A small demonstration of the power of truth

We think of the prevailing leftist and open-borders orthodoxies as immovable behemoths, crushing the life out of our society. In fact, they are unreal and insubstantial, consisting essentially of lies. All that’s needed to remove them is the truth. That, at least, is the underlying lesson Russell W. drew from listening to a surprising turnaround by William Bennett concerning the “nation of immigrants” slogan. He writes:

Bill Bennett has been a mixed bag on immigration. Strongly opposed to illegals, but a dyed-in-the-wool liberal when it came to legal immigration (he has said how he would like MORE legal immigration from places like Mexico, that our country getting “more brown” doesn’t mean anything, etc.). He has also argued strongly in favor of assimilation, but in the sort of acceptable, mainstream “conservative” way that doesn’t acknowledge the strong racial consciousness of nonwhites. For instance, he says that they should “be taught English and learn American history,” assuming that this will somehow overcome the racial solidarity problem (and even that is assuming we could wrest control of education from multi-culti elites and return them to an assimilation/civic virtue model of instruction circa 1900—good luck!). He also invoked “nation of immigrants” fairly often, in that throat-clearing way that so many politicians do.

However, he has shown some glimmers of hope recently. He talked to Robert Rector last week, and he was genuinely alarmed at the prospects of 70 million new immigrants over 20 years. He also seemed to buy into the much-needed corrective that we are not a nation of immigrants when Rector simply pointed out that throughout our history, only a small proportion of country at any given time was foreign born. Bennett repeated this argument over the course of the day.

Now, what’s so striking about this last example is that it didn’t require Bennett to learn any new facts or absorb some complicated analysis. His position on “We are a nation of immigrants” changed 180 degrees merely through a rather simple re-examination of the basic idea and what it means to be an immigrant.

That suggests to me that this obstacle in the immigration debate of PC shibboleths and mendacity, that cloud of platitudes and meaningless lip-service intended to keep non-elites slumbering on this issue while their betters sell them out for the sake of a utopian globalist ideology, is perhaps in reality very brittle. It may seem hard and unyielding, given the stifling PC climate of public discourse, but some seemingly minor pinpricks of honesty and forthrightness have the capacity of doing it serious damage.

A reason for hope?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 22, 2006 05:07 PM | Send