Category Archive

This WSJ poll is about six weeks out of date, so it is pretty useless for tracking the presidential race.  There are some other results that have more lasting relevance.  58% say that the globalisation of the American economy has been on the whole “bad,” with just 28% saying the opposite and 11% declaring it a wash.  That is pretty clearly bad news for the party most closely identified with globalisation at present.  The number for those saying globalisation has generally benefited “the American economy” has dropped 14 points from a poll 10 years ago.  There are as many dissatisfied with their financial circumstances (33%) as there have been since the wake of the ‘01-’02 recession.  52% said that immigration “hurts more than it helps” the United States, up eight points from last summer and back at the same levels two years earlier.  As of mid-December when the poll was taken, 56% said that victory in Iraq was not still possible.  All of the pro-”surge” talk affected the respondents over the course of 2007, but as of last December 44% said it had made no difference and 14% said that it had made things worse.  57% agreed with the statement that most American soldiers should be withdrawn from Iraq by the start of 2009.  Except for immigration, obviously, the Republicans are on the unpopular side of every one of these questions.    

The poll also has two interesting figures on anti-Mormonism.  59% could correctly identify that Romney was a Mormon, and 26% “felt uncomfortable” about Romney’s  Mormonism and its possible effect on his presidential decisions (this was how the question was phrased), which was slightly higher than the percentage “uncomfortable” about his religion in the abstract. 

While immigration hurts black and white low-wage workers, the authors note, the effect is three times as large on blacks because immigrants are more likely to compete directly with them for jobs. ~Steve Malanga, City Journal

TAC had an article that was related to this same topic in its 12/19/05 issue, and, of course, Chronicles has been emphasising the effects of mass immigration on American labour for decades.

Looking at it in terms of the election, this issue was the reason why Tancredo was the lone Republican at the NAACP gathering last year.  It’s also notable that the only candidates who mentioned the Newark killings mentioned in Malanga’s article were Republicans.  The strong opposition between the two groups is also one of the causes of the resistance to Obama’s candidacy among Hispanic voters, even though he has adopted the same pro-immigration line that every other black Democratic politician takes.

Duncan Hunter, who actually opposes free trade and illegal immigration, has endorsed Mike Huckabee, who wants you to think that he does.  My one-time, quite ludicrous prediction that Duncan Hunter would be the Republican nominee (based once again on the implausibility of all of the alternatives) was informed partly by the idea that Hunter’s protectionist and border security credentials would help the GOP this cycle with those states that they must win.  One of the crucial flaws with this is that I assumed voters would want the experienced legislator who knew what he was talking about, rather than the artful showman who does not.  Nonetheless, the Huckabee phenomenon shows that there is some response among Republicans to the themes Hunter has articulated–they just needed someone a bit smoother and more glib to gesture towards them very generally before they would get excited. 

P.S. Hunter’s endorsement statement is here.  It clearly helps Huckabee’s reputation on border security and national security that one of the leading restrictionists and former Chairman of the Armed Forces Committee has endorsed him.  It’s an interesting split of the two also-rans: Tancredo went for Romney, which was frankly more bizarre than this, and Hunter has backed Huckabee.  As recent and cynical as Huckabee’s shift on immigration has been, the Hunter endorsement doesn’t strike me as being nearly as odd as Tancredo’s support for Romney.  The latter is just wrong on so many levels.   

One of the more remarkable results of South Carolina exit polling is the support Huckabee received from conservatives, especially from “very conservative” voters who made up 34% of the electorate.  Overall, he led among conservatives generally (35%) and among the “very conservative” he did better (41%).  In the eyes of a large number of these voters, he was the logical “conservative” alternative to McCain, just as Bush became that alternative eight years ago as he discovered that he needed to come at McCain from the right and played up to S.C. conservatives.  (In the same bizarre  way that conservatives bonded with Bush after this, the grateful anti-McCain forces might have started to see some virtue in the New Huckabee.)  For those now fretting about the Return of McCain, I would note simply that it was the conservative establishment that managed to subvert Huckabee with their relentless campaign against him over the past six to eight weeks, and and it was the vanity campaign of Fred Thompson, which must now come to an end, that paved the way for McCain to win in South Carolina and so propel him towards the nomination. 

The Great Conservative Hope, as Thompson has been treated and as he portrayed himself, facilitated the success of McCain, whom some sizeable proportion of the party and a huge part of the elite regard as unacceptable and more than a few see as not conservative.  Well, in their rejection of Huckabee they repudiated the person who, like Bush, could have halted McCain’s advance and possibly crippled his campaign.  Rather than rallying around someone who just pledged to be against amnesty, the Republicans of South Carolina (apparently half of whom favour deportation) who accepted the criticisms of Huckabee from Thompson and others have just empowered the one man most ardently committed to amnesty.  Either this was the goal of tearing down Huckabee all along, or the vendetta against the Arkansan has just come back to bite the people who have regarded him as little more than a “pro-life Democrat.”  Unwilling to tolerate the one who was probably the least objectionable, the GOP may have saddled itself with someone large numbers of Republicans will not be able to stand and who still supports amnesty in spite of everything.  The Bob Dole campaign mark II is getting ready for launch.   

Remarkably, those who voted for Romney in South Carolina have probably just ensured that their candidate loses sooner than if they had voted tactically for Thompson (or, somewhat more improbably, for Huckabee).  Romney’s ”delegate strategy” relies on the same divided field coming out of South Carolina that went into it.  Rapid consolidation of the race around one or two main rivals makes that strategy less likely to succeed.  Having recognised their failure to gain ground in South Carolina, the Romney campaign nonetheless did not foresee the danger that would come from their remaining supporters there splitting the opposition to the other two. 

Even those who mentioned immigration — or “the illegal aliens,” as Wolfis put it — seemed unaware that McCain was an outspoken Republican advocate for providing illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship last spring. ~The Politico

With the Kemp endorsement earlier this week, McCain is definitely becoming the second coming of Dole.

Via Jim Antle

Several things happened during my break that still merit some comment.  I was reminded of one of them by Brooks’ latest column when he wrote:

For immigration skeptics, he [Romney] swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

Viewed as a purely tactical anti-Huckabee and anti-McCain move, I can understand why Tancredo did this, but when I first heard about it I was amazed.  Even though I understand why he endorsed Romney, it still strikes me as a bizarre move.  Tancredo is obviously identified with opposition to mass immigration, and more than any of the “second tier” candidates made a point of criticising leading candidates for their opportunism on immigration and their conversions ”on the road to Des Moines.”  No one better embodies the “conversion on the road to Des Moines” than Romney, and no one is less credible in his criticisms of other candidates for their weaknesses on immigration policy.  The most ardent opponent of amnesty has now shown his approval of a candidate who represents everything about the marriage of Republicanism and corporate interests that Tancredo rejects.  It is a strange and inexplicable endorsement, perhaps even more so than Gilchrist’s endorsement of Huckabee, and could conceivably mean the difference between victory for the huckster or triumph for the fraud on Thursday.  Endorsing either Thompson or Paul would have made sense, and could have given Paul a needed boost in early contests.  Instead, Romney the venture capitalist gets the backing of the foremost elected restrictionist in the country in yet another bad bargain with the candidate of the GOP establishment.  Short of endorsing McCain or Giuliani, nothing could have put Tancredo more out of step with restrictionist voters. 

P.S.  Incidentally, I also agree with Brooks that Romney’s by-the-book approach to the nomination will, if successful, lead to general election defeat for the Republicans.  Weighed down by the war and deeply unpopular across the board, the GOP also has to be able to compete with the Democrats in states where voters view globalisation and free trade with skepticism at best, and Romney adopting the role of a cardboard-cutout “full-spectrum conservative,” when he has no real credibility on at least two of the three “legs” of the “stool” he frequently mentions, is not going to do the trick.  The GOP might very well lose no matter which candidate they select, but they will definitely lose with Romney.  

