The Right’s preferred take on the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles is that they’ve brought together the full spectrum of hard-Left ideals — what Mary Harrington has labelled the “Omnicause”. At National Review, Jeffrey Blehar sighed that in LA, “all the radicalisms combine into one.” Some of the riots’ college-age protagonists no doubt accept that framing, donning kaffiyehs to signal that they are united in one universal struggle against white supremacy (or whatever).

Yet the most dominant images and slogans from the riots suggest that the motive force might be something else entirely. Consider the numerous photos and videos of balaclava-clad rioters waving the flags of Mexico and other Latin-American nations and shouting slogans such as “Viva La Raza!” — long live the race. Rightly understood, these symbols and watchwords evoke not progressivism, but instead nationalism and reactionary cultural revanchism, with Mexico and Hispanic identity as their objects of devotion.

What we’re dealing with, in other words, is a scenario more akin to banlieue riots in France, in which a subset of the population feels little to no attachment to their country of citizenship and is bent on claiming — or reclaiming — space for other national or civilisational identities. Every few years, rioters claim the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis for Algeria or Islam. Likewise, LA is being claimed for the spiritual geography of Hispanidad.

If that seems a fanciful line of thought, bear in mind that there’s nothing stopping the activists from waving US flags while demanding humane treatment for migrants or opposing Donald Trump’s deportation policies. They could even forgo flags altogether. But people don’t blindly adopt potent symbols such as foreign flags or la raza: these things have meaning. Today’s burrito intifada goes beyond the issue at hand, revealing the stalling of the great engine of “Americanization”.

This stall has many causes. One is the sheer volume of migration. Assimilation works — miraculously — in the United States. But as the Barbara Jordan-led Commission on Immigration Reform pointed out during the Clinton era, it takes time. Pile on enough newcomers, and it stops working, in part because they can cluster ethnically with few incentives to feel themselves part of the US story of westward expansion.

Another factor concerns educational multiculturalism and identitarian grievance studies that supplanted authentically universalist intellectual traditions in schools and colleges. As Christopher Lasch argued back when these trends were in their infancy, the older pedagogical models that imposed one set of norms had an emancipatory effect among migrants and minorities, allowing them to rise to higher ideals transcending race and ethnos. Two generations of identity and grievance studies, however, have plunged members of these groups deeper into their own cultural shells and biases.

As Catherine Liu has argued, California especially has been an epicentre of institutional identity- and grievance-pandering. At one point, the Golden State went so far as to enshrine Aztec prayers as part of its Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

This is dangerous stuff. It’s the stuff of Houellebecquian social conflict, in which the majority population concludes that minority groups are little more than “paper citizens” bearing hostility for their flag, history, and even territorial integrity. It becomes a matter of body against body, identity against identity, blood against blood. There is nothing progressive about idolising la raza.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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