezuelan government to try to influence the 2018 midterms by sending Honduran migrants north in the thousands.” On CNN, the conservative commentator Matt Schlapp asked pointedly, “Who's paying for the caravan? Alisyn, who's paying for the caravan?,” before later answering his own question: “Because of the liberal judges and other people that intercede, including George Soros, we have too much chaos at our southern border.” On Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, a guest said “these individuals are not immigrants. These are people that are invading our country,” as another guest asserted they were seeking “the destruction of American society and culture.”

In the meantime, much of the mainstream press abetted Trump’s effort to make the midterm election a referendum on the caravan. Popular news podcasts devoted entire episodes to the caravan. It remained on the front pages of major media websites. It was an overwhelming topic of conversation on cable news, where Trumpists freely spread disinformation about the threat the migrants posed, while news anchors displayed exasperation over their false claims, only to invite them back on the next day’s newscast to do it all over again.

In reality, the caravan was thousands of miles and weeks away from the U.S. border, shrinking in size, and unlikely to reach the U.S. before the election. If the migrants reach the U.S., they have the right under U.S. law to apply for asylum at a port of entry. If their claims are not accepted, they will be turned away. There is no national emergency, there is no ominous threat. There is only a group of desperate people looking for a better life, who have a right to request asylum in the United States, and have no right to stay if their claims are rejected. Trump is reportedly aware that his claims about the caravan are false. An administration official told the Daily Beast simply, “it doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate… this is the play.” The "play" was to demonize vulnerable people with falsehoods in order to frighten Trump's base to the polls.

Nevertheless, some took the claims of the president and his allies seriously. On Saturday morning, Shabbat morning, a gunman walked into  the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 people. The massacre capped off a week of terrorism, in which one man mailed bombs to nearly a dozen Trump critics, and another killed two black people in a grocery store after failing to force his way into a black church.

Prior to committing the Tree of Life massacre, the shooter, who blamed Jews for the caravan of “invaders” and who raged about it on social media, made it clear that he was furious at HIAS, founded as the Hebew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that helps resettle refugees in the United States. He shared posts on Gab, a social-media site popular with the alt-right, expressing alarm at the sight of “massive human caravans of young men from Honduras and El Salvador invading America thru our unsecured southern border.” And then he wrote, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

The people killed on Saturday were killed for trying to make the world a better place, as their faith exhorts them to do. The history of the Jewish people is one of displacement, statelessness, and persecution. What groups like HIAS do in helping refugees, they do with the knowledge that comes from a history of being the targets of demagogues who persecute minorities in pursuit of power.

Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man, as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surge in anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have taken care not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word.

Many of Trump’s defenders argue that his rhetoric is mere shtick. That his attacks, however cruel, aren’t taken 100 percent seriously by his supporters. But to make this argument is to concede that following Trump’s statements to their logical conclusion could lead to violence against his targets, and it is only because most do not take it that way, that the political violence committed on Trump’s behalf is as limited as it currently is.

The Tree of Life shooter criticized Trump for not being racist or anti-Semitic enough. But with respect to the caravan, the shooter merely followed the logic of the president and his allies: He was willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent an “invasion” of Latinos planned by perfidious Jews, a treasonous attempt to seek “the destruction of American society and culture.”

The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread, and that his followers chose to amplify.

As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, those who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed. Their condemnations of antisemitism are meaningless. Their thoughts and prayers are worthless. Their condolences are irrelevant. They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten.

The Muslin Ban Is Only The Beginning... As The GOP Falls Down A Xenophobic Rabbit Hole

In a 5-4 ruling, a very right-wing Supreme Court reversed a series of lower court decisions to OK Turmpanzee's Muslim travel ban, claiming the ban is "squarely within the scope of Presidential authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act." Justice Sotomayor: "A reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus... What began as a policy explicitly 'calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States' has since morphed into a 'proclamation' putatively based on national-security concerns. But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the president and his advisers create the strong perception that the proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers."

I wonder how long into the future that apology will come? Republicans may be a minority of the country, but between an incompetent Democratic Party and a devious and determined GOP, they somehow manage to control all 3 branches of government. And, as Ron Brownstein reported yesterday, Republican voters increasingly oppose even legal immigration. Xenophobia reigns supreme as the Republican base goes all Know Nothing.

