Forward Kentucky: The ethnic entrepreneurs of today’s GOP
EDITOR'S NOTE: "Ethnic entrepreneurs" despise free trade unions. Sens. Cruz, Cotton and Hawley are among the most anti-labor lawmakers in Washington.
By BERRY CRAIG
“Ethnic entrepreneur” might sound like a term for a successful minority businessperson.
It’s not. Ethnic entrepreneurs are “instigators of conflict,” Barbara F. Walter recently wrote in Time magazine. Make that instigators of racial and ethnic conflict.
Typically, ethnic entrepreneurs are influential politicians, preachers, pundits, and TV personalities whose stock-in-trade is fomenting white grievance politics. “Though the catalyst for conflict is often ostensibly something else — the economy, immigration, freedom of religion — ethnic entrepreneurs make the fight expressly about their group’s position and status in society,” explained Walter, an international relations professor at the University of California-San Diego and author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop them.