The Plot to Change America

Michael Gonzalez shows us that the idea of 'identity' did not just innocently emerge. It was invented for the purpose of dividing citizens into groups to be used as political pawns in a plot to change America. Identity politics turns citizens into 'innocent victims' in need of governmental carve-outs, and promotes brokers who do their bidding. Gonzalez lays out just how this madness can be brought to an end. A very timely book. Highly recommended. Joshua Mitchell, author of American Awakening

Identity politics is at risk of tearing apart a nation which aspires to be indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Mike Gonzalez explains in The Plot to Change America, how identity politics starting in the 1970s has tried to tear the nation apart--and how, sometimes, it has boomeranged on its practitioners. Michael Barone, Senior political analyst, The Washington Examiner, Longtime co-author, The Almanac of American Politics

Persuasive and clarifying, this book is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand how we arrived at the sordid identity politics of today and what must be done to tear it down. Gonzalez reminds Americans of all races and ethnicities that we are better off choosing individual agency, pride, and success over a culture of victimhood. Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto

Mike Gonzalez is a tremendous voice for conservatism. In his new book, The Plot to Change America, Mike irrefutably wrecks the identity politics arguments of the political Left, which have been tearing the country apart for years. Ben Shapiro, host of The Ben Shapiro Show and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Right Side of History

A forceful call to stop the cancerous spread of identity politics and begin to undo the terrible damage it has done to our country. David Azerrad, Hillsdale College

Auteur

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He spent close to twenty years as a journalist, fifteen of them writing from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He left journalism to join the Bush administration, where he was a speechwriter for Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau, where he wrote speeches and op-eds. Since 2009, he has been at The Heritage Foundation, where he writes on national identity, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation, and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general.

Texte du rabat

"The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book will reveal what really has happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group-making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics"--

Résumé
The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.

The first myth that this book exposes is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.

Échantillon de lecture

From Chapter 1

In the early 1950s, the esteemed University of Texas at Austin social scientist George I. Sánchez wrote to a young scholar to warn him that a pan-ethnic identity group for Americans with Latin American roots made no sense. The professor did not mince words: “For gosh sakes, don’t characterize the Spanish-American with what is obviously true of the human race, and then imply, by commission or omission, that his characteristics are peculiarly his and, of course, radically different from those of the ‘Anglos’!” He enumerated further objections: “We insist that ‘Latin American’ (‘Spanish-American,’ ‘MexicanAmerican,’ etc.) has no precise meaning nor does the term connote generalized cultural attributes. . . . We say that, for convenience, all non-Latins are to be called ‘Anglos’ (Germans, Italians, Jews, Catholics, Baptists, hill-billies, Bostonians, poor whites, Texans, Minnesotans, ad infinitum) have a precisely defined common culture whose features can be correlated with the non-existent (or, at best, undefined) features of the Latin ‘culture.’!!!!” 

The recipient of this letter was Julian Samora. What had occasioned Sánchez’s letter was a paper by Samora on a Colorado health-care program for “Spanish Americans.” As quoted by Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Sánchez went on: “The time orientation of a ‘poor white’ is no different from that of a poor Negro or of a poor Spanish. Neither can provide for the future; each has to live for the present; after laboring for 14 hours a day, none of them has the energy or interest or curiosity to go to PTA’s or to Association meetings. You wouldn’t either, nor would I—nor would Abraham Lincoln!” Sánchez belonged to that generation of Mexican Americans that still believed that individual effort would lead to prosperity and assimilation. As Francis-Fallon puts it: “Material improvements in jobs, housing, and schools would not only allow them to live better but would reveal their fundamental similarity with other Americans.” Sánchez’s concerns were with obstacles to individual improvement.

Sánchez criticized the notion that Mexicans were a race and even more vehemently rejected the attempt to create a pan-ethnic group out of people with origins in various Spanish-speaking countries. Not only did this not make sense to him, but it stood in the way of the emphasis on individual agency. In an earlier letter to Samora, Sánchez urged him to consider that “the characteristics that distinguish the Spanish-speaking group in any part of the United States are much less ethnic than they are socio-economic.” He also sent Samora a review he had written of a book about Spanish-speaking Americans, in which, as Francis-Fallon notes, “Sánchez cast doubt on the entire concept of such a book. It ‘takes a veritable shotgun wedding to make Puerto Ricans, Spanish-Mexicans, and Filipinos appear to be culturally homogeneous,’ he wrote.”

Sánchez remained constant in this view. A decade later, in 1963, after the influx of Cubans escaping Fidel Castro’s communist takeover of the island nation, he wrote, Spanish-speaking Americans “are just too many different peoples to be…