The firestorm over the separation of children from their undocumented parents at the border has almost completely overshadowed another milestone in the long-running national immigration debate: Opposition to legal, as well as illegal, migration is hardening into a bedrock principle of the Republican Party.

With last week's vote in the House of Representatives on hardline immigration legislation from GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, about three-fourths of Republicans in both the House and Senate have voted this year to cut legal immigration by about 40%. That would represent, by far, the largest reduction in legal immigration since Congress voted in 1924 to virtually shut off immigration for the next four decades.

And while each of the bills this year to slash legal immigration ultimately fell short of passage, their preponderant support among Republicans marked a telling shift in the GOP's center of gravity: The last time Congress seriously considered cuts in legal immigration during the 1990s, about three-fourths of Senate Republicans, and about one-third of House Republicans, opposed it.

"It tells me that the party is more interested in reducing the number of foreigners in the United States than in reducing illegal immigration," says David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. "One reason to allow people to immigrate legally is to reduce the incentives to come illegally, and so this entire portion of that immigration bill is working at cross-purposes to the goal of securing the border and reducing illegal immigration."

For years, many Republicans have claimed that even as they demanded a crackdown on undocumented, or illegal, immigration, they supported a robust system of legal immigration. Even President Donald Trump nodded to that tradition in a tweet on Sunday when he insisted that illegal immigration "is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years!"

But, in fact, the vast majority of congressional Republicans this year have now voted for Trump-backed legislation that would not only crack down on undocumented immigration but also severely constrict legal entry into the country, including for millions of those who, as Trump put it, have been "waiting on line for years" to enter legally. "It really looks like the entire debate about illegality is not the main issue anymore for Republicans in both chambers of Congress," notes Bier. "The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States to the greatest extent possible." The result is that Republicans are now engaged in a two-front war against both legal and undocumented immigration. Trump has clearly signaled he intends to emphasize illegal immigration as a primary wedge issue for the November elections: Even amid the chaos over separations at the border, he's turned to more overtly nativist and racist language, charging that undocumented immigrants "infest" and "invade" the US and urging an end to due process protections for them.

Congressional Republicans, in turn, have backed away from earlier promises to legally protect the so-called "Dreamers," young people brought to the country illegally as children. After Trump rescinded former President Obama's policy sheltering those young people from deportation, House Speaker Paul Ryan, among other leading Republicans, promised Congress would provide a lasting solution. But every Senate proposal to protect them failed, with the vast majority of Republicans voting no.

...That vote stands as a milestone in hardening GOP attitudes against migration because the Goodlatte bill represented a wish list for the party's most anti-immigration forces. By the calculations of Bier and Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration group, it would have reduced legal immigration over the coming decades by fully 40% (far more than the 25%, already a historic decline, that the sponsors claimed.) It would have severely limited the opportunity for migrants to seek political asylum in the US. And despite Trump's gesture toward those "waiting in line," the bill, after a short transition through 2019, would have canceled pending immigration applications from about 3 million married adult children and siblings of US citizens who have waited in line for, in many cases, decades, as Biers and Anderson wrote recently.

The strong House Republican vote for the Goodlatte bill came after the GOP caucus voted even more overwhelmingly last year for legislation to punish so-called "sanctuary" cities that fail to fully cooperate with federal immigration law. In that June 2017 vote, House Republicans voted 225-7 to cut off a wide array of federal grants to states or cities that limit immigration cooperation and to allow private citizens to sue such jurisdictions if they claim that they or family members were later harmed by undocumented immigrants released through their policies. (Ryan's immigration bill revives that provision.)

Generally, the Senate Republican immigration bills haven't tilted quite as far toward the party's nativist element. But even so, 36 of the 50 voting Republican senators last February voted for Trump-supported legislation sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa that would have cut legal immigration by about as much as the Goodlatte bill (though it would not have erased the applications of millions of potential migrants waiting in line). And all 50 voting Senate Republicans last February backed legislation from GOP Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania to slash federal funding for states and cities that fail to fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Partly, the hard Republican turn against not only undocumented but also legal immigration can be explained by the party's shifting geographic center. In the House, the Senate and the Electoral College alike, Republicans now depend predominantly on the parts of America that have been the least touched by the steady growth in the immigrant population over the past 50 years.

