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Vox
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Vox
What a Black fascist can teach us about liberalism
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. American diplomat, consultant and author Lawrence Dennis (1893-1977) walks to court during his sedition trial on May 9, 1944 in Washington, DC. Getty Images It was 1935, and Lawrence Dennis was sure that fascism was coming to America. He couldn't wait. Dennis, a diplomat turned public intellectual, had just published an article in a leading political science journal titled 'Fascism for America.' In his mind, the Great Depression was proof that liberalism had run its course — its emphasis on free markets and individual liberty unable to cope with the complexities of a modern economy. With liberal democracy doomed, the only question was whether communism or fascism would win the future. And Dennis was rooting for the latter. 'I should like to see our two major political parties accept the major fascist premises,' he wrote. 'Whether our coming fascism is more or less humane and decent will depend largely on the contributions our humane elite can make to it in time.' His case for fascism, made at book length in 1936's The Coming American Fascism, felt persuasive to many at the time. A contemporary review of the book in the Atlantic wrote that 'its arraignment of liberal leadership is unanswerable'; he was well-regarded enough to advise leading isolationist Charles Lindbergh and meet with elites on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from sitting senators to Adolf Hitler himself. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I first encountered Dennis researching my feature on liberalism and its critics (which has just emerged from the Highlight's paywall). In the piece, I use him to show that liberalism's enemies have long predicted its inevitable doom. But the more I've thought about Dennis, the more I've realized how much we have to learn from him today. There are striking parallels between Dennis's fascist attack on liberalism and the arguments made by its current right-wing critics. And given that Dennis's arguments proved so badly wrong, his fate should be a warning against accepting similar predictions of inevitable liberal doom from his modern heirs. There are, I think, two central errors in Dennis's work that have direct parallels in the arguments made by contemporary illiberal radicals. I've termed them 'anti-liberal traps,' and I think many are falling into them today. What Lawrence Dennis believed Dennis came to fascism through a peculiar route. A Black man who passed for white for nearly his entire life, he was openly critical of Jim Crow and American racism — almost, his biographer Gerald Horne theorizes, as if he wanted people to know who he truly was. Horne further suggests that Dennis's embrace of fascism was motivated in part by disgust with the racism of the median American voter. Dennis, Horne intimates, may have been so disgusted with racist rule of 'the people' that he embraced rule-by-elite as an alternative. But while he did discuss race, Dennis's arguments in The Coming American Fascism were primarily economic. In his view, the Great Depression was not an isolated crisis but rather a sign of the current political order's structural failures. Dennis believed that capitalism depended on several key factors to deliver economic growth — including continued acquisition of new territory, a growing population, and debt-financed business expansion. By the 1930s, he believed that these factors had reached a dead end: that the US could not feasibly acquire new territory, that its population would level off thanks to immigration restrictionism and birth control, and that private debt had reached wholly unsustainable levels. The Depression, he argued, was a symptom of these structural failings coming to a head. In Dennis's view, American liberal democracy did not have the tools to repair the flaws in the capitalist system. Liberalism was, he believed, joined inevitably to laissez-faire economics. Its deference to private property was so total, its institutions so dominated by the interests of the wealthy, that it would be impossible for even a leader as ambitious as then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make serious internal adjustments. 'The features of the liberal system we are now discussing are fundamental. It is constantly forgotten that the quintessence of liberalism and liberal liberties under a constitution is the maintenance of a regime of special or exceptionally favorable considerations for private property,' Dennis writes. 