Unleashing the Cultural Counter-Revolution
Never thought I'd see a Pro-Confucius Campaign
Over the past few days, the internal contradictions of the MAGA front have burst into full view.
First, there’s the tensions between Capitol Hill Republicans—the people who, occasionally, have to face voters and make laws—and the Mar-a-Lago crowd who make policy by not-at-all-ketamine-fueled tweeting. Politico today reports that Speaker Mike Johnson is twisting, twisting in the wind after Elon Musk and some Florida man blew up his bipartisan deal to pass a budget (continuing) resolution, leaving him with a much rockier path toward re-election as speaker.
Second, there’s been a huge fight between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (on one side) and Laura Loomer and the more white-hooded parts of MAGA over cutting off all immigration. (It’s really telling about where our politics are that we have to care about any of these people; the left-wing equivalents would be, I guess, Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke and …? (Are they even alive?) The difference between how far removed they are from power and how … close Loomer is to Trump is really something.
This has featured, as an aside, Ramaswamy discovering that a lot of Trump voters really, genuinely, actually do not like non-white people and view people of color as less deserving of full, or any, citizenship, much less legal immigration rights. As an aside, I’m reminded—of course I am—of the 1923 case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, which isn’t even bottom-five Supreme Court decisions but is still putrid. The précis is this: Bhagat Singh Thind sued to overturn racial restrictions on naturalization for U.S. citizenship that prevented Asians from being naturalized, but
Thind did not challenge the constitutionality of the racial restrictions. Instead, he attempted to be classified as a "free white person" within the meaning of the Naturalization Act based on the fact that Indians and Europeans share common descent from Proto-Indo-Europeans. … The Court unanimously rejected Thind's argument, adding that Thind did not meet a "common sense" definition of white, ruling that Thind could not become a naturalized citizen. The Court concluded that "the term 'Aryan' has to do with linguistic, and not at all with physical characteristics, and it would seem reasonably clear that mere resemblance in language, indicating a common linguistic root buried in remotely ancient soil, is altogether inadequate to prove common racial origin."
Thind obviously had the case right by the precepts of actual race science—not that there is a science of race, but there was a “science of race” in the sense of an organized doctrine of racial differences, and the claim that Indians = Aryans = white was uncontroversial. So uncontroversial, by the way, that the literal source the Supreme Court cited to say the reverse stated plainly that Aryans of India were white. Yes, literally, Associate Justice George Sutherland, who had an interesting life but was apparently somewhat of (as his colleague Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., would approve of my saying) a moron, literally got the race science wrong.
Very cold comfort for Thind to be right on the science but wrong by the common-sense of powerful White people! Please note this is foreshadowing.
A couple of fun (read: horrifying) facts:
Sutherland also wrote Euclid, which made zoning legal in the United States, so you can literally also thank him for why housing is so expensive in your country
Sutherland also wrote Curtiss-Wright, which eviscerated checks on the president’s powers in foreign policy, so he is basically the grandfather of the imperial presidency
Because the Court had suddenly held that Indian Americans were no longer eligible for citizenship (the relevant laws did not permit naturalization of Asians at the time), a large number of the small Indian-American community, mostly in California, found themselves unable to hold their land possessions in California because of the Alien Land Law of 1913; others, like Dalip Singh Saund, a Cal Ph.D. in math, had to change their careers—Saund became a farmer and community organizer for the next thirty years, until laws changed, he could naturalize, and he could eventually become the first Asian member of Congress .
I swear that none of this is tangential. This is all bringing up how the 1920s, the last great genuinely reactionary moment in American politics, brought the same tensions we’re seeing now between elitist technocrats, like Ramaswamy, and vastly more putrid nativists—and how the nativists decisively won. Again, these are not random facts from history; they are little mosaic tiles foreshadowing the conclusion of this essay, about how, if you pick the wrong allies in a political fight, you might find out just where you stand with them in the worst way at the worst time.
The irony of Ramaswamy’s tiff with less-cosmopolitan MAGA folks is that Ramaswamy’s own program for America is pretty culturally conservative. His epic tweet about how American culture makes us soft and unable to compete with Chinese math whizzes is worth reprinting in part:
Don’t even bother savoring the ironies that these are the words of someone who is allegedly working hand-in-hand with noted intellectual and totally-really-literate Donald Trump, who may have even read many of the books he’s authored. I want you to really think about how … this is just the angry version of completely standard upper-middle-class American parenting. Limiting screen time? Promoting STEM? Encouraging obsessive engagement with extra-curriculars? Vivek, buddy, we’re already there. Where have you been?
