A movement that has now shown its true colors

Richard Hanania

7 hours ago

Anti-Indian hate is somehow intensifying. Earlier this week, a tweet showed up in my feed from the University of Texas in which a girl of South Asian descent was talking about her experience as a student. It was a completely mundane social media message. The post had nothing to do with my normal interests, yet the moment I saw it, I understood why it was going viral. The tweet ended up getting deleted due to the backlash to showing a young Indian woman simply existing. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth posts a mundane picture with the Indian minister of defense, and this makes the chuds seethe with rage, asking him why he is standing with America’s enemies. And in a last-minute instance of trying to mobilize the haters, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner just announced that companies that use H-1B visas will no longer be eligible for certain grants.

I’m increasingly obsessed with this topic, and think that it deserves a lot more coverage than it’s getting. The combination of the degree of vitriol expressed toward Indians and how little rational justification there is for it should lead you to index heavily on what is happening. I previously wrote that the hate we are seeing comes down to Indians having dark skin while being bad at sports. This theory holds up, but we need a bit more psychology to explain why things have gone this far. Traditional American prejudices against groups like blacks, Hispanics, and Jews now seem mild and marginal compared to the constant unbridled hate directed toward Indians who are not doing anything wrong.

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As a general matter, the greatest hatreds are often based in insecurity. But rightists don’t envy Indians for their dark skin and lack of athletic prowess. They may be somewhat jealous of their socioeconomic success, but from that perspective there are a lot of groups they could be getting angry at. Moreover, my experience is that elites oriented toward nationalism or MAGA are just as opposed to immigration from India as the chuds, which a story of envy doesn’t explain. That said, it may be the case that the chuds are jealous, and right-wing intellectuals do their normal thing where they try to come up with respectable-sounding rationalizations for what people in their coalition believe.

So is skin tone, poor athletic ability, and envy of success enough to explain everything? Perhaps. But I think that there’s an additional factor here, and it gets to the heart of the intellectual and moral failures of American conservatism.

The left has for over half a century now regularly accused the right of being motivated by racism and bigotry. Sometimes this has been fair, sometimes not. But the controversy surrounding each particular issue was always something you could debate. Conservatives could answer each charge of bigotry and still sound reasonable.

“No, it’s not that we don’t like Mexicans. But the rule of law is important and we must have an orderly system.”

“I’m sure most Muslims are fine people, but there are serious questions about terrorism and cultural incompatibility with letting too many in.”

“Fighting crime isn’t racist against black people. In fact, they’re the ones who benefit most from increased policing.”

I think that a lot of the problems caused by minorities were always exaggerated due to prejudice, but whatever. You could actually discuss the underlying issue, with reasonable commenters on each side. Conservatives could tell themselves that they were good people with legitimate concerns, and their opponents were treating them unfairly. On issues like crime and DEI, they could sometimes hope to build a broader coalition. This has been the dialectic of American discussions about race since at least the 1960s, and to a large extent even before that.

Then the Indian showed up and he was basically everything conservatives said they ever wanted in an immigrant: law-abiding, family-oriented, high-earning, low crime, low welfare dependency, English-speaking, not supportive of terrorism or illiberal ideas. Yes, you can cherrypick things like political liberalism, but it’s kind of crazy to expect a group to identify with the political tribe that hates them, and it would be a sign of a lack of self-respect if they did. Most people usually don’t sit around worrying about the political orientation of a group that is 2% of the population and assimilating well enough that there’s no guarantee that this will be a longterm issue, unless they’re grasping at straws.

All of this is to say that if conservatives weren’t racist, they would be falling over one another to praise Indians. They could go to the left and say:

A-ha! We told you that we had twenty reasons to dislike immigration and complain about minorities. You said we were racist, because it seemed like quite the coincidence that most of the threats to the country came from non-white people, or white liberals whose greatest sin is sympathizing with them. But it was in fact a coincidence! You can’t deny this anymore because there’s a group of non-white immigrants that we love. We’ll admit, we set our standards really high, but we looked at the data, and Indians surpass them all.

Checkmate, libs.

Of course, the opposite happened. When conservatives started noticing a group composed of ideal immigrants according to their own criteria, they not only failed to embrace them, but reacted with a fury that made all of their other prejudices seem innocuous in comparison.

