Critiquing Jonathan Chait's article on race and the Obama Presidency

[Cassius]

I think I have to critique some of your points.

I think that your contrasting 'non-nation states' (like America and Brazil) with 'nation states' (like the UK) is a flawed premise. The vast majority of European countries already had, even before the rise of non-European immigration, considerable minority groups (if you think of the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh and to some extent the Jews in the UK as an example), and it can be seen, like in America, that the main conservative party is associated with the traditional 'hegemonic' cultural group in most European countries (in the UK, it is the English, in Spain, the Castilians, and so on). This is not all that different from in America, where the GOP is associated primarily with white people (and before was primarily seen as the party of WASP's). It is true that conservatism in Europe is associated with elitism (although, conservative parties, even during the days when they were more openly elitist, have been able to attract sizeable shares of working class votes, as with the Tories at the turn of the 20th century). But, again, American conservatism is no different; the parties which are generally regarded as the antecedents of the Republicans, the Federalists and the Whigs, were (as I'm sure Cathcon and Mecha will tell you) rather elitist groupings in themselves (though they clearly attracted non-elitist support).

I think to say that our racial history, in Europe, is not as fraught as your own, is again an oversimplification. Whilst it is true that we have never quite had anything like the 'white vs black' and 'european vs native' conflicts that you have, we must remember that this is the continent, to use a couple of well-known examples, that gave us the Holocaust and the Serbian war crimes, which are just a couple of examples of how brutal our 'racial past' has been. Indeed, one might even say more brutal than your own. Even countries, such as the UK, that have managed (by and large) to escape genocide in recent centuries, racial history (or, perhaps more accurately, cultural group history) has been very fraught, as can be observed in Northern Ireland, where the divisions between Protestant and Catholic are as much cultural as they are religious.

Finally, I would query your view that the belief of some on the right that America is a nation-state in the same way as European countries apparently are is misguided. Many European countries are both multilingual and multiethnic (Spain is a decent example). Nation-states are not natural things which sprouted into existence out of nowhere. They were made, by individuals and groups, as is the case with Imperial Germany, which was constructed out of numerous independent states (and took in quite a number of other cultural and racial groupings in the process). So, in a way, the belief held by some that America is a nation state is not entirely wrong, as, after all, America has, for a very long time, largely been led and governed by white 'Anglo-Saxons'. From their perspective, America is one, just as the view that Britain is a nation-state is a view held by some British people, or that Spain is a nation-state is a view held by some Spanish people.