'A series of majority votes arrived at by the parliamentary or Congressional methods of majority group pressures, lobbying, and the individual pursuit of reelection by hundreds of office holders, do not constitute a guiding hand. And a political system of checks and balances is not coordinated control.' This last line hints at Dennis's fascist vision: a system in which liberal democracy is replaced by the rule of a handful of enlightened elites, who develop a comprehensive plan for the economy rather than leaving things up to the whims of private owners. Only state control over economic affairs, including nationalization of the banking system, could repair the malfunctioning economy and put the United States on the pathway to prosperity. Dennis was no communist: he did not believe in the complete abolition of private property. Rather, he believed that the state should be far more aggressive in dictating to private owners — forcing them to make corporate decisions based not on the profit motive but rather on the good of the collective, as defined by the fascist governing class. This was the model emerging in Italy and Germany at the time he was writing, and one he believed would prove vastly more efficient and productive in the modern world than American-style liberal democratic capitalism. 'America cannot forever remain 17th and 18th century in its law, and political and social theory and practice, while moving in the vanguard of 20th century technological progress. The defenders of 18th century Americanism are doomed to become the laughing stock of their own countrymen,' he writes. Dennis believed that liberalism's practical failings stemmed from its philosophical essence: that 'the features of the liberal system we are now discussing are fundamental.' The liberal obsession with individual rights, be it private property or free speech, made liberal democracies ideologically incapable of taking the economic steps necessary to fix capitalism's errors. 'The fascist State entirely repudiates the liberal idea of conflict of interests and rights as between the State and the individual,' he writes. 'Liberalism assumes that individual welfare and protection is largely a matter of having active and powerful judicial restraints on governmental interference with the individual; Fascism assumes that individual welfare and protection is mainly secured by the strength, efficiency, and success of the State in the realization of the national plan.' The obvious objection is that this fascist vision would lead to terrifying mistreatment of citizens. Dennis did allow that Germany had gone too far in this direction by repressing the media and the church, but argued that 'a desirable form of fascism for Americans' could avoid such 'drastic measures.' Even Germany, Dennis believed, would not become 'a State and government…whose every act would be an abuse,' as 'such an eventuality seems most improbable in any modern State.' Though fascist ideology might define the national plan in a way that directed violence against ethnic minorities, Dennis — ever the closeted Black man — believed that such racism could be excised from the fascist project. 'If, in this discussion, it be assumed that one of our values should be a type of racism which excludes certain races from citizenship, then the plan of execution should provide for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races,' he worried. 'If, on the contrary, as I devoutly hope will be the case, the scheme of values will include that of a national citizenship in which race will be no qualifying or disqualifying condition, then the plan of realization must, in so far as race relations are concerned, provide for assimilation or accommodation of race differences within the scheme of smoothly running society.' The anti-liberal traps, from 1936 to 2025 We now know that every single one of Dennis's arguments was terribly wrong. The New Deal worked; both the US and European democracy developed social models that reformed capitalism without abandoning its essence. This political-economic system proved far more effective economically than either fascist or communist central planning. And fascism in practice committed every horrible abuse that its liberal critics warned of — and some so awful that almost no one imagined their possibility in advance. Now, '1930s-era fascist was wrong' is not exactly breaking news. But what I found notable about Dennis is how closely his argument follows a general pattern of anti-liberal argument — one which many far-right intellectuals deploy today in their critiques. It is one centered on what I described earlier as the twin 'anti-liberal traps.' The first anti-liberal trap is a claim that a recent crisis is a product of unchangeable and unreformable liberal philosophical commitments. It is a belief that while liberal states still stand, the author has seen their coming doom — and its causes align, just perfectly, with the author's preferred view of the world. Such claims not only demand extraordinary evidence, but risk being embarrassed when events in the world begin to shift. Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, has put this mode of argument at the center of his worldview. In two recent books, Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change, Deneen argues that the current rise of populist figures like Donald Trump augurs liberalism's collapse — a collapse that is, he believes, a necessary product of liberalism's philosophical commitments to meritocracy and individualism. 