* The Mexican intellectual is Jorge Castañeda perhaps? The Transom had an interesting review of one of his books that seems on point with your post:
One of the threads in his book which may have some unfortunate and concerning applications for the United States is that Mexico has struggled under what he describes as a “Hobbesian behemoth” of powerful government, which “simply never allowed civil society to flourish” as it persisted over the course of 500 years. Mexican society never developed anything like the “little platoons” of Burke, nor the network of associations that Alexis de Tocqueville credited with American democracy’s vitality – there was the government and the individual, with no civil society in between. This creates and fuels a patronage society, with the attendant social ills of corruption, cartels, crime, and more.
Mexicans simply do not form lateral social bonds, writes Castañeda: they only form bonds upward and downward. As such, Mexican society is extremely difficult to organize.
The ability of major questions to be democratically and peacefully adjudicated is severely constricted. As Tocqueville wrote of those citizens who have the attitudes of colonists: “They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law with the spirit of a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.” It’s possible that what we see in Mexico is the American future: that as our own civil society is pushed from the public square and supplanted by the power and force of government, it will replace organizations and communities in ways which impact the fundamental nature of the body politic.
* I was teaching math in Tegucigalpa during the first election after the ouster of Mel Zelaya. Out of 25 to 30 professional staff at the school, not one claimed to have voted. In the lead up, when I saw all the campaign posters in the streets, I figured that to a certain extent the election must matter. But on the day of the election, there was almost no one in the streets. Just a few soldiers. No one was voting. I talked politics with lots of people, and didn’t here one person say, “I voted for…” This is weird since there were all sorts of protests and marches in the streets. It may be just gauche or risky in Honduras to mention voting. But mainly, I believe, they (90% plus) don’t involve themselves.
* I’ve noticed an increased arrogance and dismissiveness from federal officials over the years; I suppose from forever, but it seems more pronounced since the Bill Clinton administration. Where bad press and public outrage once seemed to be of concern to federal bureaucrats, they now seem to measure their progress by how much ire they generate.
One little example is the occasional joint federal-local violent crime task force around here that crash the wrong house and shoot an innocent person. The local law enforcement personnel are identified by name in the newspaper, while the federal agents manage to stay anonymous.
* I lived in a suburb just south of O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Throughout the 80′s and into the 90′s there were huge protests against airport noise and many lawsuits. The area was mainly white then, largely Italian and Polish. Today it is mainly Mexican and you really don’t hear much about noise anymore, even though O’Hare has expanded with new runways at its southern end.
* Watch the TV show “Parks and Recreation,” which regularly makes fun of local town meetings just like the one pictured in your post. The ordinary attendees are almost all white and most of them are stooges, but they are all white. Every time it depicts a town meeting, the show pokes fun at democracy, but it really loves local government and the wacky but endearing white populace that enables it.
* Talk show host Michael Savage is coming out with a new book next week, Government Zero. He’s been talking about it and he makes the point that diversity means the end of democracy, a no-party system with an increasingly autocratic rule.
* From Harold Meyerson’s recent article about the Bronx:
Today, the Bronx has no comparable political culture or organizational life. “In my district,” says Ritchie Torres, who represents the central Bronx on the New York City Council, “we have some organizations that have a rich history of community organizing, but in general, civic society in the Bronx is lacking. My district has 160,000 residents, 60,000 registered Democrats, and 6,000 voters. With such a low level of civic engagement, we’ve had a lot of public officials who ended up in jail. And this comparative lack of civic and organizational infrastructure has been a challenge for the Working Families Party.”
* Those 6,000 voters in that Bronx district are almost certainly the ones with the higher IQs. The rest of the district probably totals people blow 100 points. The problem is, the lower your IQ, the harder it is to vote. People below the average have a terrible time just trying to read and understand the language of the ballot initiatives.
* Tom Friedman wrote a column awhile back that extolled the advantages of one-part autocracy. It’s easy to believe that this is what Progressives dream of.
