Escaping the long shadow of the civil rights revolution.
To many Americans, the riots in Los Angeles look like another chapter in the history of the country’s race riots, going from the “long, hot summer of 1967” to the George Floyd riots of 2020. But the 2025 L.A. riots are different. The figure who helps us see that is Vice President Dan Quayle, the man who covered up the true causes of another infamous series of riots in Los Angeles.
In the spring of 1992, riots began after the verdict was announced in the Rodney King case. When the LAPD lost control of the streets, President George H.W. Bush declared a state of emergency and sent in the National Guard. Shortly thereafter, in a speech that became famous for Quayle criticizing the TV character Murphy Brown, the vice president provided an ingenious reframing of the disturbances. He used the riots to pronounce the central credo of his era:
From the perspective of many Japanese, the ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society. I beg to differ with my host. I explained that our diversity is our strength and I explained that the immigrants who come to our shores have made and continue to make vast contributions to our culture and to our economy.
Quayle had recently returned from a trip to Japan, where he observed that country’s response to the L.A. riots. For the Japanese, the riots were an internationally intelligible sign of a society in distress, the symbolic equivalent of the American flag flown upside down.
For Quayle, the riots were also a distressing sign. But that was because they signaled that America still had a long way to go to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement. In his speech to the Commonwealth Club, Quayle stated he was “shocked and outraged by the verdict in the Rodney King trial,” and declared that as far as defeating racism was concerned, “more needs to be done.” The riots were about black race relations, and progress lay in promoting economic opportunity while maintaining law and order.
The vice president also gave his own generation—“I’m considered one of those baby boomers we keep reading about”—a talking-to. Their rebellious spirit had changed the culture, underming “family, hard work, integrity, personal responsibility” (hence the passing reference to the single mother Murphy Brown). If boomers wanted the national project of the civil rights revolution to succeed, they needed to improve the culture. More civics, better television, and more lessons in social responsibility were in order.
The boomers accepted Quayle’s terms. They continued to debate whether welfare helped or hindered economic opportunity, and whether the persistent divisions between whites and blacks or varying cultural values were to blame. In his speech on the riots, Bill Clinton condemned “white flight.” Yet everyone agreed on the importance of diversity, the supposed cornerstone of America’s national identity.
Quayle gave America’s boomers the core of their civic creed. He sacralized the country’s multicultural experiment, even as the dust was still settling on the very event that exposed the experiment’s intractable problems.
Multiculturalism Run Riot
The 1992 L.A. riots were postwar America’s first multiethnic riots. In prior riots, such as in Miami in 1980, controversial acquittals in police brutality trials provoked protests, which degenerated into riots wherein police and whites were targeted.
In 1992, the brunt of riot violence happened between minority ethnic groups. Blacks were not the only rioters involved. Latinos, including many illegal immigrants, made up over half of the first 5,000 arrests. Rioters ravaged Crenshaw Boulevard, a middle-class black neighborhood. And the rioters infamously wiped out most of Koreatown as its denizens scrambled to rooftops to fight them off.
By framing the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the familiar terms of a black race riot, Quayle distracted from this unprecedented, unnerving reality. Southern California was ground zero for America’s multicultural experiment, launched in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act and carried on by the subsequent invention of a special minority race category of Hispanics, distinct from whites. Quayle’s doubling down on the old struggles of the civil rights era was a way to avoid reckoning with the new social situation that had been simmering in the decades since.
When Quayle spoke, California was undergoing massive population growth, adding seven new congressional seats in time for the 1992 election. Immigration, not natality, drove this growth. One RAND report observed that were it not for immigration, San Francisco and Los Angeles would have lost 400,000 residents rather than gained 600,000. This growth was downstream of high levels of illegal immigration from Latin America: in the 1980s, as much as one-third of California’s population growth may have been due to illegal immigration.
In criticizing “white flight,” politicians such as Bill Clinton imagined homogeneous white suburbs contrasted to black inner cities. But in Southern California, that no longer described the demographic landscape. During the 1980s, the San Fernando Valley—“America’s suburb”—had diversified at a rapid pace. Areas that were 80% white at the beginning of the decade were 40% by the end.
Clinton’s concerns over “white flight” channeled 1960s America’s horror of ethno-tribalism, which is exactly what multiculturalism and mass immigration produced. Mass immigration in Southern California created deep-seated economic and social networks that traversed state boundaries. These networks became intergenerational thanks to the court-enforced generosity of free public education, which incentivized migrant workers to bring their children with them and to stay in the U.S. Not only did this embed ethnic networks throughout Southern California, but it also placed immense pressures on the school system, tasked with integrating immigrants into American life.
Already in 1986 the Policy Analysis for California Education recorded that 13% of all students in the California system were “limited-English,” with the majority of these enrolled in Southern California—and nearly half in Los Angeles alone. Since so many students did not know English, they would not abandon their prior ethnic networks to integrate into the rest of the country. By 1992, ethno-tribalism was part and parcel of Southern Californian urban life.
