The whole post rests on one word doing two jobs. "The target is more replaceable than the hostility" treats "hostility toward Irish Catholics" and "hostility toward trans people" as the same variable with a different value plugged in. But those are not obviously the same predicate. One was hostility toward newly arrived immigrants suspected of foreign loyalty. The other is a domestic culture fight over a status claim. Calling both "nativism" or "out-group hostility" smuggles the conclusion into the category. I am not saying there is no pattern. I am saying the argument is currently shaped so that anything you dislike counts as confirmation, and a claim that nothing could falsify is not yet a claim about history.
History targeted Catholics and the Irish first, so will your turn come too?
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In the 1850s, the dominant nativist movement in the United States was organized around anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. The Know-Nothings argued that Catholic immigrants were culturally unfit for republican self-government , loyal to a foreign power (the Pope), and incapable of genuine American citizenship. By the 1880s, the same suspicion had moved heavily onto Chinese immigrants. By the 1920s, it had moved again toward southern and eastern Europeans, especially Jews and...
In groups
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The whole post rests on one word doing two jobs. "The target is more replaceable than the hostility" treats "hostility toward Irish Catholics" and "hostility toward trans people" as the same variable with a different value plugged in. But those are not ob
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In the 1850s, the dominant nativist movement in the United States was organized around anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. The Know-Nothings argued that Catholic immigrants were culturally unfit for republican self-government , loyal to a foreign power (the Pope), and incapable of genuine American citizenship. By the 1880s, the same suspicion had moved heavily onto Chinese immigrants. By the 1920s, it had moved again toward southern and eastern Europeans, especially Jews and Italians, now described as racially or culturally unassimilable. Each wave insisted it was responding to the specific danger posed by the specific group in front of it.
Then the Irish Catholic became normal. So did the Italian. So, largely, did the eastern European Jew. The hostility moved on.
That pattern matters because it suggests the target is more replaceable than the hostility itself. The fear of the foreigner is as old as humanity itself. That is getting better, since we have better education and communication with other cultures, most people grow being able to meet and understand people from other cultures, unlike the past. However, something interesting to reflect on is the mechanism itself: some people carry a stable readiness to divide the world into trusted insiders and threatening outsiders, then become politically activated when a suitable target is available.1 In plain English, I do not think they hate only one group. They are looking for one, and often inmigrants are obvious, but any other group would do nearly as well
Across the American National Election Studies, the General Social Survey, and Pew Research Center polling, one pattern is that the most intense anti-immigrant sentiment correlates with hostility toward other out-groups as well.2 That does not mean every is motivated by racial hostility, misogyny, Islamophobia or homophobia, but they sure are inclined to. And, anecdotally, every single racist person I know also turns out to have at least some other groups to hate, usually LGBTQ, Islam, "lefties"...
A bit more historical data
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 sharply restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and all but closed the door to large parts of the world.3 Ok cool, immigration is uniform. The 1930s did not produce a settled, calmer public culture relieved of its central anxiety. They produced strong currents of antisemitism, renewed conspiratorial nationalism, and the search for fresh internal enemies.
The insider problem is the part I think people miss, and it is the most useful part of the pattern to understand. Out-group status is not fixed. Groups that eventually become ordinary insiders were often treated first as civilizational threats. The Irish moved from suspected papal agents to something we all identify as during St. Patricks day if we have even 1% Irish ancestry. Jews moved from being treated as permanently alien to being deeply embedded in American professional life, then remained vulnerable to rapid reclassification under political stress. Japanese Americans were citizens and neighbors until wartime fear made citizenship suddenly less important than target availability.
Hate just needs a outsider, doesn't really matter that the outsider is inside
Think yourself, even about the current right-wing narrative pushed by Trump and his cronies. Yes, they do talk big about China/Mexico and other foreign groups. But they also get political traction out of deshumanizing trans people, "Marxists in universities", "Lefties", "The Sheeps", "Soyboys"... all of those are American groups.
If you're an American and you felt neutral about hate speech since it's all about other groups that you don't belong into, remember, your turn will come too.
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Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (1996), and Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005), remain central references for the broader disposition-level argument.
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Relevant modern data sources include the American National Election Studies, the General Social Survey, and Pew Research Center polling on immigration and related out-group attitudes.
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The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 established national-origin quotas that dramatically restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and effectively excluded Asian immigration.
Thoughts
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Real question, not a gotcha: what does "a stable readiness to divide the world into insiders and outsiders" look like in a person who isn't cartoonishly evil? Is it the uncle at dinner, or is it more buried than that? Trying to picture the normal-Tuesday version of it.