There’s three observations that follow. One is that Vivek is apparently high on his STEM supply and may literally not recognize that this is the water in which all striving families already swim. (I mean, he’s from Cincinnati—there’s enough high-achievers there that he should have guessed that Louisville, Columbus, and Indianapolis all have tons of folks like this—it’s an extremely Middle American type!) There’s a certain type of techbro/financebro/STEMbro student and adult that I’ve come to realize actually does not grasp that there’s prizes to be won other than money or that smart folks might choose other forms of success than the ones they prize. The Temu version of This Kind of Guy is the student who accosted me after class once because my gen-ed course was taking too much time and he was getting a lower grade in it than in his STEM courses. (This is not a productive approach.) The higher-priced version is, well, Vivek or Andrew Yang, who really believes that Democrats are the party of …
… let’s do some backroom critical race theory. “More creating, less ‘chillin’” really gives it away, right? Much of what Vivek wants his kids to stay away from is basically just Black-coded. Much of the rest is white trash-coded, or just weirdly dated lite misogyny (“hanging out at the mall” buddy have you been to an American mall?????? they literally don’t allow teenagers!). In other words, it’s pretty standard upper-middle-class and aspirational professional-managerial class stuff, with the quiet parts said just a little too loudly—not quite deftly, naturally.
The second observation is that this is a call for a Cultural Counter-Revolution in favor of unwavering competition with China via a commitment—not the way I’d do it, but the way Vivek sees it—to unwavering excellence and determination, to arete rather than DEI, to Rationalia rather than CRT, and, well, okay also some tax cuts for folks like him. It is a Pro-Confucius Campaign, a gloss on traditional upper-middle-class family values as what will Make America Great Again. It’s an immigrant story in search of a Permanent Immigrant Revolution, in which each generation can re-create the fire and drive that (the story goes) delivered the first generation from darkness.
It’s twaddle, of course. Well, one part isn’t; I keep repeating upper-middle-class because these are the verities of the class above most but below the few; the very rich don’t need any of this because they have money and power, and so they can pretty much do whatever they like. Vivek should ask Donny Trump about how to wriggle out of jams. It’s the faith that virtue is rewarded; even if it surely seems like virtue is rarely rewarded with the very top spot on the greasy pole, at least those clinging to UMC status and aspirations can flatter themselves that they aren’t like the degens above or below them.
It’s also twaddle because it assumes that you can idea yourself out of a structural situation while depriving yourself of the means of structural change. I can tell you how to realize these goals: give big chunks of federal funding straight to top universities, require admission to college strictly by examination, and embrace double-blind grading. (Yes, this is the UK system ca 1975.) Instantly, you will make people really care about studying again. Sure, we’ll be creating an American gaokao (click the link if you don’t know what that is), but, hey, what works works—we can create a class of persons, American in blood and clothing, but Confucian in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. (It should be noted that I am not opposed to many versions of this plan, and in the course of drafting this paragraph have daydreamed of many glorious roles for upright auditors and accreditors to uphold these standards.) But DOGE enthusiasts are bent on undoing exactly the tools you’d need to make any of this work.
But it’s ultimately twaddle because the market for this among ordinary MAGA voters is very limited. The whole promise of white supremacy is not embracing competition; it’s killing and suppressing anyone who threatens your position atop a hierarchy, and then benefiting from that. This is not some absurd liberal proposition; this is more or less how, say, pale Californians of a hundred years ago justified laws that targeted the landholdings of Asian immigrants, who threatened whites in the Sunshine State because they worked too hard and too well. The solution, then as now, wasn’t to retrain and reskill for the next round of a fair match; it was to shut it all down, by any means necessary. That’s why the 1920s were not just the decade of flappers but also the decade of the Tulsa Massacre, and it’s why a lot of white folks who wanted to get ahead in the mid-1920s decided to join the second coming of the Klan. And it’s also why we ended up with immigration laws even more draconian than the ones that shut out folks like Mr. Thind.1
The final observation is also pretty clear. If Ramaswamy wants a party that embodies the pure id of the diverse, high-achieving culture of America’s campuses, science fairs, and immigrant families, he needs to switch over to the Party of Obama, the party which nominated Al Gore, John Kerry, Barry O, two Clintons, goddam Dukakis, and some woman named Kamala. All the places that he venerates are extremely liberal-coded. The whole point of mere liberalism—the stuff that Gores, Clintons, Obamas, and Kerrys love—is to protect the competition against those who threaten it. (You can add to this list, more or less, Bush 41, Eisenhower, and probably Jerry Ford too.)
The Democratic Party is also a very big tent and not everyone subscribes to this—far from. There’s a lot of transactionalism and frankly misguided idealism that threaten to undermine any principles like the ones in the previous paragraph. And there’s no guarantee that the good guys will win in the long term. What’s telling, though, is that it really seems like Ramaswamy, who seemingly says what he believes, and Musk, who says a lot but apparently really believes in the rights of super-smart immigrants to work for him, apparently thought that everyone else they worked with didn’t actually believe in the anti-immigrant, rather bigoted views they expressed.
If only there were a tendency that believed in strengthening and reforming institutions to mitigate harms and promote virtues.
The thing about joining a revolution is that eventually the eddies of radicalism and reaction get mixed up. You might think that you’re leading a counter-revolution against radicalism, only to be surprised when your allies suddenly sharpen the guillotine for you.
Happy story for him, eventually: he got citizenship later under a law extending benefits to veterans of the Great War. Very small lining, very dark cloud.