Nativism Sells Like Hotcakes

 

The oldest fear in the human brain, served hot with fries.

Pete Hegseth went to Normandy, on the anniversary of D-Day, and spoke of European beaches being “stormed” again. Not by armies this time, but by “dangerous ideologies” arriving by sea. Boats. Men. Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria. The setting was not accidental: military graves, Allied memory, Europe as a civilization once saved and now supposedly at risk again. The message came wearing a borrowed helmet from history.

Marco Rubio, in Munich, wrapped the same anxiety in a more diplomatic phrase: civilizational erasure. He did not say white erasure in those words, but the subtext was sitting in the front row, jingling its keys. Low birth rates, migration, loss of national identity, Europe ceasing to be Europe. The old fear in foreign-policy clothing.

You have to give this rhetoric one thing: it is efficient. It does not need to explain much. It does not need to prove everything it suggests. It only has to place three things close together — death, offspring, group — and let the brain do the rest.

The offer almost writes itself: a share of collective eternity. Amazon Prime Day for immortality. For ten cents, you get the promise that something of yours will continue: your blood, your people, your name, your civilization, your kind. Not just individual immortality. Collective immortality. The family-size combo.

The price is in the fine print, though not that fine: othering whoever ends up on the wrong side of the line. The other child. The other neighbor. The other citizen. The other body that ruins the family portrait of destiny.

It is not a hard sell. The emotional tinder is everywhere. Fear of death, fear of losing status, fear that your children will live in a world that feels foreign, fear that history has no owner. The firecrackers are ancient: blood, soil, women, children, borders, invasion, purity, honor, humiliation. The whole Paleolithic kit with a microphone and a foreign-policy panel. A half-damp match is enough.

The disturbing part is not that the trick is sophisticated. It is that it does not need to be.

When demography enters politics in an apocalyptic tone, it stops speaking only about births, migration, or integration. It starts speaking about disappearance. It tells people that if they do not control who enters, who is born, and who belongs, they will be erased. Not as individuals, but as a symbolic species. Your lineage. Your world. Your acceptable version of the future.

And then the conversation changes temperature. An immigration law stops being just a law. A birth-rate statistic stops being just a statistic. A neighbor stops being just a neighbor. Everything begins to carry an ugly electricity, as if every unfamiliar body had arrived to claim a piece of your grave.

That is when the product appears: a family-size combo against death. Fake, greasy, and wrapped in nostalgic packaging. It promises that something resembling you will keep occupying the world, and calls that continuity. It promises that the lineage can do what the body cannot: remain.

Ethnic purity, civilizational obsession, fertility turned into patriotic duty: all of it builds a blender with a halo. Reproduction, status, and anxiety packaged as destiny.

This is where identity enters the sale. Not as a private philosophical puzzle, but as the hinge that lets the product work. If the group is just a group, demographic change is political. If the group is you, demographic change becomes mortality.

Octavio Paz, in  The Labyrinth of Solitude, makes the first shock of self-consciousness briefly breathable. He writes of the adolescent startled by being, leaning over the river of his own consciousness and seeing a face distorted by the water, wondering whether it is his. That tremor is real. There is a moment when simply living is no longer enough: you also begin to watch yourself live. The reflection appears. Distance appears. The strangeness of being separated from yourself appears.

But nativism industrializes that tremor. It turns self-consciousness into bloodline panic. It takes the mirror and bolts it to a border fence.

The pitch does not work on everyone. For some, the question “who am I?” looks less like liberation than paperwork. The moment someone rehearses an answer in the mirror, the coherence audit begins.

But throughout history, most humans did not live that way. They lived through lineages, houses, tribes, religions, peoples, surnames, inheritances, borders, dead ancestors who still give orders, and futures to be administered. The idea of not seeking immortality through offspring, of not feeling the group as an extension of the body, of not needing “one’s own” to survive in order for one’s life to have mattered, is fairly rare. Modern, urban, individualist in the best sense. Also fragile.

That is why the product sells.

Because it does not present itself as a product. It presents itself as duty, memory, belonging, defense, love of children, respect for the dead. No one thinks they are buying fear. They think they are buying continuity.

And once someone is buying continuity, almost any price begins to look reasonable.

Even the other.

Especially the other.

A Nation with a Tired Playbook

 

On national identity, threat, and how deep the blade went under the skin

When I first moved to the United States, one of the things that struck me most was the country’s humor and vernacular optimism. Americans seemed trained to turn discomfort into jokes and uncertainty into possibility. Coming from a society with a different emotional weather, that was not a small difference. It felt structural.

For years, liberal comedy did this especially well. It made absurdity breathable. It took hypocrisy, bureaucracy, corruption, bad faith, moral panic, and institutional stupidity and turned them into oxygen. The joke did not erase the danger, but it created enough space to survive recognizing it.

That is why I do not observe the thinning of that humor as a minor cultural detail. In my view, humor and optimism were part of the American operating system. When a society that once metabolized absurdity through jokes begins preserving dread at full strength, something has changed.

The problem is not that Americans, or liberals in particular, suddenly became less funny. The problem is that politics became too compelling, too consequential, and too deranged to remain safely comic.

Every day delivers a fresh spectacle: courts, billionaires, executive orders, corruption, cruelty, constitutional dread. The material arrives pre-satirized. You do not even need to get creative. Reality keeps walking onstage wearing the costume.

