A report published by Yahoo News on Monday described a “brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital” during the presidency of Barack Obama. The operation penetrated FBI communications to a “stunning” degree, according to officials quoted in the story, but was misunderstood and downplayed by the intelligence community and the Obama administration, which was ostentatiously attempting to “reset” relations with Russia when the operation began.
Yahoo News tied their years-long saga of counterintelligence cat-and-mouse to several major news events, including the 2016 mass expulsion of Russian diplomats – ostensibly ordered in retaliation for Russian “meddling” in U.S. elections, but actually because those Russian diplomatic facilities were hives of electronic surveillance activity – and the more recent story about the CIA extracting a Russian asset in 2017. According to the report, a significant number of Russian assets stopped talking to U.S. intelligence agencies because they were afraid their identities would be discovered.
To make a very long story short, the Russians took advantage of the Obama administration’s much-ballyhooed “reset” in relations to set up an aggressive network of electronic monitoring devices in the United States, the effort gaining further momentum after Russian President Vladimir Putin became convinced the U.S. was manipulating protests in Russia to delegitimize elections with allegations of vote fraud.
The Russians threw themselves into the job of cracking FBI communications and hit the jackpot sometime in 2011. According to Yahoo News:
That effort compromised the encrypted radio systems used by the FBI’s mobile surveillance teams, which track the movements of Russian spies on American soil, according to more than half a dozen former senior intelligence and national security officials. Around the same time, Russian spies also compromised the FBI teams’ backup communications systems — cellphones outfitted with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie capabilities. “This was something we took extremely seriously,” said a former senior counterintelligence official.
The Russian operation went beyond tracking the communications devices used by FBI surveillance teams, according to four former senior officials. Working out of secret “listening posts” housed in Russian diplomatic and other government-controlled facilities, the Russians were able to intercept, record and eventually crack the codes to FBI radio communications.
Some of the clandestine eavesdropping annexes were staffed by the wives of Russian intelligence officers, said a former senior intelligence official. That operation was part of a larger sustained, deliberate Russian campaign targeting secret U.S. government communications throughout the United States, according to former officials.
The two Russian government compounds in Maryland and New York closed in 2016 played a role in the operation, according to three former officials. They were “basically being used as signals intelligence facilities,” said one former senior national security official.
Some of these decryption efforts were not terribly subtle, as the Russians would literally follow FBI surveillance teams on foot and monitor their communications or drive around in vans packed full of radio gear, listening for FBI calls. The FBI was using radios designed more for light weight and easy mobility than communications security, and their system was regrettably slapdash. Eventually they started using cell phones, which were also compromised by Russian intelligence.
“The infrastructure that was supposed to be built, they never followed up, or gave us the money for it. The intelligence community has never gotten an integrated system,” one former official told Yahoo News. When the extent of the comms system compromise became clear, a great deal of money was reportedly spent in haste to acquire better encrypted radios.
Another official called the Russian operation an “incredible intelligence success” but added the most heavily encrypted transmissions used by American agencies was never cracked. Speculation abounds in the intelligence community over whether the Russians cracked FBI codes on their own, got their hands on some FBI equipment and used it to reverse-engineer the code system, or had help from a mole inside the U.S. government.
The Obama administration’s response to the communications breach was troubling, if not very surprising. As with the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration was willing to overlook a great deal of mischief to get the historic headline-grabbing diplomatic breakthrough it wanted. Yahoo News reports:
According to a former CIA official and a former national security official, the CIA’s analysts often disagreed about how committed Russia was to negotiations during the attempted reset and how far Putin would go to achieve his strategic aims, divergences that confused the White House and senior policy makers.
“It caused a really big rift within the [National Security Council] on how seriously they took analysis from the agency,” said the former CIA official. Senior administration leaders “went along with” some of the more optimistic analysis on the future of U.S.-Russia relations “in the hopes that this would work out,” the official continued.