In the House, about 85% of Republicans represent districts where the foreign-born share of the population was lower than the national average of 13.5% in 2016. Similarly, 42 of the 51 Republican senators represent the 30 states where immigrants compose the smallest share of the population, mostly in the South, the Midwest and the Mountain West. Republicans hold only nine of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states where immigrants constitute the largest share of the population, most of them along the coasts. In 2016, Trump's pattern of support followed those tracks too: He won 26 of the 30 states with the smallest share of immigrants, but lost 16 of the 20 with the highest.

In both the House and Senate, several Republicans from high-immigration jurisdictions opposed the legislation constricting legal migration. Those opposing the Goodlatte bill last week included Steve Knight, Jeff Denham, David Valadao and Dana Rohrabacher of California, Carlos Curbelo of Florida, Leonard Lance of New Jersey and Barbara Comstock of Virginia. All of them hold swing seats where immigrants make up at least one-fifth of the population. Senate Republican opponents of the Grassley bill included Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Flake of Arizona, two high-immigration states.

But a noteworthy number of Republicans from high-immigration jurisdictions in both chambers supported the legislation severely reducing legal immigration. In the Senate, they included Marco Rubio of Florida, John Cornyn of Texas, Cory Gardner of Colorado and David Perdue and Johnny Isakson of Georgia. Those supporting the cuts in the House included John Culberson and Pete Sessions of Texas, Karen Handel and Rob Woodall of Georgia, Dan Donovan in New York City and Mimi Walters in California. All of those House Republicans represent potentially competitive seats where at least one-fifth of the residents were born abroad.

And of course all Republican senators and virtually all GOP House members, no matter how large the immigrant presence in their constituencies, voted to punish "sanctuary" cities.

Those votes are a reminder that in all parts of the country, the Republican coalition now revolves around the elements of American society most uneasy about immigration in particular and demographic change in general: older, blue-collar, evangelical and non-urban whites. In recent polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, Republicans living in urban, suburban and rural communities, for instance, were all far less likely than Democrats in the same places to say that immigrants had improved the quality of life in their neighborhoods.

In its most recent national poll, Quinnipiac University found that among all adults, only about one-sixth wanted to reduce legal immigration, while nearly three-fifths opposed building Trump's wall across the Mexican border, three-fourths supported legal status for all of the undocumented and almost four-fifths backed allowing the "Dreamers" to remain in the US and apply for citizenship. Two-thirds opposed the recently suspended Trump practice of separating undocumented children from their parents at the border.

As the GOP's geographic tilts even more toward the places least affected by immigration, the party's nativist elements will gain more power inside the party at a time when Trump is already using them to prop up his catastrophic regime. "And that means," concludes Brownstein, "even as America inexorably grows more diverse, the party is likely to hurtle further away from the support for legal immigration championed by Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush." Xenphobia will be a major GOP plank for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, this number keeps growing: A decade ago over half of Americans (56%) self-identified as someone with at least one great-grandparent born outside the U.S.

Alan Grayson (D-FL) has a perfectly logical explanation of why the Trumpists are going full-bore racist now, which, he said, "represents a fundamental misperception of the concerns of voters. The actual 'racist vote' is very small. The reason why Trump was able to muster votes in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, apart from Russian interference, is that many voters there thought that there would be economic benefits to them if he were elected, or that he would 'drain the swamp' in DC. Of course, after delivering benefits only to himself and other One-Percenters, and after immersing himself in the swamp, all that is left for Trump is to play the racist card."

Hawaii's Kaniela Saito Ing, probably the most cutting edge candidate running for Congress anywhere, told us "the Muslim Ban is just one piece of Trump’s hateful, dehumanizing, and immoral immigration agenda and larger strategy. The entire administration implements a coordinated strategy to divide working people by stoking hate and fear, thus distracting and tiring us from fighting against the wealthy elite. But we are greater than our fears. As we’ve done before, we can choose to fight for the people we love and the future we believe in. All of us have a choice. We can sit on the sidelines and watch the nation slip into authoritarianism, or we can fight for aloha... We know it’s not the courts that will carry our Resistance forward, but our solidarity and willpower. Five old, conservative men do not speak for our nation. I have hope that Americans will elect a new Congress to reverse today’s shameful ruling."

