The Other McCain

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‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’?

Posted on | July 22, 2019 | 4 Comments

 

What has prompted our immigration crisis? Isn’t it the same sentiment that leads Democrats (and David French, but I repeat myself) to claim Ilhan Omar is a better American than anyone born here?

“Oikophobia,” a hatred of one’s native country (and of one’s fellow citizens) is the most remarkable proof that our elite class have become hopelessly degenerate. Consider David French’s argument that, unlike those of us who were born here, “immigrant citizens have actually done something to earn their status.” Well, what had Ilhan Omar done for America when she was naturalized at age 18? Less than my father did. Dad was an Alabama farmboy when he joined the Army at age 18 and he earned the Purple Heart in France in 1944. Is David French implying that being my father’s son makes me less worthy of American citizenship than Ilhan Omar? Isn’t this insulting insinuation at the heart of the open-borders argument, the idea that all immigrants are better than any America, because Americans are the worst people in the world?

If you are a native-born American — and especially if you are white — Democrats consider you infinitely inferior to Ilhan Omar. The tone of David French’s argument suggests he agrees with this assessment, and one does not persuade people by insulting them. Why can’t French, an intelligent man and an able lawyer who once did great work in the cause of academic freedom, see why his anti-Trump arguments fail?

The problem, I think, is that French has been swept along by the same floodtide of degeneracy that produces mobs of enraged anarchists on the streets of Portland and makes college campuses unsafe even for well-meaning liberals like Bret Weinstein. The election of Trump, and the rising populist sentiment that elected him, caught our elite by surprise. They were shocked to discover that a powerful plurality of Americans — nearly 63 million voted for Trump — had never accepted the notions of “progress” that prevail among the university-educated elite and in the urban communities where the elite reside. Among the core tenets of this elite weltanschauung is a belief in the superiority of immigrants. You might notice the way they quote Emma Lazarus’s poetry as if it had more authority than the Constitution, a reverence for the “huddled masses” being essential to what amounts to a religious faith among our otherwise godless elite. When I visited the campus of Harvard with Pete Da Tech Guy in the fall of 2017, we were immediately confronted on our arrival with a protest on behalf of so-called “dreamers.” Harvard students are not nowadays notable for their dedication to moral virtue — they get drunk and screw around quite shamelessly — but they are adamantly certain that it is morally wrong to deport illegal aliens.

Many years ago, Peter Brimelow pointed out that a major problem with U.S. immigration policy is that voters have seldom gotten a chance to express their preference at the ballot box. The elite of both parties seem generally agreed in preferring immigrants to native-born Americans, the Republicans beholden to corporate interests that want cheap labor and the Democrats seeing immigrants as future Democrat voters. Public opinion surveys indicate that most Americans see the issue of immigration as a matter of numbers. A majority would approve of accepting 250,000 new immigrants annually, and even if you bumped that number up to half a million, most people would be OK with it, but what we have had for the past 20 years is an unofficial policy of almost unlimited immigration. Our immigration laws are riddled with loopholes, and enforcement has been uneven and irregular, so that the combination of legal and illegal immigrants has amounted to more than 1 million every year since the mid-1990s. A majority of Americans oppose this, but prior to 2016, they never had a real chance to express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box. They had previously been offered no clear choice; choosing between open-borders Democrats and open-borders Republicans was no choice at all, as far as immigration policy was concerned, and some Republicans (including my late Cousin John) were worse than any Democrat on the issue. Trump’s blunt talk — “Build a wall!” — appealed to voters who had long been frustrated by the refusal of the political elite to address their concerns over our immigration policy (or non-policy, to be more accurate). The potency of that populist resentment startled not only the political class, but also the journalists and pundits who had acted as publicity agents for the elite’s open-borders consensus.

Much has been made of the harsh “tone” of President Trump’s rhetoric and of his mercurial temperament. His critics among the conservative commentariat make much of the “character” issue, saying that even though Trump has enacted many policies that conservatives have long advocated, he does not function as a role model, failing to represent the responsible and thoughtful character of a true conservative.

Trump’s coarse language and erratic behavior, however, are an integral part of his success. During the 2016 primary campaign, I compared him to the NFL legend Fran Tarkenton, a scrambling quarterback whose unpredictability made him an unsolvable riddle for opposing defenses. Trump seems to operate according to some internal gyroscope, an instinct that leads him to say and do things which no political consultant would suggest, but which nevertheless produce victory. Consider his tweetstorm last Sunday against “the Squad” of freshmen Democrat congresswomen who had been at war with Nancy Pelosi. Jumping into that fight seemed to contradict every sensible precept of effective politics, and even many Trump supporters were dismayed. Yet once again, Trump’s instinct was vindicated, as even many of his opponents agreed he had succeeded in making these four young left-wing radicals the “face” of the Democratic Party. In the process, not incidentally, Trump hijacked the news cycle for an entire week, so that nothing else (e.g., Joe Biden’s debut of his health-care proposals) had any real impact. And as we approach the next round of Democrat presidential debates, Trump is riding high in the polls (his latest result in an NBC poll matching his all-time best), and Democrats are becoming demoralized.

“Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” people keep asking Thomas Friedman, and if his liberal friends are saying this to him, what does that suggest about the success of Trump’s methods?