That sounds like a gift to comedians, but it is not. Comedy needs absurdity with a little room around it. It needs enough distance for the body to say: this is insane, but I can breathe around it. When the absurdity has legal force, police force, market force, or institutional consequence, the laugh does not fully release. The body knows the joke can still hurt you.

So the tone changes. The comedian becomes a witness. The satirist becomes an archivist. The late-night monologue becomes less a release valve than a nightly inventory of damage. What used to make absurdity breathable now often preserves danger at full strength.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of distance. You cannot live every evening inside “their finest hour.” A nervous system cannot afford a daily version of Churchill announcing Britain’s entrance into World War II, even when some of the alarms are real.

America is not merely polarized. It is trying to regulate itself on a dancing landscape.

Everything that should provide ground has begun to move: parties, courts, platforms, media, prices, borders, identity, work, truth, expertise, even the weather. The result is not just disagreement. It is a national nervous system running threat detection at high volume.

The American model is legacy software running on that dancing landscape. It was built for another era, when the United States reigned more confidently, industry occupied more of the social imagination, and adulthood could still be narrated as a sequence: job, house, savings, retirement, inheritance. That world was never as fair or universal as nostalgia claims, but it was stable enough to make the model believable.

Now the ground moves, but the script remains. Households are still told to optimize, invest, hustle, insure, retrain, borrow, and believe in the future, while ordinary life becomes a sequence of cliffs: rent, medical bills, childcare, debt, layoffs, insurance, groceries, one missed paycheck, one broken car.

This is where the stock market becomes offensive.

Not because a rising market is bad in itself, but because of what it is asked to symbolize. Survey after survey says roughly a third of Americans lack even a few hundred dollars of emergency cushion; many could not cover a $400 or $500 shock without borrowing, selling something, or moving closer to the red line. And yet the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P keep smiling from their evergreen all-time-high peak, as if the dashboard were proof that the machine is healthy.

The split screen is obscene.

The chart says abundance.
The household says threat.
The index says historic high.
The kitchen table says one more bill.

This is not simply inequality. It is a crisis of interpretation. The country is told to read market highs as national health, while millions of households experience the same economy as fragility, exposure, and triage.

Automation sharpens the contradiction. If the old model depended on labor scarcity being solved by more labor, the new model is less clear. Machines, software, and AI do not eliminate the need for workers everywhere, but they do change the social imagination of work. Stable labor positions begin to feel less abundant, less durable, less able to absorb everyone.

In that environment, the cons of immigration become easier to dramatize than the pros. The immigrant may still be economically useful, even necessary, in whole sectors of the economy. But politically, the figure begins to look less like labor and more like pressure.

 A society under that much contradiction needs an explanation it can touch. So it turns toward the immigrant.

This is not an accident. Immigrant labor has long been useful to the economy alive: in fields, kitchens, construction sites, care work, cleaning, delivery, meatpacking, warehouses, hotels, and all the places where the official economy prefers not to look directly at its own dependencies. The immigrant body has been used as infrastructure: underpaid, overworked, politically exposed, socially deniable.

But at a certain point, the value changes.

The economy once needed the immigrant hidden in the kitchen, field, warehouse, or care home. Now power can use that same body as evidence, warning, spectacle, and offering. The worker who helped keep the machine running becomes proof that the machine was invaded.

This is the sacrificial logic. The legacy model is failing, but the failure is too large, too distributed, too abstract, too implicated in everyone’s arrangements. Financialization cannot be shouted at from a rally stage with the same visceral satisfaction. Asset inflation does not have a face. Deindustrialization is too historical. Healthcare is too bureaucratic. Housing scarcity is too local and too national at once. The dancing landscape has too many causes.

The immigrant simplifies the landscape.

Here is a body.
Here is a border.
Here is a story.
Here is the thing that crossed.
Here is the reason you are afraid.

The cruelty is that both legal and illegal immigrants can be absorbed into the same ritual. Legality matters administratively, but politically the category can be blurred whenever the machinery needs a larger offering. The point is not accuracy. The point is conversion: anxiety into anger, precarity into blame, structural failure into a human target.

The immigrant is made to carry a contradiction the society cannot metabolize. A country that depended on the labor now performs outrage at the presence. A market that benefited from the worker now lets politics treat the body as contamination. The person who helped keep the machine running becomes evidence that the machine was invaded.

That is why the sacrifice is propitiatory. It does not solve the crisis. It gives the crisis a victim.

The old model cannot admit that the ground has changed. So it asks for a body.

There. That is why the gods are angry.

The armor failed, but the forge is not gone

What worries me most is not any single item on this list. Not the market, not the media, not the border, not even the politics of blame. It is the possibility that all of it has gone under the skin.

A country can survive bad policy, bad markets, bad leaders, bad news cycles. What is harder to survive is a change in temperament: when humor stops functioning as oxygen, when optimism becomes performance, when precarity becomes identity, when politics becomes weather, when sacrifice becomes explanation.

That is why noticing the change matters. Noticing is not enough, but it is not nothing. A society cannot repair what it keeps misnaming. If dread has replaced humor, if spectacle has replaced explanation, if scapegoating has replaced diagnosis, then the first constructive act may be to say so clearly.

The point is not to recover a naive optimism. The old optimism belonged to an older landscape. But there may be another kind: not the optimism of denial, but the optimism of refusing the sacrifice. The optimism of insisting that the dancing ground is real, that the model is old, that the anger has causes, and that no body should be asked to carry them all.