Steve Sailer writes: The world is organized into 200 separate territorial states, each with armed men employed by its government. It’s interesting to speculate about other ways to organize the world, but it’s not clear that there are other ways to do it. (It’s especially not clear that there are better ways to do it.)
Or consider the single most extraordinary exercise of power of 2015: the German government’s decision to invite a million Muslim mob into Europe. There was a lot of flapdoodle extruded about how Angela Merkel was exemplifying “European values” and the like. But the German Chancellor wasn’t actually acting through the European Union or in concert with other European governments. Instead, she acted with Bismarckian impudence as the head of the national government with the biggest GDP in Europe. She gave an order, one that violated some EU rules by the way, and it got carried out, because that’s what national governments do.
While some leading figures of the American deep state increasingly tend to talk as if they represent the entire planet, their power is grounded in armed men paid for by American taxpayers, men who mostly believe that patriotic stuff about how they are defending America.
And that’s about as good a solution for the inevitability of the state as resting on armed men as we’ve come up with.
* You know, maybe in the future, billionaires like Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Mark Zuckerberg will put generals on their payrolls. During the waning years of the Roman Republic, Roman legions felt more loyalty to individual generals than to Roman state institutions. Maybe that will happen again in the future?
* I shared this with Forbes writer and open borders advocate Frances Coppola on Twitter. Here’s how it went:
Typical, parochial American shares @DouthatNYT's latest with @Frances_Coppola. pic.twitter.com/fq2nDVRQAn
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) January 14, 2016
* His argument for slower immigration is the same as most mainstream politicians’ – to allow the immigrants time to be absorbed into the native population, and slowly erode the identity of the host country. He seemingly has no support for the right of the native population to remain racially distinct. His is an argument that will always support the gradual transformation of a country by immigration, because if it happens faster it will provoke a reaction that would stop it entirely.
* He is writing for the New York Times, so maybe give him a little slack. There might be more HBD/alt-right ideas in that one blog post than in David Brooks’ entire oeuvre.
* “Culture” is often used as a polite dog whistle for “ethnicity.” Substitute the terms and any of us could have written that column. I’m sure Douthat is smart enough to know his audience, and his polite throat-clearing is already earning him some “Racist!” comments.
By the way, I watched some of the Trump rally in Pensacola, FL, and the Anglo-Celt tribal vibe seemed very obvious. The Unthinkable is happening: whites are shifting to identity politics. The Left, in its blind fundamentalism, is unleashing forces it does not understand and will not be able to control.
My Sunday column argued, fairly strenuously, that mass immigration on the scale of the last two years will put more stress on the politics and culture of Germany than any prudent statesman should accept, and that the German government should do everything in its power to not only limit migration but actually restrict asylum rights and begin deportation for some of the migrants who have already arrived.
This is unlikely to happen; even less likely is the resignation of Angela Merkel, which I concluded the column by suggesting would be appropriate at this point. But whatever comes in Germany it seems very likely that immigration, and with it what the former National Review editor John O’Sullivan calls “the national question,” will dominate European and American debates for at least as long as the refugee emergency continues in the Middle East and North Africa. And since the immigration debate has long been dominated at the elite level by voices that blend an economistic view of immigration as always and everywhere a net plus with a cosmopolitan-utilitarian view of open borders (or something close) as a humanitarian obligation, it seems worth laying out some premises that I think ought to underly the conservative alternative to that consensus.
First, though, two links, one on the European debate and one on the American, which I think provide a useful survey of the issues that ought to matter to the right (and not only to the right). First, this Ben Schwarz essay in the latest issue of The American Conservative, arguing that mass immigration is unraveling English customs and norms and identity with unforeseeable results. Second, this Reihan Salam essay in National Review on U.S. immigration policy, making a case for “a new melting-pot nationalism … to counter the ethnic and class antagonisms that threaten our society today.”
Now to my own premises:
1. The nation-state is real, and (thus far) irreplaceable. Yes, the world of nations is full of arbitrary borders, invented traditions, and convenient mythologies layered atop histories of plunder and pillage. And yes, not every government or polity constitutes a nation (see Iraq, or Belgium, or half of Africa). But as guarantors of public order and personal liberty, as sources of meaning and memory and solidarity, as engines of common purpose in the service of the common good, successful nation-states offer something that few of the transnational institutions or organizations bestriding our globalized world have been able to supply. (The arguable exception of Roman Catholicism is, I fear, only arguable these days.) So amid trends that tend to weaken, balkanize or dissolve nation-states, it should not be assumed that a glorious alternative awaits us if we hurry that dissolution to its end.
Nor should it be assumed that immigration can save nation-states from their own internal difficulties, because …
2. Immigration is a perilous solution to demographic decline. One of the common right-of-center cases for mass immigration, offered by politicians like Jeb Bush and optimistic economists alike, is that in an age of falling birthrates the West needs migrants to sustain its economies and support its welfare states. (“New Germans who are today being fingerprinted as their asylum claims are processed will tomorrow care for the elderly and pay the taxes that fund a generous welfare state,” The Economist promised last fall.)
This is true up to a point, but its logic assumes that immigrant assimilation goes reasonably well — that immigrants find it relatively easy to learn the language, to adapt (at least up to a point) to Western social norms, to find and hold jobs in a post-industrial economy, and that they don’t simply become another set of clients of the welfare state they were supposed to save. And under conditions of demographic decline the pressure to adapt will necessarily be weaker, because there are simply fewer natives around to define the culture into the new arrivals are expected to assimilate. (In the German case, as my column suggested, a few more years of migration at this pace could forge a rising generation in which Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are actually a near-majority.) In which case the odds of fragmentation and balkanization go up, because …
3. Culture is very real, and cultural inheritances tend to be enduring. Present-day America attests to that fact: We pride ourselves (justifiably) on our success assimilating immigrants, but centuries after their arrival various immigrant folkways still define our country’s regions and their mores. The Scandinavian diaspora across the upper Midwest still looks a great deal like Scandinavia — hardworking, gender egalitarian, with high levels of civic trust, higher-than-average educations and incomes, etc. The cavaliers, servants, and slaves migration to Tidewater Virginia obviously still shapes the Deep South’s entrenched hierarchies of race and class. The Scots-Irish migration to Appalachia and its environs is still heavily responsible for America’s sky-high-by-Western-standards murder rate. And of course the wider world is full of similarly striking case studies.
What this implies is that accepting immigrants from a particular country or culture or region involves accepting that your own nation, or part of your own nation, will become at least a little more like their country of origin. With small or slow migrations this may only happen at the margins and it may be swamped by other effects; with large or swift migrations it may happen in more significant ways. But whether the immigrants are coming from Asia or Latin America or the Middle East or North Africa, you will be able to see in those regions at least some foretaste of their impact on your own society. And what you see matters, because …
4. Cultural commonalities help assimilation; cultural differences spur balkanization. That is, the more a foreign-born population has in common with the nation it’s entering — in terms of everything from language to religion to family structure to education levels to cultural habits — the more easily it can make itself truly at home in its adopted country.
And these commonalities are a complex, in which no single variable is necessarily a trump. For instance, race and racism are obviously potentially powerful obstacles to assimilation. But as Schwarz points out, the English experience suggests that racial differences need not preclude immigrant success in cases where other cultural variables favor integration:
Take a black immigrant from Jamaica in the 1950s. He—the first New Commonwealth immigrants were overwhelmingly men—was probably Anglican, likely cricket-playing, and quite possibly a wartime veteran of the British armed forces or merchant navy. Had he been schooled, he would have learned England’s history and been introduced to its literature. (Probably owing to these commonalities, today’s black Caribbean population has the highest rate of intermarriage with British whites of any minority group.) The cultural distance that separated him from a white British native was almost certainly smaller than is the chasm that today separates a white British resident of, say, Sheffield from her new neighbor, a Roma immigrant. Yet that immigrant, having almost certainly arrived from Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania, would be classified by UK immigration authorities as a European Union migrant—EU citizens enjoy the unfettered right to live and work in Britain—and would therefore be presumed “white” by researchers making extrapolations from immigration data.
Likewise, immigrants whose ethnicity (or race or religion) looks similar on a bureaucratic spreadsheet can have very different trajectories depending on where they’re actually coming from. A “South Asian immigrant” immigrant fleeing Idi Amin’s purge of Uganda’s Indian petit-bourgeoisie is not a “South Asian immigrant” from rural Kashmir. A “Muslim immigrant” from Istanbul is not a “Muslim immigrant” from eastern Syria is not a “Muslim immigrant” from Afghanistan.
