Latinos as "the stage army of the elites"

My new VDARE.com column considers why the press was so surprised to discover that likely American voters support the Arizona law by landslide majorities. I introduce the concept of non-Asian minorities as a useful "stage army" of the elites.

A "stage army" in a Shakespearean production is one in which extras march across the stage then whip around behind the scenes to march across, again and again.

Here's an excerpt from the middle:

In modern America, Latinos often function as a sort of "stage army" for our elites. They want Hispanics to intimidate—by sheer bulk of numbers—the citizenry and make resistance to elite projects appear historically hopeless. The vast and seemingly always increasing quantities of Hispanics can be cited as justification for whatever a person in a position of influence wants to do.

Say you are the President of the United States and you are worried that what you consider your demographic bases—"young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women"—won’t remember to show up to vote in 2010. So pick a fight over a state law and try to turn it into a racial conflict. Anybody who opposes you must be a racist, so you can’t lose, right?

Or say you want a make-work sinecure as an ethnic studies instructor or diversity coordinator. Harp on the existence of nearly 50,000,000 Latinos in the U.S... Claim to be one of their natural leaders. Assert that Real Soon Now they are all going to get around to voting—and that, when they do, they will all agree with you that you should have an easy job.

Say you are a high school administrator who doesn’t like the kind of students who wear American flag T-shirts to school. Well, punish them and blame it on the Latinos. Claim the Mexicans would riot if an American flag were seen on Cinco de Mayo—which is what has just happened at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California.

I believe that this sort of elite enabling, not Reconquista, is the real political danger that the Mexodus poses to the U.S.

Having followed this issue closely for decades, I've come to the conclusion that there isn't much chance of Mexican elites in the U.S. organizing a powerful Quebec-style separatist movement.

There are two reasons: First, as Barack Obama decided in the 1980s after his lengthy consideration of Louis Farrakhan’s black economic nationalism, there’s no money in separatism. If Mexicans wanted to live in a separate country run by Mexicans, they would live in Mexico. 

Second, Mexicans in the U.S. don't organize much of anything beyond the extended family or neighborhood level (such as a gang). LA Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez noted: "For example, in Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery or broad-based charity."[Mexican Americans Are Building No Walls, February 29, 2004]

On the other hand, the vast numbers of Mexicans in the U.S. due to legal and illegal immigration, the 1986 amnesty, and their high fertility serve the American left as a sort of mock mob, allowing American leftist elites to intimidate their rivals in all sorts of turf wars.

The American Left claims to have the vast Mexican masses on its side. They will (someday) vote in large numbers—so you'd better surrender now to them (or, to be precise, to their self-appointed leaders and allies).

Much of modern American leftism boils down to encouraging tribalistic attitudes among nonwhites. Clearly, some Mexican students in Morgan Hill’s Live Oak high school interpreted their school’s endorsement of multiculturalism through their own usual gang turf lens. Nor is it surprising that some American students, when exposed to these kind of school-sponsored Mexican assertions of cultural dominance, resist with subversive gestures, such as displaying American flags.

I have long argued that these racially fraught situations are used by upper middle class white liberals as class markers in order to put down their rivals of lower rank.

In California, for example, upper middle class white liberals almost never educate their children in high school classrooms with large numbers of Mexicans. It’s simply not done.

So if your kid goes to a school where Mexicans are dominant in numbers, and is therefore made uncomfortable by Mexican declarations of ascendancy, then that just shows to the white liberal mind that you and your kid are losers. Obviously, you can’t afford private school or to live in an expensive school district, or you aren’t smart enough to figure out how to manipulate the magnet and charter school rackets in order to get in with the right people.

It's a Perpetual Motion machine: if the elite-subsidized minority tribalism provokes the slightest sign of tribalistic reactions among the people who aren't allowed to express group pride—that is to say, Americans, citizens, whites, etc.—then that can be used to cram more expressions of elite-sponsored minority tribalism down the throats of the people who don't have their own approved tribe.

Wash, rinse, and repeat.

I then compare the Live Oak H.S. events to the recent Harvard Law School Watsoning. One obvious lesson to follow when targeted for a Two Minutes Hate is to stand tall, like policeman James Crowley of Cambridge, not cravenly apologize like Harvard president Larry Summers of Cambridge. (Larry, hilariously, immediately gave a $50 million slush fund to Drew Gilpin Faust as reparations. Not surprisingly, Dr. Faust soon replaced Summers as President.)

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer