The ongoing border crisis is all the various rotting fruits of contemporary American politics pureed together. A putrescence smoothie. It has a bit of everything, for those of you keeping a diet log at home: hydrocephalitic bureaucracies in the last fits of their dementia and government agencies selectively ignoring laws. It has NGOs diverting billions of dollars in U.S. tax money towards initiatives hostile to the interests of US taxpayers. It has sloganeering protestors in the streets. It has militarized police making sure those protestors duly respect the boundaries of the designated “free speech zones.” There are also impotent state governments hosting the in-and-out photo-op trips of DC Congress members. And there’s conspicuous moral one-upsmanship in legacy, digital, and social media alike. There are bought politicians on one side of the aisle angling to finish off middle America through demographic replacement. There are bought politicians on the other side of the aisle angling to finish off middle America by flooding the markets with cheap labor. And shady backroom deals abound in the incestuous, parasitic Sodom of Washington, deals only hinted at by accident in the carefully manicured releases of our Pravda press. It’s a remarkable admixture.
Equally pureed are the multitudinous arguments against allowing this crisis to continue unabated. (The arguments in favor of allowing it’s continuation seem fairly unified: “Sad little refugee children just want their shot at the American dream! How could you say no to that?”) Some of them I’ve already more or less introduced: the idea that our nation must uphold the rule of law, for instance, or the idea that a perpetual influx of immigrants from South of the border depresses the labor market and squeezes the wallets of American workers. There’s also the related argument that these new arrivals will be an insupportable strain on our already struggling schools, our already flailing healthcare system, our law enforcement, our social safety net. They’re bringing in diseases, too. Are we ready for that? And they’re importing the same gangs and the same drug cartel violence that are the gruesome hallmarks of Mexican cities like Ciudad Juarez. And they’re assimilating to the language and social norms of the United States with less and less enthusiasm. And so on and so forth.
What strikes me about all of these arguments is not that they’re generally unreasonable. On the contrary, I think almost any of them, from the diseases to the refusal to learn English, suffice as a good enough reason to turn off the faucet. No, what strikes me about all the arguments is how various and sundry they are. The folks in America (and they rarely get a microphone or a spot on the evening news) who are speaking out against immigration are beating that issue with any stick that’s handy: the economy, anxiety about crime, epidemiology. Conservatives are throwing everything at it but the kitchen sink, and, against the steady stream of “We have a duty to these children!” soundbites, it’s not even clear that such a spirited defense will work.
In a sane country, of course, we would need not such ado. In a sane country, we would realize that open borders and mass immigration on this scale amount to a displacement of our countrymen, an effective dissolution of our nation. A sane country with sane statesmen watching over it would look at the situation and say, “Our birthrates at home are beneath replacement, and immigration both legal and non is on a significant upswing. This spells subsummation. We ought to address these obstacles post haste.” You and I both know, though, that we live in no such country, and so we’re unlikely to witness such pearls of common sense cast from the hallowed halls of our nation’s capital.
Nevertheless, our pleasant little hypothetical about a not-criminally-insane ruling class does illustrate some points along the line of what I was discussing last week. See, the conservative position is a simple one, at least conceptually. It seeks to maintain what’s best in a nation and a people, generally by protecting the conditions that gave rise to those achievements in the first place, shoring them up against the vicissitudes of time and fortune and change. It seeks to, wait for it, conserve.
But conservatives today, groaning under the dispensations of political correctness (and often perfectly complicit with it), are unable to articulate that basic idea. They are unable to pledge their love and their loyalty to an actual concrete nation and an actual historical people—because it’s terribly exclusive and hegemonic and not to mention totally racist to do so. They are unable to raise their voice in defense of the country of their birth. And so instead they have to resort to all manner of proxy and jury-rigged and ad hoc arguments.
That’s why so many of the positions that get branded as “conservative” in contemporary political discourse are actually anything but. There’s nothing inherently conservative about a free market or untrammeled competition in the private sector or tax breaks for the wealthy. Those things are just as likely to disrupt the traditions of a given society as they are to invigorate them. A market ought to be “free” to the point that it redounds to the long-term benefit of the country that houses it. No more and no less. Likewise, there’s nothing inherently conservative about a small government. Modern bureaucratic states tend to be horribly mismanaged and wasteful, yes. They tend to encourage the dregs to rise to the top rather than the cream, yes. But this sort of state ought to be opposed because it harms its people, not because it violates some disembodied ideal of Perfect Conservatism. In reality a government ought to be big to whatever point redounds to the long-term benefit of the country it oversees. No bigger and no smaller.
The same critique could be made of other conservative values like “individual liberty” or even “constitutionality.” These are proxy values. They’re the arguments that you make because the rhetorical environment in which you’re operating aggressively prohibits you from making the more fundamental one: “This is good for the future of our people, for us.” And people, even our people, don’t exactly rally to these proxy positions because, regardless of whether or not they can verbalize their complaints on a conscious level, they see these arguments as the bloodless, abstract Hail-Marys that they are. No one is going to go to the barricades for the right of Microsoft to conduct business in Redmond without undue governmental regulation. No one is going to bleed for responsible audits and balanced budgets. These might be situational goods, they might not. But they are secondary issues at best.
Such a default to proxy arguments is a persistent weakness in conservative rhetoric. Like any other, resolving it won’t turn this ship around overnight. It’s unlikely to win a lot of converts from the far left, either. But speaking plainly and on behalf of the ordinary Americans, even though most of them suffer a ghastly lack of pigmentation, who represent the historical America does have a chance to resonate with them. And there might be something to that. Treating our nation as a real and definite people—not as a simple geographic region that “refugee children” are free to enter at will and not as a set of metaphysical propositions that bear only a tangential relationship to the conditions on the ground—might just get people to the barricades, real or metaphorical, when the time comes for it.
A “disembodied ideal of Perfect Conservatism” would be ipso facto non-conservative.