Those disagreements were part of a “reset hangover” that persisted, at least for some inside the administration, until the 2016 election meddling, according to a former senior national security official. Those officials clung to the hope that Washington and Moscow could cooperate on key issues, despite aggressive Russian actions ranging from the invasion of Ukraine to its spying efforts.
Part of the problem was also institutional inertia within the intelligence community, a problem difficult for outsiders to diagnose because so many of the details are classified. The notion that Russia might have compromised not just FBI radios but even “secure” intelligence facilities and drag information across the supposedly inviolate “air gap” between secure systems and the Internet appears to have blown some minds, for example.
It is not clear if the Russians ever managed to fully penetrate these facilities despite some comically obvious attempts. One of Yahoo’s sources thought the Russians might have been pretending they penetrated communications at CIA headquarters just to play head games with their American adversaries.
The good news is that the Yahoo report concluded with an assessment that the Russians have some institutional inertia problems of their own, and appear to have struggled to replace the assets expelled from the United States during the diplomatic facility purge of 2016. The bad news is that U.S. analysts are evidently still conflicted about exactly what the Russians are capable of, from counterintelligence activity on U.S. soil to election meddling, and everyone seems to agree the U.S. intelligence community has become too politicized to get a clear picture of the risks.
Democrats Move Towards
‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin
Associated Press
Left-wing
progressives are embracing a political alliance with Silicon Valley
oligarchs who would trap Americans in a cramped future without hope of
upward mobility for themselves or their children, says a left-wing political
analyst in California.
Under the headline “America is moving toward an oligarchical
socialism,” Joel Kotkin writes :
Historically, liberals advocated helping the middle class
achieve greater independence, notably by owning houses and starting companies.
But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on
Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision. Greg Fehrenstein, who
interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an
increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller
slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist
on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and government
aid.”
Numerous oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, founder of
eBay, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, founder of the Y Combinator — have embraced
this vision including a “guaranteed wage,” usually $500 or a $1,000 monthly.
Our new economic overlords are not typical anti-tax billionaires in the
traditional mode; they see government spending as a means of keeping the
populist pitchforks away. This may be the only politically sustainable way to
expand “the gig economy,” which grew to 7 million workers this year, 26 percent
above the year before.
Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the
next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments.
Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will subsist while playing
with their phones, video games and virtual reality in what Google calls
“immersive computing.”
This plan, however, is being challenged by the return of
populism and nationalism when President Donald Trump defeated the GOP’s
corporatist candidates and the progressives’ candidate in 2016. In his 2017
inauguration, Trump declared:
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital
has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the
cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its
wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories
closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our
country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not
been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there
was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
That all changes starting right here and right now because this
moment is your moment, it belongs to you …
What truly matters is not which party controls our government,
but whether our government is controlled by the people.
For several years, Kotkin has been dissecting the Democrats’
shift from working-class politics toward a tacit alliance with the billionaires
in the new information-technology industries that are centralizing wealth and
power through the United States. In 2013, for example, he argued that
California’s politics were increasingly “ feudal “:
As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental
sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent
of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of
opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent
census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some
estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican
Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.
At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level
of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse
than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to
roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare
recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.
Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are
downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos
actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one
recent report . Nor are things expected to get
better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey , most Californians expect their
incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the
young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.
Read Kotkin’s “oligarchal socialism” article here .
*
“Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels?”
“By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such
credit for his analogous response to the Great Recession.”
“Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the
country and really have killed Americans, inevitably, under the
administration’s anything-goes immigration stance.”
WHY ARE
VOTERS SO FUCKING MAD?
CITY
JOURNAL
MYRON
MAGNET
Haunting
this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no
longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy
feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs.
We have
lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic
election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the
president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them
unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders
designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All
its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old
functions. But in fact, a new kind of
government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched
in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the
adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an
evolution but a usurpation.
What has
now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the
Administrative State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect,
Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president,
who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the
Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded
“nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as
obsolete. (See “ It’s
Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More, ” Summer 2014.) What a modern country
needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the
fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it,
effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.
M odernity, Wilson thought,
demanded efficient government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent,
hyper-educated experts, applying the latest scientific, economic, and
sociological knowledge to industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too
complex for self-governing free citizens to solve. Accordingly, he got Congress
to create executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade
Commission, to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin
Roosevelt proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board
and the Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission
and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect.
Before they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into
stretching the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the
federal government in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate
transactions. He also had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to
delegate legislative power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by
setting up agencies with the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of
course, vests all legislative power in
Congress, empowering it to make laws, not to make legislators.
But the
Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If
Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate
judicial powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary.
Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a
legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting
violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as
fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they
also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart
of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought),
as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth
Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and
tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private
papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search
warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue
waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and
companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully
remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked
constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of
the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal
conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.
Adding
insult to injury, Wilson, his allies, and their current followers call
themselves “progressives,” a fatuous boast implying that they are the
embodiments and chosen instruments of the spirit of an ever-improving,
irresistible future. In tune with the German idealist philosophy that Wilson
and his circle studied, they claim to be marching toward an as-yet-unrealized
goal of human perfection. But that perfection, the German philosophers
believed, would look something like Prussia’s enlightened despotism. For
Americans to think that it is progress to move from the Founders’ revolutionary
achievement—a nation of free citizens, endowed with natural rights, living
under laws that they themselves have made, pursuing their own vision of
happiness in their own way and free to develop as fully as they can whatever
talent or genius lies within them—to a regime in which individuals derive such
rights as they have from a government superior to them is contemptible. How is
a return to subjection an advance on freedom? No lover of liberty should ever
call such left-wing statism “progressive.” In historical terms, this elevation
of state power over individual freedom is not even “liberal” but quite the
reverse.
A s these agencies have
metastasized, they have borne out not a single premise that justified their
creation, and their increasingly glaring failure has drawn citizens’ angry
attention to them. Expert? As a New Deal congressman immediately recognized
with shock, many of those who staffed the Administrative State were kids just
out of law school, with zero real-world experience or technical knowledge.
Efficient? Can-do America, which built the Empire State Building in 11 months
and ramped up airplane production during World War II from 2,000 in 1939 to
nearly 100,000 in 1944, now takes years of bureaucratic EPA busywork to repair
a bridge or lay a pipeline, and who knows how many businesses never expand or
even start because the maze of government regulation is too daunting and costly
to navigate? Only last year, EPA “experts” fecklessly stood by as workers under
their supervision accidentally dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater
into the Colorado River, and the agency vouchsafed not a word of warning to
downstream Colorado and New Mexico officials for an entire day before the
poisonous, fluorescent-orange flood hit them. Over at Veterans Affairs, those
who’ve fought for their country die in droves while waiting for medical care.
But what’s the problem? asks agency head Robert MacDonald blithely. After
all, at ever-popular Disneyland, “do they measure the number of hours you wait
in line?”
Non-political?
Ask Lois Lerner at the Internal Revenue Service. Oh wait: she pleaded the Fifth
Amendment—and her boss, John Koskinen, simply ignores Congress’s orders, even
as more than 2,000 of his enforcement agents have acquired military-grade
weaponry, among 200,000 of such administrative-agency officers now similarly
equipped with lethal arms, presumably for coercion of the citizens they
supposedly serve. Or there’s the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal
Communications Commission, lackeys of President Obama and his ultra-partisan
agenda.
Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels? Moreover, from the establishment of the first administrative
agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, essentially designed to
create shared railroad cartels—these agencies have been key instruments of
crony capitalism, which today often takes the form of senators and congressmen
pressuring agencies for rule changes or waivers to benefit their contributors,
usually at the expense of their competitors as well as the public, as the
author of the recent Confessions of Congressman X complains of his
fellow legislative “puppets.” Little wonder that today’s Americans think that
such people don’t represent them. Pollsters report that trust in government is
at its lowest level ever, with only 19 percent expecting government to do the
right thing, according to last year’s Gallup and Pew polls.
Ensuring
the citizens’ health and safety? Where is the Food and Drug Administration as
counterfeit medicines and medical supplies from China infiltrate our hospitals?
As for the infamously dysfunctional Transportation Security Administration, its
Keystone Kops’ regularly reported inability to spot journalists carrying banned
weapons onto airplanes, while they are too busy fondling travelers’ private
parts or undressing grannies, is a standing national joke—on us. We lost our
constitutional safeguards for this ?
F DR spewed out his
agencies in a “try anything” spirit to cure a Depression that his predecessor’s
misguided palliatives had worsened, and debate still surges over whether the
New Deal agencies did harm or good, putting aside their doubtful legitimacy.
But the majority of Americans at the time gave the president credit for good
intentions. By contrast, many voters
give Barack Obama no such credit for his analogous response to the Great
Recession. They see it as a cynically calculated ploy to extend
government’s power over the people, especially given the White House chief of
staff’s crack that a president should “never let a good crisis go to waste.” So
on the pretext of addressing the financial crisis, the administration partially
socialized American medicine with legislation that only Democrats voted for,
without bothering to read it, and that citizens who opposed the measure—still a
solid majority of those polled—saw as a kind of coup d’état, framed with utter
irresponsibility and ignoring the scary financial mess. As happened during the
New Deal, a timid Supreme Court found the act constitutional only by the
politically driven legerdemain frequent in that institution’s checkered
history. It struck many as flimflam, not government by consent.
The
result was a spectacular expansion of the Administrative State, with some 150
new agencies and commissions created; no one knows the exact number. And these
agencies purposely removed the Administrative State even further from
government by the people. One agency, the Independent Payment Advisory
Board—the so-called death panel—is so democratically unaccountable that
Congress can only abolish it by a three-fifths vote in both houses within a
seven-month period next year. After that, the law bars Congress from altering
any of the board’s edicts, a provision as far from democratic self-government
as you can get.
When the
administration finally confronted the financial crisis, lengthened by
Obamacare’s disincentives to hiring, its reflex response was to expand the
Administrative State still further with the Dodd-Frank Act, named for its two
legislative sponsors, both of whom had been in bed with the mortgage racket,
one figuratively and one literally. Whether it solved the problem is dubious.
What is certain is that it is as undemocratic as Obamacare, with its Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, whose budget Congress can’t control, its Financial
Stability Oversight Council, whose rulings no court may review, and its army of
regulators occupying the big banks and squeezing multimillion-dollar penalties
out of CEOs clinging to their supersize compensation, regardless of what
happens to the stockholders. Meanwhile, the opaque Federal Housing Finance
Agency, formed during the crisis to salvage the misbegotten mortgage giants
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seems bent on nationalizing permanently this
sizable chunk of the economy, putting the government in charge of citizens’
housing as well as their health care.
As for
the “stimulus” that was supposed to give a Keynesian boost to the economy:
since you can’t prove a negative, no one can show that if all that money had
stayed in the private economy, it would have created more jobs and economic
growth than the economically anemic Obama era has done. What unemployed or
underemployed workers saw, though, is that a good portion of stimulus money
went to protect the jobs of public employees, whose welfare evidently trumps
that of the citizens whom they supposedly serve. Coal miners saw that, even as
the administration aimed to kill their jobs, its stimulus shoveled out hundreds
of millions of dollars to now-defunct Solyndra and other nonviable,
crony-capitalist “green” energy companies, supposed solutions to a
global-warming crisis that many think a hoax, though some two dozen public
officials seem keen to suppress, Inquisition-style, the very utterance of that
thought. And voters noticed that America’s three highest-income counties are in
the Washington suburbs that house the federal government’s recession-proof
functionaries. (See “ Hail Columbia !,” Winter 2013.)