Quayle’s Contradictions
Quayle’s rhetorical strategy in May 1992 had been on the terms of the 1950s and 60s: riots were not justified because America had opened up new opportunities for blacks that had not been available at a prior time. “The country now has a black middle class,” he boasted. But that’s exactly what was disappearing from Los Angeles. During the 1980s, Asian and Latino immigration drove up the costs in previously affordable neighborhoods. This prompted “black flight” from the city and exacerbated economic and social tensions for those who remained.
Herein was the great scandal of the L.A. riots, which the Japanese noticed but Quayle preferred to hide: riot violence correlated with racial displacement. Neighborhoods experiencing Latino and Asian in-migration and black out-migration were more likely to see violence. Demographic replacement proved to be the most accurate diagnostic tool for understanding where violence broke out.
The 1992 riots marked a turning point. Thanks to Quayle, multiculturalism—and mass immigration—got reframed as an essential component of the civil rights revolution. Thanks to Quayle, what had initially been a fringe position—that, as a Ford Foundation-funded study contended, Mexican Americans “share with Negroes the disadvantages of poverty, economic insecurity and discrimination”—became mainstream.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush explored ever-more creative (or reckless) policies to complete the civil rights revolution, advance multiculturalism, and boost the economic standing of blacks. But the demographic balance that this national project presupposed—a largely white country working on behalf of its largest minority to remedy historic wrongs—slipped away.
Between 1990 and 2018, the black population of Los Angeles dropped by 26%. By 2000, nearly 25% of California K-12 students had difficulty with English. All these trends reinforced ethnic tribalism and worsened ethnic tensions.
“When I was growing up,” one Latino told the L.A. Times in 2016, “there wasn’t too much Hispanics and blacks going after each other. That’s a major change. I don’t feel welcome in some neighborhoods. It’s not safe for me.” Mass immigration completely revamped social and economic life, reinforcing the new ethno-tribal networks that work around, across, and through the American state.
Multiculturalism had succeeded—what had failed was Quayle’s civic nationalism. He had tried to update a 1960s-era national project, upholding civil rights and repudiating ethno-tribalism. However, that’s exactly what Southern California had embraced in the 1980s. Quayle tried to hide the rise of ethno-tribalism, and the social unrest that went with it, by pronouncing “diversity is our strength.” He made diversity into America’s national identity. It was an open embrace of ethno-tribalism. Accepted for decades and then accelerated under Obama, it took the open borders of the Biden Administration to showcase to the rest of the country how destructive that project was.
Today, never have so many Americans been so ready to dump Quaylism. Nevertheless, it’s not clear whether they understand the scale of the challenge Quayle’s creed brought about.
Civic Identity Crisis
If one wanted to render the older, 1960s-era civic nationalism possible again in the United States, the very first step would be to break up the transnational networks that support ethno-tribalism. They’d be weakened by enforcing immigration laws, ending illegal immigration, and deporting those who are here illegally. The Trump Administration’s officials, who from the president downward reflect this fairly conventional civic nationalism, are doing just that.
But nearly half a century after the legal and economic conditions that enabled them were put in place, the ethnic networks are now too well-established to be dislodged by some deportations.
It’s all too easy for leftist organizations and their collaborators to stoke unrest by trying to mobilize these foreign, ethnic networks against the American state. And this is perhaps the most important difference between the Floyd riots of 2020 and the present ones in Los Angeles.
The Floyd riots were in many ways old-fashioned race riots, part of a centuries-old American tradition. The ones in 2025 Los Angeles, where rioters wave Mexican flags, represent another kind of outburst. They are displays to galvanize the ethnic solidarity that has been entrenched since 1992, and that Dan Quayle tried to hide. For those on the street, being of Mexican descent overrides the moral and communal meaning of holding a U.S. passport. It’s no wonder that the President of Mexico speaks up on their behalf.
In The Clash of Civilizations, a book about the emerging problems within the West caused by multiculturalism, Samuel Huntington describes another scene in Los Angeles—this one happening on October 16, 1994. Marching beneath “a sea of Mexican flags,” 70,000 protested against Proposition 187, which denied many social services to illegal immigrants. But as Huntington recounts, the protest backfired. “Why are they walking down the street with a Mexican flag and demanding that this country give them a free education?” observers asked. Shortly thereafter, another group of protestors marched carrying an American flag upside down. These protests galvanized support for Proposition 187, helping carry it through.
The Clash of Civilizations predicts what happens when a country—or a whole civilization—tries to define its civic identity in terms of openness and diversity. The majority might embrace it and enforce it aggressively among themselves. But their actions would accelerate the creation of transnational, deterritorialized ethnic networks, making internal clashes more likely. Ethnic and racial bonds would become more important than ever before, and the older projects of civic nationalism would exhibit more desperate signs of distress, as the prospects for keeping them alive slip away. That’s Los Angeles today. The Mexican flag is still in the streets, and the American flag is still upside down.
