Brady Perkins's blog

I've recently become a lot more interested in the current political movements that are gaining a lot of steam, mostly because it's a wide variety of content about modern America that I can easily access from so far away and because it makes me feel a little bit closer to home.

And, to me, it sounds like the political threads that are forming are pretty consistent across a lot of new candidates, places, and even my friends, family, and myself. What I mean is that there are just a few canon ideologies from various wings of various parties that are starting to become pretty powerful.

Political discourse

After exploring the political discourses around the communities that I'm involved in, I settled in to some writing from my current adopted hometown of Rochester, New York, where the discourse leans pretty far in one direction. Being that Rochester is a strong community for the kind of conversation that a lot of Democratic Socialists are having now, I went trying to find some of the writing coming out of their DSA chapter.

I found this article in the ROC DSA blog, called the Rochester Red Star, that brought up a topic that had come to my mind a lot but which I hadn't thought about in very much detail: the insistence, usually from the left, that our immigrant communities is part of what makes America truly exceptional and different from the rest of the world. The blog post I read is here.

As a mildly-observant American, I can definitely see it's often been the immigrant communities that produce some of our best and most prized infrastructure and culture (like the trans-continental railroad; American jazz music, which definitely originated in our Black communities and which has also been influenced in some genres by immigrants from Latin America; and a lot of our major cities' most prized culinary achievements, like New York pizza and any number of other American adaptations of food). America really wouldn't be what it is now if not for these people.

Mott Street in lower Manhattan, the traditional center of Manhattan's Chinatown. Derek Jensen (Tysto), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But, as I've heard and as was pointed out in the article, there's still a difference between these observations and the narrative that's often pushed today, which is that these facts are quintessentially American in a way that other nations can't emulate.

I think that in politics throughout history and especially today, there's a strong thread of facts being distorted, even just a little bit, and even in ways that appear generally good at first, into oversimplified versions of themselves that can be packaged easily into an ideology and sold to voters. Ideology is simple by nature, it's the knee-jerk responses to questions about political issues, and the litmus tests that people use to quiz each other on their views.

And while the amount of growth that America has been able to achieve through the hard work and cultural contribution of its diverse range of immigrant communities is certainly a thing to be appreciated, selling it to voters as some kind of quintessentially-American specialty that we need to preserve for the sake of the nation's soul takes a fact of modern life that shouldn't be understated (that modern societies are often multicultural and that that often contributes to their growth) and turns it into a political platform for which there can be opposition.

And so the modern discourse about America's borders has turned into a fight between two sides whose blood are both boiling: one side fears that controlling who enters and leaves will obliterate what makes the country special, and the other thinks that ultimate control of the borders is necessary for the preservation of our society.

Don't blur the conversation

The reality is that multiculturalism is just a fact of the day. You can see this intuitively by looking at the urban-rural divide even within our country: the demographics of major cities are often much more diverse than populations outside those cities.

This isn't just the case in America, it's the case in many major cities around the world. New York City has such a diverse variety of languages spoken around its entire region that you can find an online map dedicated to tracking the distribution of them all. But Singapore, another international destination, is similarly diverse, with the city even having four official languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, languages spanning a large part of south and southeast Asia. Even in Taichung, where I currently find myself, you can't avoid seeing signage in Vietnamese and Indonesian all across the streets of Central District.

Pagoda Street in Singapore. Bahnfrend, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is true that even relatively small towns in America tend to have interesting statistics, too: for example, Springfield, Ohio experienced a stabilization in its population after Haiti was awarded with temporary protected status following the 2010 earthquake. But the places that diversity lands in the United States have largely to do with what opportunities are being afforded by particular communities in the moment. To continue the example, Springfield largely became a destination because of today's economic conditions in the Rust Belt, including relatively good opportunities with relatively low cost-of-living compared to other parts of the country.

A work site in downtown Springfield, Ohio, March 2010. Cindy Funk, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The reason why cities are often more demographically diverse than surrounding regions is because they usually afford easier access to jobs, better support networks for new immigrants, and better public services than a small town usually would. The reason why America has become a destination for so many immigrant populations is not because America is uniquely accepting of them, but because America has wealth. America is the world's major city. Even outside of its major cities, America had a historical appeal because it was in the right place at the right time; the potato famine of the 19th century drew large numbers of Irish to New England, and political unrest and poor economic conditions in late 19th-century China drew a large number of Chinese to the newly-annexed American West Coast.