And, besides, the thinking goes, people far from the border really don’t care. ~Peter Brown

Brown’s article makes a lot of sense, but I think it overlooks that the crucial thing that is driving the new wave of opposition to immigration is the response from voters in both border states and in states that are far in the interior.  If anyone does still think that people in interior states don’t care about immigration, this is incorrect. 

Open borders advocates often cite polling on immigration from border states as evidence that the issue is a losing one, which ignores intensity of the opponents who live in these border  states.  Meanwhile, the farther away from the border one is, the more troubling a broader mass of voters tends to find illegal immigration to be, especially as it begins to affect their communities.  I think this is because it strikes them as evidence of just how out of control things have become.  Obviously, Iowa is pretty far away from the Rio Grande, but immigration is a burning issue there, and not just among the activists.  The same was true for western Massachusetts and even among some Democratic voters, as the special election earlier this year showed.  Part of this, as Lizza’s story on immigration politics explains, is the reaction to recently arrived immigrants in places where there had not been large numbers of them before.  The shock of sudden change combined with the underlying dissatisfaction with government failures in this area of policy make for a fearsome political reaction.  Add to that the long-standing unhappiness of a significant number of very intense opponents in the border states.  As a result, enforcement and restrictionism become much more attractive throughout the country. 

The candidate chose to occupy his snow day with a moral blunder of the first order — accepting the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of an anti-immigrant group called the Minuteman Project. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson has turned on the “compassionate” conservative candidate pretty quickly here.  Not because of the man’s real moral blunders (see Wayne Dumond et al.), but because he associates himself with restrictionists and adopts restrictionist proposals.  In Gerson’s moral universe, opposition to illegal immigration and support for border security seem to be among the worst errors one can make (”a moral blunder of the first order,” he says).  Ironically, Gerson’s criticism of Huckabee’s embrace of Gilchrist is just the kind of thing Huckabee needs in the nomination contest to shore up his reputation as an “authentic conservative” (as his advertisements refer to him).  Anything that will distance him from Gerson and “compassionate conservatism” is a plus for him, since it undermines the argument that the rest of us are promoting that Huckabee is in many ways not conservative and is not the candidate that conservatives should want to support.  Gerson’s disapproval may become for some people another reason to give Huckabee another look, when they should not even give him a first look.  

Considering Huckabee’s incredibly small campaign staff, this question was quite amusing:

Did someone vet Gilchrist’s past statements?

The candidate doesn’t even have someone to brief him about leading news stories on national security, and we’re supposed to expect a rigorous vetting process of endorsers?  The strange thing is that Huckabee’s transparent flip on immigration probably won’t hurt him that much, despite what Gerson thinks it will do to his reputation for “authenticity.”  The beauty of a politician having a reputation for authenticity is that it is almost always undeserved.  In any case, it can be effectively faked by clever performers, and there’s no doubt that Huckabee is that if he is nothing else.  Further, all of his main rivals have been as bad or worse on immigration than he was.  I was going to say, “except for Fred Thompson,” but Thompson isn’t really a main rival anymore.  This means that their collective stampede to the right on immigration gives him plenty of cover to transform himself cynically into an anti-amnesty, border-enforcing champion.  Unbelievably, Iowan restrictionist voters are buying into it right now. 

Huckabee’s immigration flop hasn’t fooled everyone:

Jim Gilchrist here speaks only for Jim Gilchrist, he does not speak for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, nor is he nationally representative of most patriots in the “Minuteman movement” – who under no circumstances could ignore the failed record nor endorse the duplicitous “plan” recently rolled out by candidate Mike Huckabee. The national media needs to recognize that Jim Gilchrist’s endorsement is his own personal statement, nothing more.

I should also apologise for any misleading statements on my part that claimed that the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps had collectively endorsed Huckabee.  As the letter points out, they are legally barred from making political enndorsements as an organisation.

At Huckabee’s side today was a man named Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen, who was on hand to endorse Huckabee. ~Noam Scheiber

I can’t express to you all how little sense this makes.  It’s baffling, like so much else associated with Mike Huckabee lately.  The only thing more bizarre would have been if Gilchrist had endorsed McCain.  How does the founder of the Minutemen endorse Huckabee?  What parallel universe have we fallen into that this is happening?  I mean, Gilchrist essentially has to ignore everything that the man said or did regarding immigration for the last decade.  Apparently the take-away lesson is that shameless pandering works.  Before much longer maybe Huckabee will land Tancredo’s endorsement. 

Ryan Lizza’s article on the GOP and immigration has this telling section:

Huckabee is the latest victim of the Republican shift on the immigration issue. We talked on what should have been a happy day for Huckabee. According to at least one poll, he had taken the lead from Romney in Iowa, and was enjoying a sustained burst of positive media coverage. “Oh, man, it’s been unbelievable,” he said in his winning, Gomer Pyle-like voice. “We’re up in New Hampshire and I’ve got more press coming to the events than I’ve got people. I’m not kidding. It’s unbelievable. We have so many people coming we can’t fit them in the places.” But Huckabee’s excitement was tempered by Romney’s persistent attacks on his immigration record as governor of Arkansas, and he seemed to be grappling with the intensity of the question among Republicans. “It does appear to be the issue out here wherever we are,” he told me. “Nobody’s asked about Iraq—doesn’t ever come up. The first question out of the box, everywhere I go—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, it doesn’t matter—is immigration. It’s just red hot, and I don’t fully understand it [bold mine-DL].”

Of course he doesn’t fully understand it.  He has spent his entire political career as a governor demonising and denouncing opponents of illegal immigration.  He employed every heavy-handed smear available to oppose the policies that he now clasps tightly to his bosom.  He was the Lindsey Graham of governors, and yet all he has to do is propose the kind of policy he would have never supported as governor and suddenly all is forgiven and forgotten (if it was ever known). At least Romney had the decency to alter his position on this early in the campaign.  Huckabee may be even less scrupulous in this respect than the fraud.

As I wrote in the 9/24 TAC (sorry, not online), commenting on Huckabee’s “evolving” ideas on immigration and his second-place showing at Ames:

Yet only two years ago, as governor, he denounced a bill in the Arkansas legislature that would have prohibited state benefits for illegal immigrants as “un-Christian” and “un-American.”

If Huckabee believed that then, he is bowing to political necessity and sacrificing his principles–something he said shouldn’t be done when he spoke at the “values” voters summit–and he is doing so in the most transparently opportunistic way possible. 

P.S.  Michelle Malkin shares my stunned disbelief.

Huckabee’s inexplicable levels of support among restrictionist voters and a new ad on immigration have prompted a Romney counter-attack, but as attack ads go this must be one of the weakest I have ever seen.  Once he prefaces his attack by saying that Huckabee is a good family man who is pro-life and supports traditional marriage, Romey has basically given up trying to gain an advantage on social issues.  Trying to maintain “Iowa nice,” Romney’s ad doesn’t really deliver the killer blow and largely leaves Huckabee unscathed.  It is an ad that will interest journalists and wonks.  Meanwhile, Huckabee’s ad is very simple and says exactly what restrictionists want to hear (”no amnesty”), even though we know that Huckabee was perfectly content in the past with “comprehensive immigration reform” legislation that these voters would regard as amnesty.  Of course, Romney is in an awkward position here, since attacking Huckabee’s credibility over his very recent apparent conversion on immigration reminds voters that Romney has had “evolving” views on just about everything.  As Mark Krikorian notes, Huckabee has once again endorsed the Pence compromise plan, which many conservatives see as little better than amnesty.   

But taking all that into account, why is Romney giving Huck the kid gloves treatment?  Mark Halperin lays out the perils of attacking Huckabee, on account of the personality-driven nature of his campaign.  For one thing:

Voters seem attracted to the man—not his issue positions, his record, or the quality (or lack thereof) of his campaign apparatus. Taking down Huckabee the Candidate means taking down Huckabee the Man, and that requires the kind of nuclear blast no one is yet inclined to launch. 