'Liberalism has careened towards its inevitable failure,' he writes in Regime Change, because 'liberalism's conception of liberty created both a new ruling class and degraded the lives of the masses.' Specifically, he argues, liberalism's commitment to freeing individuals to live the lives of their choosing has led to weakening of the ties that bind humans together — without which most will suffer so badly that the system cannot long survive. 'The advance of liberal liberty has meant the gradual, and then accelerating, weakening, redefinition, or overthrowing of many formative institutions and practices of human life, whether family, the community, a vast array of associations, schools and universities, architecture, the arts, and even the churches,' he writes. Deneen's analysis is, in argumentative structure, extraordinarily similar to Dennis's. Both take recent events, be it the rise of Trump or the Depression, as proof that liberalism's doom is not merely likely but assured. Both argue that this inevitable collapse stems from liberalism's unchangeable and unreformable philosophical essence. And both, notably, locate the failures in areas that align with their political interests. Deneen is a Catholic conservative who believes the state ought to promote conservative religious values; Dennis was a fascist who believed in a state-structured economy. Not coincidentally, they blame liberalism's inevitable doom on (respectively) its social and economic failings. In describing these similarities, I am not attempting a comprehensive rebuttal of Deneen's arguments. The content of their arguments are different enough, as are the circumstances. Perhaps Dennis was wrong and Deneen is right. But there is a tendency, among observers of all stripes, to overextrapolate from recent developments — typically in ways that flatter their own worldviews and biases. The second anti-liberal trap represents a similar kind of wishful thinking. It is an idealization of liberalism's alternatives: a comparison of actually-existing liberalism either to theoretical models or whitewashed versions of its real-life competitors. To imagine, in essence, Dennis's anti-racist fascism or less-hateful Nazism. You can see this, most obviously, in the recent right-wing vogue for Catholic integralism: a political model in which the state would be tasked with using its power to further the spiritual mission of the church. Any such project would require truly extraordinary amounts of coercion to be implemented in a country that's 20 percent Catholic (and most American Catholics are not themselves far-right). More broadly, right-wing religious regimes have a poor track record when it comes to protecting the rights of non-believers. Yet integralists respond to these claims either by deflection — liberal states coerce too! — or an assertion that their confessional state would surely be better than the others. Recalling a conversation with a Jewish colleague about what would happen to this person under integralism, Harvard's Adrian Vermeule — a leading American integralist — described his answer in two glib words: 'nothing bad.' You also see parallels to Dennis in the way that modern anti-liberals talk about contemporary Hungary, which has become to the illiberal right what the Nordic states are to the American left. Hungary is undeniably authoritarian, but its modern right-wing defenders angrily deny that its regime is anything other than a well-functioning democracy. Hard evidence to the contrary, such as its repression of independent media or attacks on judicial independence, are dismissed as liberal propaganda or else no worse than what happens here in the United States. This false equivalence, incidentally, was a favorite move of Dennis's. In dismissing charges that fascism would trample on individual rights the liberal state protects, he replied that all states coerce, just in different ways. 'The popular type of denunciation of fascism on the ground that it stands for State absolutism, or a State of unlimited powers, as contrasted with the liberal State of limited powers, is based on misrepresentation of the true nature of the liberal State,' he wrote. 'The important differences between fascism and liberalism in this respect lie between those certain things which each State, respectively, does without limitation.' Again, the point is not to suggest complete equivalence: Viktor Orbán's Hungary is not Adolf Hitler's Germany. Rather, it is to point out how similar the arguments are structurally — how easy it is, when starting from a point of hostility to liberalism, to handwave away criticisms of its alternatives through idealizations and tu quoques. Lawrence Dennis was not a dumb man. After reading much of his writing, I'm confident of that. But his arguments, which seemed so persuasive to many at the time, proved to be mistaken in nearly every particular — a shortsighted extrapolation from recent evidence that misread both the politics of liberal democracies and liberalism's philosophical adaptability to new circumstances. It's a lesson that radical anti-liberals today ought to take to heart.
Vox
3 hours ago
- General
- Vox
Most couples used to meet this way. What happened?
