America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community. These activists strived purposefully to turn Americans of this community (who mostly resided in the Southwestern states) against their countrymen, teaching them first to see themselves as a racial minority and then to think of themselves as the core of a pan-ethnic victim group of “Hispanics”—a fabricated term with no basis in ethnicity, culture, or race.
...Assimilation has been a goal of Mexican Americans for most of their history. One hundred fifteen thousand or so former citizens of Mexico chose to stay north of the Rio Grande after the 1846-48 Mexican-American War.... Well into the 1960s, a desire to be absorbed into the great American melting pot made many Mexican Americans suspicious of continued immigration, which was high from the 1890s on. Mexican Americans concluded that “the needs and interests of American citizens simply had to take precedence over the problems faced by the growing Mexican immigrant population,” according to the U.C. San Diego social scientist David G. Gutiérrez in his book Walls and Mirrors (1995). For most community leaders, “Mexican Americans were in fact Americans and therefore should make every effort to assimilate into the American social and cultural mainstream.”
...After World War II, however, activists started to become very critical of such assimilationist tendencies. Roybal’s election campaign drew attention to the criticisms, as did the 1948 presidential run of Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president. Wallace often spoke to crowds in Spanish while on government business. Scholar Kenneth C. Burt does not exaggerate when he writes in U.C. Berkeley’s Public Affairs Report of 2002 that these races were “a turning point in American politics.” They opened a new era of identitarianism for those who wished to win the Mexican-American vote. At the same time, sympathetic groups emerged like the Community Service Organization (CSO), financed by Alinsky and supervised by one of his top lieutenants, Fred Ross, from 1947 onward. What the CSO wanted was votes, and thus the politicization of a Mexican-American bloc.
...The activists who fomented such grievances had two weapons at their disposal: ideology, and the economic incentives that government and private actors soon began offering to members of groups who claimed to be as oppressed as blacks had been.
On the ideological front, the activists had realized that the vehicle for radical change would not be the workingman, but the identity group. They were influenced by European Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who in the 1930s had a transformative epiphany: Marx had promised that the working class would overthrow the bourgeoisie, but the working class had been astonishingly bad at achieving revolution. He and others later, particularly the German-American Columbia University Professor Herbert Marcuse, agreed that it was nearly impossible to instill into the proletariat the feelings of resentment that would conduce to mass organization. Man can aspire to improve his economic condition, after all. What he cannot change is his race or sex.
These weren’t just theories: Marcuse took a personal hand. He directly shaped the worldview of the future Black Panther Angela Davis, to whom he taught philosophy at Brandeis. His exhortations to destroy the patriarchal family were repeated nearly verbatim by the feminist theorist Kate Millet, with whom Marcuse held a famous “Dialogue on Feminism and Socialism” at U.C. San Diego in 1975. “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude,” wrote Marcuse in his 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man. The working class, however, had no interest in such self-realization. “[T]hey find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,” Marcuse despaired. The vanguard of the revolution therefore had to come from “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.”
...Which brings us to the economic incentives. Activists saw a pot of gold when Johnson decided in the mid-1960s that the government was going to spend lots of money on the Great Society. Benefits such as quotas in government contracts, electoral redistricting, and affirmative action would eventually be dangled as the wages of minoritization. To be able to tell a tale of oppression and discrimination would help get intended beneficiaries anything from a Small Business Administration loan to a spot in the incoming class at Princeton.