As I point out in my last book, conservatism in the US is now fully populist, which means that it can criticize its opponents for hypocrisy but can’t be pinned down on the same grounds. MAGAs attack corrupt elites while supporting the man who has used government to enrich himself and his family by orders of magnitude more than anyone else in American history. They say they want a “high-trust society” while spreading conspiracy theories and undermining trust in elections without any rational basis for doing so. No one in American politics is lower trust than Trump supporters! They are the disease that they worry about immigrants bringing over. You’ll see right-wing influencers take pride in being politically incorrect and not worrying about racism, sexism, and classism one second and then pounce the moment that a Democratic political figure says anything that allows them to play the role of the woke scold. Yes, I’m sure they defended Natalie Harp because they’re so sensitive about women in the workplace being respected. Conservative figures can speak eloquently about the importance of individualism and merit until the moment that their audience, driven by white grievance, starts saying these are bad things, and then switch their views overnight.

Scott Alexander points out how Yarvin transitioned from elitism to populism over the years while pretending to hold on to the same ideology. This is because the core of Yarvinism was always putting people of color in their place. When racism was marginalized in American politics and it seemed like you needed a based dictator to get rid of the immigrants and destroy DEI, Yarvin supported authoritarianism. When racism took over the Republican Party itself, he became a partisan cheerleader, because his thought and those influenced by it were never motivated primarily by an abstract notion that monarchism is superior to democracy.

I think, unlike most people on the right, Yarvin has been consistent, even though he’s lacking self-awareness in exactly what he’s consistent about. Most writers and thinkers who are influential voices in the Trump coalition are opportunists. And as conservatism has gotten dumber at a mass level, the intellectuals themselves have become more and more ridiculous, trying to reverse-engineer rational justifications for the prejudices of a right-wing audience increasingly untethered to reality. It’s possible to be an intellectual who cares about maintaining trust-based institutions. What’s not possible to do honestly is say this is your concern while supporting Donald Trump! Obviously, rightists simply use the concept of trust as a way to criticize the theoretical impacts of immigration while ignoring the disastrous direct effect that populism has on the thing they pretend to care about.

Since the 1960s, racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice has been central to the mass appeal of the Republican Party. It wasn’t as if there were ever mass segments of the public reading Hayek and Burke and voting on that basis. Sometimes, the bigots were right. They had good arguments about the excesses of the civil rights era and how American urban life unfolded in subsequent decades. For that reason, they could win over centrists and intellectuals for some of their proposed ideas. When the conservative movement fought DEI, bigots and those who believed in meritocracy and individual rights could stand side by side.

With Indians becoming more prominent, the goals of white nationalists and classical liberals diverge. On other topics, conservatives can hope to be convincing to others, so this creates an incentive to behave themselves. Outside of anonymous message boards, you rarely hear comments as crude as “man, I hate the way n*ggers talk” because that will get in the way of making legitimate points about crime, and there’s an incentive to police bad behavior. But with Indian-American immigrants, since there are no legitimate grievances any rational person can point to, the crude bigotry is all that is left and dominates the conversation. They smell, they’re clannish, they worship demons, they danced in front of a World War II memorial, all their success is based on cheating, they study too hard. Indians are simultaneously low-IQ third worlders who will dirty the streets and a new elite that can outwork and dominate American natives, taking away their hopes and dreams.

I spend a lot of time deconstructing each of these arguments. They’re all maddeningly embarrassing, and I’ve never heard a case for reducing Indian immigration below current levels that did not make me lose respect for the intellect and character of the person making it. It’s all obviously reverse-engineered to produce justifications for indulging the lowest parts of human nature. None of this even depends on liking Indians! You can hate them and accept the benefit that comes from having more talented, hardworking people in your country.

At some level, I think that conservatives understand all this. Sometimes you’ll see a woman who is attracted to toxic men but in denial about it and keeps saying she wants a nice guy in her life. Then some nerd comes along who checks every official box, and she ends up developing a special level of contempt for him. It’s not that the nice guy just isn’t her type; his mere presence reminds her that she is deluded about herself, and she feels the need to exaggerate his flaws and get away from him as quickly as possible.

The rightist likes to think he has an ideology that can appeal to smart, decent, thoughtful people. There are of course social science findings and schools of thought that a conservative can draw on, from the ancient Greeks to the American Founders, twentieth-century free market economists, and modern evolutionary psychologists. Right now, in a populist era, the intellectual conservative spends most days pretending that the philosophical school of thought he has adopted is consistent with whatever he needs to believe to remain a member of the Trump coalition in good standing. This has become increasingly difficult for nearly everyone who isn’t a white nationalist authoritarian, and I think the fact that opposition to high-skill immigration from India is now all but mandatory for ambitious conservatives puts the final nail in the coffin of any real attempt to pretend that the right in its current iteration can be anything but a movement that panders to hateful losers and allows them to indulge their hatreds.

