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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: The Enoch Powell Question As America divides and controversy over mass immigration mounts, did his "Rivers of Blood" speech get it right? “Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” So spoke British politician Enoch Powell 50 years ago in his famous speech delivered to a small audience of Birmingham constituents. Those words were an allusion to the forebodings of a soothsayer in Virgil’s Aeneid, so Powell was not literally predicting “rivers of blood.” But he did assert in stark terms that the transformation of Britain’s historic demography through mass immigration was a danger requiring the loudest possible alarm. Powell, defense minister in the Tory shadow cabinet at the time of his speech, was considered one of Parliament’s foremost intellectuals. But the political establishment’s response was immediate and brutal. The Times of London dubbed his warning “evil.” Party leader Edward Heath stripped Powell of his party post. And some Labour MPs called for his prosecution for inciting racial hatred. Yet a thousand London dockworkers marched to protest his dismissal, and tens of thousands sent him letters and postcards thanking him for speaking out. If the consensus then was that he had gone too far, Powell’s posthumous reputation, forever linked to the speech, has only grown stronger over time among conservatives. Fifty years later, it seems clear that Powell’s most dire forebodings have proven mistaken—or at least premature. There have been no “rivers of blood.” And, while there have been sporadic terror attacks connected to immigration in Britain, some causing mass casualties, these are a far cry from what Powell predicted. Indeed, London’s present mayor, Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistanis who immigrated to Britain in the year of Powell’s speech, has observed that terrorist attacks of the kind now occurring may simply be “part and parcel of living in a big city.” But immigration now is the single most contentious issue throughout the Western world. As the nations of the West have become increasingly multiracial, their politics have grown more polarized. And a case can be made that it is too soon to dismiss Powell’s warning out of hand. Thus in these times, as the polemics, counterarguments, and mutual insults hurled back and forth by commentators and politicians have begun to grow repetitive and predictable, it may be instructive to step back and approach the Powell question less directly, through the lens of contemporary social science. Issues of order and stability have always been central to political theory, and there is of course a substantial political science literature about revolution, state failure, and civil war—the events that actually could bring about “rivers of blood” through internal strife. This essay will explore some of what social scientists have written on these questions over the past generation. In the United States today, it is hard to ignore the reality that large numbers of Americans unambiguously despise one another for political reasons. Perhaps this was always the case, but social media and ideologically polarized cable news have certainly heightened the reality. These entities hammer away at Americans about the perfidy of their opponents, reinforcing the perception that political opponents and their beliefs are despicable—and thus rightfully rejected by large numbers of their fellow citizens. At the ideological level America has become divided into two equally intolerant communities. The Left faction, contained within the Democratic Party and now its most dynamic contingent, is driven primarily by multicultural identity politics. Having seemingly made peace with growing inequality and capitalism, the Left has become an updated version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition—people of color and “progressive” whites, plus the recent addition of exotic new varieties of gender-identity activists. The animating belief here is that the United States is a toxic bastion of white male heterosexual privilege, and the country can be redeemed only by that regime’s dismantlement. This political sensibility gets vehement opposition from a party of “nativism,” defined not by the defense of white male privilege (whose existence in any meaningful sense is denied by most nativists) but by opposition to the Left’s effort to discredit the Western heritage and dismantle the traditional America. Donald Trump clearly benefited from this opposition, which he played some role in molding into an electoral force. America’s new immigrants did not create these hatreds and seldom play active roles in the intensifying battle, though the number that does is growing. But they and their offspring vote Democratic by decisive majorities, which ensures that changing demography exacerbates the division, generating on one side a sense of demographic triumphalism (and a consequent contempt for compromise) and on the other a sense of trepidation and defensiveness that translates into powerful political passions. The Powell question is whether these splits eventually will threaten American democracy and civil peace. It was a question that occupied a group of professors who convened at Yale last fall to discuss whether American democracy was under threat. Most were liberals who chewed over in predictable ways the “It Can’t Happen Here” trope—whether Donald Trump constitutes a fascist menace. But Duke’s Timur Kuran, whose depiction of the two factions roughly corresponds to those noted above, stated that a growing intolerance characterizes political communities of both left and right. At the core of these ideological communities he sees mutually reinforcing intolerances. They depend upon each other for the political outrage that increasingly defines them. “Each of the two intolerant communities wants to wipe out the other,” concludes Kuran, who mitigates his blunt language by observing that this “wiping out” entails merely “making the rival community accept, if only tacitly, its world view and favored policies.” Currently, he says, the two sides are in rough equilibrium in terms of political power, but Kuran foresees many sorts of extraneous events that could upend the equilibrium in favor of one faction or the other. Kuran clearly is correct when he says that the degree of political polarization is now striking. Americans in 1960 nearly unanimously told pollsters they were indifferent to whether their child married someone from another political party, but now they care a lot about it. (Half of Republicans would reportedly be “upset” and a third of Democrats.) Dating apps now signal whether one’s potential partner has differing views over abortion. A recent Pew survey reveals that Democrats and Republicans are further apart in their attitudes on key issues than at any point in decades. In 2016, the alt-right’s “joking” use of Nazi memes on Twitter drew apprehension and scorn, but perhaps of equal importance is the restoration of Lenin, Stalin, and hammer and sickle memes by young leftists. Che Guevara never left us, of course, but now we have Ta-Nehisi Coates, touted as the leading black intellectual of his generation, who muses that the “complete abolition of race as a construct” is one of those things that “don’t tend to happen peacefully.” Of course, anyone who lived through the radical emergence of the 1960s knows that violent rhetoric need not necessarily signify very much at all in the long run. But there was plenty of unsettling violence in the late 1960s, and we’ll never know how close the country came to real societal instability. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
(Edited)
An "inciting racial hatred" accusation 50 years ago! So the establishment there was already as jewed as it is now. Nothing ever changes. This writer, typical for TACon, tries to whitewash the issue. Of course there are rivers of blood flowing because of UK's political insanity -- for everybody getting raped, beaten and killed by the ever-multiplying muds, that's exactly what it is. We must solemnly mark this 50th anniversary 43 days from now as we live through the semifinal death throes of whitedom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech
#2. To: NeoconsNailed (#1)
An "inciting racial hatred" accusation 50 years ago! Powell may have underestimated the problem.
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