A reminder: democratic hope lives among people with reason to fear

Those blue spikes in citizenship applications in California followed Republican advocacy of the anti-immigrant Prop. 187 and before each subsequent change election. Source: Cato Institute

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer has written what seems an important addition to my recent discussion of the fear driving white U.S. evangelicals mad and into the arms of unscrupulous right wing politicians:

Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate; instead they took up arms in two world wars to defend it. Japanese Americans did not reject liberal democracy because of internment or the racist humiliation of Asian exclusion; they risked life and limb to preserve it. Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187, or because of a man who won a presidential election on the strength of his hostility toward Latino immigrants. Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic.

This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them. But it is also because of a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.

Do take a look at the link in the quotation; Server reminds us the FBI once declared open season on Black radicals. There have been times when state violence was systematically deployed against disfavored citizens; these uppity dissenters had reason to fear.

Somehow it is hard to believe that government operatives are about to be turned loose against nice white Southern Baptists, but too many have been bamboozled by this dystopian threat.