Meanwhile, the stories that remind voters that Huckabee is a minister who has said things about “taking back” America for Christ will work to Huckabee’s benefit, at least in those states where said re-taking is considered to be a desirable and perfectly normal goal by a broad swathe of Christian conservatives.  This is supposed to horrify secular voters, and maybe it does, but it just reconfirms for social conservatives that he has been one of them and on their side for a lot longer than many of the other current suitors.  Remarkably, when Huckabee has to drop past statements or reject old views, as he quickly did over the “AIDS quarantine” story, the label “flip-flopper” isn’t being used. 

When Huckabee changes his mind, it seems as if it is being treated as a genuine and reasonable change.  There is certainly a difference in how Huckabee’s attempts to trick voters and Romney’s deceptions are being treated iin the press.  To the extent that media bias is involved, the explanation seems clear: Romney was a liberal who has publicly repudiated his past views (whether he has “really” changed his mind or not is secondary), while Huckabee is a Gersonist and is therefore in many ways sympathetic to therapeutic-state liberalism.  In short, Romney has spurned liberals, but Huckabee flirts with some of their ideas and shows an openness to their policy ideas in certain areas.  Paradoxically, the conservative attack on Huckabee’s record and charges that he is a kind of progressive or Christian leftist may endear him to the mainstream media and prevent them from giving his record the thorough scrutiny that they ought to give it.  Meanwhile, progressive observers seem to be divided between thinking of Huckabee as a potentially tolerable Republican and regarding him as a loon with horrible policy ideas, and this ambivalent response is helping Huckabee maintain an aura of having conservative authenticity that he, in fact, does not possess.  (He has to keep running the phrase “authentic conservative” in all his Iowa ads because he knows that lack of authenticity is the thing that is killing Romney and would be killing him, too, if people knew anything about him.)  The very incoherence of his policy ideas is keeping his critics on left and right off-balance, because they can all find something in his grab-bag of proposals that they can support or at least tolerate.      

Update: Jonathan Martin has the Huckabee response to the ad, which makes effective use of Romney’s own reluctance to veto the very bill that he is bragging about vetoing in the ad.  At the time, Romney said, “I hate the idea of in any way making it more difficult for kids, even those who are illegal aliens, to afford college in our state.”  He hated the idea, sounding more Huckabathetic* than Huckabee, but has chosen to make the very same issue the chief defining difference between Huckabee and himself.  Point to Huckabee.

*I claim my rights for coining this and its related noun, Huckabathos.

So, as Romney tells it, he couldn’t control whether or not his landscaper hired illegal immigrants, which is why you need to vote for him so that he can push for enforcement!  If there hadn’t been a follow-up questioning his management competence, this would have been a moderately effective dodge.  It’s not a fully satisfactory answer, since the same company was engaged in these practices last year, as we all know.  Even so, the follow-up question seems a bit lame to me–the man has actually rehabilitated corporations and did put the Salt Lake City Olympics in the black, and we’re really going to question his judgement and doubt his competence as a manager because his landscaper has hired illegal immigrants?  Really?  Now if you want to make this about his utter inconsistency on immigration, be my guest.  That, however, is a matter of his policy record and his reputation as, as I have put it, an “opportunistic fraud.” 

There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners. ~Michael Kinsley

This is one of those things that you never expect to see in Time or any other mainstream publication, and then suddenly there it is.  The debate really does seem to have shifted in the last year.  I don’t know that I would put it quite this way, but the basic insight is right. 

We do have some obligation to be just in how we act towards foreigners (for starters, we might refrain from attacking their countries without good cause or treating their political systems as our toys), but it isn’t at all clear that justice demands–or even allows–mass immigration.  For reasons I have stated before during a debate that I have neglected to follow up recently, we have prior obligations to our fellow citizens that take precedence over whatever obligations we have to others.  Mass immigration is most unjust to native labour and to the communities in other countries that lose a lot of “human capital” to other markets, but it is also unjust to taxpayers who foot the bill and bear the costs of this immigration.  Under the current arrangement, even the immigrant labourers–who are supposedly the beneficiaries of all this–are treated exploitatively and unfairly.  Thanks to the importation of cheap labour, we do have cheaper goods and services, which means that there is an entire economic structure based on taking advantage of these labourers, which is also unjust.  

I have never quite understood how supporting mass immigration was the position that was obviously more “fair” to foreigners.  There are arguably just as many foreigners in their own countries who suffer on account of more industrialised economies drawing away some of their most productive and educated people.  The latter may ultimately benefit greatly, but, as Kinsley says, let’s not kid ourselves that immigrant labour is preferred because of an innate sense of fair play and a desire to help the foreign opportunity-seekers of the world.   

And while saying that Bush and the Republicans have failed for eight years may have some impact, we won’t be running against Bush, Instead, my hunch is there’s room for an argument saying that the modern GOP won’t ever get serious about staunching illegal immigration because their main supporters, large corporations, like the supply of cheap labor. ~Ezra Klein

This unfortunately seems right.  Were any Democrats willing to try to steal the “enforcement-first” ground from the GOP, they would find a lot of success and would neutralise the Republican advantage on immigration that I discussed before.  The trouble for the Republicans is that their leadership is possibly even more terrified of appearing too “tough” on immigration than Rahm Emanuel et al. are afraid of appearing weak.  It is oddly the one issue where the Republican leadership is unwilling to use voter anxiety and the appearance of Democratic “weakness” to its advantage.  Klein has succinctly explained why this is.  I called them the Party of Immigration for a reason.

The Washington Post, not generally known for exaggerating the electoral viability of anti-immigration politicians, has another item, this time a full news report, on the significance of the candidate’s opposition illegal immigration in the excessively touted, but better-than-expected performance of Jim Ogonowski in the MA-05 special election:

But by last month, although opinion polling showed that he was well liked, he was still running 10 points behind Democrat Niki Tsongas with just weeks to go before a special election. The campaign needed a way to go beyond biography, to persuade Northern Massachusetts to vote Republican. They found it in illegal immigration.

GOP spinmeister Democratic House majority whip Rahm Emanuel commented:

This issue has real implications for the country. It captures all the American people’s anger and frustration not only with immigration, but with the economy.  It’s self-evident. This is a big problem.

Republicans can either capitalise on this and address the economic and other anxieties of voters (which would require them to cease their “the sun never sets” rhetoric about the economy for starters) and craft a message that will reach the “Lou Dobbs voters” and others in fairly hard-hit parts of the country, or they can ignore this potential advantage and pretend that all will be well.  We know what the leading presidential candidates want to pursue the latter course.  The question is: why would the Republicans want to cede an issue that they theoretically could use to their advantage?  So that they can retain their credibility as ideologues of free trade?

The Post story continued:

“Immigration played into the economic issue,” said Francis Talty, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who followed the Tsongas-Ogonowski contest. “Do you want illegal immigrants to get in-state [university] tuition? Do you want them to get driver’s licenses? Do you want their children to get benefits under SCHIP? It was the benefit side that has real resonance, not the deportation thing.”

In other words, the “Tancredoisation” of these issues, so to speak, by Ogonowski apparently did work to his advantage.  It wasn’t enough to overcome Tsongas’ lead and all the natural advantages a Democratic candidate has, but it helped narrow the gap.  Immigration was apparently just about the only area where Ogonowski had a decisive advantage:

Internal polling found that Ogonowski’s tough stance was winning 60 percent to 30 percent over the positions articulated by Tsongas, said Rob Autry, another Public Opinion Strategies partner who served as Ogonowski’s pollster. Ogonowski’s position on taxes had a narrower, 13 percentage point lead. Every other issue “was dicey,” he said.  

So, one of the lessons of MA-05 would seem to be that recasting issues on which Republicans are on the losing side into an argument about illegal immigration is a vote-winner. 