From Tom Friedman, NYT, 9/8/2009:
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
* Latino engagement is very low. This is why black politician Charlie Rangel has been able to defeat Latino challenger Espaillat twice even though his district is 55% Latino and 25% black. Its also why Jewish politician Sheldon Silver was able to be reelected for decades after Latinos outnumbered Jews in his Lower East Side district.
Its very frustrating for young Latino politicians in NYC. They want to amass political power using the Latino population as their base. However their base won’t come out to vote while the old Black and White residents do. Young White gentrifiers also seem to prefer to vote for black incumbents over Latino challengers.
* This is the paper you’re referring to.
It’s by Fredo Arias-King, a political insider who was Vincente Fox’s presidential aide.
“While Democratic legislators we spoke with welcomed the Latino vote, they seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy. Several of them tended to see Latin American immigrants and even Latino constituents as both more dependent on and accepting of active government programs and the political class guaranteeing those programs, a point they emphasized more than the voting per se. Moreover, they saw Latinos as more loyal and “dependable” in supporting a patron-client system and in building reliable patronage networks to circumvent the exigencies of political life as devised by the Founding Fathers and expected daily by the average American.
Republican lawmakers we spoke with knew that naturalized Latin American immigrants and their offspring vote mostly for the Democratic Party, but still most of them (all except five) were unambiguously in favor of amnesty and of continued mass immigration (at least from Mexico). This seemed paradoxical, and explaining their motivations was more challenging. However, while acknowledging that they may not now receive their votes, they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and “teaching,” they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did. Curiously, three out of the five lawmakers that declared their opposition to amnesty and increased immigration (all Republicans), were from border states.
Also curiously, the Republican enthusiasm for increased immigration also was not so much about voting in the end, even with “converted” Latinos. Instead, these legislators seemingly believed that they could weaken the restraining and frustrating straightjacket devised by the Founding Fathers and abetted by American norms. In that idealized “new” United States, political uncertainty, demanding constituents, difficult elections, and accountability in general would “go away” after tinkering with the People, who have given lawmakers their privileges but who, like a Sword of Damocles, can also “unfairly” take them away. Hispanics would acquiesce and assist in the “natural progress” of these legislators to remain in power and increase the scope of that power. In this sense, Republicans and Democrats were similar.
When thinking of populating as a way of obtaining power, perhaps these U.S. legislators, rather than from the statesman Sarmiento, took an unconscious cue from another Latin American leader who used migration and ethnic policy for less laudable goals. Mexican President Luis Echeverría (1970-76), who began the cycle of political violence and economic crisis from which the country has yet to recover, pursued a policy of moving hundreds of thousands of impoverished people from the country’s south to the more prosperous and dynamic northern states, where they remain to this day, mostly in shantytowns. His goal was to neutralize those states’ more active civic culture that threatened his power—as these states were at the time the main source of opposition to his dictatorial ambitions. These pauperized and dependent migrants and their offspring would provide a ready source of votes for the ruling party along with a mobilizeable mass to counter (politically as well as physically) the more civic-oriented middle classes of those northern states and “crack” their will to challenge his corporatist regime. Along with other extra-constitutional tools (he almost succeeded in canceling the constitution to remain indefinitely as president), migration from undeveloped areas was used by Echeverría as “politics by other means.” Echeverría, in other words, was the ultimate knave.”
Steve Sailer has often spoken of a high-low coalition against the middle. He’s also called immigrants the reserve army of the elite. This paper seems to confirm his theories.
* A family I knew well in Winnetka had moved from Evanston, where they were both professors at Northwestern, and liberal politically…One of the reasons, they told me, was that when they went to parent conferences and other parental events in the local grammar school, absolutely no black or hispanic parents would show up. They were disturbed by the complete lack of interest shown by minority parents, and the appearance of segregation at parental events. The school was about 40% minority in fact.
* Just look at California in general, and its three most prominent statewide elected offices: Brown, Boxer, Feinstein. All white (or “white”), the three of them combined are old enough to extend back to the 8th day of creation. Yet, their state is so “young” and “vibrant” and “diverse.”