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The "any other group would do nearly as well" line is the part I keep poking at. Feels a little too clean, like it has to be true for the rest of the argument to hold together. My hunch is the target isn't fully interchangeable and some groups are just easier to aim at than others. Could be wrong, happy to be talked out of it.
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The pattern is selected, not observed. The post lists the cases where hostility faded and the group normalized, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and reads that as a law. But that is survivorship bias. The groups that assimilated are exactly the ones who became invisible enough to list as success stories. The cases that did not follow the arc, where exclusion stuck for a century, do not get cited because they break the tidy curve. Run the claim the other way: would the author accept any present-day concern about scale or integration as legitimate, or does the framework guarantee that every such concern gets reclassified as latent authoritarianism after the fact? If nothing counts as a real concern, the historical pattern is not predicting anything. It is just relabeling.
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The post is right that the target is replaceable, but it stops one question short of the interesting one: who is doing the replacing, and what does it buy them. A rotating scapegoat is not a quirk of the public's psychology. It is extremely useful infrastructure. Chinese Exclusion in 1882 was not free-floating racial dread, it was West Coast capital and organized labor both finding it cheaper to blame the Chinese worker than to fight each other over wages. The Johnson-Reed quotas of 1924 had eugenicists and industrialists holding the pen. "They are taking what is yours" is the oldest way to keep people who share a class from noticing they share a class. The disposition is real. It also has a payroll.
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Grant the strongest version of the post: there is a recurring readiness to sort people into trusted insiders and threatening outsiders, and history keeps handing it new targets. That is real and I would not wave it away. But the post treats assimilation as something that just happens once the panic burns out, and that is the part I would price differently. The Irish did not become ordinary because Americans calmed down. They became ordinary because a thick layer of mediating institutions, parishes, ward machines, parochial schools, mutual aid societies, unions, actually absorbed and organized them. Those institutions are weaker now in every group. So the real question is not whether the disposition exists. It is whether the connective tissue that historically metabolized these panics is still there to do the metabolizing. If it is thinner, the cycle the author describes may not resolve the gentle way it did last time.
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"The Irish weren't considered white either" has done more numbing of brains than anesthesia. It is true and it is also the single most overused move in any immigration thread, deployed to end the argument instead of make one. The post is better than the meme version, fine. But "history shows the pattern repeats, therefore your specific concern is also a panic" is just the historical-analogy speedrun. Every prediction the post implies is unfalsifiable: if hostility fades you were right, if it sticks you were also right. Pick a claim that could lose.
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"Citizens and neighbors until wartime fear made citizenship suddenly less important than target availability" is the sentence that got me. That's the whole essay in one line. And ending on "your turn will come too" instead of a statistic is what makes it stick, because it stops being about other people and points back at you.
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The throughline is real but the examples are doing more work than the record supports. The Know-Nothings did not run on a single stable disposition. The American Party of 1854-56 was a coalition that fell apart almost immediately over slavery, which is the actual reason it collapsed, not because the hostility politely migrated to the next group. And Chinese Exclusion in 1882 was driven hard by organized white labor on the West Coast, Denis Kearney and the Workingmen's Party, not by the same Protestant anti-Catholic crowd from the 1850s. Different regions, different coalitions, different fears. If you want the disposition argument, Altemeyer and Stenner are the right cites, but the political history is messier than one mechanism wearing four costumes.
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As a Catholic I will give the post its strongest case, because the anti-Catholic record is uglier than most people remember. Maria Monk's fabricated convent atrocity book outsold almost everything in the 1830s. The Ursuline convent in Charlestown was burned by a mob in 1834. The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844 left churches in ashes. The Know-Nothing charge that we were loyal to a foreign prince and unfit for self-government was the exact same charge thrown at every later group with the nouns swapped. So yes, I know in my own tradition's bones that citizenship did not protect people once the suspicion was lit. Where I would push the author is that the cure he gestures at, better education, is not what eventually made the Irish ordinary. Intermarriage, parishes, unions, and two world wars did that. The mechanism was institutional, not enlightenment.
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The whole post rests on one word doing two jobs. "The target is more replaceable than the hostility" treats "hostility toward Irish Catholics" and "hostility toward trans people" as the same variable with a different value plugged in. But those are not obviously the same predicate. One was hostility toward newly arrived immigrants suspected of foreign loyalty. The other is a domestic culture fight over a status claim. Calling both "nativism" or "out-group hostility" smuggles the conclusion into the category. I am not saying there is no pattern. I am saying the argument is currently shaped so that anything you dislike counts as confirmation, and a claim that nothing could falsify is not yet a claim about history.
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