U nease over illegal
immigration also has stoked today’s fear that the government no longer belongs
to the people, and it’s important to understand the separate but mutually
reinforcing ways that it has done so. Once again, President Obama has made a
bad situation worse—this time, by his contemptuous refusal to execute the laws
faithfully. His catch-and-release policy for illegal border-crossers, as well
as his ban on deporting young aliens brought here by their illegal-immigrant
parents, are imperial, antidemocratic edicts that might have sparked
impeachment proceedings, had not Congress’s silly move to impeach Bill Clinton
for lying about his sex games with an intern tainted that weapon for years to
come. The result of Obama’s diktat, as contrary to the spirit of the Founders’
Constitution as is the Administrative State, is that law-abiding taxpayers must
pay for the kids’ welfare support, health care, and schooling—as they already
do for “anchor babies” born to mothers who have sneaked over the U.S. border
for the purpose of having a child eligible for “child-only” welfare benefits,
scarcely less than ordinary welfare payments and vastly more than the income of
Central American peasant families. No American voted to incur these costs,
which, if current trends continue, are likely to persist for several
generations of such families, so they amount to taxation without representation
as naked as George III’s.
As for the illegals who work, often for long
hours at low pay, off the books: because immigrants, 13 percent of the
population, hold 17 percent of the jobs—and no one knows the percentage of workers
who are here illegally—jobless working-class citizens have understandably
concluded that a lawless government, by countenancing such cheap labor, is
taking the bread out of their mouths. Should they eat cake instead?
America’s highest-income counties are in the suburbs that house
Washington’s recession-proof functionaries.
What
citizens want to know is that, of all the world’s people who seek to live in
America, our government will admit those who come legally, whose families will
not harm us, and who will add to the wealth of the nation, not reap where they
have not sown. After all, public safety—not clean energy or national health
care—is government’s purpose. Nevertheless, Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the country and really have
killed Americans, inevitably, under the administration’s anything-goes
immigration stance. Further, it’s no comfort to any American who has
suffered loss from an Islamist terror attack within our borders—from Ground
Zero and Fort Hood to San Bernardino and Orlando—that such incidents pose no
threat to our existence as a nation, as the president has said by way of
reassurance, while refusing to call such outrages by their right name. How many
citizens would have to die in a dirty-bomb attack in Grand Central Terminal for
such events to strike him as a threat to the nation’s existence?
The
question of providing a path to citizenship for the 12 million illegal aliens
already here is also germane to the debate about whom the U.S. government
serves and to whom it belongs. Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh jokes that “illegal
aliens” is a politically incorrect term; we must say “undocumented Democrats”
instead. But it’s a joke with a barb,
for no one can doubt that these 12 million, if they could vote, would vote for
the Democratic program of an ever-larger, richly paid government extracting
ever-larger transfer payments from productive workers to the dependent
poor—James Madison’s definition of the tyranny of the majority in Federalist 10. With black poverty and exclusion steadily ameliorating,
thanks to decades of striving by well-intentioned Americans of all races—even
though Obama’s ex–attorney general Eric
Holder devoted his tenure to denying this plain truth—the Democratic Party
needs a new class of victims to justify its “helping” agenda and its immense
cadre of well-paid government “helpers.” Central American peasants fill the
bill.
Formerly,
our open economy drew the enterprising and energetic to these shores, and our
lack of a public safety net, with only private ethnic and religious charities
to help the unfortunate, meant that those who couldn’t contribute to the U.S.
economy went home. But today, when we
have a vast welfare state that didn’t exist during earlier waves of
immigration, the mothers of anchor babies come for handouts, and even the
children of hardworking legal Hispanic immigrants end up on the welfare rolls
at troublesomely high rates. In addition, our showering of self-proclaimed
refugees with welfare benefits, which attracts the shiftless rather than the
enterprising, only compounds the government-sustained dependency problem—dependency
upon taxpayers who didn’t choose this particular philanthropy.
