Stephen Miller and me

We come from very similar ancestry but our politics are poles apart, refuting his doctrine of race essentialism.

If Stephen Miller is right, then something is wrong. He and I have vastly different politics. That should not be. We share a heritage, geographic and ethnic. Miller believes that where you’re from determines who you are. So why are we different?.

My ancestors and Stephen Miller’s come from the same Old Country, about 100 miles apart, as best I can tell. This was the land of Fiddler on the Roof, the Pale of Settlement where Ashkenazi Jews were concentrated, and subject to pogroms, in the western Russian Empire.

According to Miller’s uncle (and an unpublished book by Miller’s grandmother), the family’s forebears lived in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now southwest Belarus. Fleeing anti-Jewish violence and conscription in the Tsar’s army, family members escaped, in phases, coming through Ellis Island and eventually settling in Pennsylvania.

My family’s forbears lived in the village of Pukhovitch, “halfway between Minsk and Pinsk” in what is now southwest Belarus. Fleeing anti-Jewish violence and conscription in the Tsar’s army, family members escaped, in phases, coming through Ellis Island (and Canada) and eventually settling in New York and Connecticut.

Nazi forces occupied Miller’s ancestral Antopol in the early 1940s. The Jews were concentrated into a ghetto and later killed. I haven’t researched the fate of Pukhovitch under Nazi occupation, but I once saw a word resembling “Pukhovitch” on a list of destroyed towns at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

With this shared history, how did Miller and I end up with such radically different politics? How is it that he came to embrace political beliefs aligned with the people who murdered Jews in his ancestral shetl, maybe even relatives of his, and that I came to abhor them?

Miller’s worldview, and that of so many co-ideologues on the right, holds that where you are from determines who you are. Don’t believe me. Listen to what they say.

Trump, Miller, and their allies routinely portray immigration as an existential threat. As official policy, his State Department said that “migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization.” Trump speaks of “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries” and asks “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?”

This is called race essentialism, a belief that a person’s race, ethnic or national origin determine their characteristics. It is a foundation of racism and a lifeblood of bigotry.[1]

These posts exhibit Miller’s race essentialism in action:

So when Miller’s forebears and mine came over from the same place at the same time, were they importing their society? Did they recreate the conditions and terrors of their homeland? Did they hate the civilization they were yearning to migrate to?

I am confident Stephen Miller thinks I hate America. This is the guy who said “The Democrat [sic] Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” And I can say, with mounds of evidence, that Miller hates millions of Americans.

Does my alleged hatred derive from the essence of my forebears? Does Miller’s hatred derive from his? Both answers cannot be yes, because our ancestors share the same national/ethnic/religious background.

Another thing we share is that Miller and I grew up in California, although in different cities and in different decades.

Like Miller, descendants of my immigrant ancestors grew up in Los Angeles. One family is liberal, the other conservative. How do we explain this if they are the same essence?

Obviously, something changed over the generations that led Miller to a vastly different ideological place than me. As it did within my own family.

So which one of us proves that assimilation is impossible, me or Miller? Or do we both show it is possible? Maybe assimilation is a process that blends the experiences of both those living in and moving to a country. A century ago, it was Jews, Italians and Poles who were said to be undermining American society. Miller’s immigrant ancestors were once accused of “recreat[ing] the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” an accusation he levies at others today. This is why Miller’s uncle calls him an “immigration hypocrite.”

Therefore, doesn’t Stephen Miller himself, the great-great-grandson of immigrants, by holding a senior position in the U.S. government with power to put his beliefs about immigrants into policy, disprove his own assertion that immigrants can’t assimilate? Doesn’t the fact that I, in a much more attenuated way, in a position promoting policies that reject Miller’s agenda, disprove his belief that where you come from determines who you are?

Essentialism is the enemy of equality. It is the antipathy of the core principle of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” It is a rejection of Paul the Apostle’s description of a new universalist religion in which “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

And Stephen Miller unwittingly shows us how.

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[1] In this piece and this piece I analyze anti-CCP rhetoric from (mostly but not exclusively) American conservatives, finding that they engage in race essentialism by portraying authoritarianism in China as distinct and more venal than authoritarianism in other places.