Like many women these days, 30-year-old Jude Cohen is over dating apps. So she's decided to relinquish some of the responsibility in finding a partner: 'I'm asking my friends to set me up,' the New York City-based communications consultant says. Late last year, a family friend heeded the call and, without warning, introduced Cohen to a potential date via text. The man lived in her hometown, hundreds of miles away, but she wasn't opposed to long distance. Prior to their date a few weeks later — Cohen was back in town for a wedding — she knew scant about him. She made an attempt to find her date's Instagram but was unsuccessful. The date was fine, she says, and the conversation was 'lovely.' But Cohen just wasn't attracted to her date. Ironically, if he lived in New York, she'd have plenty of friends to set him up with. Still, Cohen is holding out hope for a successful setup. 'I continue to ask my friends to set me up,' Cohen says. 'It was not a deterrent that the first time didn't work out. All in all, it wasn't a bad experience. It's just a part of the numbers game that you have to play to find your person.' Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The setup can feel like a relic of a bygone era of dating. Introducing two friends who might be romantically compatible seems quaint in a time when people can filter through singles based on the most granular qualities on apps. But for most of modern dating, heterosexual couples were most likely to meet their spouse through friends. That is, until the 2010s, when meeting online overtook friend-facilitated introductions, a trend that has only accelerated since then. According to one study, only 20 percent of straight couples met through friends in 2017, compared to 39 percent who met online. Compare that to 1995, when a third of couples met through friends and only 2 percent met online. It's safe to say that the setup is, if not dead, on life support. But as more singles grow frustrated with dating apps and yearn for more organic connection, could a return to the setup be in order? Are singles willing to surrender control in pursuit of a partner? Related Delete your dating apps and find romance offline 'Of all the things I've heard people say they're doing to try to meet people more organically,' says Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor in human communication at Arizona State University, 'getting set up isn't one that I've had people tell me that they're really longing to go back to. For some of them, they probably never experienced it.' From introductions to algorithms Coupling up only became an individual pursuit recently. Historically, choosing a partner was a group affair. Outsiders have had influence on romantic relationships in myriad ways: For centuries, parents the world over have had some degree of control over who their children married (and in some cultures, they still do); a long line of matchmakers worked to connect families in their communities; and friends, extended family, neighbors, coworkers, and other group members all had a stake in who their friends paired off with. A study from 1991 found that when a couple felt their family and friends approved of their relationship, they were more likely to stay together. (It should be noted that study participants were primarily middle-class college students.) The setup comes with clear upsides. If a mutual friend thinks there might be something between two people in their orbit and goes out of their way to make an introduction, that speaks volumes. Knowing this person has been vetted and vouched for in some way is appealing. A setup has built-in accountability, too. Your date may be less likely to be a jerk if they know their behavior might get back to their friends. But being this intertwined can also get awkward in the event of a fight or breakup, when personal moments are suddenly fodder for group gossip. Over the last few decades, choosing a partner became a more private pursuit. The facilitating friends also have a lot at stake. Research shows that playing matchmaker for friends is associated with higher wellbeing, happiness, and, overall, is a rewarding experience. The matchmaker might feel a sense of ownership over the fledgling couple, the reason for their love. A successful setup has implications beyond the couple themselves, too — the friend group deepens with new connections and can fracture if the relationship dissolves, with mutual friends choosing sides or dividing time between exes. But over the last few decades, choosing a partner became a more private pursuit, says Reuben J. Thomas, an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Instead of leaning on social networks to facilitate a match, dating is now 'a very personal quest to find a relationship that helps you become the person you want to be, the best you, to 'self-actualize' through your relationship/marriage (and to leave the relationship if it hampers that),' Thomas says in an email. Instead of relying on the extended network of your community, you can sort through profiles of hundreds of strangers from the privacy and comfort of your bedroom. One of dating apps' greatest strengths is their ability to connect users to people outside of their social network. Most Americans marry people of similar racial, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and dating apps have the power to at least diversify the dating pool, if not totally buck the trend. Your friends and family are limited in their social reach; they only interact with a finite number of people at work, at school, at clubs. There's an even greater cap on how many of those people are single. 