Not that American politicians are likely to take notice - to do so would be to indulge in nativism, or worse - notwithstanding the present saliency of the illegal immigration question. For, you must understand, it is one thing to take cognizance of the deleterious effects of illegal immigration - though even this is fraught with innumerable pitfalls of wrongthought - and quite another to notice that even legal immigration may alter the political and culture landscape in ways undesirable to the natives. Why, nations are arbitary constructs, mere temporary congealments of transient market relations, or invidious attempts to exclude and oppress The Other. What right have the 'natives' -a meaningless term, anyway - to keep something - which is nothing, really - to themselves? The audacity!
Not that American politicians are likely to notice then, that demographic change married to ethnic politicking has resulted in the ouster of John Howard, former Australian Prime Minister and Friend of Bush. After all, the dominant liberal world-picture cultivates habits of blindness, reality, including correlations between ethnicity and culture, or ethnicity and political proclivities, being a blasphemy against the solemn dignity of the Idea.
There is, though, a more cynical interpretation of this blindness, which I may as well express, given that I may be the most cynical contributor around these parts. It may well be that the establishment, political, corporate, and economic, is fully cognizant of the reality of cultural and political transformation, and considers this a feature, and not a bug, of present policies. After all, such transformations, "inexorable" and "irresistible", are guaranteed to remove, as a viable political force, those atavistic cultural formations which, as yet, still constitute obstacles to the international order of the superman, unconditioned by particularity and formed solely by the exercise of will (or consumer preference). Those forces may be obstacles in two not-unrelated senses: first, that they actively oppose the new, post-national system - by refusing comprehensive immigration reform, for example - and second, that they, more generally, compel the establishment to take note of them in order to acquire power. The establishment requires the votes of those who are held in contempt in order to maintain the facade of legitimacy; hence, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" could become, with the passage of time and the passage of millions more immigrants through the turnstiles, "Who Gives a Fig About Kansas?" No one really does; it's merely a matter of being able to rid oneself of the pretense that one does that ultimately matters to the establishment.
(HT: Steve Sailer)
Comments (6)
The absence of shared traditions, shared cultural memory, and common historical understandings, makes self-government impossible. This is why the establishment so despises these things and works so so diligently destroy them (or, alternatively, works to outlaw their substantive preservation). People who do not know or understand each other can not be made to do so by any act of government, so their affairs must be endlessly managed.
The people who would do the managing are, predictably, the most eager to see the common heritage of the people dissolved utterly. The ones in charge of constantly "educating" people about this or that group have a vested professional interest in seeing those groups expand in importance, because it infuses their own position in society with greatly enhanced power and importance.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | December 13, 2007 12:20 AM
I'm a little confused, so bear with me.
How exactly does this "liberal blindness" (sorry, even a bit perplexed at that, as the link's discussion of an arse painted on the armor of ninja turtle left me unsatisfied) relate to legal immigration?
Are you trying to make an argument that we (America) should be selective about which countries from which we allow a greater proportion of immigrants in an effort to maintain the current Anglo-derived culture?
Posted by Royale | December 13, 2007 8:46 AM
In other words, the inverse relationship between diversity and social trust is a feature, not a bug, for those whose power rises in concert with levels of social alienation and inter-group friction.
Sam Francis is smiling at his vindication.
Posted by Maximos | December 13, 2007 8:54 AM
But wasn't that the point of the racial integration of public schools in the 1950s? That children have a right to intermix with other races as the theory (at the time), was that if they did intermix, then the races would grow up trusting each other.
Hence, they realized that social trust and diversity was a problem that needed to be fixed.
Granted, time has proven whether or not that theory and the method of implementing it was valid.
Posted by Royale | December 13, 2007 9:19 AM
Hence, they realized that social trust and diversity was a problem that needed to be fixed.
The problem begins with the universalizing impulse: We have in our common cultural memory distasteful and sometimes catastrophic incidences of (for lack of better term) Us Vs. Them. In light of such examples, it became fashionable (and is now Standard Orthodoxy) to regard all such examples of Us Vs. Them as distasteful. Thus the goal then is to eliminate, by cradle to grave indoctrination, moral preening, and incessant brow-beating, all such incidences of Us Vs. Them. Not only must we eschew the lived out, and occasionally egregious, examples, we must beat back every such impulse, no matter how weak, in our public and (importantly) private consciousness. It is not merely enough to stand for justice or the rule of law: You must feel dirty for even imagining that waves of immigration of any sort threaten your "way of life"... in fact, you should feel dirty for even imagining that you have a "way of life" that deserves any privilege at all.
Now, of course, this is ludicrous: By this logic I should not save for my retirement or children's education, but instead divide every spare dollar to be shared with everyone in the whole world equally. Why should I prefer my children to everyone else's? Are not they just as worthy? Why should I prefer my wife to every other woman? My comfort or security to that of every other man world-wide? And so on...
Ah, we are told, should love your neighbor as yourself... And doesn't Jesus give us the good Samaritan as an example? Tony Esolen makes a case that it is just such a universalizing of the concept of neighbor, this preferring of the universal and diminution of the particular, that prevents us from truly loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is impossible for us to love all men equally (at least on this side of glory), but pretending to may well give us some relief of having to love my actual neighbor, whose dog shits in my yard.
To suppress this Us Vs. Them impulse is of course to suppress human nature itself. And whether or not one considers human nature to be infinitely malleable or not, it is nevertheless an attempt against one of the more ingrained parts of our nature. It is, of course, doomed to failure, and the only question is how bad will it get when it fails.
I think Archie Bunker ironically (considering who was writing his lines) said it best:
Posted by anonymous | December 13, 2007 1:45 PM
Just to render explicitly what hitherto has been only implicit: I do consider the cultures, political proclivities, and so forth, of prospective immigrants, as well as the overall tendencies and probable consequences of immigration flows to be licit objects of discrimination.
Posted by Maximos | December 13, 2007 2:00 PM