Our epidemic of constructed identities

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

...Robert Francis O’Rourke, from a wealthy and well-connected Texas family of Irish descent, was a more or less a nondescript Democrat, three-term congressman backbencher—at least until he ran for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. But in the midst of the national anti-Trump “Resistance,” “Beto” (Robert = Roberto = “Beto”) became a sort of veritable Latino identity politics and hard-left progressive sensation. O’Rourke’s Latinate emphasis too was a wise move, in that mpsuedo-authenticityost longtime obscure congressional white male representatives do not become national figures and would-be presidential candidates in less than a year.

The oddity of Beto’s efforts at social construction was that Senator Rafael Cruz ran as “Ted.” In other words, he campaigned as what he really was: an assimilated Latino of half-Cuban heritage. In contrast, an Irishman without any Latino ancestry reinvented himself as a veritable Latino. And note that while most so-called white Texans voted for the authentic “Latino” Ted, most Latinos voted for the fake Latino Beto.

Barack Obama grew up as a middle to upper-middle-class student in prep school in Honolulu, the child of a visiting Kenyan student and a white middle-class mother. His sometimes privileged childhood was due largely to the talent and hard-work of his white grandmother from the Midwest who rose through the ranks to become a successful banking executive.

At various times in school Obama was known as Barry Obama or Barry Soetoro before returning to his given name as Barack Obama as a college student. Part of the reason why the later so-called unhinged “birther” conspiracy theory took hold (i.e., that yarn that Barack Obama allegedly was not born in the United States) was that Barack Obama’s own literary agency Acton & Dystel, in one of its own promotional pamphlets produced in 1991, identified Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

His publicist likely created that myth—and Obama himself either did not correct the mistake or was not consulted about the attribution—not because Obama was a native of Kenya but because such a false claim was seen as useful in offering greater authenticity of the author’s “otherness.” The editor later confessed error on her part.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest congressional representative in history, grew up in a mostly upper middle-class family in Yorktown Heights, an affluent suburb in Westchester County, New York. Her parents were Puerto Rican immigrants, her father an architect. Alexandria herself graduated from the upscale Yorktown Heights High School. The suburb was 90 percent white and the average median household income was nearly $110,000, placing it among the most affluent communities in the nation. Ocasio-Cortez graduated from the private Boston University.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez’s family’s story is one of higher education, upward mobility, and integration into the majority population (somewhat similar to Kamala Harris’s upbringing in Berkeley and Montreal, the daughter of a cancer research scientist, and a Stanford economics professor).

While Ocasio-Cortez described herself as working-class and brought up in the Bronx, her family in fact moved to Yorktown when she was 5 years old. In her meteoric political career, she has presented herself as a Bronx barista (where she moved after graduation), and an often impoverished activist, who seeks social justice on behalf of the poor. While her message is certainly mainstream socialist (abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, ban internal combustion engines by 2030, Medicare for all, etc.), it gains credence by the working-class patina that Ocasio-Cortez wears.

...In the past, immigrants of all classes and backgrounds sought to identify as Americans and did so authentically, on the premise that one left one’s old country for a reason and had no wish to replicate its failures in a new and preferred homeland.

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