Pairing these existing support networks with America becoming the world's leading economic power following World War II, a transformation into an uber-wealthy country with those existing support networks for immigrants and one of the world's best healthcare research systems made it a forward-looking and appealing destination for a large number of even more immigrants in the mid-20th century. Actually, while many on the political right today claim that the soul of Americana, a cultural ideal found mostly in the mid-20th century, is at stake because of today's immigration policies, the rate of immigration all throughout the mid- and late-20th century was much higher than it has been for the past two decades.

Immigration to the United States spiked beginning in the 1960s and peaked during the 1990s and 2000s. Tweedle, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Modern migration

American immigration patterns in the 1960s were largely spurred by economic conditions during that time and by the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which deprecated immigration quotas, the historical and highly discriminatory system of immigration control used prior. Because it had become easier to immigrate and because there was a relatively high capacity for immigrants to make a life for themselves at that time, and because the quality of life overall in the United States was relatively high compared to less-developed Asian countries of the mid-20th century and war-torn Europe still rebuilding, America had become an obvious destination for a lot of people.

Today, similar patterns occur in Europe and in some Asian cities, like Singapore. The Netherlands is also seeing an increase in immigration, for example, due to the healthcare, education, work opportunities, high pay, high quality of life, and political stability that exists in the country today. Climate change also accentuates existing causes of migration, reinforcing peoples' desire to move to places for which wealth reinforces resilience.

Why the discourse is problematic

The reason why the narrative, often from the Democratic Party, that American immigration represents an un-replicable and truly unique part of American culture is problematic is that it obscures the humanitarian argument for supporting our immigrant communities and replaces it with a more nationalist one. We shouldn't support our immigrant communities because doing so makes us more American; we should do it because supporting our neighbors is the right thing. We shouldn't believe that supporting the immigrants is especially American because it sidelines the experiences of immigrants in other places, who are equally deserving of the love and support of their own neighbors and new adopted communities.

Instead of selling diversity as a uniquely American strength, we should acknowledge the social and economic conditions that made it this way, and acknowledge too that the development of a multicultural and diverse population is just a part of the journey from a small nation to an industrial society to a wealthy society that supports its citizens adequately using that wealth that drew so many people from across the world in the first place.

Despite our political polarization and modern narrative of hopelessness, America is still well-poised to be a nation that supports a high quality of life for its citizens.

Boston is one of America's oldest cities. It's survived everything that's happened here since 1630. Sharon Hahn Darlin, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In America, we still have that strong healthcare research system, one of the first of its kind in the world and one that continues to power global medical advances; an expansion of easy access to healthcare, increases in government funding for healthcare research, and empowerment of public programs like Medicaid are doable, even if they take time and political will that we don't currently have. Our university system is also still one of the world's best; funding for public university education and more regulation on profit mechanisms for non-profit private universities could help reduce the cost of attendance for students nationwide. Better funding for public transit and multimodal transportation infrastructure can make travel and transportation cheaper and safer. Enforced legal rights for unions and antitrust litigation is already on the books, just being left untouched due to politicians able to gain power through a campaign finance system that, in all truth, only emerged recently and has already been severely restricted in at least one state.

While public sentiment doesn't work fast, we've all accepted that democracy doesn't make change at breakneck speed, and right now, we at least do know what the problems are and how to fix them. Despite the best efforts of our current administration, there will be midterm elections this year and national elections in 2028, and as long as we avoid idealism and vote based on the policy of the candidates that try to appeal to us, we can still make rational decisions on both sides of the aisle.

What the current moment represents

As in the immigration example, neither the right or the left has an ideology that represents the full truth of the current moment. Ideology, as already mentioned, is not a fleshed-out system of thoughts by its own definition; it's just a marketing mechanism. And while politicians of the past would argue that ideology sells, candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in today's high-information, high-competition environment have successfully campaigned on policy in an environment where voters know that they want change, and now, increasingly know what their problems are.