Rashida Tlaib's Michigan primary is coming up August 7. Plenty of time to give her a hand. Yesterday right after the Supreme Court's mistaken decision, she told her supporters that Trump’s Muslim Ban hits close to her home and her family.

As a Muslim American, I’ve taught my boys that in our America anyone who works hard enough and is guided by compassion can overcome hateful bullies. That even in the face of President Trump’s hateful rhetoric and actions, a young Muslim mother can make history and be elected to represent close to a million people in the U.S. Congress.

If those who seek to spread hate celebrate today, let them. This is their twilight. We-- people who live our lives with empathy and acceptance-- outnumber them, we are louder than them, and we are coming to take our government back from them!

 Just Sunday I was at a church in my district when Rev. Dr. Steve Bland Jr. said it best: “We are not people who are divided, we are disconnected.” Trump’s mission is to create a divided America by having us turn inward, away from our neighbors, but he’s going to get a wake up call. He just pushed us more together, united across communities, to fight back.

Whether it’s banning Muslims from the United States, ripping families apart at the border, or dehumanizing immigrants and people of color on a daily basis-- we must stand together to protect our families from Trump’s hate. The next stage of the fight against the Muslim Ban moves to Congress, and I want to go to Washington to help lead the resistance.

Muslim Americans have heard Trump’s message, but it isn’t working like he hoped. We aren’t running away, we’re running for office, and there’s no Muslim Ban that can keep me out of Congress.

I Don't Care If The GOP Chokes On Its Racism-- But They're Wrecking Our Country

Yesterday, Arizona psychopath Kelli Ward told Maria Bartiromo on Fox's Sunday Morning Futures that she thinks "Trump and his leadership is what the country wanted-- that's why he's in the White House-- and I think he's got lofty goals that we should accomplish that will put America first" and that a primary challenge against him "would be a big mistake for the establishment wing of the Republican Party to attempt." Kelli Ward is a right-wing sociopath from West Virginia serving in the Arizona state Senate and running against Jeff Flake for a U.S. Senate seat with Trump's encouragement. Here's a video Mitch McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund SuperPAC just ran against her:



"She's not conservative," they assert, "she's just crazy." She's also pretty typical of the Trump Arizona fans interviewed by The Guardian at his Phoenix hate rally last week-- deranged, delusional... crazy.

Last week Jeremy McCarter took a stroll down The Atlantic's memory lane... to 1916. He told the story of Randolph Bourne. "In his time, as in ours," wrote McCarter, "America was undergoing rapid demographic change. Immigration levels in the first decades of the twentieth century neared all-time highs, thanks to the millions who arrived from Italy, Poland, and other countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. A hit play of 1908 supplied a metaphor for what was supposed to happen next: 'America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!'"

In real life, though, this melting didn’t happen as predicted. Immigrant groups kept their languages, styles of dress, preference for certain dumplings. Many Americans feared that newly arrived aliens would import hostilities from their homelands. The year Bourne wrote his essay was the third year of the Great War. Were unmelted Germans going to fight unmelted Russians on the streets of Chicago? If President Woodrow Wilson decided to join the conflict, where would these aliens’ loyalties lie? Many American leaders called for the melting pot to get hotter, to burn away the “hyphens” that made Hungarian-Americans or Greek-Americans a group apart. The former President Theodore Roosevelt painted a dark vision of the dangers facing the country if its inhabitants failed to achieve “100 percent Americanism,” which he defined as speaking only English and feeling total and exclusive loyalty to the interests of the United States. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of it continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” A hyphenated American, he said, was no American at all.

Bourne’s essay, titled Trans-National America, is a bracing seven-thousand-word challenge to the morality, logic, and wisdom of that view, in his time and ours. The record of ethnic groups trying to live together in this country hadn’t been perfect, Bourne acknowledged, but considering the abysmal results of such attempts everywhere else it had been tried, he thought they coexisted here with “almost dramatic harmlessness.” What the ethnonationalists view with dread and suspicion, Bourne saw as grounds for pride and joy. “For the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun,” he wrote.

