Common Sense and Common Folk
Having recently moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, my wife and I decided, as part of our intention to integrate into the community, to attend a Vancouver Canucks hockey game. It was something of a special occasion as the game featured the only meeting of the season at the Rogers Arena between the Canucks and the Montreal Canadiens, the team I grew up rooting for and, indeed, once dreamed of playing for.
What surprised us was that the stadium seemed packed with Canadien fans, red white and blue sweaters everywhere around us, cries of “Go Habs Go” (from the team’s French nickname, les habitants) and loud cheers erupting for every Canadien goal dwarfing the vocal enthusiasm for the home team. Raised in Vancouver, Janice was appalled. Where was the municipal spirit, the fan loyalty, the pride of place? Was this the residue of rampant multiculturalism? I, of course, a native Quebecker, was delighted. And after all, win or lose, les Canadiens are a storied franchise akin to myth, going back to the founding of the National Hockey League in 1927, recalling the “flying Frenchman” of old, and comprising a pantheon of hockey greats that dominates the history of the sport. Canadien games are always sold out.
But there was something else we found equally if not more conspicuous, namely, the good nature, spirit of camaraderie, courtesy, respect and conviviality we were surrounded by. Recovering from a serious soccer injury, I was hobbling on a cane, as a result of which I was treated as a VIP. Security personnel escorted us to the Call Wicket and picked up our reserved tickets for us. The jammed corridors parted like the red sea for my halting passage. The fast-food vendors were patient, not fast, in serving us. Our row and seat neighbors were the soul of concern and graciousness. The aisle usher was unfailingly attentive. We were among real people, the so-called common folk from all walks of life, some well-off, some not so much, all standing for the anthem (no one, so to speak, taking a knee), most participating in the spirit of the game in an amiable and welcoming atmosphere.
On the Skytrain back to our new home, Janice and I, both early-retired professors after years of exposure to the nasty complexities of academic life, fell into conversation about the gaping difference between “the world” and “the academy,” between ordinary folk doing the world’s work and the cloistered parasites of the university hothouse, between lively people in the stands and bored students in the amphitheaters, between practical people and theoretical people, in short, between the do-ers and the talkers.
This summary is obviously to some extent a facile generalization -- there are some estimable people in Academe and unprepossessing people among the general public -- but it expresses a larger truth. We have far better relations and interesting encounters with tradespeople, for example, than we do with the general run of academics. Academe, we agreed, has increasingly come to resemble a hen party of professional backstabbers, cultural sycophants, sanctimonious prigs, administrative mercenaries and intellectual supremacists who regard themselves as elite opinion-makers and bellwethers of social progress. And, of course, they are the most influential pedlars of leftist hallucinations, graduating an army of gainfully unemployable millennials and propagandized radicals trained to carry forth their program of social destabilization and “egalitarian” coercion.
As British writer James Delingpole notes, the schools have turned out “a powerful electoral bloc of brainwashed little Marxists” who have been rendered “entirely unfit for any career outside the taxpayer-funded bureaucratic state.” Left-wing academics have filled their impressionable heads “with postmodernist, Marxist drivel about identity politics, microaggressions, intersectionality and entrenched social injustice.” True enough. And woe betide any instructors who still believe in freedom of speech, thought and assembly, who wish to teach standard academic subjects rather than proselytize and convert students to a political agenda, who love their disciplines as they were meant to be taught, who are grateful for a free-market economy that allows them to earn substantial incomes, and who, most likely, vote conservative. The only saving remnant in the modern university consists of the science and, perhaps, business faculties, but they too are being incrementally infected by the virus of “social justice,” feminism and Marxist indoctrination.
With few exceptions, one will find scarcely a shred of common decency in the modern university and nothing like the friendliness, unself-conscious boisterousness and hospitable reception we met with at the Rogers Arena -- and, indeed, that we meet, more often than not, in the thoroughfares of ordinary life. People who actually work for a living, who build, repair, transact and serve, tend on the whole to be respectable and pleasant. People who deal mainly in ideas and theories outside the practical sphere of application -- exempting STEM and MBA -- tend to be coasters and sybarites bloated with revisionary self-importance, as Janice and I can attest from years of uncomfortable experience in the ivory tower.
In a way, this is nothing new. The conflict we are witnessing today, typified by the fissure between the intellectually elect and the workaday pragmatic, enjoys an ancient pedigree, going back to the philosophical clash between Plato and Aristotle which has reverberated through education and religion from the Classical Period in Greece to the present moment. Plato held to the realism of Universals -- what makes a thing or property individual is its participation in the timeless and absolute realm of ideal Forms. Something is red because it participates in the essence of Redness. There are many different kinds of triangles in the world, but we recognize them as triangles because they participate in the ideal Form or eidos of Triangle.
Aristotle is said to have developed the adversary concept of nominalism. Universals have no independent or supersensual existence; a thing or property is what it is and is recognized as such by its sensual similarity to other things in the mind of the perceiver. A universal is not an entity-in-itself but a mental concept. It all sounds rather silly, but the debate is a profound one, that is, how we go about knowing and naming disparates. What is the relation between an abstraction and a thing, between collective nouns and adjectives on the one hand and their particular instances on the other? The battle between abstract “Realism” and concrete “Nominalism” has raged for centuries.
The rancor persists to this day. According to Bruce Fleming in a fascinating essay Dogma of the Day, this philosophical divergence is behind the most visible clashes of Western society, “between the educated and the uneducated, liberals and conservatives, coastal and inland, red and blue states,” etc. Those who accept a version of the dogma of Platonic Universals, which Fleming calls “linguistic realism,” maintain that words are reality, that, as deconstructionist Jacques Derrida maintained in his 1967 volume Of Grammatology, “Il ny a pas de hors-texte” -- there is nothing outside the text -- and that words determine the shape and nature of reality. If a man says he is a woman, he is a woman. If a woman says she has been sexually assaulted, she has been sexually assaulted. If Western civilization is judged a colonialist evil, no counter-evidence can change that factoid. If “whiteness” is privilege, then it can be nothing else. (Of course, such designations apply only to a prior, ideologically determined referent, chosen by the illuminati who decide what words mean and how they are to be reified.)
As Fleming points out, “the dogma of linguistic realism determines…the content and cast of those institutions that deal in words: universities, specifically the wordiest departments, those in the humanities and social sciences.” Their denizens and adherents constitute the intellectual elite, aka the chattering classes, who have taken it upon themselves to control and arbitrate our perception of reality. They have given us the cultural monstrosity of political correctness. The words we are constrained to use are not a common currency facilitating acts of exchange but counterfeit substitutions establishing a false economy of thought. They are imaginary Universals, eternal and unchanging, unaffected by discrete and empirical particulars as these exist and function in the world “out there.”
Ultimately, such particulars do not participate in the conceptual fabrication as formulated by our school of contemporary neo-Platonists. A man who says he is a woman is still a man. A feminist who claims to be systemically oppressed is still a liar. A member of the class of virtue-signallers is not a virtuous person. The Open Society is a closed shop. Antifa is a collection of fascists. The patriarchy is a figment of the Platonic ether. And so on. But fact and truth never stopped a Progressivist, for whom a finite existent is presto transformed into a contrary essence, or a thing which does not exist is hoisted into a Universal category. Linguistic realism trumps nominal specifics.
In effect, for the proponents of linguistic realism, literature (or “texts”) determines the tenor and substance of the world rather than giving us a view of it. These neoterics have assumed the prerogative of the creator God: In the beginning was the Word. But their word is not creative, it is merely an act of the totalitarian will, imposed upon a world that is already there and obstructing or mediating our view of it. What we are witnessing, in Robert Curry’s terms from Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth In A Post-Truth World, is a war on the crucial role common sense plays in our lives. Progressive academics and intellectuals have sought to elevate speculative theories and fashions above prudence, native intelligence, self-evident truths and a “shared understanding of the basic realities of life.”
For the most part, conservatives and ordinary people are the doing classes, for whom words are not the world but are in the world, specifying particulars, objects, actions and operations. It is not that the common folk are devoid of ideas but that they do not mistake ideas for concrete things. They do not, as Fleming puts it, focus on the glass in the window but on the view one sees through the glass. Of course, those who are not members of the cerebral sodality do not hold to any philosophical doctrine or engage in refined debate, but they may be said to behave as nominalists in their daily affairs. As do-ers, not talkers, their de facto opposition to representational or linguistic realism is embedded in action, in doing things in a real world and making that world work. “The polarization of the world into talkers and actors,” Fleming concludes, “is at the basis of our conflicts today.”
Janice and I were lucky to get out of the academic racket before official retirement age, even at the cost of anorexic pensions rather than bulimic salaries. We would rather go to a hockey game than to an academic lecture, to be with real people rather than paper people. Admittedly, we continue to write, but to write against the totalitarian flow, and we continue to speak, but to speak against the cultural and political pressure to shut speech down in favor of ideological conformity. We are speakers, not talkers. That is our way of doing.***
Sharing a glass of wine on our return, I see that Janice is still a tad miffed, chafing at the mixed reception accorded her favorite team by her home city. I tell her she should consider switching allegiance to les glorieux. After all, Canadien netminder Carrie Price hales from British Columbia but has no problem tending goal for the Habs. Moreover, despite the dispersions of a multicultural age -- cities full of newcomers and teams with international rosters -- the Canadiens are emblematic of a singular people and province with a distinctive heritage. Even the spelling of the name in English is unique: French “Canadiens,” not “Canadians.” They are the only nominalist team in the League, a category of one. Clearly, were our Greek philosophers still around and passionate about hockey, Plato would root for the Canucks and Aristotle for the Canadiens.
Final score: Canadiens 3, Canucks 1. Go Habs Go!
Graphic credit: SVG SILH
David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing, 2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's
Immigration Disaster
Description
Description
Brokaw: ‘Hispanics Should Work Harder at Assimilation’
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the
creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open
borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“Open border advocates, such as
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to
California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has
documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few
skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them
access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals
were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6
million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Description
Atlantic Magazine: Immigration is Fracturing America into Rival
Tribes
Immigration is splitting the United
States into warring tribes, says an unusual article in the strongly
pro-migration Atlanticmagazine.
Almost Half Speak a Foreign Language in America's Largest
Cities | @CIS_org
Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of
Multiculturalism
Description
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's
Immigration Disaster
Author Peter Brimelow
Description
The controversial, bestselling book that helps define the debate
about one of the most important and hotly contested issues facing America:
immigration.
From Publishers Weekly: Forbes senior editor Brimelow's
alarmist, slashing anti-immigration manifesto is likely to stir debate. He
maintains that the 1965 Immigration Act and its recent amplifications choked
off immigration from northern and western Europe while selectively reopening
U.S. borders to a huge influx of minorities from Third World countries. Many of
these latter entrants are unskilled and require welfare support, and those who
do work may adversely affect opportunities for poorer Americans, especially
blacks, according to Brimelow. Because of multicultural
programs, he charges, the new immigrants are not expected to assimilate, and
thus they retain their separateness. Illegal
immigration?two to three million entries a year?plus one million legal
immigrants annually are causing, by his reckoning, an "ethnic
revolution," because Asians, Hispanics, Middle Easterners and others shift
America's balance away from the white majority, creating a strife-torn,
multiracial society. Brimelow calls for an end to all illegal immigration, a
drastic cutback in legal immigration, policies favoring skilled immigrants and
elimination of all payments and free public education for illegals and their
children. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal
"Immigration has consequences," Brimelow (a Forbes senior editor and
a contributor to the National Review) interjects repeatedly through this
scattershot, argumentative tract against current immigration policy and
practice. Claiming that the 1965 Immigration Act and later legislation in 1986
and 1990 have worsened a host of economic, political, and social problems in
the United States, Brimelow cites supporters and critics alike of American
immigration policy and his own interpretation of immigration statistics to
disprove commonly held beliefs about immigrants' contributions to America,
which he believes have been overemphasized. Brimelow
argues that our environment is endangered, our public health threatened, our
economy strained, our national unity diluted, and our politics fragmented all
by an immigration policy that is out of control and captive to a ruling
"elite," which he associates with the liberal establishment and
political correctness. Though Brimelow scores some points in his shrill attack, his
highly politicized and provocative language which often relies on ethnic
stereotypes makes this book a polemic guaranteed to rally the faithful and
offend most others.
Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity
Author Samuel Huntington
Description
In his seminal work The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel
Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold
war, “civilizations” were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in
international politics.
Now in his controversial new work, Who Are We?, Huntington focuses on an identity crisis closer to home as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.
America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, says Huntington, including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, our national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants and challenged by issues such as bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the “denationalization” of American elites.
September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity, but already there are signs that this revival is fading. Huntington argues the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Timely and thought-provoking, Who Are We? is an important book that is certain to shape our national conversation about who we are.
Now in his controversial new work, Who Are We?, Huntington focuses on an identity crisis closer to home as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.
America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, says Huntington, including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, our national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants and challenged by issues such as bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the “denationalization” of American elites.
September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity, but already there are signs that this revival is fading. Huntington argues the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Timely and thought-provoking, Who Are We? is an important book that is certain to shape our national conversation about who we are.
Brokaw: ‘Hispanics Should Work Harder at Assimilation’
27 Jan 20192,712
1:22
Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”
former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw offered theories on as to why
Republicans tend to be against immigration from Latin America.
Brokaw identified politics and
racial aspects, but went on to add assimilation by Hispanics was a hurdle as
well.
“A lot of this, we don’t want to
talk about,” Brokaw explained. “But the fact is, on the Republican side, a lot
of people see the rise of an extraordinary, important, new constituent in
American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats. Also, I
hear, when I push people a little harder, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I want
brown grandbabies.’ I mean, that’s also a part of it.”
“It’s the intermarriage that is
going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other,” he continued.
“I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at
assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You
know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure
that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel
comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both
sides, frankly.”
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the
creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open
borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“Open border advocates, such as
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to
California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has
documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few
skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them
access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals
were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6
million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of
Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison
It's not just a
short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment
approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of
healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as
a nation.
MEXICO WILL DOUBLE U.S.
POPULATION
By Tom Barrett
At the current rate of invasion (mostly through Mexico, but also
through Canada) the United States will be completely over run with illegal
aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US
law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion,
ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the
United States.
Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity
Author Samuel Huntington
Description
In his seminal
work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel
Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold
war, “civilizations” were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in
international politics.
Now in his controversial new work, Who Are We?, Huntington focuses on an identity crisis closer to home as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.
America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, says Huntington, including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, our national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants and challenged by issues such as bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the “denationalization” of American elites.
September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity, but already there are signs that this revival is fading. Huntington argues the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Timely and thought-provoking, Who Are We? is an important book that is certain to shape our national conversation about who we are.
Now in his controversial new work, Who Are We?, Huntington focuses on an identity crisis closer to home as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.
America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, says Huntington, including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, our national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants and challenged by issues such as bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the “denationalization” of American elites.
September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity, but already there are signs that this revival is fading. Huntington argues the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Timely and thought-provoking, Who Are We? is an important book that is certain to shape our national conversation about who we are.
Atlantic Magazine: Immigration is Fracturing America into Rival
Tribes
John Moore/Getty Images
Immigration is splitting the United
States into warring tribes, says an unusual article in the strongly
pro-migration Atlanticmagazine.
The
causes of America’s resurgent tribalism are many. They include seismic
demographic change, which has led to predictions that whites will lose their
majority status within a few decades; declining social mobility and a growing
class divide; and media that reward expressions of outrage.
But
the mass immigration of 44.5 million people is the
primary cause of the three other factors — “declining social mobility and a
growing class divide; and media that reward expressions of outrage.”
Yet
the authors do not even suggest any changes whatsoever to the replacement-level
immigration which brings in one foreigner every year for every four Americans
who turn 18, which lowers wages, and
ensures an expanding array of rival languages and civic rules in the United
States:
In
2017, there were 85 cities in which a majority of residents spoke a foreign
language at home. These include:
- Hialeah, Fla. (95%);
- Laredo, Texas (92%);
- East Los Angeles, Calif. (90%)
- Elizabeth, N.J. (76%);
- Skokie, Ill. (56%);https://cis.org/Report/Almost-Half-Speak-Foreign-Language-Americas-Largest-Cities …
- Hialeah, Fla. (95%);
- Laredo, Texas (92%);
- East Los Angeles, Calif. (90%)
- Elizabeth, N.J. (76%);
- Skokie, Ill. (56%);https://cis.org/Report/Almost-Half-Speak-Foreign-Language-Americas-Largest-Cities …
Almost Half Speak a Foreign Language in America's Largest
Cities | @CIS_org
The
two Yale authors, professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, describe the diversity
created by immigration:
All
of this has contributed to a climate in which every group in
America—minorities and whites; conservatives and liberals;
the working class and elites—feels under attack, pitted
against the others not just for jobs and spoils, but for the right to define
the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into a zero-sum
competition, one in which parties succeed by stoking voters’ fears and
appealing to their ugliest us-versus-them instincts.
Again,
the authors do not suggest any immigration changes that could lower public
fears over the elite’s determination to change the nation’s identity to suit
their elite interests.
Elite
groups openly acknowledge that immigration is the force which now drives
American politics — including the shocking election of real-estate developer
Donald Trump in 2016. As New
York Magazine says in a
review of Chua’s earlier book:
Perhaps
the most bitter of all contemporary political battles — and a Trump favorite —
is immigration, which behind the ideological posturing is a referendum on whose
tribe will control the country’s demographic future …
Similarly,
a new study by
authors from the University of Michigan argues that the nation’s
tribal polarization is driven by rising racial and ethnic conflict:
Race/ethnicity
now cleaves the parties more neatly than ever, and not simply because Democrats
and Republicans disagree in their attitudes about race itself. In fact, whites
are sorting out of the Democratic party at a significant rate while minorities
are standing pat. Figure 1 presents evidence in this regard using the American National Election
Studies time-series data starting from 1952. The
growing racial gap between the two parties is evident. As the share of Whites
among self-identified Democrats is rapidly decreasing (outpacing demographic
changes in the country as a whole), the Republican Party remains overwhelmingly
White. Our conjecture is that it is these changes in race and ethnicity that
drive most of the affective polarization we have witnessed over the last 30
years.
By
failing to identify immigration’s role in the problem, the two Yale authors are
left with a few recommendations so vague as to be useless.
They
urge that conservative Americans step up their efforts to persuade minorities
that they are equal — as if Americans have not been trying to do that
at enormous expense since the civil war, and as if immigration does not fuel
the ethnic politics which denies equality between Americans and immigrants.
The Atlantic authors do offer some cautious
criticism of the progressive left which has worked with business to impose and
preserve mass migration, even after the 2016 election:
For
its part, the left needs to rethink its scorched-earth approach to American
history and ideals. Exposing injustice, past and present, is important, but
there’s a world of difference between saying that America has repeatedly failed
to live up to its constitutional principles and saying that those principles
are lies or smoke screens for oppression.
But
neither of those two recommendations address what the Yale authors
admit is the primary cause of rising tribalism — the elite’s policy of
importing foreign workers and their tribes into
the United States.
Nor
did they provide readers even a cursory description of President Donald
Trump’s promised fix, his Four Pillars reforms.
Moreover,
neither author acknowledges the basic reality that their peers in the
elite do want tribalism to overthrow Americans’ shared, non-racial, civic
culture, which the elites prefer to dismiss as merely a “white” culture. Chua
indirectly admits this goal in her 2018 book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations,
as the New York Magazinereviewer
describes:
Better-educated
whites, who dominate the country’s political and cultural institutions and are
the main beneficiaries of the globalized economy, have adopted as their
“tribal” identity a sort of post-national cosmopolitanism, defined against what
they regard as the provincial culture of poor whites …
it
seems inevitable that American whites will lose their majority status sometime
around the middle of the current century. More cosmopolitan whites tend to view
this prospect with indifference or even excitement.
it
is clear to many thoughtful liberal scholars and journalists that
immigration-driven cultural change has greatly contributed to right-wing
populism. On the other, they view slowing the pace of immigration as a complete
non-starter. As they see it, the only option is to double down on the status
quo and hope that the storm passes—even if this approach risks triggering a
crisis for open societies, such as the one we are arguably living through
today. It is as though these thinkers are convinced that … that conservatives
who worry about the pace of cultural change must be crushed rather than
accommodated.
For
example, Bloomberg writer Noah Smith welcomes the government-imposed foreign
populations because it means that Americans cannot expect the millions of
foreigners in their midst to follow Americans’ collective civic rules about how
people are supposed to behave. Smith claims:
Diversity
provides a backstop defense against the natural tendencies of homogenization
and conformity … A country with institutions strong enough not to have to rely
on homogeneity will be the strongest country imaginable.
But
the civic culture destroyed by diversity includes shared expectations of civic
equality within freedom, of Internet-enabled free speech and organization, and
of debates over facts not feelings. The civic rules help Americans prevent
their elite from segregating themselves into “oligarchical socialism,” globalist
virtue-signaling, elite colleges and gated communities, stock-market wealth,
and technological power over political debate.
Smith
does admit his experiment with imposed civic variety may prove disastrous
to American people:
I
believe that there is a chance our experiment might fail. That building a free
society from people of all races, religions, and national origins might in fact
prove too hard a task …
But
no matter the risk to 300 million non-elite Americans, Smith insists “the
America experiment [with diversity] must continue.”
Smith
counters polite criticism of his diversity-first argument by describing his
critics as racists, so exemplifying the tribalism which Smith uses and which
the two Atlantic authors
claim to oppose:
1/Tucker
Carlson's question - "How is diversity our strength?" was not asked
in good faith, but for purposes of racist demagoguery.
But I will try to answer it in good faith, because it's an important question in its own right.https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1038222675322318850 …
But I will try to answer it in good faith, because it's an important question in its own right.https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1038222675322318850 …
Tom
Jawetz is the vice-president for immigration policy at the Democrats’ primary
think-tank, the Center for American Progress. He argues that immigration
is about the treatment of all people worldwide, not about Americans’ concerns.
That radically universal view demotes his moral duty to his fellow Americans
down to the same level as his moral duty to distant peoples of Singapore,
Lichtenstein, Nepal or Indonesia.
Conversations
about #migration are about something so
much more fundamental. They are about how we value other human beings. They are
about whether we stand by our universal principles. @MJRodriguesEU #GlobalCompactMigration
So
of course, ordinary Americans — of all colors and classes and
variations — are collectively pushing back against their hostile or
uncaring elite. New York Magazine insists
on defining them see as “whites,” but the members of Trump’s multi-colored coalition have:
defined
their tribal identity in opposition to the [elite] Establishment, which they
perceive as a distant, occupying foreign power, indifferent to their interests
and intent on elevating minorities and foreigners to pride of place within
“their” country.
Four
million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal
government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allow an
army of at least 2 million visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside
asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.
Overall,
the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration
shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the
market with cheap white-collar and
blue-collar foreign labor.
That
flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees.
The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps,
reduces high-tech investment,
increases state and local tax burdens,
hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes
Americans away from high-tech careers, and
sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and
their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because
investment flows towards the large immigrant populations living in the coastal
states.
Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of
Multiculturalism
Author Lawrence Auster
Description
Multiculturalism and unmitigated
immigration have weakened America quite possibly to the point of no return.
At its founding, immigration
was integral in the formation of the United States of America. The melting pot
was the essence of our beginning. The blending of diverse people overwhelmingly
from Europe made the country an extension of the greatest of civilizations.
When immigration was measured, when assimilation was demanded, and when our
borders were controlled, America thrived. This diversity within limits enriched
America. But in the last half century or so, when uncontrolled immigration from
the world over was pushed upon us, when balkanization was encouraged, America
faltered. "Diversity" became a deceptive catchword and a force
hostile to cultural and natural distinctions. Illegal immigrants were welcomed
by the millions. Eventually, we saw racial profiling in college admissions,
politicians pitting groups of people against each other, and white becoming
a bad word.
In Our
Borders, Ourselves, genius conservative essayist Lawrence Auster details
the fraud foisted upon the American people in the name of diversity. Published
posthumously, Our Borders explains how the Immigration Act
of 1965 led to the erasing of white America and the nihilist culture we live in
today.
The granting of
aggressive race consciousness to minority groups and the denial of it to the
majority are only one part of the problem. This book identifies the principal
ideas and forces--racial, political, psychological, moral, and religious--that
are destroying American civilization and shows how those forces have been
institutionalized and internalized by the American people themselves, including
conservatives. Auster explains in detail the shift from classical liberalism to
modern liberalism, which corresponds to the shift from self-respect to
self-esteem.
Once a society has
denied the existence of right and wrong, it has abandoned its own history and
denied its own legitimacy. It has opened a Pandora's Box of evils that,
according to Auster, can never be returned whence they came.
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