A Non-Ideological Testimonial
I was once a “normie.” My political and social views were pretty conventional for someone who considered themselves a conservative Protestant. I oppose abortion. I am for the sanctity of marriage. Remain a virgin until marriage. Homosexuality is sinful, and so on. I was pretty conventional in my economic and political views. Pro-market. Pro-trade. Small government. Lower taxes. Strong military. NAFTA was going to be a boon. That sort of thing. Coming from the imperial satrapy to the north to study in Michigan, I fell in love with all things American. Guns. The history. The founding. All of it. I kept a beautiful cloth bound two volume boxed set of “The Debate on the Constitution” proudly displayed on my desk right next to my Bible. I was even born on the fourth of July.
Hailing from snow bound lands to the north did provide me with some differing perspectives to those who grew up in America proper. We really did seem to live the true spirit of the mid-century consensus, the colour-blind society. We heard about things like “racism,” but they never really touched our daily lives. Anyone we knew who was black seemed more or less like us. Sure, there were poor areas, but these folks lived in government assisted housing complexes and were mostly white. You know, “white trash.” Although, we had the decency to never use that term in polite company. And when the Toronto Blue Jays went to the World Series in 1992, and the broadcast shifted from local to American feeds, all of a sudden there was a great deal of excitement and commentary about Cito Gaston, the manager, being black. For most of us, we were like, “You, now that you mention it, I suppose he is.” We lived the color-blind society. My first experience with racial politics was ending up at the wrong Meijer’s in the wrong neighbourhood. It took me a bit to understand the hostile looks I was getting. Oh, I don’t belong here. I learned where the white Meijer’s was located and my “normie” bubble remained safely in place. It was the 1990’s after all.
But, like many, the scales began to fall from my eyes. With me, it really began in 2008 with the mortgage crisis. Stephen Harper’s initial reaction was to do nothing. Letting irresponsible banks fail would have been the right response. But instead, we got some variation of quantitative easing everywhere. Then, there was the Obama administration. Canadians drunk on the color-blind society still think of him as one of the best presidents of all time. Then Justin Trudeau came into office. Something changed with him, intensified. Many of us had already begun noticing changes. I am not sure when it was that people started using the term “Bramladesh” when discussing the city of Bramalea, but it has been in use a long time. But no one really “noticed.” But with Trudeau’s Liberals came an intensification of immigration. It wasn’t just “high value” immigrants drawn from the Middle East, India, Pakistan, China and Vietnam. There were influxes of large number of refugees and students. Soon we were hearing numbers like a half a million per year being bandied about. In a country of only 30 million people, that is a lot.
I live in a mid-sized city away from the main centres of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The changes taking place in those major centres was now spilling out into the surrounding regions. Immigrants were looking for cheap housing to buy, for themselves and as investments. In a span of five to seven years, my city has been completely made over. It’s not like going to Bramalea to visit friends and family, where a trip to the mall makes you feel like you are traveling into a foreign land, and you need a passport just to go shopping. Even then, what were seeing was not enough to break through the frame within which we had grown up. We lived in a colour-blind society. We had been basically socialized, often in ways imperceptible to us, that you are not supposed to see racial or ethnic differences in people or think that any given people group could be culturally incompatible with another. You simply taught yourself not to see or think those sorts of things. To do otherwise was “racist.”
In the midst of these migrations from over seas and into my city continued unabated during Covid. Real estate was considered an “essential service,” thus allowing the flow of migrants to continue unabated. South of the northern border, the debate tends to revolve around the categories of “legal” and “illegal” migrants. I hate to say this to people, but when that day came, and we finally gave ourselves permission to “notice,” we also had to accept that it was all done legally. All mass migration is mass migration. It is what it is. Once we stopped focusing on Covid, many of us started to really notice what was happening. Because of the way it happened, we couldn’t get ourselves exercised about them being “illegals.”
And this is why immigration is becoming a problem, not just in those states located on America’s southern border, but everywhere. And the analysis isn’t being done in abstract categories. You rarely hear people use fancy terms like “wage arbitrage.” It is like they are waking up from a long slumber, and suddenly the world is different. My sense of it is that the world of the “colour-blind society” taught people not to see what was happening. Maybe you acknowledged that this was a thing in the south, in Florida, Texas, New Mexico and especially California. But for the rest of “normal” America, people generally tried to be welcoming of newcomers, even if they didn’t look like us. The comprehensive ethic of the color-blind society—which has many new names now— and was supposed to be about fair dealings between citizens, made rapid change imperceptible for a long time. Difference, even at scale, wasn’t noticed because it wasn’t supposed to matter. What made us finally pay attention? Its hard to say and probably different for everyone.
Recently, I had coffee with my mom and dad, both in their 80’s, and somehow the topic of immigration came up. My mother is a saintly woman who rarely criticizes anyone. But her mantra in that conversation was that the immigrants that have entered our country over the past several decades are too different, they are not assimilating, and there is too many of them for the country (and culture) to handle even if they were making a good faith effort to assimilate. A sensible point. It used to be a commonsense point.
Everything feels different. It’s not radicals talking about this. Every day, normal, run of the mill, non-political people are letting themselves see what is happening. And whether or not this is a new phenomenon, a recent thing in their own personal experience or it has reached a tipping point where they can no longer ignore what is happening. Many are church going people who likely were involved at some point in sponsoring a refugee family, feeling good about how welcoming they are. These are not haters. But they know what their personal experiences are telling them: something has changed. And it’s happening in places that are not supposed to have immigrant problems. People want to know how 20,000 Haitians showed up in a small Ohio city of 60,000. It certainly wasn’t an accident. That many people in one place, coming in a short period of time, from a place where the culture and environment are radically different. How do you find housing for this many people? Is there room in the schools? What about hospitals? Et cetera.
More important than the strain on public utilities, diminished property values, and the rest, are the social and cultural elements. Normies look around and their town, the place they have lived their whole lives, has, within a startlingly short amount of time, been completely transformed, an alien environment. They don’t know how to feel about this. They don’t want to be racist. They don’t hate anyone. But they want their communities back. Their charity has been abused by their governments.
It has reached a point where the authorities and the media can no longer stop people from noticing what they are seeing with their own eyes. So naturally, officialdom must be rallied, propaganda must be produced. We hear stories of people being arrested for posting about this on social media. There is much shrieking that Elon Musk is a threat to democracy because he allows “radicals” to foment hate and spread “disinformation.” Covid left people skeptical. They are not buying it. These are not radicals, internet edgelords. They are average folks. Your neighbours. The people with whom you go to church. They know what they are seeing. There is no “science” to follow. They are starting to talk about it openly. Their own communities are changing before their eyes and there is nothing that our political leaders can do not to stop that. Normies feel powerless and demoralized. If they dare speak up, they are called “racist.” All this is clearly intensifying the tensions in our political landscape. Mass, unchecked immigration has changed our country, that’s obvious. But the attitudes of ordinary, normie, very off-line people have changed as well. But the unknown question for all of us is, what will come of it? Anyone who thinks they have their finger on the political pulse right now but hasn’t noticed that the normies are noticing is out of touch and will miss the potentially tectonic political shifts happening right now.
Image Credit: Unsplash
