“A family from Mexico arrives this morning legally has as much right to the American Dream as the direct descents of the Founding Fathers. The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view. But if there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you, tonight this hall belongs to the Party of Lincoln. And the exits which are clearly marked are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.” - Senator Bob Dole, address accepting the Republican presidential nomination, San Diego, 15 August 1996
As comes Autumn so comes college football as millions of Americans tune in for what, in actuality, seems the nation’s favourite past time — sorry baseball! Living in England, I’m regrettably incapable of following American sports closely. But, courtesy of social media, the subsequent discourse it brewed, I saw the stands at Darrell K. Royal Stadium jubilant as the Longhorns managed an incredible triumph, scoring three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, down twenty, and taking the ball from Ohio State as the clock ran out. And then I saw something quite ugly.
Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, saw what I did, and didn’t. He did not see students celebrating football. He saw a “problem.” He posted the image and wrote that it was “far worse than anyone imagined.”
The problem? It is proof that Americans have been “displaced by foreigners.” What that entails exactly, is where his beliefs, and the direction of many in the Republican Party, become quite grim. There is an insidious undertone to this post that is, irrefutably, racist. The students in the foreground were, by every account, Texans. Ninety percent of a UT freshman class comes from inside the state. Mr French did not care about their origin. Mr French cared about their skin colour.
Dwelling on Mr French is tedious, and tiresome; there is little use in platforming or refuting the ramblings of a deranged bigot. What happened next, however, is of consequence and worth acknowledging. Senator John Cornyn called it “intolerance and racism” and warned that “this is how great political parties self-destruct.” Like so many of his Republican predecessors, once ejected by personal choice or at the ballot box, Mr Cornyn too joins a list of ‘concerned traditional conservatives’ who have suddenly found a voice that has otherwise been lacking in this past decade of Trump. Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows joined the condemnations, declaring that Mr French crossed a line by demeaning people over their ethnicity; other Republican legislators, untainted by national ambitions, called it racism, plain and simple.
Governor Greg Abbott distanced himself, but did not denounce it vehemently. Attorney General Ken Paxton, running for Senate on the same ballot as the worst MAGA has to offer, managed to condemn racism — in attacking Mr Cornyn for once having mentioned his own Whiteness. Mr French himself did not apologise. He accused Mr Cornyn of “cheering for” foreigners over citizens and dismissed critics inside the party as “America Last losers.” Most damning of all is the silence of Vice President JD Vance, who is married to Usha Vance, an American of Indian heritage, and has mixed-race children, yet has remained utterly quiet on this tirade.
And it is here that the story turns from one man’s ugly bigotry into a rot festering within the party. Many Republicans have defended him; one reposted a claim that any who encouraged abandoning French was an enemy of the cause; another called the Republicans critiquing him “contemptible.” The debate was not settled by the bigotry; it continues past it, with a faction of the party treating the acknowledgement of racism as the real offence, and of Mr French’s words as a lesser matter, to be relegated as if it was a mere rounding error, the price of loyalty.
It begs the question of how the party of Reagan, who declared “anybody from any corner of the world can become an American” found itself so inverted. This inversion is the thing to look at squarely, because it does not begin with French nor will it end with him. Seven years ago, Nick Fuentes and his online “groypers” ambushed Charlie Kirk and other conservative pundits at campus events in what they refer to as “groyper war”, demanding to know why a movement that called itself America First tolerated immigration; legal or illegal.
Charlie Kirk, once a conventional constitutional conservative, originally held the sensible view that green cards should be stapled to the diplomas of talented foreign graduates. It’s a position that, inherently, makes sense — how is it America first to educate the best talent on U.S. soil just to repatriate them four years later? But Mr Kirk did not hold this position for long, yet the pressure did not come from the left. It came from inside the coalition, from those who believe America’s character and exceptionalism do not derive from law, creed, and values but from blood and tenure.
It is not remarkable that Fuentes exists; his rhetoric derives from the seeds laid by Pat Buchanan in 1992. Every movement and party has its extremists — it’s intellectually dishonest and laughable to pretend the Democrats and the progressive left don’t. But the remarkable thing is how much of his programme the party has come to absorb. Restricting legal immigration of the talented is now the position of the party defended on economic grounds that simply contrast with reality. Arguments about assimilation have no bearing here; how can anyone argue the students, even if they weren’t of American origin, have not assimilated? If immigrants are behaving rowdily, chugging beers in a parking lot, and cheering for football does this not exemplify the success of American integration? The same politicians, had these students been White, would have cheered at this display of “American culture.”
