The Growing, Fracturing Landscape of Indian American Politics

You can tell that an ethnic group is really flourishing in the United States when they start to produce prominent xenophobes and racists, particularly of the anti-Black variety. The trajectory from victim to victimizer is one of the surest markers of upward social mobility. In 1993, Toni Morrison ruefully noted in Time magazine that assimilation means immigrants must join “freely in this most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born Black population.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ramparts of white supremacy were maintained by old-school Protestants who organized groups like the Know Nothings and the second Ku Klux Klan to terrorize not just people of color but also Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans. In the 21st century, the most prominent bigots of the MAGA right are the descendants of these groups: figures like Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Stephen Miller.One of the few intriguing developments in the 2024 Republican primary is fresh evidence that Indian Americans—or at least a significant cohort of them—might join this longstanding trend. The two candidates who have made the biggest unexpected splash in the GOP primaries are the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and...