This will give Dave Weigel heartburn:

In Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional District–a collection of mill towns and affluent and blue-collar suburbs north of Boston–the surprise issue was illegal immigration. Ogonowski made it the centerpiece of an anti-Washington campaign. An Ogonowski news release, for example, accused Tsongas of being “committed to giving cheap college to illegals at taxpayer expense.”

I had been guessing that Ogonowski’s anti-immigration positions were probably doing him more good than harm.  It shouldn’t be surprising that such an issue could work to Ogonowski’s advantage, especially in a special election with fairly low turnout.  That doesn’t mean that Ogonowski’s position wouldn’t help him in a regular general election, but it does remind us once again not to put too much stock in what MA-05 tells us about the strength of the two parties or the importance of particular issues.  What many people seem to be concluding from this race (GOP is reviving, Dems are in danger) is probably wrong, and no one should be investing the closeness of the outcome with much significance.

Sayeeda Warsi, given a peerage by David Cameron to enable her to join his front bench as spokesman on cohesion, has taken on the issue head on, volunteering her view that immigration has been “out of control” and that people feel “uneasy” about the pace of immigration into Britain. Her intervention has outraged black groups who say she is using the language of the BNP. It also threatens to derail Mr Cameron’s attempts to shake off the Conservatives’ “nasty-party” image, while exposing divisions between left and right.

“What this country has a problem with is not people of different kinds coming into this country and making a contribution, but the problem that nobody knows who is coming in, who is going out – the fact that we don’t have a border police; we don’t have proper checks; we don’t have any idea how many people are here, who are unaccounted for,” she says. “It’s that lack of control and not knowing that makes people feel uneasy, not the fact that somebody of a different colour or a different religion or a different origin is coming into our country.” As her press officer squirms in his chair, she continues: “The control of immigration impacts upon a cohesive Britain.”

Warming to her theme, she declares that the decision to house large groups of migrants on estates in the north of England “overnight” has led to tension in local communities. Similar tensions have been found in the London in Barking and Dagenham, where the far right has been making political in-roads. “The pace of change unsettles communities,” she says.

Lady Warsi’s outspoken intervention is somewhat surprising as she is the daughter of immigrants herself [bold mine-DL]. Her father is a former Labour-supporting mill-worker from Pakistan who, after making a fortune in the bed and mattress trade, switched his allegiance to the Tories. The lawyer, 36, who is married with a nine-year-old daughter, devoted her early career to improving race relations, helping to launch Operation Black Vote in Yorkshire and sitting on various racial justice committees. So her analysis of race relations on the eve of the Tory conference cannot be dismissed as a right-wing rant [bold mine-DL].

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Lady Warsi claims that the conspiracy of silence on the subject of immigration plays into the hands of the far-right British National Party.

“The BNP will look at what issue it is locally that they can exploit and the other political parties are not seen to be dealing with and they will play to that,” she says. Far from ignoring the issue of immigration, she thinks it should be confronted head on. “I think we need to have the debate. One of the problems why the BNP has been allowed to grow is sometimes certainly the Labour Party took the view that if we ignore them they will just go away,” she says.

But while BNP supporters, including the English National Ballet dancer Simone Clarke, have been sharply criticised for backing a racist party, Lady Warsi says that BNP voters should be listened to. “The BNP and what they represent, they clearly have a race agenda; they clearly have a hate agenda. But there are a lot of people out there who are voting for the British National Party and it’s those people that we mustn’t just write off and say ‘well, we won’t bother because they are voting BNP or we won’t engage with them’,” she says.

Indeed, she says, people who back the extreme-right party, criticised for its racist and homophobic agenda, may even have a point. “They have some very legitimate views. People who say ‘we are concerned about crime and justice in our communities – we are concerned about immigration in our communities’,” she said. ~The Independent

This has apparently annoyed many people in Britain (not least of which was probably David Cameron, who wanted his conference week to be blissfully free of anything remotely interesting).  What could the shadow community cohesion minister be thinking, talking about, well, community cohesion like this?  How could someone whose career has been in race relations make statements about, er, race relations?  Obviously, it is considered unpardonable to suggest that immigration restriction or even modest reform is legitimate, which is why these remarks are even considered that noteworthy, and it is considered even worse when it is done by the daughter of immigrants, even though it cannot be dismissed as easily when she says it.  Not just a “right-wing rant,” you see, because no daughter of immigrants could actually have come intellectually to see any reasonableness in ”right-wing” views.  (It is the fact that it cannot be dismissed out of hand, as would normally be done, that I think really vexes Baroness Warsi’s critics.)  If all immigrantss started assimilating and respecting the opinions of their fellow citizens, where would it lead? 

Apparently, Daniel thinks I spend a good deal of time saying nothing more substantive than that I do not agree with things I disagree with. ~Will Wilkinson

In the two particular cases in question, I think that a skeptical reader might not find that much more to the arguments Mr. Wilkinson advances beyond his assertion of moral abhorrence for policies and norms that he does not support, plus the occasional dismissive reference to nationalism or a “national coalition” thrown in here and there.  How substantive that is, I will leave to others.  My concluding remarks for both responses sought to draw out what seemed to me to be the root of the disagreement, which was a disagreement over basic assumptions.  In the remainder of both posts, I did attempt to address at least some of the rest of what Mr. Wilkinson had to say.  Perhaps these attempts were lacking. 

In any case, the two posts in question are expositions of the observation that conservatives do not hold his kind of libertarian assumptions about national identity and borders, because, among other things, they do not and cannot take liberty to be the moral baseline.  They make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, nationals and non-nationals, which they consider to be not simply prudent but actually obligatory and right.  Neither do conservatives, or most people for that matter, judge the efficiacy and worthiness of U.S. immigration policy on the basis of whether it aids the populations of ”developing” nations, because we do not think that it is the role of the U.S. government to set its policies to maximise the prosperity of the populatiions of “developing” nations.  Having put up a rather eccentric set of standards, Mr. Wilkinson finds that conservatives are not measuring up.  That’s all very well, but I don’t know that it tells us very much.  That is why I wrote the concluding remarks that I did.   

My concluding points in these two cases were to draw attention to the fact that the points of contention between Mr. Wilkinson and his interlocutors are not disagreements over anything like measurable practical benefits for the world’s poorest or anyone else.  They are disagreements between libertarians such as Mr. Wilkinson and conservatives, because the two are sharply, seemingly irreconcilably at odds about basic values.  He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong. 

He wrote:

For example, this liberal finds the claim, implicit in much of the immigration debate, that I ought to heavily discount the welfare gains to non-citizens simply because they belong to a different national coalition morally abhorrent. I don’t doubt that many people take themselves to have an “inescapable” moral obligation to treat outsiders unfairly, or to even positively harm them (even kill them!), if it redounds to the benefits [sic] insiders. But I deny that there is any such obligation to escape in the first place. 

There’s no question of an obligation to treat outsiders “unfairly”–the so-called “unfairness” comes in distinguishing between insider and outsider–since it only seems like unfair treatment to someone who thinks there should be no distinction.  Yet there is no good rationale for abolishing the distinction, or at least none that has been presented in these posts.  The point is that there is not an argument I can see for why there is no obligation.  It is simply a restatement of Mr. Wilkinson’s assumption that none exists.  Hence my original conclusion. 

He then made the point that the (to use Levin’s phrases) “contractual way” and moralising according to “continuity and generation” are both equally artificial, which prompted me to respond that, if this is true, their equally artificial nature simply underscores  that people opt for one “way” or another depending on what functions they valued most.  This drives home the point, implicit in the entire discussion about moral sentiments, that the adherents of the two ”ways” judge morality by significantly different standards.  If it is true that “the liberal dimensions of the moral sense are uniquely amenable to defense by rational argument,” it would be interesting to see some of that kind of argument in these cases.        

In the latest post, Mr. Wilkinson tells us that “the global system of exclusion through citizenships, visas, and borders has manifestly failed to make the world’s least well-off better off,” though the system was never designed specifically to make the “least well-off” better off.  The basic question remains: why should that system be upended or radically changed, when the system of exclusion has actually worked to promote competition and innovation that have benefited most nations enormously?  Furthermore, is it even certain that such a proposed massive influx of poor labourers into developed economies would have the beneficial effects attributed to the proposal?  The idea might be as humanitarian and high-minded as you please, yet the costs of absorbing all these people (and the more, the better, because we wouldn’t want to be heartless and cruel, would we?) could weaken or stall those developed economies to the detriment of all.  

Conservatives argue that there is a hierarchy of loyalties based on natural affinities and social relationships, and that it is, in fact, a disordering of moral priorities to pretend that our obligations to our next-door neighbour and to a man on the other side of the world are effectively the same or even close to being comparable.  Proximity, kinship and shared citizenship create bonds between people that do not exist with others.  Conservatives here are no more personally ”indifferent” to the suffering of the world’s poorest nations than are the people of any “developed” country.  What Wilkinson calls “indifference” to foreigners’ suffering, conservatives call loyalty to compatriots (and a rejection of the sentimentality that allows us to see nothing around us closer than Africa).  The false choice that Mr. Wilkinson would have us make is to believe that there is something particularly pernicious and vicious about valuing such loyalty, and that the only way to show concern for the suffering of the world’s poor is to open the gates and create a huge, exploited underclass in our own country.  

I assume that Mr. Wilkinson’s concern for the world’s poorest is not a kind of rhetorical moral blackmail, though he still deploys it rather heavy-handedly.  Naturally, he does not extend the same assumption of good faith to his interlocutors, but imputes to them “morally abhorrent” views, he hints of bad faith and disregard for other people’s human rights, and describes the ideas to which he objects as “repugnant, and dangerous” and “poisonous.”  He says things like: “Levin wants to defend the shudder when it comes to, say, cloning, but (I trust) not when it comes to the subhuman treatment of the Dalits.”  Levin argues that there are some obligations that we owe family and neighbours that we do not choose, which means in Mr. Wilkinson’s view that he would not really think twice about tacitly endorsing the worst aspects of a dehumanising caste system. 

Don’t you see?  Any reasonably strong concern for purity and hierarchy must lead to tolerating the treatment meted out to untouchables.  That sounds like a very fair conclusion based on what the man said.  This is the sort of tendentious stuff that religious conservatives in particular have had to put up with for years: if you strongly espouse a moral precept, you must obviously endorse the worst fanaticism imaginable and you cannot possibly object to it.   Oh, yes, and then there is the charge of indifference to the suffering and injustice suffered by billions.  But, no, really, there is an argument in there somewhere.   

Telling us that that our immigration policy should be geared towards reducing global poverty is revealing in its own way, but takes no account of the ever-greater immiseration of the population left behind by the mass emigration advocated here as a solution.   Is Mr. Wilkinson “indifferent” to the suffering and injustice that those people who remain  behind (and inevitably many people will remain behind) will experience?  I wouldn’t assume that he is.  Yet that seems to be a likely outcome of the proposal he has endorsed.  Rather than stripping the most destitute of nations of their human resources, it would be best for all involved in the long term if they remained in their own countries.  This would in all likelihood hasten the pace of domestic reforms that would gradually make these places increasingly liveable and prosperous.  For each horror story from the “developing” world, there are success stories in the same parts of the world that suggest that mass abandonment of the poorest countries is not the only alternative to dead-end developmentalism.  As Easterly says:

But this doesn’t quite square with the sub-Saharan Africa that in 2006 registered its third straight year of good GDP growth — about 6%, well above historic averages for either today’s rich countries or all developing countries. Growth of living standards in the last five years is the highest in Africa’s history. 
  

At the moment when things may be looking up, with the obvious notable exceptions, we should call on people to flee their countries just as they beginning to enjoy some limited prosperity?  The failures of international development efforts in many parts of the world are well known, and Mr. Wilkinson and I are in agreement about that much.  However, some “developing” nations have actually managed to improve social and material conditions quite considerably (those Dalits that concern Mr. Wilkinson so much are politically mobilised now and have elected officials drawn from their ranks–unthinkable only a couple decades ago).  It seems to me that the benefits for future generations in these countries would be greater still, if more of their most capable and industrious people did not resettle elsewhere but instead remained to build up those countries rather than essentially abandon them.       

So if it’s wrong to consign someone to second-class citizenship based on skin color, why should we feel any more comfortable about forcing someone to live someplace horrible like Zimbabwe simply because that’s where he happens to have been born? ~Tim Lee

Because we’re not “forcing” someone to live in Zimbabwe (or wherever), but rather preventing him from living here.  Second, Zimbabwe was not always so horrible, and is not doomed to be so.  It is horrible for very explicable reasons of bad “policy,” if you can call systematic plunder and looting a policy, that are a matter of record, and which could be corrected if the Mugabe kleptocracy were no longer there.  I feel “comfortable” about stopping Zimbabweans (or anyone else) from coming to this country en masse, if they could actually manage it, because I see what this massive influx of refugees is doing to Zimbabwe’s neighbours and I do not want that for my country.  I would prefer that it not be happening to Zimbabwe’s neighbours, either.  The refugee crisis is a product of corruption and misrule on an epic scale.  The solution is not found in constantly offering maniacal despots a safety valve to release the buildup of social discontent, but in keeping the pressure on until the tyrannical goose is well and truly cooked by domestic rebellion.  Mass emigration not only drains other countries of some of their most industrious members, but it also serves as a much-needed relief for people in control of the sclerotic and bankrupt political institutions of many “developing” nation-states.  Western guilty consciences and the policies based thereon are their insurance policy and one of the means for their continued domination and exploitation of their subjects.  I have a hard time coming up with a moral theory that justifies that.

Update: On the subject of Zimbabwe, would you believe it if I told you that Zimbabwe was still 31st in a ranking of states for good governance in sub-Saharan Africa?  That means that there are 17 countries that are considered to be governed even more atrociously.  That seems worth nothing.

Sigh.  It’s enough to make you despair for your “national coalition,” also known as a “country.”  It never fails to amaze me how those who are keen to talk about the constructed nature of identity and social conventions seem to think that it is therefore somehow illegitimate to maintain identities and conventions once they have been constructed.  The key idea of constructivism is that we are the ones shaping and crafting the concepts we use, and that they supposedly do not derive from the nature of things.  If that is so, and for the sake of argument let’s say that it is, it is ultimately no more “abhorrent” in a firm, absolute sense for one group to exclude outsiders than it is for another to include them–both kinds of treatment of outsiders serve different functions, and the kind of treatment you advocate depends very much on which function you value more and which one you think you can live without.  Those who are already uninterested in the maintenance of national identity will naturally have no problem with welcoming in outsiders by the millions and tens of millions–they have made the great sacrifice of not maintaining something they didn’t value–while simultaneously declaring their greater moral sense for valuing inclusion.   

The unchosen obligations, which are still imposed on us and affect us even when we react against them by rejecting them, that the liberal wants to weaken actually serve both manifest and latent functions, and it is on account of this that they are reproduced.  Failing to maintain and reproduce them does actually lead to social disorder, which the liberal desperately tries to normalise and affirm as just a “different” kind of social organisation.  The vast majority of human experience tells us that there is something in human nature that compels us to cultivate in-group solidarity, construct identities in opposition to other groups of people and structure relatively restrictive social rules to organise our group.  Any of these things can be taken to extremes, and they can also be badly neglected.  In the current age of neglect, “society” continues to trudge on in one form or another, but the social costs stemming from neglecting those old unchosen obligations have badly damaged our capacity for creating social capital.   

Excesses in either direction will undermine human flourishing.  Of course, confusion sets in at the beginning when you begin making liberty the baseline of judging whether or not something is desirable.  Mr. Wilkinson has successfully shown once again that he hates boundary maintenance–both of the physical and the metaphorical kind–and that conservatives favour it, which is why he isn’t a conservative.  Very illuminating.   

