The Pendulum Swings

Hot on the heels of the improbable election of a libertarian to the presidency of long-socialist Argentina comes the election of a nativist firebrand as leader of famously multicultural The Netherlands. Those two events appear to have finally woken the wokerati up to the distasteful reality that people are fed up with their agenda.

They must be deep sleepers. The signals have been there for years.

As Oliver Wiseman notes at the Free Press,

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has been in office for a year. In Germany, the right-wing AfD party is rising in the polls. In France, Marine Le Pen is more popular than Emmanuel Macron. In 2016, the twin electoral wins for Donald Trump and Brexit were said to herald the arrival of a populist moment. That was seven years ago.

I recently wrote about how our societal scriptwriters feel they have a monopoly on caring about others. That sense of exclusivity has led them to a feeling of contempt toward anyone who isn't of their tribe and, when coupled with their abandonment of the notion of equality in favor of the disparate treatment of others they dubbed "equity," means that contempt is unchecked by any "golden rule" principle.

This in turn leads them to engage in reflexive contrarianism when it comes to public policy, most starkly in immigration policy and in multiculturalism.

That contrarianism is at the heart of these 'populist revolts,' to use their language. If the benighted masses think that native culture and values are better, then that culture must be quashed and those values rejected. If the benighted masses are suspicious of unchecked immigration, then the border must be flung open.

Neither of these policies stands a rational test, however.

The values of individual liberty that are America's foundation (and enshrined in her original documents) have been proven by time to be superior to all the alternatives humans have come up with to date.

Unchecked immigration cannot coexist with a welfare state. The moral hazard is severe, and no nation can afford to feed, clothe, and house an endless stream of handout-seekers.

Regular readers know that I'm not by any means a closed-border type. I've shared my views, here and elsewhere, many times. In short, I share Charles Koch’s view:

I would let anybody in who will make the country better, and no one who will make it worse.

I also share Milton Friedman's conclusion:

It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state.

The latter constrains the former. The "right sort" of immigrants, i.e. people with skills and of working age (with their families is OK, too), are not only beneficial but necessary, given that Americans are not reproducing at a population-sustaining rate. Want your Social Security when you retire? Better get OK with adding to the workforce from abroad. But, America cannot be a refugee destination. It's heartbreaking to see the harm done to Venezuelans by Chavez and Maduro, but we cannot take in everyone whose life stinks there. It's simple math.

This leads to the other Best-and-Brightest idea: post-modernist multiculturalism. Or, in plainer english, the idea that there are no objective realities that can be found apart from the filters of individuals' life experiences, and that there are no "better" or "worse" value sets - just different ones.

They don't actually believe in these themselves, truth be told, because they routinely reject the Right's values (and, increasingly, the values that libertarians esteem). See: reflexive contrarianism. But, they paper over that disdain with... disdain. Meanwhile, they elevate value systems based on identity politics, as in "whoever is the most oppressed gets the most respect." Since their grievance hierarchy has put muslims above women, above gays, above Jews, and obviously above the 'old white men' that wrote the Constitution, then Islam's and especially radical Islam's grossly illiberal values get a bye.

"It's their culture, who are we to criticize it?"

Here we get to the libertarian litmus test: "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." If their culture comes in conflict with our fundamental American values that hold individual rights (and by extension, property rights) supreme, their culture can go stuff it.

Over in Europe, they are paying the price for not assimilating their immigrants. The multicultural message has told those immigrants who are taught not to respect other cultures that their intolerance is OK. This has produced "no-go zones," which are parts of cities where the "natives" of France and Sweden and other nations would be at physical risk should they dare venture in.

As Sam Harris observed:

Islam is a religion of conquest.

Multiculturalism doesn’t work unless everyone is on board with it.

Across America's two and a half centuries, there's been an attitude of "when in Rome..." in immigrants. Waves came here seeking the American Dream, and patriotism was as or more important to immigrants as to eighth-generation natives.

Our Best-and-Brightest couldn't abide a notion embraced by the benighted masses, so we've gotten to where displays of the American flag trigger them and make them fearful, and to where they have to, in reflexive-contrarian fashion, denounce America in order to feel good about themselves. That they thought they could sell this to the public, and that it would be their path to permanent power, is its own conceit.

The major parties routinely make efforts to figure out what combination of electoral ingredients are needed to establish a permanent majority. They constantly fail. The White House has seesawed between parties for the entirety of the nation's history, and you have to go back nearly century to find an instance of three Presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) from the same party getting elected in sequence.

The pendulum of power always swings.

Like a pendulum, the political and cultural climate also swings. And, like a pendulum, the magnitude of the swing depends on how far it was drawn to one side.

Here is where I fear and lament. With the Left abandoning patriotism of any form, the Right has had the opportunity to reshape it without outside input, and the nativism that bred bigotries against past waves of immigration - waves that were as patriotic as any other American - is becoming ascendant. That's not a good thing.

As I noted earlier, America needs immigrants. Ours is a nation of immigrants, and the notion of shutting the doors and sealing the border is itself reflexive-contrarianism. That sort of ping-pong does no one any good, and we need to be rational rather than reactive.

I'm all for the Left getting its just desserts for abandoning the values of individual liberty. I'm all for the "better than us" socialists getting their what-for. I worry, however, about where that pendulum swing takes us. The GOP's front-runner hasn't exactly been a principled defender of the Constitution.

Was that hyperbolic blather? Some will say so. But, like most politicians, Trump has hugged the Constitution when it served him, and done his best to it when it got in his way.

Where we go next depends on many things, including what happens between now and next November. But, the global momentum cannot be denied or ignored - people in the West are fed up with being treated like cattle or chattel, and are voting their anger at the current ruling class.