Race nostalgia as social blight

In a time of ongoing hostility from the Trump administration to refugees seeking asylum, there’s one group that the White House has remained enthusiastic about bringing in. In May 2026, every single person admitted to the U.S. as a refugee was a White South African. As Mother Jones has reported, with more than six thousand refugees admitted to this country since October 1, only three asylum-seekers were anything but white people from South Africa.

This policy is shockingly cruel to those from other countries who are in need of actual asylum. And the promotion of Afrikaners is a foolish stunt costing U.S. taxpayers at least $100 million for no good reason.

But it’s emblematic of a larger response in the country, among moderates as well as the right-wing extremists now holding office. Today I want to talk about the dangers of race nostalgia creeping even into areas where it’s easy to miss its presence impact. In today’s post, I’ll address cultural change, and how white solidarity as an argument has infected nearly every kind of political argument being made today—even if many cases are far more subtle than Republicans bringing more white South Africans to the U.S.

The Angry Dad problem

In prior essays, I’ve talked about the hatred for women undergirding so many actions taken by the Trump administration. And this other hatred I’m talking about today—which manifests as white supremacy and a willingness to punish outgroups—seems to be just as deep-seated. It’s a profound psychological issue teased out and pumped up by malicious actors to gain power.

Some large subset of people, by natural temperament or by the circumstances of how they were raised seek a particular kind of love and approval from a strongman daddy figure. Some people need not only to be loved, but to be loved more than others and to see that loved proved through punishment of peers they see as less worthy and less loved.

People who want this kind of love need a love that is judgmental and exclusionary. They feel that if they submit to the demands of that father figure, they will create a world in which time will stop, no threatening change will happen, and they can remain beloved children of the angry father, who will protect them and take out his fury on other, lesser competitors for his affection.

Bad actors in organized churches or disorganized cults often take advantage of this human vulnerability in a religious context. Racism is a way to inject those fears into politics. The U.S. right now is suffering from it being open season for both the religious and political manipulation of who is worthy and who will be saved. In this sick world of anxiety and placation, a politician who loves every constituent is not a public servant at all but an abomination. Every helpful thing he or she provides to others means he is depriving his legitimate flock of their just rewards.

How better than to illustrate this model than Trump showing his supporters that he will only let people in the country who look like them—who feel persecuted in the ways that they do, and whose lives are portrayed as made worse or threatened by political change and any recognition of the humanity and citizenship of other human beings?

You don’t have to look at the sympathy Hitler had for the Afrikaners under British rule to see the historical parallels. It’s also simple enough to understand how the willingness to kill hundreds of thousands of human beings since the beginning of the second Trump administration due to cuts to the US Agency for International Development reinforces this vengeful daddy model. The deaths of people of color on a massive scale is just exclusionary culling as the flip side of admitting of white South Africans as refugees in the U.S. 

Andrew Sullivan is (still) wrong

There’s a quote I was looking for from something Andrew Sullivan wrote several years ago. I couldn’t find the specific passage I was thinking of, but Sullivan tends to stick to the same ideas. He’s a gay immigrant who is distrustful of other queer folks and immigrants, but insistently portrays himself as a thoughtful moderate. So it wasn’t hard to find a statement similar to the one I recalled, but made at another time. In June 2018, Sullivan posted on Twitter: “Slowing massive demographic change is not fascist; it's conservative.”

He was arguing against undocumented people in the U.S., but made this sleight of hand to talk about slowing demographic change instead. Is he against people coming without papers, or is he against people from predominantly nonwhite countries showing up?

I’ve thought about this line of reasoning a lot. Because slowing massive demographic change is eugenics. What exactly is considered massive demographic change? When has the U.S. not faced massive demographic change? What if that change is already baked in through those present in the country today? Why should demographic change matter in a country explicitly built on ideals and not on bloodlines?

The current white Afrikaner program would be a joke, except for the fact that it’s wasting taxpayer dollars while simultaneously removing a long-standing role the U.S. has played in accepting asylum seekers from places like Haiti and Venezuela. Even potential refugees from countries long acknowledged to be dangerous or unstable for certain residents are now far more likely to remain trapped in those countries. The longstanding ideal of the United States as a home for “poor… huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is erased.

The trap of faux nostalgia

Most people who aren’t already MAGA understand that bringing in white South Africans, whom the government is suggesting are targeted for “white genocide,” is a perversion and mockery of U.S. refugee policy. But I remember thinking during the first Trump administration that Sullivan’s arguments have a lot more currency than Trump’s obscene versions of them—that a lot of people who don’t necessarily see themselves as overtly calling for authoritarian government would be sympathetic to what Sullivan says.

This kind of demographic change is both real and not real. The country has certainly changed demographically again and again since its birth. People may dream of a time when circumstances were different, but what they’re longing seems to me more often a loss of their own cultural currency and importance—whether through age, changing social norms, or cultural trends. The trap is that idea that someone else’s race or culture is the actual reason you feel lost.

As political scientist Justin Gest noted a few years ago, between 1845 and 1854—not even a full decade—the volume of arriving Irish immigrants on the East Coast outnumbered immigrants from all other countries since 1776 combined. After the Civil War, millions of Black men got the vote in another major societal shift. But note that the fears triggered by this shift—the fears that led to the undoing of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow—were not about demographic change, but about maintaining power over others and a fear of equality.

