with whom I had not discussed political issues in many years wrote to me about my article,
He seemed to agree with my analysis of the problem, but then put up many objections to doing anything about it. While my reply goes over ground that will be familiar to readers, my correspondent’s concerns are so representative of liberal attitudes on this issue that the exchange may be worth reading.
On one hand you say the “war” idea is a powerful mobilizing idea, but then you say that nothing can be done. That’s both contradictory and untrue. Are we to fold up and die because of some demonstrations? Do you think such demonstrations will grow smaller and less aggressive and hostile in the future? We are in the process of turning into a Latin American society (just as George W. Bush celebrated in 2000) with everything that that implies, not just “culturally,” but politically. The paralysis that you and others feel in the face of those demonstrations is only going to grow worse. If that’s not the future you want, we have to do something now.
You are entertaining the false though common assumption that enforcing the law means attempting to remove 12 million illegals all at once, in one great roundup. That sounds so impossible that people dismiss it out of hand and give up on any idea of enforcing the law, and so surrender to the pro-illegal alien side of the argument. But a sudden mass deportation is NOT what this is about. It’s about enforcing the law, effectively, firmly, steadily, and surely, so that illegals go home and don’t keep coming here. Truly penalizing employers would mean they stop hiring illegals and the illegals go home. Truly protecting the border is entirely possible. It’s sheer nonsense and defeatism to imagine that it’s not.
You write:
“You need to propose practical solutions. We have plenty of laws already that are unenforceable. Tougher laws are nothing but tokens to win votes with certain constituencies.”
The practical solutions are all there. True border protection. True employer sanctions. True enforcement of the law. Withdrawing federal funds from cities that violate the law by providing “sanctuary” for illegals.
Ironically, you demand practical solutions, then you shoot down the possibility of any practical solution. You say my article is an eye-opener, which implies that you’re concerned about this problem, but then you make defeatist statements that make any solution impossible.
In fact your entire letter is an exercise in defeatism. You write:
“If it is a war, it is an insurgency from within and without our borders which is impossible to win. Our laws and due process make it impossible to repel the invasion and enforce immigration laws against so many violators.”
Ok, so according to you, there’s NOTHING to be done to defeat this war which you yourself acknowledge is being waged against us. Why then do you ask for practical solutions from me? Your sentence, “If it is a war, it is an insurgency from within and without our borders which is impossible to win,” declares any solution off the table. It is the most self-defeating statement I’ve ever seen.
I remind you that in the mid-1990s, the last time we discussed this subject, you were singing the song of the open border: America the land of freedom; all people should be able to come here; we can handle any numbers; even to worry about the issue was anti-spiritual. And now you, who have been an open borders supporter, are expressing concerns about the results of the very policy you strongly supported in the past, while you are still using the sorts of arguments that helped legitimize open borders and that would make any immigration control impossible.
You’ve gone from “Immigration is great, America is the land of freedom, the more the merrier, God wants us to welcome all people, we can handle everyone, there’s nothing to worry about,” to, “The Mexicans are attacking us from within and without and there’s nothing to do about it.”
You’ve gone in one leap from saying that immigration is fine and that there’s nothing to worry about, to saying that immigration is a disaster and there’s nothing we can do about it.
In both stages of this process you are saying the same thing. Back when it would have been more possible to do something about it, you denied that it was a problem. But now that you admit that it’s a problem, you insist that it’s “too late” to do anything about it!
So I say to you, if you are to participate in this debate, you need to take responsibility for your own past subscription to the beliefs and attitudes that have led to this disaster. You can’t just come in, after having been an open immigration supporter, and say, as though you have no past positions on this issue, “Yeah, it’s a big problem, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” At the moment, you’re an unrepentant open borderite demanding a solution to open borders.
Further, your defeatism doesn’t stop with the notion that “the immigrants are too numerous and there’s nothing we can do about it.” You even trot out the liberal anti-American slogans that we deserve to be invaded. You write:
“How do you counter the historical fact which is the moral justification for legal and illegal immigration from Mexico? The U.S. invaded Mexico and took their land. The official history and propaganda of this country covers up ethnic cleansing tactics and brutal wars used to expand U.S. territory.”
Now please. The United States defeated Mexico in 1848. This was not a problem for 120 years. We had no Mexican immigration problem, and no national guilt problem, until the 1960s, which was when a little revolution occurred (as Sonny Bono said, “The Sixties were great, but only musically”), and lots of Americans and ultimately the country as a whole adopted the anti-American, white-guilt view of the world and lost the belief in America and even in its right to exist as a country. And we did that at the same moment when Mexican immigration was increasing and when we opened up the borders with the 1965 Immigration Act.
