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

[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.