A few years ago, Richard Hanania realized that if he became an Open Borders extremist like Bryan Caplan, his racist past, unpleasant personality, and tawdry present (e.g., his predilection for posting cheesecake photos) wouldn’t be held against him:
Richard argues:
I have finally cracked the mystery of Indian hate.
For decades, conversations about race in America have gone like this. Liberals accuse conservatives of being racists, conservatives respond that they have non-racist reasons for their opinions.
“No, I don’t hate Mexicans, it’s about the rule of law.”
“No, having more police isn’t racist, in fact it helps black people the most.”
You can make an arguable case in each instance that conservatives had a point. This was our dialectic.
Then the Indian came along. He’s everything that conservatives have ever said they wanted in an immigrant: law-abiding, high-earning, family-oriented, legal, English-speaking, no terrorism or illiberal attitude.
Here was an ultimate test that would show whether conservative opinions were ever based in reason.
Conservatives not only failed to embrace Indians. They reacted with a fury to their existence that made all their previous prejudices look mundane.
Imagine a woman who is attracted to toxic men but says she wants a nice guy. When she gets a nice guy who checks all the boxes, she hates him more than anyone else because he exposes her as engaging in self-delusion. His existence attacks her very identity.
That’s conservatives and Indians.
The right wanted to believe that they had a political ideology that could appeal to smart, decent people. The conservative intellectual was always reverse engineering justifications to flatter the prejudices of chuds. Again, on most issues there was a plausibility to the arguments being made.
Indians have exposed how fake the entire thing was. Conservative politics on a mass scale was rooted in stupidity and racism the whole time. Political scientists knew this already, but it’s now become too glaringly obvious to deny, even for uninformed rightists themselves. There is nothing left for conservatives to do but give up on reason and embrace racial hate as their organizing principle.
We should thank Indian immigrants, among all the other things they do, for providing this clarity.
But of course, reality is actually vastly more interesting than that.
In Hanania’s recent careerist-driven world view, American MAGA chuds are the driving force in world history.
But, obviously, they are instead not very sensitive and slow to respond to changes.
In particular, Indian immigrants have been changing in some ways over the decades, such as becoming more right wing, racist, and nationalistic, besides just growing hugely more numerous in the United States.
India, like Israel, is a lot more right wing than it used to be. That has its good sides:
Paywall here.
