IIf any town symbolizes the evolution 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 gigantic Crowell-Collier publishing plant closed on Christmas Eve in 1956. Thirty years later, in 1983, Newsweek Dedicated Overall Issues Dear Springfield, the letter, titled “The American Dream,” ends sadly with, “The times were not friendly to dreaming.”
The next few years were even tougher for manufacturers. Abandoned the town Wages have plummeted. 2016 Pew Research Report Springfield has found itself losing more high-income residents and gaining more low-income residents than any other major metropolitan area in the U.S. The city has become plagued by the diseases of despair that now plague so many other postindustrial, working-class communities, from soaring rates of 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.
Immigration influx helped revive A city on the verge of death. Access to housing and health services was further restricted, and tensions rose. Racists and far-right groups seized on the issue, trying to turn tensions into hatred by talking about an “invasion” that would destroy the city. It gets wilderThe allegations, which ultimately led to accusations that Haitians eat people's pet dogs and cats, became a national issue after Donald Trump made the remarks with Kamala Harris during last week's presidential debate. “In Springfield, they eat dogs. And the people who come there eat cats,” Trump said. Even before Trump's outrage, prominent Republicans, including his vice presidential candidate, had been voicing their support for the allegations. Candidate J.D. VanceTexas State Senate Ted Cruz, House of Representatives Judiciary Republicans and Trump supporters Elon Muskall of which perpetuated and gave legitimacy to this myth. Many, including Musk, believe that Democrats are knowingly “importing millions of illegal immigrants” and “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.
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It is not just on immigration that signalling has become so important. For example, jokes about Rachel Reeves' “Iron Chancellor” and Labour's refusal to reverse or even improve the abolition of Winter Fuel Allowance for all but pensioners were born out of a desire to signal the strength of economic policy, even at the cost of scaring millions of pensioners. Symbolism and signalling have always been part of politics. But today it often seems as if they are. teeth Politics. The meme has become the message. When that happens, the tribal affiliation you want to signal, the symbolism you want to assert, becomes more important than ever, and the signals you send become more uninhibited.
In Springfield, despite the town's Republican mayor and Ohio's Republican governor denouncing the lies about Haitians, many people not only continued to tell them but reinforced them. At a campaign rally in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday, Trump has denounced Denouncing “beautiful places being taken over by illegal Haitian immigrants” and “young American girls being raped, violated and murdered by cruel, criminal foreigners,” the rhetoric has stepped up, shamelessly stoking deep-rooted racist myths and fears. Fuel the outrage machine, and there will inevitably be consequences. Springfield's city hall and two schools serving large numbers of Haitian children were evacuated last week. Bomb threat “Used Hateful words To the immigrants and Haitians in our community.”
Just before the presidential debate Nathan Clark said At a Springfield City Commission meeting. Clark's 11-year-old son, Aiden, was killed last August when their school bus was struck by a minivan driven by Haitian immigrant Hermanio Joseph. Since being convicted Clark was sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison for manslaughter, a terrible tragedy and one of the few true crimes meted out to Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Clark began his speech with the shocking statement that he wished his son had been killed by a 60-year-old white man. Why? Because then “the endless mob of hatred spewing would leave us alone.” For Clark, the tragedy of his son's death was magnified by “morally bankrupt politicians” using him to “spewing hatred” against Haitians. “Please stop the hate,” he 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.