Today we regard a Northerner circa 1855 who transported, housed, and concealed from authority a fugitive slave as a moral visionary, despite the fact that he was flouting the laws of his time. Is there any morally relevant distinction between that individual and someone today who smuggles a refugee from Zimbabwe into the United States, shelters him in his home, and helps him evade the immigration authorities? ~Tim Lee

My Scene colleague Tim does his best to weight things in favour of his argument with the most extreme example of a misruled country and a comparison with slavery and a title that evokes memories of apartheid.  Since everyone will agree that Zimbabwe is today a waking nightmare, and we will also agree that slavery and apartheid are bad, there must be nothing left for it but to relocate the entire population of Zimbabwe to our shores.  The Zambians will be relieved.  Or maybe there is another answer.

First, it is doubtful that life in a country that is suffering net population loss by the millions because of fears of famine and violence from ZANU-PF-supporting ”veterans” is less brutal than was the antebellum South.  With respect to food production in particular, modern Zimbabweans would be fortunate to live in agriculturally rich and fertile lands that were being used so productively as they were in the Old South.  Slaves in the antebellum era certainly had a much better chance of staying alive and prospering after a fashion than do “free” people in Zimbabwe today.  Give Mugabe his due: his tyranny is just about as brutal as it gets short of mass killing.  

Second, since it apparently needs to be said, people who are actually engaged in human trafficking today and the Harriet Tubmans of the past are very different sorts of people.  First, the former are driven primarily by economic interests, while the latter were a sort of politico-religious agitator.  The moral differences between them are vast.  The former are criminals, not simply by some technicality of federal immigration law, but by trade.  They are smugglers and crooks who exploit and abuse their charges.  Since the people they bring here are on the fast track to being cheap exploited labour, and if we wanted to keep using slavery analogies, they are about as morally pure and high-minded as slave traders.    

Bringing slavery into the debate might introduce other difficulties for the proponent of large-scale immigration, since extreme economic dependency is the state into which these people are entering (or, rather, it is the state in which they will remain).  The argument a pro-immigration person might want to make is that this system of illegal exploitation and human trafficking is one of the reasons why immigrants should not be criminalised for trying to come here, since that would theoretically prevent at least some of them from putting themselves at the mercy of criminal operations.  Of course, even in an era of open borders with all the other problems that would create, such exploitation would continue, especially for those coming by boat, as migrants will still be herded into shipping containers just as they are today if there is an economic incentive for the smugglers to do it and little or no law enforcement to deter them.  Decriminalising immigration, which I take to be the main point Tim wants to make, would not mean that the human traffickers will be any better regulated; decriminalising immigration is a concession to the supposed “reality” that it is already impossible to regulate the “movement of labour.”  If I were wont to get on a humanitarian soapbox and decry the evils of such human trafficking, I could point to this as a massive moral blind spot of the pro-immigration side, but I don’t like humanitarian soapboxes and see this as mostly a distraction from the larger question. 

The larger question is this: how does mass emigration actually help other parts of the world?  Letting in those who can escape the nightmare is all very well and good, but it is almost certain that the most motivated and most capable will be among the first to abandon their “prisons,” as the Free Exchange blogger calls them, leaving their neighbours to endure even greater hardships as conditions continue to deteriorate.  Applied domestically, this would be rather like writing off inner cities as hopeless and encouraging those who could ”get out” to move to the suburbs, leaving the city centers to deteriorate and collapse even more quickly.  In effect, what these humanitarian arguments for ending “international apartheid“ will lead to is resource-stripping of human capital by the developed world, maintaining the “developing” world’s status as a source for raw materials and a world with the export profile of a colonial dependency.  Rather than arguing, as some anti-developmentalists do, that trade and investment will build up the economies of these countries, the “humanitarian” argument for encouraging mass emigration calls for massive divestment from the failed “enterprises” of post-colonial Africa and elsewhere by the very inhabitants of those countries.

As I have argued before against a certain Free Exchange blogger :

Some might think that people who live in these “prison” countries regard the place where they live as their home and might even say that they are not simply labour units to be reassigned to allow for greater efficiencies.  Mass uprooting and relocation of poor populations with migrants moving from the countryside to the city and from the home country to communities abroad, which has happened in virtually every impoverished, modernising nation-state from the independence of Greece on, is all very good for those who can get out, but dooms those who remain (and many will remain) to an even more miserable existence.  Dr. Wilson once remarked on this, asking a rhetorical question that went something like this: “What sort of country robs poor countries of their best and brightest people?”  This blogger’s kind of country, it would seem. 

I have never seen an issue where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson is right about one thing (and one thing only): there is a stark opposition.  There is a short-term temptation for Republican candidates this year and next to pursue Hispanic votes in the general election through the shameless and misguided pandering of embracing Gerson’s preferred, horrible immigration policy, which, if enacted, would result in the guaranteed long-term destruction of the GOP as a competitive national party.  There is a temptation to treat Hispanic voters like idiots and pretend that liberalising immigration is their top priority (only slightly less condescending than the old Republican effort in the ’90s to try to build up support among Hispanics by supporting Puerto Rican statehood).  Of course, the reason why Hispanics do not tend to vote for Republicans and young Hispanics are even less likely to do so is that these voters do not support the various other, non-immigration policies championed by the GOP.  This is, in fact, why most immigrants tend to vote for the Democrats: Democrats propose policies on social services, education, welfare and the like that are more likely to benefit immigrants, or which are more likely to be in keeping with the political traditions they have brought with them from their old countries.  Additionally, Republicans cannot outdo Democrats in their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, since they have no enthusiasm for it.  They cannot be insistent on assimilation, which is what their constituents demand, while playing up to bilingualism or rhetoric about strength in diversity.  

Hispanic voters’ opinions on immigration policy are hardly monolithic.  The idea that capitulating to immigration liberalisation or amnesty will win over these voters assumes that actual Hispanic voters want such policies, when a sizeable number of them may prefer immigration restriction.  Gerson wants the GOP to do two incredibly stupid things at the same time: pander to Hispanics by adopting strongly pro-immigration views, thus alienating core constituencies of the party, and simultaneously insult the Hispanics with this pandering while ignoring any and all other policy issues that are the actual source of Hispanic alienation from the GOP.  It is a combination of substantively bad policy with an embarrassing attempt to employ the symbolic politics that both parties use to feign concern for this or that community.  It would be much more refreshing if pro-immigration Republicans could at least acknowledge that they support liberalisation and amnesty because it suits the interests of large businesses even though it means future doom for the GOP. 

Via this Economist Free Exchange blogger (via McArdle), whose arguments seem strangely familiar, comes a review of The Bottom Billion.  My guess is that Paul Collier, the author, and I would agree on many of the evils of ”developmentalism” and would find some of the same problems with the organisations and institutions that allegedly promote development in poor countries.  The Free Exchange blogger refers to ”Easterly’s jaded pessimism,” which is fair if he means Easterly’s attitude towards the institutions and ideology of development.  It might be misleading to those who are not aware that Easterly is, in fact, a tremendously optimistic booster of free trade (one might almost call his views on trade naive, but I do not) who believes that the surest way for “the developing world” to enjoy economic growth is for development agencies and foreign governments to stop engaging in their absurd obsession with “helping” them.  Much more help of that kind, and these countries are done for.  

At one point, the reviewer writes:

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow once wrote that economists are intellectual sanitation workers: their key contribution is to consign bad ideas to the trash.

So that’s what economists are good for!  I had been wondering.  The Free Exchange blogger goes on to promote mass immigration (or rather mass emigration from the poor nation-states) to free people from their “national prisons.”  Iraqi refugees have been thus “liberated,” and I assume that they would have preferred to stay in the “prison,” which makes this talk of prisons seem rather odd.  Some might think that people who live in these “prison” countries regard the place where they live as their home and might even say that they are not simply labour units to be reassigned to allow for greater efficiencies.  Mass uprooting and relocation of poor populations with migrants moving from the countryside to the city and from the home country to communities abroad, which has happened in virtually every impoverished, modernising nation-state from the independence of Greece on, is all very good for those who can get out, but dooms those who remain (and many will remain) to an even more miserable existence.  Dr. Wilson once remarked on this, asking a rhetorical question that went something like this: “What sort of country robs poor countries of their best and brightest people?”  This blogger’s kind of country, it would seem. 

