“How America Ends” Essay Strategies
Part 1
Choice C
Essay #2 (1,000 words) Due April 7
Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Read Yoni Appelbaum’s essay “How America Ends” and develop an argumentative thesis about the role of massive demographic shifts on American democracy.
I will quote some of Appelbaum’s essay in italics.
“Democracy depends on the consent of the losers”:
Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential.
Today, though, is different. Political parties are at war with one another. One wants to wipe out the other. One wants to “own” the other. To fail to “own” one’s political opponent is the difference between life and death.
There is therefore no peaceful loss of an election. One is always at war and one must always fuel aggression by feeding one’s social media outrage machine.
This leads to political division that is so virulent or intense that many say the United States is in a Cold Civil War.
Parents’ Worst Nightmare and Secession (individual states separating from rest of the United States)
As partisans have drifted apart geographically and ideologically, they’ve become more hostile toward each other. In 1960, less than 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans said they’d be unhappy if their children married someone from the other party; today, 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would be, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic poll—far higher than the percentages that object to marriages crossing the boundaries of race and religion. As hostility rises, Americans’ trust in political institutions, and in one another, is declining. A study released by the Pew Research Center in July found that only about half of respondents believed their fellow citizens would accept election results no matter who won. At the fringes, distrust has become centrifugal: Right-wing activists in Texas and left-wing activists in California have revived talk of secession.
We’re now in a state of “scorched earth policy,” the appetite to annihilate one’s political enemies, not live in peaceful disagreement.
Our political opponents are demons, subhuman Gollums, and metastasizing growths of cancer.
This atmosphere of dehumanization is resulting in escalating violence from both political extremes. As Appelbaum writes:
In other instances, political protests have turned violent, most notably in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a Unite the Right rally led to the murder of a young woman. In Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere, the left-wing “antifa” movement has clashed with police. The violence of extremist groups provides ammunition to ideologues seeking to stoke fear of the other side.
What is the cause of this nightmare we’re in?
Appelbaum gives some causes: He writes:
What has caused such rancor? The stresses of a globalizing, postindustrial economy. Growing economic inequality. The hyperbolizing force of social media.
White America of the Past Vs. Greater Diversity of the Present
But the dominant cause is the change in racial demographics.
As Appelbaum points out:
But the biggest driver might be demographic change. The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests.
White Christian America is becoming more diverse. The white dominant population is shrinking in the face of greater diversity.
Living in Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Seattle or other “blue” political zones, we tend to celebrate diversity. After all, diversity is our home. We celebrate the food, the culture, the cosmopolitan mix of people. This is what we know and enjoy.
But in flyover states that tend to lack diversity, where white America wants to cling to the America of the past where white Americans were the dominant group, we have racial hostility.
So you have Diversity America and All-White America, and these two forces, Appelbaum observes, create America’s great political divide.
America is in a battle for its soul, an embrace of diversity and a move toward the future; or a desperate foothold on white dominance and a fixation on the past.
Both groups feel victimized and threatened by the other. Both groups feel “discriminated against.”
Criticism of Appelbaum’s Thesis
Now I’m a white male, and I don’t feel discriminated against. Why is this?
For a lot of reasons, but one is that I grew up in a diverse culture. As a child in San Jose, California, I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of Mexican-Americans, and we ate and played together, shared meals together. Their parents hung out with my parents. We shared ingredients from our backyards and made homemade Mexican dishes.
Later in life, I became a college instructor and hung out with thousands of diverse students.
Pivotal Moments of My Life Marked by the Help of People of Color
In 1987, my first college teaching job was with the help of a Mexican-American.
My second college teaching job I was hired by a female African-American.
My third teaching job, I was hired by a man from Nigeria.
My Teacher of the Year Award in 1994 was given to me by four African-American men.
My first tenure-track teaching job was given to me by an Asian-American.
So I am at home with diversity from a cultural standpoint. But not only that, as a white male, I find the idea of living in an all-white community or a racially segregated community to be disgusting and a moral abomination.
Why? Because racial segregation is not part of my cultural identity.
My cultural identity is based on diversity, inclusion, and cosmopolitan openness. It’s not even so much an intellectual position as it is something that flows through my blood.
Culture and Race
And here is where Appelbaum needs to talk about culture, not just race, in his analysis of America’s political divide.
So, Mr. Appelbaum, I love your essay, but we’re in more of a cultural war than we are a race war.
It’s the cultural war, largely based on race, that makes political elections a matter of “life and death.”
It’s the cultural war and race that makes politics the scorched-earth battle we’re in.
So to reiterate, I agree with Appelbaum that we are in a racial war; but the racial component is complicated by cultural differences. It’s more of a Blue and Red State War.
We need to consider the culture war as we consider writing a thesis for this essay option.
Part 2 of Yoni Appelbaum’s Essay “How America Ends”
Choice C
Essay #2 (1,000 words) Due April 7
Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Read Yoni Appelbaum’s essay “How America Ends” and develop an argumentative thesis about the role of massive demographic shifts on American democracy.
I will quote some of Appelbaum’s essay in italics.
In part 1, we talked about how America is in a racial and cultural war.
Delay the Inevitable
In the next part of his essay, Appelbaum argues that the White Right, or the White Old-Guard, sees American diversity taking over white America eventually. This takeover is “inevitable,” so White America is trying with all its might to delay the inevitable.
To make this delay, white politicians will pack the courts with white judges who will keep the old-guard policies.
Will America eventually make the adjustment to a diverse America?
But sometimes, that process of realignment breaks down. Instead of reaching out and inviting new allies into its coalition, the political right hardens, turning against the democratic processes it fears will subsume it. A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up.
The conservative movement is pivoting away from political ideas and focusing on white racial identity, and this, Appelbaum observes correctly, is very bad and dangerous for America.
And here is the danger in a nutshell:
When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.
“Whatever the cost” could include:
One. Electing racist demagogues to high office.
Two. Enabling racists who commit acts of violence such as what we saw in Charlottesville race riot with white guys holding torches and chanting, “They will not replace us.” (Vice video)
Three. Weaponizing fake news as a justification to “preserve the race” as seen in the 2020 HBO documentary After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News.
Four. Rejecting science-based evidence as a liberal plot to take down white America as seen in Far Right’s dismissal of the very real Covid-19 virus threat.
Regarding the political divide over the Covid-19 danger, we read in Wired:
According to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, only 40 percent of Republicans believe the coronavirus is “a real threat,” compared to 76 percent of Democrats. Fifty-four percent of Republicans say it’s “blown out of proportion.” That’s consistent with earlier polling that suggests Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to call reports about the seriousness of the outbreak “generally exaggerated.”
As reported by Rachel Maddow, there are 7 states, all Red, that are the only remaining states to have no lockdown orders to protect citizens from Covid-19.
Five, the White Right feels justified to abandon “democratic principles” and rely on fascism and facist leaders to win their war. They will elect leaders who lock up babies in cages at the borders and separate the families. This is part of the “scorched-earth” war.
We stand at the abyss, but there is hope, according to Appelbaum:
Even today, large numbers of conservatives retain the courage of their convictions, believing they can win new adherents to their cause. They have not despaired of prevailing at the polls and they are not prepared to abandon moral suasion in favor of coercion; they are fighting to recover their party from a president whose success was built on convincing voters that the country is slipping away from them.
Appelbaum’s hope hinges on conservative party giving up white racial identity politics and returning to political ideas.
But as of writing, the White Identity Cult endures. We can only hope this cult, like Nazi Germany, fades in the dustbin of history and leaves a permanent mark of shame on America, so that we don’t return to this fascism again.
Sample Thesis Statements:
Sample #1
While Appelbaum could better clarify his points by showing that America’s race war is in part a cultural war, he makes a persuasive argument that America’s existential crisis is that the Right is so desperate to fight diversity that it is relying on fascist principles and methods, including electing racist demagogues with no political experience to high office, giving the green light to Racist Extremist Groups to come out of the woodwork, weaponizing fake news in order to “own the libs,” and rejecting science-based evidence as a “liberal conspiracy.”
Sample #2
While there is much to despair in Appelbaum’s essay, there is at the same time ample historical evidence to show that America will overcome its racial and cultural war and find a truce so that democracy may survive.
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