I loved Saturday morning cartoons as a child. My favourites were Bugs Bunny, the Flintstones, and the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner chases across their desert landscape. I loved the capers of Wile E., his desperate attempts to catch up with a bird that constantly eluded him, and all his many inventions that somehow always failedto work. I especially delighted in his use of the pogo stick, a mode of transportation that inevitably led to disaster made especially hilarious by the fact that it would work for a while — boing, boing, boing — and then go disastrously wrong when he fell into a canyon — BOING.
I was reminded of the pogo stick recently, while reading a liberal’s version of “how we got here,” and by “here,” I mean Donald Trump’s America which is, according to liberals and progressives, nothing like the America they have known. They are once again in thrall to “resistance historians” like Heather Cox Richardson, who spend columns and columns and hours and hours on their blogs and podcasts dissecting what went wrong. Theirs is an oddly redacted version of history, one where everything evil began with Reagan, got worse with George H. W. Bush, then even worse with George W. Bush, and then infinitely worse with Trump, and then Trump again. Like magicians, they make the years of Bill and Hillary Clinton (an informal co-presidency), Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, disappear, poof, like magic. The immigration crisis in particular has brought out the worst of this sleight of hand, and readers and listeners, also apparently devoid of memory, are apt to swallow these fictions wholesale.
As I have written, often, the current immigration crisis did not begin under the Republicans: it was the Clintons who effectively created a new class of criminal migrant with legislation like the draconian Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), both in 1996. Rebecca Bohrman and Naomi Murakama point out that while the latter was supposed to tackle domestic terrorism in response to the Oklahoma bombing, it has in fact “justified immigration restrictions in criminological terms and criminal penalties in anti-immigration terms.” Taken together, the Acts increased the penalties for what were formerly relatively minor infractions and expanded the reach of the prison industrial complex. For instance, before 1996, undocumented immigrants apprehended and imprisoned for crimes were released after serving their sentences. After 1996, they would remain in prison until deported. 1 This section is from my previous essay. Obama still holds the record for the most number of deportations, and Joe Biden promised he would be even more strict, promising to one-up Trump. In June 2024, Biden issued an executive order placing restrictions on claiming asylum at the southern border, and he deported more people than the current president (though that record may soon be broken by the latter). Resistance historians like Richardson don’t simply whitewash this complicated history, they erase it by not bringing it up at all or by pretending that the Democrats were simply hapless in the face of Republican politics.
As Charlotte E. Rosen puts it in Protean, Richardson in particular “absolves liberals for their participation in defending ideologies and structures that in many ways enabled the Trumpian project they now fear.” I recommend that everyone interested in countering the standard liberal narrative about “how we got here,” as presented by Richardson and the like, read and circulate Rosen’s work as widely as possible. I have something much shorter on the historian coming out soon, but for now, to return to my beloved childhood cartoon: Liberals, with their version of history, especially with regard to immigration, remind me of Wile E. making his way through the desert, hopping over the inconvenient parts, the presidencies that helped bring about this disaster in the first place: Reagan, Bush, BOING, BOING, Bush, Bush, BOING, BOING, Trump, BOING, Trump.
Let us call this the Boing Boing Theory of Everything: the tendency to ignore Democrat contributions to the disaster we now see unfolding before our eyes.
It’s as if someone dropped an anvil on their heads and caused all memory to disappear. Liberal American history is cartoonish in its amnesia.
For more on immigration, see:
Hillary Clinton Needs To Retire
DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now
“Undocumented”: How an Identity Ended a Movement
Undocumented vs. Illegal: A Distinction without a Difference
What’s Left of Queer?: Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World
Romancing the Border: Or, Making (Self) Deportation Sexy
Radio Interview with Karma Chávez on Wisconsin Public Radio, WORT
KBOO Interview on “Illegal vs. Undocumented“
Image: Wiki