This talk of “national prisons” is the sort of language applied to states that one wishes did not exist and would like to see dismantled.  Again, the example of Iraq (or that of the recent Ivorian civil war) stands out to show us what will follow the breakdown of the “national prisons” in Africa and elsewhere.  However, like the bold Wilsonians dispensing self-determination to the “imprisoned” nations of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, those who would destroy the prisonhouses may be quite unhappy with what results.   

Ross follows up on the debate over his latest Atlantic piece on future Democratic electoral prospects, and he explains quite clearly what he means by populism and how his reform ideas relate to it.  I think Ross’ analysis of electoral trends makes sense, which is why I wrote in defense of it.  However, I am actually sympathetic to those, such as Will Wilkinson, who do not like the substance of the policy proposals endorsed by economic populists, as I do not care for many of them myself.  I disagree with some libertarian critics of this populism, to the extent that they even allow that it actually exists, concerning some specific areas of policy and more general assumptions about the legitimacy of the claims of national sovereignty and national interest.  While I have some right-populist inclinations in matters of trade and immigration and I have a very old-fashioned Bolingbrokean-Jeffersonian hostility to concetrated wealth and power, which makes for some common anti-corporate ground with more conventional left-populists, in practice I am not that much of a populist.  You will not see me voting for Edwards-style populism or “compassionate” conservatism or “Sam’s Club Republicanism” now or ever.  For that matter, I neither shop at Sam’s Club, nor am I a Republican, so that makes me a pretty unlikely supporter of this sort of politics, since I rather rather regard the former as a symptom of moral and economic disorder and regard the latter as, well, not my favourite organisation.  Yet I still do recognise that there are people who might just go for such reformism, and these really are the sorts of people the GOP needs to win over and keep if it wants to remain competitive going forward.   

As I have made abundantly clear over the years, I am a small-government constitutionalist and a Ron Paul man, which puts me in a fairly small group.  (I am also very sympathetic to corporatist ideas of solidarity and a conservationist ethic, which may put me in an even smaller subset of this group.)  Despite an appreciation for some of the aspects of corporatism, the kind of economic intervention by the state on offer these days leaves me completely cold.  (Non-intervention is very often the wise course, in foreign policy as in domestic affairs.)  However, my preferences do not really give me the luxury to pretend that people in this country are not looking for some sort of intervention by the state in the field of health care, because they plainly are.  You hear this anecdotally from friends and colleagues, and you see it backed up in polling.  The desire is there, and the main dispute seems to be over whether you have a mostly state-run or a more state capitalist-run program.  Mike Huckabee talks vaguely about having a solution that involves none of the above, but he is typically blissfully free of specifics when he says this.  (Based on anecdotal impressions, I would say that young, educated professionals might be even more worried about health care than many other groups, but I wouldn’t press that too far.)  These people are acting on the assumption that the U.S. government is “their” government (if only!) and that it exists to provide them with certain things they need, or at the very least to provide them with the “opportunity” to acquire what they need. 

At this point, someone usually says something saccharine about empowerment, which is usually where they finally lose me, since it is never the government’s role to empower its citizens.  This idea of government empowering people is the root of all swindles.  Indeed, citizens’ power stands in an inverse relationship with that of the government,and the government never “gives back” the power it has taken.  The more “empowerment” we have, the more servility we have.  This is naturally not a popular view (for confirmation, see the political history of the 20th century or just the 1964 presidential election), and it is not one that is normally associated with populism, though I think a case could be made that it is the ultimate populist view, insofar as it is one that places the best interests of the people ahead of popular enthusiasms.  It is the view most consonant with a decentralist understanding of political liberty, and such an arrangement would ultimately be far better for the common good, a humane, sane way of life and the flourishing of more self-supporting communities. 

As George Grant observed forty years ago, though, political decentralisation without economic decentralisation is simply submission to corporate oligarchy, which I think he regarded as worse than a living Hell (in which case, he would have been too generous).  Consequently, he was known as the “Red Tory” for his harsh criticism of the dissolving acid that capitalism and technology poured on social bonds.  Also, the Loyalist and Anglo-Canadian Conservative tradition never knew the reflexive hostility to state action that our political tradition initially did, and strangely enough Canada now enjoys more effective decentralisation in certain respects than we do (even though it also has more in the way of government services).

All of this got me to thinking about how strange it is that the Democrats have become the party of the economic populists, since they have historically been the less nationalist of the two parties and appear to be in no danger of changing, yet this kind of populism almost always goes with a strong dose of nationalism.  Most economic populist complaints today focus on a few general areas: free trade, the effects of globalisation (e.g., outsourcing, etc.), related government favouritism for corporate interests and immigration.  The Washington-New York political elite is largely in agreement that free trade, globalisation, state capitalism and mass immigration are fundamentally desirable.  There may be disagreements about how to manage them, but there is only minority support for rejecting or opposing any of them on a large scale.  (This is still true in the current presidential fields.)  You would expect the historic party of labour to be more concerned about immigration, but as chance would have it, they are also the historic party of immigrants.  You would expect the more nationalist party to be more skeptical of free trade and globalisation, but they are also the party of corporations.  On each issue where populists might gain traction, the party leadership has tended to reject the populist position and endorse the globalist one, because their true corporate masters desire it.  This remains true.  What is striking today is the extent to which Democratic candidates are willing to buck corporate America at least a little when it comes to free trade, which suggests that the populist critique of free trade and globalisation, which was smothered during the incredibly boring, issue-free 2000 election, might break through this time and cause a change in the political landscape.       

In the course of giving his devastating reply to Derbyshire’s review of his book Religion of Peace?, Robert Spencer reminds us once again of a crucial point regarding Christianity and immigration:

In reality, Christianity has no inherent connection at all with open-borders insanity and globalization. No less prominent a Christian than St. Thomas Aquinas expressed the mainstream Christian view when he said that “after his duties towards God, man owes most to his parents and his country. One’s duties towards one’s parents include one’s obligations towards one’s relatives, because these latter have sprung from [or are connected by ties of blood with] one’s parents…and the services due to one’s country have for their object all one’s fellow-countrymen and all the friends of one’s fatherland.” An open-borders globalist? Not quite.

It is telling that many of those who either cite the Gospel as the source for rejecting national loyalties and/or supporting immigration or invoke the Lord to justify the importation and exploitation of poor labourers are not themselves professing Christians.  Of course, the absurdity of justifying the exploitation of labourers in the name of Christian fraternity ought to be obvious, but we live in dark times where even the simplest things are obscured.  This quote also brings us back to the question of the relationship between Christianity and patriotism.

It has also never been clear to me where anyone came across the idea that orthodox Christianity endorses or encourages egalitarianism or rootless cosmopolitanism.  (There have been many modern Christians who have understood their religion in this way, but their egalitarian and cosmopolitan views are typically matched by their departure from orthodoxy more generally.)  The teachings in the Gospels and Epistles presuppose social hierarchy and patriarchal authority, and their authors literally cannot conceive of a world in which civic and family obligations are weak or non-existent, much less do they advocate for such a view.  If Christianity is “universal” in that it is for the salvation of all, it nonetheless does not obliterate natural loyalties and affinities to particular places and peoples.  Being willing to leave all your earthly relations for the sake of following God is a measure of the devotion the believer has and his desire to put God first–it does not abrogate his obligations to his kith and kin.  Indeed, to be a good and faithful servant, the Christian must not only show mercy to those who seek it from him, but he must also discharge his duties to those to whom he is obliged and related.  The Apostle exhorts: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (I Tim. 5:8) 

For more on this, I recommend Dr. Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life.  