'People's friendship circles tend to have fewer single people in them as they age beyond early adulthood, as more and more of their friends enter marriages and long-term relationships,' Thomas says. With increased exposure to a diverse array of strangers, singles on apps have more control over their love lives. In a period of history when Americans are spending less time with friends — and more time alone — you might not want to wait around for a pal to set you up with their coworker, nor should you have to. 'That's quite a bit different than how we've always met our partners,' Sharabi says. 'Usually, we run in the same network, we have the same habits, routines. When you talk about introducing somebody who's entirely independent from that, it does change the dynamic a little bit.' Removing friends and family from the romantic equation has some downsides, Sharabi says. In a study, Sharabi found that couples who met online reported slightly less satisfying and stable marriages than those who met offline. This can be attributed to lingering stigma around app-faciliated connections and family members who may judge a partner from outside their circles more harshly. 'Now you've got friends and family that are really disconnected from the process as well. They're not always supportive of the relationship,' Sharabi says. 'You're out there meeting strangers who they may or may not approve of because they just don't know them.' The new dating experience The setup may also not mesh with modern dating's array of expectations. The amount of information app users have access to prior to a date — an assortment of photos, interests, career, even weeks' worth of conversation — far exceeds the brief bit of background a friend may offer before setting you up. Another expectation of digital courtship — that the 'perfect' person is just a swipe away — can further dilute the allure of a setup. If the date you met online fails to meet your standards, hope springs eternal that the next profile will check all your boxes. With seemingly endless options, singles might discount someone simply because they don't have the right look or the right job. The nature of the setup is virtually the opposite: Here's one person you might jive with. If you aren't satisfied, it might be awkward with your mutual friend — and you'll be sent straight back to the dating apps. 'I feel like my friends have been single for so long,' says Maxine Simone Williams, the founder of the speed dating event series We Met IRL, 'they have a laundry list of what they want, which makes it even harder to set them up, because it's like, well, you don't want this.' On rare occasions, Williams has seen some event attendees walk in, survey the room, and leave. 'They're like, nobody here was my type,' she says. As much as modern daters lament the constant rejection and expendability of modern dating culture, it's also possible that they enjoy being in the driver's seat and having control. 'You do often hear people yearning for a simpler time of romance, but I think in reality they would hate it if society went back to the old ways,' of family-controlled marriages and having fewer options, Thomas says. 'Losing the ability to just shop for potential partners oneself, to have choice and agency, to be able to take the initiative and fairly quickly find a date in a big online space full of options, losing that would greatly frustrate most people today.' When it comes to dating in college, Chicago-based marketing intern Aliza Akhter has relied on apps to meet other singles. The last time the 20-year-old met a significant other through friends was in high school. To Akhter, setups are something her parents' generation did. Her friends don't ask each other if they have other single friends. She'd be open to meeting someone at a friend's party or even a setup date, but she's in the minority, she says. 'If you're single, it's pretty much a given that you either have a dating app or you have at some point,' Akhter says. 'So maybe it's just the fact that people know that there's another easier option than the introduction.' Algorithms have replaced the role of family and friends in facilitating relationships. Still, the fate of the setup isn't all grim. In recent research, Arielle Kuperberg, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has found among thousands of college students nationwide, more are now meeting romantic partners through friends and family than they were in 2019. Fewer are meeting partners online compared to 2020, when nearly a quarter of respondents met their significant other online. 'We have a five-year period we look at in this paper, from 2019 through 2024,' Kuperberg says, 'and the last year was the highest rate at which people were met through friends and family. So I think there could be a comeback.' Sharabi, however, is not as optimistic. 'I think it's dead,' she says, 'and I think that dating apps killed it.' In her view, algorithms have replaced the role of family and friends in facilitating relationships and despite apps' negative publicity as of late, she doesn't see them disappearing altogether. But if Jude Cohen, the freelance communications consultant in New York, has anything to say about it, the setup will live on. Cohen and her friends have sought to make the experience more joyful by organizing what they call the 'Blind Date Club' where each friend is tasked with bringing a date to dinner for another person in the group. Some brought friends of friends, others made dating app profiles on behalf of their pal. ('It was very clear on the profile I'm swiping for my friend Amy,' Cohen says.) Cohen found a date for her friend John by posting a video on TikTok. Five out of the six couples extended their date beyond the initial dinner. Cohen was one of them — she had a few more dates with her setup, too. Although none of the matches grew into anything more serious, Blind Date Club was a whimsical way of bringing community back into dating.
