Racial nativism’s collapse and successor nationalism’s decline remain unexplained.

Evidence

By this line of thought I came at last to grasp the crucial significance of the first of the two boundaries I had placed on my inquiry, namely its restriction to the forty-year period when the nativist strain was ascendant. I had shone a glaring and—I still believe—revealing light on that ascendancy. In so doing, however, I had left myself without a fully satisfying explanation of the collapse of racial nativism or of the vulnerabilities of the liberal nationalism that succeeded it. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2049

Categorization

• QUESTION: Higham admits his four-decade frame left the decay-and-transition question unresolved — precisely the reader’s question about what happens when the enemy vanishes.
• XREF: connects to: Racial nativism began as a defensive swing requiring no new intellectual input — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 804

Broader Connections

• Racial nativism began as a defensive swing requiring no new intellectual input #expands (0.87) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 804