While it takes time to find out what core problems are the ones that will solve the large issues of our day, and it's true that in the learning period there can be some uncomfortable moments (like administrative flip-flops from term-to-term that represent voters who are apparently uncomfortable with anyone, no matter the party, sitting in the Oval Office), gaffs like our country allowing Trump to use his position to facilitate billions of dollars in graft via an enormous crypto scam can still be corrected with real policy now that we've discovered those exploits in the system.

The current moment doesn't represent an inherent problem with American democracy or a problem with our political system that can't be fixed, it's a turning point in our policy that we can use to patch our system for the modern era of information access, globalization, and concentrated wealth; this has already happened at various times throughout the country's history.

For example, Progressive Era reforms of the early 20th century enabled the now-industrialized and much larger nation (both in population and in land) to take advantage of its wealth and social structure in a way that was, while still not perfect, still more equitable and sensible (the right of women to vote, the dissolution of massive monopolies, and corporate regulations for the health of the public). Compare this, and today, to the America of the late 1800s, owned largely by railroad, oil, and other corporate oligarchs (isn't it strange that at least one villain hasn't changed between the discourse of William McKinley's time and today?).

But real policy, the kind that will propel us forward, doesn't come purely from ideology. It comes from questioning party lines and voting for candidates who describe what they stand for in detail, rather than those who can summarize their entire campaign in a TV ad. It comes from encouraging utilization of our modern access to information in a way that is responsible and healthy for us and for our democracy, and from being involved in our communities so that we know what our neighbors need. Not only is it good for your neighbors, it's good for you, too.

While a lot of people know this at a surface level now, it needs to continue being drilled in to our brains until it really settles. We can't just say “polarization and isolation are bad” and then justify our preferred ideologies, we need to seek out information that pushes us to find ways out of our problems by forcing us to leave our comfort zones and to find compromise. That doesn't just go for the right or for the left, it really goes for both. And I'm not just saying that just to couch my words, I'm saying that because it's true. And while future generations will inevitably forget this, we should use the current moment to protect ourselves with law and with new norms to protect the improvements that we make that work for everybody.

While the two current powerful parties certainly disagree with each other about an almost uncountably infinite number of things, those disagreements are almost always in ideology and in party line; the people that they're trying to appeal to are more similar than not: regular, working-class people that want positive change and a system that generates a better quality of life in an equitable way and that continues to improve that quality of life for them and for their neighbors. Congestion pricing in New York City, an issue that had previously been highly marred by partisan competition, saw a 10 percent jump in public support after its implementation.

Once you remove the pure ideology, peoples' needs are surprisingly compatible and consistent. Hennepin County Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

I'm excited to return to the US before the midterm elections this year. My return flight leaves exactly a week from today; when I touch down at JFK I'll have a few hours to make my way through the nation's venerable largest city and financial capital and over to Penn Station, where I'll catch a train back up to Rochester.

I've heard it said that New York is perpetually ten years ahead of the rest of the country; if you want to know where America is headed, you can look there, and its political developments this year have been telling. If Zohran Mamdani; a candidate aligned with neither the right nor the establishment on the left; who has made his primary goal in office nothing more than to materially improve the quality of life for the residents of his city; and who, despite having been born in Uganda, ended up in the United States and is one of our modern society's most looming recent figures, represents our future, then our future can still have depth and progress, not to mention that New York City's 2025 mayoral election largely represented a failure of Super PACs to control politics in the meaningful way that they have in the past and at a national level.

New York may be special, but it's still America. Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

An interesting statistic shows that 10 percent of Mamdani's voters voted for Trump in 2024. While the Democratic establishment saw Trump's 2016 success as an American swing to the political right, a more accurate read might be that Americans were just tired of two polar opposite political establishments fighting each other for nothing more than power; Biden's win in 2020 didn't represent tiredness of Trump as much as it represented more desire for change; Trump's win again in 2024 didn't represent an abandoning of the Democratic Party or some kind of success of fascism and propaganda as much as it represented another attempt to buck platforms built on nothing but ideology.

So, I'm excited for the midterms and for 2028. As long as we can learn from the past and keep thinking critically, we can elect policy instead of ideology and repair the system that has been lacking in critical fixes for a long time.

I appreciate the read again!