The love conservatives have for what are sometimes called “hate facts” – statistics that portray minorities negatively – goes out the window when the topic is Indians. A picture of a group of them attending a football game is enough. “Indians at Costco” has become a running theme on right-wing Twitter, where someone posts a picture of brown people shopping, and everyone else agrees that this is very disturbing. The crudest forms of backwoods racism have now become a dominant force in conservatism that politicians must appeal to. Those uncomfortable with more explicit bigotry will still talk about H-1Bs, and get praise for it from right-wing influencers who are driven by white nationalist ideas.

I think that Indian hate should expand the scope of the crimes and atrocities we can expect conservatives to potentially be capable of. Throughout our lives, most of us have taken for granted the idea that our fellow citizens and those who participate in politics would always be restrained by Enlightenment ideas and the need to justify one’s position using logic and reason. We have attempts to make anti-Indian thought seem rational, but they are little more than a thin cover placed over a bubbling cauldron of hatred. As I’ve previously written,

Nativists never shy away from providing reasons when it comes to groups that use welfare and commit crimes at high rates. As soon as the topic turns to Indians, however, they’re reduced to declaring that they have no use for your bugman reliance on facts and logic. And one can understand why. Rufo and Keeperman trying to explain the basis of their views was met by universal scorn across X outside the right-wing bubble, even among people who in other contexts are with them on DEI.

A Republican politician criticizing H-1B visa holders for “stealing jobs” is no more making a real intellectual argument than Hitler was when he was ranting in Mein Kampf about the way that Jews were conspiring against German workers. Even making peace with these people as an embarrassing part of your coalition is a sign of moral corruption. Until they are purged from the Republican Party, anti-Indian hate should be seen as a moral and spiritual stain that raises the question of whether American conservatism is even redeemable.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5916756&forum_id=2.#50218164)

- The central thesis: Richard Hanania argues that anti-Indian hostility exposes the gap between conservatives’ stated principles and their actual motivations.

- Indians challenge the standard anti-immigration arguments. Indian Americans tend to have high educational attainment, high household incomes, and relatively low poverty rates. They fit many conservatives’ stated preferences for skilled, law-abiding, economically successful immigrants.

- The backlash reveals a racial dimension. Rather than welcoming a group that appears to satisfy their criteria, some right-wing commentators attack Indians over their skin color, culture, perceived social behavior, and immigration numbers.

- Economic anxiety is part of the story, but not the whole explanation. Some opponents of H-1B visas argue that employers use them to suppress wages or displace American workers. Hanania contends that these concerns often become a respectable cover for ethnic hostility.

- Populism has displaced ideological consistency. He argues that MAGA conservatives profess to support meritocracy, individualism, social trust, and high standards for immigration, but abandon those principles when their supporters dislike a successful nonwhite group.

- Conservative intellectuals are increasingly accommodating racial resentment. Hanania uses Curtis Yarvin as an example of a thinker whose political positions, in his interpretation, increasingly track the preferences of the populist right rather than a consistent abstract philosophy.

- The political implications are serious. He argues that anti-Indian sentiment makes it harder for conservatives to claim that their immigration restrictions are motivated primarily by neutral economic, cultural, or public-safety considerations.

- His conclusion is deliberately provocative: anti-Indian hostility exposes what he sees as the moral bankruptcy of contemporary American conservatism, particularly its willingness to indulge white nationalism.

Bottom line: Hanania's argument is that Indians are a stress test for conservative principles: when a group meets the stated criteria for desirable immigrants but is still intensely disliked, racial and ethnic prejudice becomes a more plausible explanation for at least some of the opposition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5916756&forum_id=2.#50218168)

they have no business here

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5916756&forum_id=2.#50218174)

none of that is factually incorrect.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5916756&forum_id=2.#50218215)

"pro white conservatives" are in tension because their ideology disagrees with their instincts. to resolve this, they need to either suppress their instinct for racial self preservation and become reason.com libertarians / classical liberals (like hanania) -- or else shed conservatism as an ideology and become outright national socialists.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5916756&forum_id=2.#50218210)