Cross-posted at WWWTW

Via Ambinder, here’s an interesting bit of information culled from Mark Penn that relates nicely to this post:

There are 10 million Protestant Hispanics in the U.S. today. 90 percent of them adhere to a variant of Pentecostalism. It was this subgroup of Latinos who helped George W. Bush increase his margin among Hispanics in 2004 — “the percentage of Bush voters among Hispanic Catholics remained exactly the same.” Penn’s own surveys suggest that Protestant Latinos are largely values voters; Catholic Latinos are much more likely to respond to economic issues.

If the GOP wants to work Rovian electoral “magic” via bad immigration policy, they would need to get on the ball and begin bringing in Guatemalans by the hundreds of thousands, since Guatemala has become something like 30% Pentecostal.  They would also have to somehow manage to keep the non-Protestant Hispanics out.  The point is that most of the Hispanics coming here are not “natural” GOP voters, just as most of the Hispanic Catholics already here are not.   

The fact is Hispanics are conservative on cultural issues, entrepreneurial on economics, and intensely patriotic. ~Fred Barnes

Which is why New Mexico has been predominantly Republican at the state and local level for 75 years, right?  Oh, wait, it’s been solidly Democratic for all that time.  How could that be?  It isn’t that New Mexican Hispanics are necessarily all that different from the description Barnes gives here (though it seems as if someone should point out what a grossly simplistic stereotype of an entire ethnicity this is), but that there is no necessary or obvious connection between these things and supporting the Republican Party.  First of all, being “conservative on cultural issues” is determined to a very great extent on what your own cultural identity is, and if you take pride in a distinct culture aside from, or alongside, a generic Anglo-American one you might very well be a cultural conservative and have entirely different attitudes towards a party that theoretically represents a different cultural conservatism.  ”English only” and English as the official national language are usually thought of as culturally conservative positions of sorts, but they will not be greeted with much enthusiasm from many Hispanic voters. 

Leaving that problem aside, the logical connection is still very shaky.  Most Hispanics in this country are at least nominally Catholic, which would mean theoretically that they are “natural” supporters of the major (at least officially) pro-life, culturally conservative party, except that there is actually no necessary connection between being culturally conservative in private, family and community life and embracing a culturally conservative political agenda.  You can argue all you like that such people should support such an agenda, but they may find it unsuitable or undesirable to do so.  The GOP has been fighting to get a majority of the American Catholic vote for decades, and has enjoyed sporadic success–part of this is the result of GOP economic and social service policies that many Catholics find unappealing and undesirable, and part of this is the result of the diverse kinds of American Catholics out there.   

I am frequently reminded at my local Orthodox church that adherence to a traditional, liturgical, hierarchical, socially conservative church by no means leads you to support the GOP (and not just because the GOP’s practical support for social conservatism and traditional morality is all but nil).  At my church, you can usually spot the converts by their political conservatism and right-leaning party affiliations.  It is actually normal that more liturgical and catholic confessions would include people of widely varying political views, so there is no guarantee that belonging to a church that officially professes moral or social doctrines that are more consistent with cultural conservatism means that you are going to support a political expression of that conservatism.  The pro-immigration GOP view takes for granted that most immigrants are pious, hard-working family-centered people and that this makes them “natural” GOP voters.  Even assuming the first is true in most cases, the second does not follow at all.  There are three possible explanations for why it does not follow: either the voters do not see the GOP as being actually dedicated to protecting life, family, community and the like, or they are not basing their voting preferences on such things or they find any natural sympathy with a socially conservative agenda offset and overwhelmed by their negative reaction to economic, welfare or foreign policy positions held by the GOP. 

Someone who is personally entrepreneurial may not be at all interested in supporting the party of the moneyed interest.  He may be even very keen on the free market, which does not necessarily push him towards the party that glorifies state capitalism.  Being entrepreneurial and aspirational does not mean that you will necessarily agree with, say, reducing tax rates on wealthier people.  (Take a different kind of example to see this point: I expect few would call the folks in Silicon Valley lacking in entrepreneurship of a kind, but many of them are on the left politically.) 

Finally, it is not at all obvious these days that “intense patriotism” would or should inspire someone to pull the lever for the party that led the way into Iraq.  Barnes’ description could be completely accurate, and it still would not make these voters into “natural” supporters of the GOP.  In the end, the reality is that they are not “natural” GOP voters because most do not, in fact, vote for the GOP.  “Natural” constituents do not need to be bribed and cajoled to support a party, but will do so because they see this or that party already advancing their interests and “values.”  Say whatever you like about irrational voters (and I could say quite a lot), a majority of actual Hispanic voters do not perceive their self-interest being served by having GOP pols in positions of authority.  Of all the pathetic arguments for bad immigration policy, the argument that the GOP must pursue a pro-immigration line in order to win the votes of people who will never vote for the party is the worst and most unfounded. 

What’s worse is many Republicans are oblivious to this or insist that losing Hispanic voters doesn’t really matter because they’ll never be reliable Republican voters anyway. These Republicans buy the notion that a sizable majority of Hispanics are and always will be Democrats. ~Fred Barnes

But they won’t be reliable Republican voters.  A sizeable majority (at least 60%) of Hispanics will always (or at least for a very, very long time to come) be Democrats.  Some will be Democrats because Democrats will always be more favourable towards mass immigration than the GOP can ever be.  Others will be Democrats because their parents and grandparents were Democrats and it is ingrained that this is the better party for them.  Still others will be Democrats because they are actually more in agreement with left-liberal ideas about “social justice” and economic fairness and greater Democratic support for government programs.  New Hispanic immigrants will also be possessing political values more in line with left-liberalism, as they will be coming from countries with stronger left-populist and revolutionary leftist political traditions, and it will be those traditions to which those migrating to this country are more likely to belong.  The GOP cannot compete with the Democratic Party for a majority this voting bloc, at least not without attempting to suddenly get to the Dems’ left on all of the relevant issues.  Any such attempt would guarantee the fragmentation and eventual death of the GOP.  Furthermore, failure to limit the rate of growth of a natural Democratic constituency will mean the marginalisation and permanent minority status of the GOP as it is currently constituted. 

For the class I will be teaching this fall, I was recently reading one of the books I intend to assign that touches directly on the reflections on the Partition and on the Putnam research on diversity described here (TAC even gets a brief mention in the article).  The book, Twice A Stranger, is an account of the history surrounding the Treaty of Lausanne, the population exchanges of 1923-24 and the experiences of the people who were uprooted as a result (as partly related by still-living survivors of the exchange).  In this book, Bruce Clark challenges the standard liberal anti-Lausanne argument (after having similarly critiqued the nationalist account):

The liberal anti-nationalist myth often suggests that relations were perfectly warm and harmonious and would have remained so if the population exchange had not been imposed as an artificial exercise in segregation.  In fact, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  As anyone who is familiar with rural society in the Balkans or the Caucasus can testify, things are never that simple.  Warm and cordial business relationships, and personal friendships, can transcend the intercommunal division in surprising ways; but that does not abolish the division–or alter the fact that in the event of a general conflagration, almost everybody tends to seek security behind the walls of his or her own community [italics mine-DL], and life becomes  uncomfortable for those who try to occupy the middle ground. (p. 172)

The connection is that people with whom you identify, whom you consider your “own,” are the people you trust and will rely on in the worst situations.  Armed conflict adds an additional dimension of the pressure to actively side and identify with your community, as well as simultaneously seek shelter and protection from that community.  It occurs to me that this is how it is possible that rampant, violent sectarianism could spring from a pre-invasion Iraq that had relatively decent intercommunal relations, friendships and intermarriages.  Sectarian labels mattered little when conflict did not force people to choose sides, and the lines of the communities were not nearly so sharp when your position on one side or the other was not so significant.  When the chips are down, however, and having people you can trust becomes a matter of surv