T he phalanx of privately
supported settlement houses and other institutions that met the great
immigration wave around the turn of the twentieth century, along with the
public school system, aimed to “Americanize” the new arrivals—teaching them our
language, manners, and customs, and especially our republican civic ethic.
Culture, after all, is as important an element of national identity as
political institutions. To become an American in those days meant little more
than learning English and subscribing to a broadly shared creed of
self-reliance, self-government, self-improvement, and allegiance to a tolerant
nation that most people agreed was unique in the freedom and opportunity it afforded—as
well as in its readiness to confer citizenship on newcomers who almost
universally desired it. But today’s
legal Hispanic immigrants often don’t apply for American citizenship, or retain
dual nationalities: Americanization often is not high on their agendas.
Moreover,
our new doctrine of multiculturalism gives today’s immigrants nothing to
assimilate to, since current intellectual fashion—set by the universities,
Hollywood, and the mainstream media—celebrates everything that makes us
different rather than the creed that once made one nation out of many
individuals. And multiculturalism’s accompanying creed of victimology
encourages dependency rather than self-reliance. Who are the victimizers of
illegal Hispanic aliens? According to today’s politically correct
“progressivism,” it is the neocolonial United States that has exploited the
Third World’s natural resources, shored up its ruling oligarchies, and
subverted its incipient democratic governments. And then it further victimizes
them with racism when they try to escape to this country.
Deference
to the greater wisdom of government, which Wilsonian progressivism deems a
better judge of what the era needs and what the people “really” want than the
people themselves, has been silently eroding our unique culture of enterprise,
self-reliance, enlightenment, and love of liberty for decades. But if we cease
to enshrine American exceptionalism at the heart of our culture—if we set equal
value on such Third World cultural tendencies as passive resignation, fatalism,
superstition, devaluation of learning, resentment of imaginary plots by the
powerful, and a belief that gratification deferred is gratification forgone—the
exceptionalism of our institutions becomes all the more precarious.
Supercharging
American anger over illegal immigration and its consequences is the politically
correct ban on openly discussing it, with even the most reasoned reservation
dismissed as racism and yahooism. And political correctness generates its own
quantum of anger among citizens, who think of freedom of speech and debate as
central to American exceptionalism. But elite culture stigmatizes plain
speaking, so that now a rapist or a murderer is a “person who committed a
crime” or an “individual who was incarcerated,” says the Obama Department of
Justice, or, according to the latest humbug from the Department of Education, a
“justice-involved individual.” Implicit in these euphemisms is the theory that
“society,” not the criminal, is to blame for crime, a long-exploded idea aimed at
blurring the distinction between right and wrong.
That’s
what makes it so disheartening to learn that the University of California has
just deemed it a politically incorrect offense to declare America a land of
opportunity, so as not to stigmatize those who’ve failed to seize it. It’s
disheartening not only because such a retreat from our traditional culture will
hold back immigrants, but also because our long cultural unraveling already has
damagingly demoralized the native-born working class in the face of economic
change. They dimly know that, and part of what makes them so angry is what they
have allowed themselves to become.
W hen Theodore Roosevelt,
who unsuccessfully ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1912 on the Progressive Party
ticket, first declared his intention to go into politics, his fellow clubmen
jeered at him for wanting to associate with the “saloon-keepers, horse-car
conductors,” and other “rough and brutal” characters running the nation’s
political parties. “I answered,” recalled TR, “that if this were so it merely
meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that
the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.”
That’s the true voice of “progressivism” speaking. As the Founders often cautioned,
a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of America’s
current predicament is that it now has such a class, and the American people
are very angry about it.
Myron Magnet , City Journal ’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a
recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book is The
Founders at Home .
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