The core basis of the MAGA movement's ideology has effectively been debunked, according to one journalist who has been covering President Donald Trump's crackdown in Minneapolis.
The Atlantic's Adam Serwer claimed earlier this week that "Minnesota proved MAGA wrong" in the wake of the Trump administration's "Operation Metro Surge" this month. In a Wednesday interview, Serwer told the Bulwark's Tim Miller: ""The right has a social theory that multiracial, multi-faith communities cannot be 'cohesive,' that our chaos is the result of the presence of people who are different from us," and then argued that the anti-immigration argument didn't pass muster, pointing to the diverse nature of Minneapolis and the hyper-local network that people of all backgrounds organized in order to protect their neighbors.
Miller prodded Serwer by playing a clip of Vice President JD Vance's interview with the New York Times' Ross Douthat last year, in which Vance asserted that "those who care about what may be called the common good" discount "how destructive to the common good immigration at the levels and at the pace that we've seen over the last few years."
"I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly," said Vance, who is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants. "And so that's not because I hate the migrants or I'm motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country. Social solidarity is destroyed by migration."
Serwer said while Vance's argument technically "makes sense on paper" and has a "logical progression to it," it was still "wrong."
"We know it's wrong because we can see in Minneapolis, we can see a group of people who, we can see these communities of people who say, 'you are my neighbor whether you were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. You are my neighbor and I'm going to protect you. I'm going to walk your kids to the bus stop because I know you can't go outside. I'm going to bring you food if you need to stay at home. I'm going to help you pay your rent. If I see ICE, I'm going to blow my whistle or I'm going to take out my camera and start filming.'"
"It's a little weird to say that when you consider that a substantial amount of the white population in the United States was segregated into ethnic enclaves where people only spoke their original language for much of the late 19th and early 20th century," he contimued. "And it turned out OK. And what we have here is immigrants are actually assimilating much faster than in that period, like much faster, like second, third generation, they only speak English. So it's just not true."
"What is so moving about the sort of neighborism there is that everybody says it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what gender you are, it doesn't matter what race you are. It doesn't matter what religion you are. You are my neighbor. I will defend you," Serwer added. "And that is a level of commitment to social cohesion that I have yet to see from anybody in the MAGA coalition who all seem to be about stating these things, not so much as a matter of principles they want to see lived in the world, but as a question of brand-building and political identity, which is, I think what JD Vance is doing."
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