David Frum’s “natives” and the grift of selling Real Americans to the professional class

Others have done a good job tearing apart David Frum’s Atlantic cover story on immigration, mostly by pointing out that it’s racist and stupid. We know what to expect by now from Frum and his fellow “reasonable” or “moderate” or “British” supporters of far right immigration policy. The question remains, who exactly is the audience of these pieces? Readers of a prestigious legacy magazine understand that Trump’s wall and the more obtrusively fascistic practices of ICE are #cancelled. So what exactly is Frum doing?

One thing he is very much not doing is examining the objective evidence. If his claim is that “voters” will continue to demand ever-stricter and more openly racist immigration enforcement, well, he might have wanted to do a quick Google search. According to the latest Pew data, immigration and immigrants are as popular in the United states as they’ve perhaps ever been:

As in recent years, a majority (62%) say immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents. Just 28% say immigrants are a burden on the country because they take jobs, housing and health care, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.

These attitudes have changed little in the past few years, but they are very different from a quarter-century ago. In 1994, attitudes were nearly the reverse of what they are today: 63% of Americans said immigrants burdened the country and 31% said they strengthened it.

Seems pretty straightforward! You might think a big fancy cover story on immigration might want to take it upon itself to argue with data that seem to contradict its basic thesis. Gentle reader, if you thought that, you are not familiar with the idiom of David Frum. Here’s a representative paragraph from his piece:

When natives have lots of children of their own, immigrants look like reinforcements. When natives have few children, immigrants look like replacements. No wonder that, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

Half of one subgroup of white Americans agree with a statement so vague that it might refer to the advent of smartphones. Profound stuff.

But hold on, what the hell is Frum — who happens to be a naturalized immigrant from Canada, as well as a graduate of both Yale and Harvard — doing with that Rudyard Kipling-ism, “natives”? Since he clearly doesn’t mean indigenous Americans, who exactly are these natives? He apparently also doesn’t mean the large majority of United States citizens who have a favorable view of immigrants. So, natives of where?

Frum starts to give the game away in that very paragraph when he invokes the mythic “white working-class.” Three years of Trump Voter Safari pieces have given us the tools needed to infer a narrative from that often sketchy signifier: The factory left town, and that’s why the guy who never worked at the factory and in fact owns three thriving car dealerships had to vote for Trump, despite voting for every Republican since Gerald Ford.

Of course, there are many white Americans who qualify as “working class” under various substantive definitions. But there are also many well-worn ways to make professional-class people in and around major urban centers believe anyone who’s white and from the provinces — or even the nearby exurbs — is Tom Joad. Over the last few years, the exact class of person who can be expected to actually read a cover story for The Atlantic has been exposed to a steady stream of discourse that confuses “working-class” whiteness with any whiteness situated outside the overlapping confines of a few major metro areas and a few dozen colleges.

Somehow, these narratives always seem to imply that there’s an authentic white person — a Real American — standing just over there. The Real American is just far away enough that you, blinkered professional with a fancy degree, can’t see him. If you read my diligent longform about this distant, ghostly, but very genuine and of-the-soil figure, perhaps he’ll begin to come into focus. Perhaps you will begin to understand Real Americans. All you have to do is accept that this paragon of authenticity hates brown people.

(And once you accept this xenophobic hatred, you can understand why the Real American definitely wants to give tax breaks to hedge fund managers — but that’s another longform altogether!)

Don’t take it from me. Consider this passage by Frum’s intellectual compatriot (and fellow white, Ivy League immigrant to the United States) Andrew Sullivan, in an article about Brexit and British-ness in which he cites the same study about feeling like a stranger in your own country that Frum invokes. To be sure, Sullivan is in this case talking about a subset of white Brits, but it’s the same reasoning and rhetoric he and Frum apply to certain white Americans:

It wasn’t their economic insecurity that gave us Brexit. It was that no one in charge even sensed their unease. Elites — and I count myself among the guilty — gave them nothing by way of reassurance or even a sense that they were understood instead of reviled. So all they had was Brexit. It wasn’t a rational decision; it was their only way to have their voices heard. Their pride and self-identity are bound up in it now, just as a critical slice of America’s is bound up in Trump. Which is why, despite the mounting evidence that the Brexit gambit is a disaster, they will never let it go.

They. Their. Them.

The natives grow restless.

Why have the more reactionary members of our sinecured public intellectual class taken it upon themselves to write about their fellow citizens as if they’re strategizing for the British Raj circa 1890? One reason is that both Frum and Sullivan — loud and proud NeverTrumpers — are almost certainly preparing to tearfully declare, in about a year, that the Loony Left has forced them to vote for Trump. That’s easy enough to predict.

Insofar as these xenophobia-apologist articles are meant to persuade the kind of professional-class liberal who might read them, though, they’re not banking on overt racial resentment. Plenty of cosmopolitan professionals are racist, but reminding them that they are isn’t a good way to reach them.

What Frum and Sullivan are doing is telling us that to reject the racism of the nativist far right would be an injustice against a particular Other. In their ethical system, to put a wall or an ICE storm trooper in front of a non-white migrant may be a regrettable way of treating a brown Other, but it is the only way to respect and honor another, more important, whiter Other. You, the Coastal Elite reading this article, can come into contact with the Real American only if you have sympathy for the xenophobia this self-sacrificing public intellectual tells you is precious to a white person you’ve never met.

That the writer revealing this truth is one of you — an elite professional and self-proclaimed meritocrat, rather than a laid-off blue-collar worker — means you must believe what they say, because it’s hard-won and acknowledged only reluctantly. It brings David Frum no joy to tell you that we must all be more sympathetic to forms of bigotry that only coincidentally align with the beliefs of Robert Mercer.

It’s unfortunate that we have to make a choice between downtrodden Others, a writer like Frum stresses, but it’s a brutal world, full of ISIS and Maduros and Axes of Evil. And the Loony Left is already standing up for the immigrants. Who will speak for the Real Americans?

David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, apparently — and you, reader of The Atlantic, if you listen to their compassionate appeals and come to understand the Real American. The natives are restless. Thank God we have these virtuous men to take up the public intellectual’s burden.