The fundamental error of those who insisted on a narrow definition of Americanism, as Bourne saw it, was believing that Americanism had any fixed definition at all. He made an impish reversal of our history, arguing that American identity consisted not of timeless truths handed down from all-knowing founders but from the accumulated prejudices of the ethnic group that managed to get here first. “English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’ breasts,” he wrote.

Bourne spoke of English snobberies from personal experience. He grew up in the stifling, Waspy town of Bloomfield, New Jersey, raised by a single mother who was somewhat awed by his precocious intelligence. (A botched use of forceps had left Bourne’s face deformed at birth, and a childhood illness had caused his back to hunch. He speculated that these disabilities might explain his radical outlook, the sympathy he instinctively felt for outcasts and failures. If so, he wrote, “the price has not been a heavy one to pay.”) Only his arrival at Columbia University let him escape his narrow upbringing and begin “to breathe a larger air.” In his Atlantic essay, when he suggested that friendships with people from diverse backgrounds-- Austrian, Scandinavian, Italian, Jewish-- could give young men and women a cosmopolitan view, he was describing his own experience. By coming together in a spirit of “intellectual sympathy,” by talking and arguing and dreaming, he and his college friends made their differences “creative.”

Those late-night conversations suggested to Bourne a new way of thinking about the immigrant’s place in America. Freedom for people newly arrived in this country isn’t the absence of coercion; it’s not the result of benign neglect. Freedom means active participation in self-government, “a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a country.” Bourne’s travels for a book on progressive education, and his phenomenally wide reading, showed him that this participation was good for established communities as well as for new immigrants. He compared the brisk, progressive cities of the Upper Midwest, where German and Scandinavian immigrants played leadership roles, with the South, which clung more tightly than any other region to Anglo-American ways-- and, in Bourne’s view, had paid a price.

To Bourne, America wasn’t some citadel in need of defending: it was a project, one that continually enfolded new participants, dynamically renewed its character. The ethnonationalist looks backward for familiarity, security, a sense of control. Bourne, the child of a hopeful century, looked ahead with ecstatic optimism: “America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men.” Other cosmopolitans, such as the philosopher Horace Kallen, had articulated the shortcomings of the melting pot, but Bourne was rare in his ability to glimpse the shining ideal that could replace it: the “Beloved Community,” a new kind of society in which citizens are bound together by the loyalty of each to all, regardless of race or creed. Bourne was the first American to extract that concept from the work of the philosopher Josiah Royce and hold it up as the ultimate fulfillment of our national project; the second to do so, forty years later, would be Martin Luther King, Jr.

Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” would outrage Bourne: How is it, he would want to know, that, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are still indulging in the kind of “tight and jealous nationalism” that had sent the European powers into a suicidal war and wreaked so much havoc on America itself? How have we learned nothing from the disasters of Bourne’s own generation? Less than a year after he wrote his essay, the United States joined the war on the Allied side, unleashing a wave of “100 percent Americanism” more virulent than he had dreamed possible. Nativist attacks, vigilantism, race riots, and censorship were inflicted on a terrorized citizenry, native-born and immigrant alike. People who spoke German were menaced by mobs, and sometimes killed in the streets; the Socialist press was all but shut down, leading to a full-fledged Red Scare. As Bourne took bolder and bolder stands against the war-- even denouncing his mentor, John Dewey, who thought the war would promote democratic ideals-- he found it more difficult to get published. Old friends fell away; prewar hopes went to pieces. He died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, at the age of thirty-two.

Bourne wouldn’t be surprised that Americans still feel the tug of nationalist sentiment. He knew that people need to feel that they belong to a group. The unique challenge of America, a teeming “nation of nations,” is to define itself in terms broad enough to suit its transnational population, not to mimic other countries’ exclusive, backward-looking pride. “We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future,” he wrote. In other words, it’s false to our history, and disastrous for our prospects, to think that we can return to a mythic greater past. Those us who are here now have the chance to make something better than our forebears made, and the obligation to try.