The Mainstreaming of Anti-Indian Bigotry
· The Atlantic
Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist best known for his opposition to critical race theory, has portrayed his career as one devoted to upholding meritocracy. “The principle, first promised by the Declaration and supported today by a large majority of Americans, would mean that the state would treat all Americans equally, regardless of ancestry, and leave as much discretion as possible to individuals to determine their own futures, without the government imposing or requiring racial favoritism of any kind,” Rufo wrote two years ago in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow. “Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader national identity.”
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He has urged Republicans to grasp the allure of this ideal, writing last year in The Free Press: “The right now has the winning argument. Americans support a ‘color-blind society’ over a ‘race-conscious society’ by a margin of more than three to one.” And he has depicted opposition to a color-blind meritocracy as a nefarious, left-wing tendency. Rufo’s “briefing book” on critical race theory notes: “Critical race theorists oppose meritocracy, especially standardized testing and competitive admissions in the education system. They claim that meritocracy is a mechanism to uphold racist structures and is derived from ‘racism, nativism, and eugenics.’”
Recently, however, Rufo has backed away from his previously forthright defense of meritocracy, and by all available evidence, he has done so because the principle turns out to contain a fatal flaw: Many of the Americans who benefit from meritocracy have brown skin. More to the point, a lot of Republicans resent those brown-skinned Americans. Given the right’s commitment to anti-intellectualism and populist resentment, and President Trump’s open embrace of job promotions based on loyalty or appearance (“central casting”) rather than qualifications, Rufo’s turn against race-blind merit might have been inevitable. Or perhaps his abandonment of the merit principle reveals a great deal about the motives that have driven him all along.
The sequence that set in motion Rufo’s conversion began with a social-media post by Bo French, a right-wing activist, the current Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, and a longtime hater of many minority groups, especially Muslims. On September 13, French complained on X about the presence of South Asian students in the crowd at a University of Texas football game. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote above a picture of the students celebrating. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
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Anti-Indian sentiment had been bubbling up on social media for some time. When FBI Director Kash Patel wrote “Happy Diwali” on X last year, his replies were flooded with “bigoted memes and rhetoric,” CNN reported. Vivek Ramaswamy, now the Republican nominee for governor in Ohio, wrote in a New York Times op-ed this past December that his feeds are “littered with hundreds of slurs.” A few days before French’s post, the Department of Homeland Security published an image of Optimus Prime confronting a brown-skinned man along with the words “Self-deport or find out” and “America for Americans. Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.” The DHS post was deleted the next day.
But the naked expression of anti-Indian bigotry by a candidate for statewide office signified that it was threatening to enter mainstream Republican politics, a prospect that immediately divided the party. The schism tracked roughly along the same lines as the ones drawn during the initial response to Trump more than a decade ago. The post was met with angry pushback from National Review as well as Texas Senator John Cornyn and Republican strategist Karl Rove—the sorts of Republicans who have tolerated Trump but harbor a not-so-secret desire for the party to return to its pre-MAGA identity.
The MAGA right had an altogether more positive response to French’s outburst. Organs such as The Charlie Kirk Show, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller defended it. “Viewers noticed that the Longhorn student section on their TV screens was made up mostly of Indian students. If you are a native Texan, this might have been infuriating, but the demographic makeup wasn’t shocking,” explained the Caller, taking for granted that its audience would find the presence of large numbers of South Asian students at UT Austin outrageous and a cause for anger on its face.
The Trump administration weighed in, somewhat more elliptically, on French’s side. The day after French’s post, Trump posted an attack on Rove, who had said he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent in the November election. “Karl Rove is so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The U.S. Department of Education posted several days later on X, “MAKE COLLEGE FOOTBALL GREAT AGAIN,” above an image of a mostly white crowd in the Texas stadium.
Trump’s intervention defined the correct position for the party faithful, as it generally does for any internecine Republican conflict. The attempt by Rove and other traditional Republicans to decree that anti-Indian bigotry was unwelcome inside their party had failed. Instead, Trump had announced that the people condemning racism against South Asians were the ones who did not belong in his coalition.
The task for the conservative-movement loyalists who wanted to remain was to rationalize this prejudice. Rufo, a conservative activist-intellectual who had built his reputation by opposing the practice of dividing people by race, was perfectly positioned to finesse this evolutionary step in party dogma.
Rufo recorded a podcast this week with Jonathan Keeperman, a right-wing publisher, for an episode they titled “The Indian Question.” One useful historical rule of thumb is that if your social identity is being made the name of a “question,” you are probably not going to like the answer.
Rufo conceded that French’s “rhetoric was bad; it’s very crude.” But the crucial question to keep in mind, he told Keeperman, was, “Is the underlying frustration coming from a legitimate place or can it all be dismissed?” They agreed that French’s frustration was legitimate. Rufo later elaborated on his reasoning by saying: “If you live in a suburb of Dallas, suddenly it’s a third or higher percentage new immigrants from India. It causes some disorientation and dislocation, which is legitimate, right?”
Resentment of these immigrant communities is understandable, the two men explained, not in spite of the fact that so many South Asians have been successful academically and economically, but because of it. Indian culture, they maintained, places too much value on studying and academic excellence, and these values are a threat to American culture.
Indian Americans, Rufo argued, are “going to grind on spelling-bee words like unlimited hours,” whereas American culture says, “You’re not supposed to study for the spelling bee.” Robinson agreed: “What actually makes America so dynamic—it’s not the kid who studies all night for the spelling-bee test. It’s the kid who is the fullback on the high-school football team, who puts his head down and is willing to run through a freaking wall on behalf of his teammates and then spends the night drinking beers at the kegger and wakes up in the morning and gets a 1500 on his SATs, okay?”
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Had a leftist suggested that American culture is defined by alcoholism and disdain for ambition, Rufo would surely decry the remark as a slander. But Keeperman and Rufo seemed to talk themselves into this bizarre version of American exceptionalism.
Rufo even began embracing concepts he had once defined as the hallmarks of his left-wing enemies. At one point, Rufo argued that “the right”—he was specifically describing conservatives who oppose anti-Indian racism—has fallen for a pernicious myth.
“The right always says”—here he adopted a mocking tone—“Oh, meritocracy, meritocracy, meritocracy. You morons. Meritocracy, the origin of the term meritocracy, it’s pejorative. It’s satirical. It’s not good. You actually don’t want meritocracy, because it perverts these unspoken cultural assumptions in ways that aren’t always visible, aren’t always, say, rationally defensible or problematic, but they strike at an essential component of the national character.”
The man who once depicted meritocracy as the very foundation of the republic now presents it as a sinister threat to American culture. In his Times op-ed, Ramaswamy argued that anti-Indian bigots “have no place in the conservative movement, period.” That debate now appears to be a settled one.