Gest explained that by the time the United States would have faced its first transformation into a “majority minority” country, whiteness had already embraced Irish, Italians, Jews and Slavs, at least to the degree that—despite ongoing prejudice against some of these groups—the milestone was effectively postponed.

Squawking about demographics in similar ways today is just as foolish and dangerous. Andrew Sullivan is now, like me, an old person. I’m in my late fifties; he’s in his sixties. It’s human to be sad if the central culture that enriched and animated your life is passing from relevance to most people in a given country. Change is also inevitable.

Government by resentment

Realizing that most people in your country don’t share your ideas about food or music or television can be alienating and leads to some reactionary behavior. It’s like the cartoon about the guy who’s mad and pretends he can’t get his plain black coffee anymore just because a lot of people now have access to or prefer fancier forms of caffeine.

And when your beloved corner store closes, for instance, it can be easy to blame it on the ethnic or cultural background of someone different who takes over the lease. But that presupposes that your store would have stayed open in the first place—that no change would have happened anyway.

We all grow old and tend to become less relevant. But too many white Boomers and Gen Xers have taken their personal griefs and tried to make the United States government reshape society so that they won’t be made uncomfortable. You have a right to be sad over change, but as soon as you’re arguing that you have a right to say what color the skin of the person living next door to you should be, you’re expecting the government to do eugenics because of your feelings.

The White Afrikaner refugee policy is a broad, theatrical way of Trump saying, “Yes, you should not be inconvenienced by people I agree are lesser humans. If you continue to support me, I will go to outrageous lengths to protect you and people I deem to be like you.”

But if you subscribe to the idea that the U.S. is a country of ideas, as I do, it raises another question. Given that there has been no true indigenous population in the U.S. in charge of the federal government since its creation, as what point in U.S. history did demographic change become unjust and merit correction? What about the parts of the country which have long been majority minority?

By explicitly showing that you will protect white people only, and punishing everyone else, what political promise future does that create? It promises an end to democracy.

 The political argument in the U.S.

The explicit Trump view has led to a strange phenomenon, in which many people who claim to be strongly opposed to the current administration find themselves adopting some of its tactics. Democrats who might refer to themselves as centrists cater to nasty immigration policies, as happened with the draconian bipartisan border bill put forward in 2024.

In a parallel pattern, too often democratic consultants and even key politicians long for a macho white guy to help save the party and the country from right-wing extremism. These figures have been taken up by those with ties to national politics, cultivated, and encouraged to run. This sends a message on a fundamental level that manly white men taking charge is the only way out of this mess.

The argument goes that if we cater to the strongman-loving model just enough to recapture the votes of those who abandoned the Democratic Party at one point or another, we can run a bait-and-switch by imposing progressive policies, even if the voters who get fooled into voting for a white guy weren’t necessarily asking for that.

Today, I’m talking less about any of those candidates’ actual platforms or backgrounds and more about and why they get selected to run or to receive massive support from institutions and institutional figures. Because if maintaining white solidarity becomes the overriding principle in selecting candidates, it affects the entire political system over time.

The downstream effects of that approach will be even greater segregation of people of color from public life and targeting of minorities—a gentler version of the purges we’ve seen over the last year from the Department of Defense, or the reduction in congressional seats held by Black politicians that will likely follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent further gutting of the Voting Rights Act. The priority should be for the Democratic Party or individual candidates to develop a vision that draws voters, rather than a handpick candidates who actively or passively confirm the larger pool of voters’ blindness or bigotry. 

What to do about it

This post lends itself a little less to my usual “here’s how you can take action” ending. It may be more useful to just help you think about how refugee and immigrant issues—and race itself—get framed.

But if you’ve also noticed the psychological need many people have to turn our larger society into an exclusionary club, it’s important to be actively dismantling that club, and to end its ability to punish outgroup and communities portrayed as less-than or undesirable.

One way to do this is by working to end the staggering levels of corruption being unleashed daily by elected leaders and appointed officials. Demand your national representatives stand up for expanded accountability and investigations of corruption. If the House of Representatives swings back into Democratic control, this will be a key role for the new majority to play. But they can get started now, as we’ve recently seen with calls for subpoenas on prediction markets and apparent instances of insider trading.

On a local level, look at the parameters for how municipal contracts get awarded where you live. Help put stronger ethics rules in place in your own community at the local level. See who law enforcement is accountable to. The more we restrict strongman-style politicians at every level from personally controlling who gets rewarded or punished, the harder it will be for them to increase corruption and shift business to a bribes-and-influence model.

Run for local office, or join a library board or other community organization. The more that services where you live are made available broadly to everyone, and the more people who are involved in government, the more fireproof your community will be against resentments and corruption on a local level—unlike where we’re at right now as a country on the federal level.

The more people who rise up organically through local political involvement, the less susceptible state elections will be to outside influence and the theories of those who think that only one kind of person can run for office and win. But I also believe that the more we build our communities to offer services to everyone and meet their actual needs, the harder it will be for malicious actors to gain a toehold by promising that America’s real salvation comes only through protecting white South African refugees and people who look like them.

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