Without the U.S. having opened up its borders, all those Mexicans, whom you are now saying we are both helpless to remove and whom we have no right to remove because of our past sins, wouldn’t even be here. They’re only here because of our liberal guilt-ridden policies which told us that we were a racist country that had no right to protect itself.
And now, ironically, you’re using the same white-guilt argument to say that we have no right to do anything about the problem that was created by the white guilt in the first place!
So, once again, you are incredibly divided by this issue. One part of you is genuinely alarmed by the Mexican invasion. But the rest of you remains 100 percent fixed in the liberal attitudes that led to this disaster—you’re intimidated by immigrant activists, and you feel America is a guilty country that has no moral right to defend itself, and also no ability to defend itself. You are thus demanding practical solutions to a problem while still holding to the attitudes that created the problem.
The fundamental reason we are in this crisis is not some objective American guilt, but the hyper liberal belief system that took over America in the Sixties. In the name of an ideal of absolute non-discrimination, this new orthodoxy made the entire history of the country, and the traditional and common sense notions of the past, seem evil, because ALL societies have some degree of discrimination, between the more able and the less able, between members of the society and foreigners, between law abiding citizens and law breaking illegal aliens, and so on. Since the Sixties America has been taken over by a belief system that sees all those normal distinctions as darkness and evil. (This is not to justify all the discrimination that occurred in the past, of course not, but the post-Sixties liberalism didn’t just aim at removing unjust discrimination, it aimed at banning all discrimination, which is not possible, and the attempt to do so is suicidal.) Though these modern liberal ideas are currently dominant and unquestionable in the mainstream, they are very recent, they are not rational, they run counter to the commonsense experience of all mankind though all of history, and they are not compatible with the continued existence of any society. The point cannot be overstated. Modern liberalism with its attack on all discrimination and inequality is an extremist belief system. Once a country adopts modern liberalism with its ideal of non-discrimination, and the resulting guilt over its entire past, it has maybe two or three generations to live.
As recently as World War II, as Tony Blankley talks about in The West’s Last Chance, America had not become the hyper liberal country it is now. We practiced censorship, we arrested and deported enemy aliens, we relocated the Japanese on the West Coast (which under the circumstances was a perfectly rational and necessary thing to do), all done in a rational, responsible, sober way, without hatred and without guilt. Further, we didn’t fight the war for “democracy” or “human rights,” at least primarily; we fought it for “civilization” against “barbarism.” Civilization is a concrete thing that we belong to. It is a non-liberal thing, because liberalism means abstract universal equal rights, and therefore pure liberalism is always opposed to any actually existing country or civilization. Listen to today’s Democratic left. They want open borders, period. They want instant amnesty and citizenship for all illegals, period. That was Kerry’s position in ‘04. Pure liberalism can never wholeheartedly accept or love an actual country or civilization, because that means that there is an “us,” and a “them,” that we favor “us” over them”; and that, to use Kerry’s favorite word when speaking about America, is “arrogant.” Nationhood or allegiance to a distinct civilization is anathema to the vision of universal liberal equality and freedom that took over the West in the post-Sixties period.
This is why one of the main themes at my website is that modern liberalism—in which the liberal values of equality and non-discrimination are the highest values of the society—is incompatible with the existence of any society, and why I say that since 9/11 we are in the apocalypse of liberalism, because liberalism is so evidently unable and unwilling to protect us from the Muslim threat (because liberals cannot bear the thought of fighting for their own guilty society against an enemy), and so, given the actual threat coming from Islam and the imperative need to do something about it, liberalism’s fatal flaws are being exposed as never before. In the same way, liberalism is unable and unwilling to protect us from illegal immigration and mass legal immigration. Therefore, either liberalism (meaning the rule of society by non-discriminatory liberalism and white guilt) must die, or America and the West will die, and liberalism will die with them. Either way, liberalism is doomed. The only question is, will liberalism die before the West dies, giving the West a chance to live, or will liberalism refuse to die, thus dragging the West down with it?
If we are to have a chance to survive, liberal dominance must end. And it must end in the mind and heart of each one of us.
Finally, you undoubtedly fear that to give up liberalism in the way I’m talking about means to become some kind of fascist. I would remind you that America existed for 170 years under the Constitution before it adopted modern liberalism as its ruling credo. At that point the views that had been seen as normal and commonsensical throughout our history began to be seen as fascist. As long as that Sixties-style condemnation of the entire past remains your own outlook, you will never be able to renounce modern liberalism, until the disasters produced by it become so personally threatening and unbearable that you have no choice but to do so. And then you will suddenly turn and become like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs, striking out in sheer instinctive need to survive against barbarian enemies. If you don’t want all of America to become like that, then you must find a rational, non-violent alternative to liberalism now, rather than be forced into a violent and savage alternative to liberalism later.
Stephen T. writes:
Mark D. writes: