"Demographic Change"

Adam Serwer

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts
A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society.

The debate between historians and journalists is about the facts. I've said it before: The 1619 Project is bad history in the model of the New York Times bad history of Zionism. Call it progress.

Two sides of Adam Serwer: Black and Jewish. So obvious but no one says a thing.

White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots

Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response. “Massive demographic changes,” Laura Ingraham has proclaimed, mean that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance. Or it’s just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans’ electoral prospects. As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible.

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

 Time to redefine the term `pro-Israel’

Those who should be most pleased with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress yesterday are those who believe that “Israel should be wiped off the map,” argues Jeffrey Goldberg. He makes the compelling case that the reality of demographic change in the region, coupled with the refusal to reach agreement on a two-state solution, constitute an extential threat to Israel:

Netanyahu, who understands the existential threat posed by Iran, does not seem to understand the nature of this other existential threat. His five predecessors as prime minister — including Ariel Sharon, whose heart did not bleed for Palestinians — understood it. President Obama understands it, too.

“The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories,” Obama told members of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, on May 22. “This will make it harder and harder, without a peace deal, to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.”

For too long, the term “pro-Israel” in the American political context been used to describe only those who minimize the suffering of Palestinians and actively enable the Israeli right’s attempt to bring the peace process to a halt, even as they offer rhetorical support for the idea of a two state solution. But political changes in the Middle East and demographic changes in the region have created a shrinking window of time for Israel to seek a resolution to the conflict on terms favorable to its long-term survival..

Serwer's twitter for "demographic"

If it's unfair in 2020 to quote Serwer from 2011, it's unfair in 2019 for Serwer to quote Ben Shapiro from 2003.  Serwer doesn't say much about Israel anymore, but it's safe to say he's with Sanders in opposing full political equality for Palestinians.