New Straits Times
5 hours ago
- Politics
- New Straits Times
New Athletic captain Williams 'lucky' to represent migrants in Spain
MADRID: Athletic Bilbao's first ever black captain Inaki Williams expressed pride at representing immigrants in Spain and called out the far right on Tuesday, after rare anti-migrant unrest shocked the country. Williams, 31, and his younger brother Nico are stars of the club which traditionally only fields players born or brought up in the Basque Country that straddles northern Spain and southwestern France. Bilbao-born Williams has spoken of how his Ghanaian parents crossed the Sahara on foot en route to Spain, with his mother clambering over the perilous border fence separating the Spanish exclave of Melilla from Morocco while pregnant with him. Asked about becoming the club's first black captain after the retirement of Oscar de Marcos and amid rising support for the far right, the Ghana striker told a press conference "it means a lot." "Destiny is destiny. If it were not for my parents, I would not be here, nor Nico," he said. "We are lucky to be able to represent many people who come from outside to earn their daily bread, and be a reference... it's important for us." An immigration debate gripped Spain earlier this month after three nights of violence between far-right groups and residents, many of North African origin, in the southeastern town of Torre Pacheco. The far-right Vox party, which has climbed in recent polls, seized on the unrest that erupted after a 68-year-old pensioner in Torre Pacheco told media he was attacked by three men of North African origin. Vox has also proposed the deportation of all irregular migrants, with tens of thousands arriving on Spanish shores every year on boats from Africa. "It seems that the far right is in fashion. We who have a voice will try to keep working, to continue silencing mouths and keep tearing down barriers," Williams said. The Williams brothers are set to play a pivotal role in Bilbao's upcoming domestic and Champions League campaigns after Spain forward Nico, 23, turned down reported interest from Barcelona and signed a new long-term contract.--AFP
The Sun
12 hours ago
- Politics
- The Sun
Inaki Williams proud to represent migrants as Athletic Bilbao's first black captain
ATHLETIC BILBAO'S first ever black captain Inaki Williams expressed pride at representing immigrants in Spain and called out the far right on Tuesday, after rare anti-migrant unrest shocked the country. Williams, 31, and his younger brother Nico are stars of the club which traditionally only fields players born or brought up in the Basque Country that straddles northern Spain and southwestern France. Bilbao-born Williams has spoken of how his Ghanaian parents crossed the Sahara on foot en route to Spain, with his mother clambering over the perilous border fence separating the Spanish exclave of Melilla from Morocco while pregnant with him. Asked about becoming the club's first black captain after the retirement of Oscar de Marcos and amid rising support for the far right, the Ghana striker told a press conference 'it means a lot'. 'Destiny is destiny. If it were not for my parents, I would not be here, nor Nico,' he said. 'We are lucky to be able to represent many people who come from outside to earn their daily bread, and be a reference... it's important for us.' An immigration debate gripped Spain earlier this month after three nights of violence between far-right groups and residents, many of North African origin, in the southeastern town of Torre Pacheco. The far-right Vox party, which has climbed in recent polls, seized on the unrest that erupted after a 68-year-old pensioner in Torre Pacheco told media he was attacked by three men of North African origin. Vox has also proposed the deportation of all irregular migrants, with tens of thousands arriving on Spanish shores every year on boats from Africa. 'It seems that the far right is in fashion. We who have a voice will try to keep working, to continue silencing mouths and keep tearing down barriers,' Williams said. The Williams brothers are set to play a pivotal role in Bilbao's upcoming domestic and Champions League campaigns after Spain forward Nico, 23, turned down reported interest from Barcelona and signed a new long-term contract. - AFP
News.com.au
12 hours ago
- Politics
- News.com.au
New Athletic captain Williams 'lucky' to represent migrants in Spain
Athletic Bilbao's first ever black captain Inaki Williams expressed pride at representing immigrants in Spain and called out the far right on Tuesday, after rare anti-migrant unrest shocked the country. Williams, 31, and his younger brother Nico are stars of the club which traditionally only fields players born or brought up in the Basque Country that straddles northern Spain and southwestern France. Bilbao-born Williams has spoken of how his Ghanaian parents crossed the Sahara on foot en route to Spain, with his mother clambering over the perilous border fence separating the Spanish exclave of Melilla from Morocco while pregnant with him. Asked about becoming the club's first black captain after the retirement of Oscar de Marcos and amid rising support for the far right, the Ghana striker told a press conference "it means a lot". "Destiny is destiny. If it were not for my parents, I would not be here, nor Nico," he said. "We are lucky to be able to represent many people who come from outside to earn their daily bread, and be a reference... it's important for us." An immigration debate gripped Spain earlier this month after three nights of violence between far-right groups and residents, many of North African origin, in the southeastern town of Torre Pacheco. The far-right Vox party, which has climbed in recent polls, seized on the unrest that erupted after a 68-year-old pensioner in Torre Pacheco told media he was attacked by three men of North African origin. Vox has also proposed the deportation of all irregular migrants, with tens of thousands arriving on Spanish shores every year on boats from Africa. "It seems that the far right is in fashion. We who have a voice will try to keep working, to continue silencing mouths and keep tearing down barriers," Williams said. The Williams brothers are set to play a pivotal role in Bilbao's upcoming domestic and Champions League campaigns after Spain forward Nico, 23, turned down reported interest from Barcelona and signed a new long-term contract.