There are legitimate arguments to be had about the consequences of mass immigration, and demographic transformation is by no means a concern only held by racists. Immigration restrictions and the idea of “America First” politics are a legitimate policy stance often unfairly smeared by those on the left who are pointing to its worst advocates. Immigration should be controlled; those who break the law should be punished; and the premise of immigration must always be — is this good not just for America, but for Americans.
But those being attacked by Mr French and his ilk are those who are Americans, born and raised, who know no other home. There is an important distinction, and attempts to erode that clear line should be condemned. Those of non-White origin now find themselves under attack from a Republican Party that, once dominated by the party’s evangelical universalism, now describes the nation and their values in frankly ethnic and religious terms. “Christian Nationalist” is a label of pride, not an accusation. It’s remarkable how, without winning an election, Mr Fuentes has managed to take over a party that has decided it could not afford to lose his voters, and so would not finish any argument he started.
There is a version of the Republican Party that remembers how this is supposed to go. In 1996, accepting his party’s nomination, Senator Bob Dole put it this way: “The 10th Mountain Division, in which I served in Italy, and the Black troops of the 92ndm Division who fought nearby were the proof for me once again of the truth I’m here trying to convey. The war was fought just a generation after America’s greatest and most intense period of immigration. And yet when the blood of the sons of immigrants and the grandsons of slaves fell on foreign fields, it was American blood.”
In 2008, at a town hall in Minnesota, a woman told John McCain that she was fearful of an Obama presidency because he was “an Arab.” Mr McCain took the microphone back from her. No, he said — Obama was a decent family man and a citizen with whom he disagreed, eliciting boos and jeers from the audience. It cost Mr McCain, a man of great integrity and honour, nothing to say and it cost him votes to have said it, and he said it anyway, because he knew that a Republican Party and an America that cannot tell its own voters where the line is have lost the right to call itself a party of principle. That Republican Party, the one of Dole and McCain, seventeen years later, is unrecognisable.
The distance traveled is not subtle, and it has been travelled before. In 1855, the Know-Nothing Party — a party our current president and vice president are not far removed from in description and behaviour — rose on a platform of hatred for Catholics and Immigrants — the Irish most of all, a people the nativists of 19th-century America counted as less than — my ancestors. Abraham Lincoln, in a letter written to his friend Joshua Speed, wrote that the nation had begun by declaring all men created equal, and lamented how the Declaration practically read “all men are created equal, except negroes”; and that, should the Know-Nothings triumph, it would read “except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” Mr Lincoln wrote it would be more virtuous and preferential to live under an honest dictatorship than a liberty that was selective and mendacious about who it covered. The Irish dead of that century’s wooden coffin ships, and the generations of their descendants, who sit in many positions of influence throughout America, are proof that hierarchy was never natural law. It was politics, and politics can be unwritten. It can also, evidently, be rewritten and I believe it is owed to those who bore such perils and strife to defy such temptations.
I would not absolve that Left and the Democratic Party, who have spent this past decade, courtesy of the Obama presidency, defining America and ranking people by racial, gender, and sexual identity; they have their own bad habits, indeed many of the nativist arguments emanating from the MAGAsphere tend to bear similarity with the intersectional lens of the left’s notorious grifters — Derrick Bell and Ibram X. Kendi — critical race theory has been adopted by the right to answer for their own inadequacies, as it was, and continues to be, utilised by the left for theirs. A conservative party used to answer that temptation on the basis of merit, not mirror it.
But that is a different column, and the fight against the Democrats’ discriminatory practices for the sake of equity, rather than equality, is a fight I have long been in the ring for. I find myself more concerned about how a party that had, until recently, kept a taboo against saying out loud that some citizens are not citizens and now finds itself with elected officials who put power above all else by defending the violation of that taboo more than they defend the taboo itself.
A Railroad Commissioner seems like a small office, but its regulatory power over Texas’ Oil & Gas influence makes it a highly influential position in American politics and is a natural catapult to higher statewide or federal office. The instincts expressed, and the cover he is receiving from the establishment for covering it, are not a small thing. It has ignited the question of whether the party of Lincoln believes in a republic of citizenry, or has conceded that it believes in a republic of stock.
Many of us in Generation Z voted, and will vote, for the first time this decade, in a country their families crossed oceans and generations to reach — no differently than Mr French’s own ancestors once did, the same as mine. And no matter their skin colour, the texture of their hair, their language, stature, they looked like that Saturday night at UT — the country working. Conservatives who cannot see that are not conserving anything. And if the Republican Party chooses this dark path, it and the American right will destroy itself. And it will be well deserved.