IIf any town symbolizes the vicissitudes of blue-collar life in America, Springfield, Ohio, might be as good a choice as any. Located in the heart of the Midwest, Springfield’s prosperity was built on manufacturing and publishing. But its decline began early: The enormous Crowell-Collier publishing plant closed on Christmas Eve, 1956. Thirty years later, in 1983, Newsweek magazine dedicated an entire issue to Springfield. Entitled “The American Dream,” it concluded plaintively that “these are no good times for dreaming.”
The next few years saw the city become even more unlivable, as manufacturers left and wages plummeted. A 2016 Pew Research Center report found that Springfield had fewer high-income residents and more low-income residents than any other major metropolitan area in America. The city began to suffer from the same diseases of despair that now plague so many other post-industrial, working-class communities, from rising alcoholism and opioid addiction to rising suicide rates.
A decade ago, the city council created a program to attract new employers: food-service and logistics companies, Amazon warehouses, microchip manufacturers. Thousands of new jobs were created, but most were still low-wage. The problem wasn’t that there were too few jobs for workers, but that there were too few workers for the jobs. So immigrants arrived to fill the gap, many of them Haitians living legally in other parts of the country.
The influx of immigrants helped revive the city, which was in decline. At the same time, it created tensions, as access to housing and health services became even more strained. Racists and far-right groups seized on the issue, trying to turn tensions into hatred, saying that an “invasion” would destroy the city. The allegations became more and more extreme, eventually leading to accusations that Haitians were eating people’s pet dogs and cats. The allegation was made into a national issue by Donald Trump during last week’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris. “In Springfield, they’re eating dogs,” Trump said. “The people who are coming in, they’re eating cats.” Even before Trump’s outrage, Republican leaders, including vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, and Trump supporters such as Elon Musk, had perpetuated and given legitimacy to the myth. Many, including Musk, have promoted another far-right conspiracy theory that Democrats are deliberately importing millions of illegal immigrants as a vote-buying tool to entrench “one-party rule.”
The Springfield incident should have been an opportunity for a fruitful debate about the policies and resources needed to spur economic growth and accommodate large numbers of outsiders: how to create decent jobs at decent wages and ease pressures on social infrastructure. Instead, mainstream politicians and public figures used the incident to sponsor vile far-right conspiracy theories and urban legends and stoke racist hatred. Conservatives often argue that the public is being denied the opportunity to debate immigration. But when presented with such a debate, many people prefer to flaunt their prejudices rather than engage in rational discussion.
The debate over Springfield also illustrates the continuing “memeification” of politics — its transformation into a collection of signals and symbols rather than a debate of content and policy. Trump has always insisted on dragging politics to the bottom, but he can do so because the desire to feed into the outrage machine rather than engage in nuanced debate has become an essential feature of politics.
This is not a feature exclusive to American politics: to my knowledge, no British politician has ever accused asylum seekers of eating their pets, but mainstream politicians routinely repeat far-right conspiracy theories like “the great replacement” and fears of white people losing their homeland, and policy initiatives such as the now-halted Rwandan deportation plan are often designed to be performative rather than pragmatic.
Symbols and signals have always been part of politics, but today they often seem to be politics.
And it’s not just immigration that has made signalling so important. Rachel Reeves’s “Iron Chancellorship”, for example, and Labour’s refusal to reverse, let alone improve, the removal of winter fuel allowance for all but pensioners, were born out of a desire to signal tough economic policy, even at the cost of scaring the hell out of millions of pensioners. Symbolism and signalling have always been part of politics, but today it often seems like it is politics: memes have become messages, and when that happens the tribal affiliations you want to signal, the symbolism you want to appeal to, become more important than ever, and signalling becomes less and less restrained.
In Springfield, despite the fact that both the Republican mayor and the Republican governor of Ohio condemned the lies about Haitians, many not only continued to tell the lies, but doubled down on them. At a campaign rally in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday, Trump intensified his rhetoric, shamelessly stoking deep-rooted racist myths and fears, denouncing “a beautiful place being taken over by illegal Haitian immigrants” and “young American girls being raped, raped and murdered by cruel, criminal foreigners.” When you fuel the outrage machine, there are inevitably consequences. Springfield’s city hall and two schools with large numbers of Haitian children were evacuated last week after bomb threats “used hateful language against immigrants and against the Haitians in our community.”
Just before the presidential debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. Clark’s 11-year-old son, Aiden, died last August when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by Haitian immigrant Hermanio Joseph. Joseph was subsequently convicted of manslaughter and is serving a minimum sentence of nine years in prison. This is a terrible tragedy and one of the few true crimes imposed on Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Clark began his speech with a statement that seemed shocking: “I wish my son had been killed by a 60-year-old white man.” Why? Because then “the endless hordes of people spewing hate would leave us alone.” For Clark, the tragedy of his son’s death was magnified by “morally bankrupt politicians” using his son to “spewing hatred” against Haitians. “Please stop the hate,” Clark pleaded.
Clark’s speech not only showed that many people in Springfield were not as bigots would like to portray them, but also that it is possible, in the midst of personal tragedy, to elicit extraordinary empathy and compassion that reaches across the divides of race and identity. If only our politics could be infused with such humanity and moral integrity.
Kenan Malik is a columnist for the Observer.
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