It all comes back to Sesame Street

[muckefuck]

So fengi post a link to an article in the NYT that expands on the generation gap in attitudes toward immigration that I previously mentioned coming across in the Economist. They ascribe it neatly to the composition of the community during one's formative years, which strikes me as being a little too close to the progressive notion that diversity breeds tolerance when there's at least as much evidence for the "familiarity breeds contempt" school of thought. (American South, anyone?) I find it interesting to see how much resistance there is to immigration among liberal baby boomers, since they're the ones who came up with the New Ethnicity after all. But I guess that's why many are so wedded to tendentious arguments about how qualitatively different the current crop of immigrants is from their those of their parents' and grandparents' generations.

In any case, speaking of you old fogies, I know some of you actively remember Watergate and all that, so I was wondering if you'd be willing to share your two cents regarding this claim (relating to a very different sort of alien population):

Pre-Watergate, most Americans were inclined to trust the President--no President had ever been implicated in that kind of criminal activity (White House staff, yes, as with Grant and Harding, but never a President). There was zero historical reason for suspecting a President would do such things as Nixon did; it was as unprecedented in the American mind as aliens visiting Earth.

Comments

[enf.livejournal.com]

I was too young to remember the Nixon administration myself, but that's about what my dad has said about it.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

Great question. I came of age politically just as all this stuff was going on. America changed greatly between pre-1968 (with the asassinations and cities erupting in flames and violent riots) and post Nixon resignation in 1974 in a way I've never seen since. Sure, in one sense, the distrust of government thread goes way back in American history. But ... pre 1968, the dominant culture including my bourgeouis suburban world was pro-Vietnam War, anti all these hippies, anti-drugs and permissive counterculture subversive types (at least in the northeast they - reluctantly- conceded that the civil rights movement was a good thing, but there was such a thing as taking it "too far"). Even throughout Watergate many people - my own parents included - clung to the notion up until the last minute that the President couldn't possibly be guilty (or maybe they just didn't want to believe it, because it meant they were part of the wrong paradigm). The realization that Oh My God those rabble rousers were right - at least about some things - was absolutely mind-blowing, to use a phrase they wouldn't have used. All of a sudden questioning authority was respectable.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I don't buy the argument that racism or immigration attitudes are formed by the composition of the neighborhood where one grew up. My neck of northern Michigan was about as whitebread as you can get. I think I could count on one hand (certainly two hands) the number of noncaucasian students in my class, and I never encountered any overt signs of racism. On the contrary, I felt like our town was always very welcoming, even to the (mostly Mexican) migrant pickers that came through every summer. In our case, I think that the area wasn't diverse simply because no one else had bothered to move there, not because they were being actively discouraged from doing so. Like you, I'm not saying it isn't possible, just that it's not a given conclusion.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

I found one line from that NYT column rather humorous:

In contrast, baby boomers and older Americans — even those who fought for integration — came of age in one of the most homogenous moments in the country’s history.

Homogeneous was not exactly how I remembered it. At the same time that we reached this "low point for immigration" we had violent race riots every summer in every American city of any size. Many of our cities were vast no-go zones. We had a generation gap wider than I've ever seen - young and old didn't even speak to one another. A marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant was "mixed." America had plenty diversity, even then, although it had a different makeup. It was the elites that were homogeneous. Insecure tribes always seem to defend their turf by whatever means possible.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

What about Lincoln? His opponents had a rather low view of him.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Near the beginning of All the President's Men, where Woodward and Bernstein lay out some of the early evidence that they found tying the Watergate burglars to White House personnel, there's a line that goes something like "Woodward and Bernstein looked at each other. What the hell did this mean?"

I asked my mother, a classic 1970s left-liberal Democrat and confirmed Watergate obsessive, "What do they mean, what did it mean? They couldn't figure out what it meant? It wasn't bleeding obvious?"

She replied that, at that time, it was simply incomprehensible that the President might have been involved in activity like that. It was almost literally unbelievable. No one had a frame of reference for understanding that the Presidency could be so corrupt.

So the account you quote here jibes very strongly with her experience of Watergate.

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

I was in my late 20's during Watergate. Nothing surprised me. Nixon had the moniker "Tricky Dick" in California where I was living. Many of my friends suspected Nixon from the start so each of the revelations confirmed our suspicions.

Chuck

[mlr.livejournal.com]

i was 20 when he resigned.

the statement: a bit of an historical pollyannaism to me.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I don't remember it being so shocking that Nixon himself was up to no good, but then my dad was a Nixon-hater who made it onto the Enemies List.

I think I was surprised by the press hooplah, though.