That success only inspires the Trump-haters to louder shrieks of indignation, because to them it is wrong for him to keep winning this way. And yet it is not really the president they hate so much as the people who elected him. What David French and the other #NeverTrump Republicans don’t want to confront — what they cannot admit, not even to themselves — is that Trump’s success is a repudiation of their own weakness, a condemnation of their abject failure. The crowd of intellectuals at National Review and the now-defunct Weekly Standard considered themselves possessors of an authority that entitled them to prescribe policy and to anoint candidates for the Republican Party. Exercising this leadership prerogative, as an elite class as secure in its authority as any feudal aristocracy, our conservative intellectuals were always eager to claim credit when Republicans won elections, but when Republicans lost, they insisted that this was never their fault. Probably their zenith of prestige was in 2005, after Bush had been re-elected, which gave credence to Karl Rove’s talk of a “permanent Republican majority” based on a so-called “center-right” coalition. That hope quickly evaporated, with military disaster in Iraq followed by Democrats recapturing Congress in 2006 and then on to the economic catastrophe of 2008 followed by the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

Insofar as a Republican majority has been revived since that low ebb of 2008, it was first because of the Tea Party — a grassroots populist movement that powered the GOP House landslide of 2010 — and eventually the populist success of Trump’s campaign. If you were directly familiar with the Tea Party movement, as I was, you know that there is considerable overlap between those who attended rallies in 2009-2010 and those who are now the staunchest supporters of Trump. While immigration was not an issue the Tea Party concerned itself with, the movement’s prominent early supporters included Michelle Malkin, author of the 2002 book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, and a leader in opposition to the John McCain-backed amnesty proposals. In general, the Tea Party’s populist sentiment was expressed as a distrust of the Beltway establishment in both parties, including those Republicans who had supported corporate bailouts in 2008.

Because the #NeverTrump Republicans refuse to accept any responsibility for the failures of Bush-era GOP policy — although all of them, including French, marched in lockstep in support of those policies — they are at a loss to explain how or why they have lost their influence as intellectual leaders of the conservative movement. Instead, they denounce the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump as ignorant racists, which prompts the question: Why would anyone support “conservative intellectuals” who so emphatically agree with Democrats?

(Pierre Omidyar could not be reached for comment.)

Four years ago, Vox Day observed that French and the #NeverTrump conservatives “haven’t grasped the fact that the demographic changes to the United States have not only changed the way the political game is played, but have changed the game itself.” The country that elected and re-elected Ronald Reagan by landslide margins has ceased to exist, replaced by one in which Republicans can win the White House only by razor-thin margins, and the most important reason for this change is immigration. The demographic changes that have so transformed our politics did not “just happen.” It wasn’t some impersonal trend which caused this, but rather it was a matter of policy, and National Review was on the side of open borders, having purged Alien Nation author Peter Brimelow and sidelined John O’Sullivan. Not only did National Review purge those who dissented from their open-borders agenda, but also treated as persona non grata anyone who lamented this purge. They will call you a racist if you don’t support open-borders Republicans whose policies make it impossible for Republicans to win elections. Why do the editors of National Review think we should be grateful for their services in denouncing Republican voters as racist, as if there is a shortage of Democrats willing to perform this service?

Americans have grown tired of being lectured about how racist they are. The white people delivering these lectures — e.g., Joe Scarborough, Chris Cuomo, David Brooks — seem to believe that their moral superiority to the rest of us is so self-evident that we will enjoy and be grateful for the opportunity to be “enlightened” by them. Yet they are telling us nothing we haven’t already been told a million times, long before anyone imagined Donald Trump running for president.

David French’s insistence that Ilhan Omar is better than any native-born American simply because she is an immigrant — that our inheritance as Americans is a stigma of inferiority — is insulting, and the fact that he thinks we are too stupid to notice this is even more insulting.

The authors of our Constitution explained that their purpose was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” If we are the posterity of our nation’s Founders — if we would deserve to be known as their heirs — then we have inherited an obligation to ensure that “the blessings of liberty” are preserved intact, that they may be enjoyed by future generations of Americans. So-called “Justice Democrats” like Ilhan Omar are a threat to that heritage of liberty, and yet David French, who wishes us to believe he is a conservative, seems to think that it is “racist” to oppose them. I do not exercise any control over what President Trump puts on his Twitter feed nor do Trump supporters seek my advice on what they should chant at rallies, but I know that Donald Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and that his willingness to call out Omar and her “Squad” (and to be smeared as a racist for doing so) indicates a keen understanding of what it will take to prevent Democrats from taking back the White House in 2020.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is something to be gained by playing “Nice Guy” with the Democrats, but if being nice were the criterion of political success, Jeb Bush might be president. And he’s not.

Get over it.



 

Category: Donald Trump, Immigration, Intellectuals

Comments

4 Responses to “‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’?”

  1. Wednesday Linkage « Bacon Time !!!!!!
    July 24th, 2019 @ 3:05 am

    […] The Other McCain: ‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’? […]

  2. Daybook. – Dark Brightness
    July 25th, 2019 @ 6:34 am

    […] “Oikophobia,” a hatred of one’s native country (and of one’s fellow citizens) is the most remarkable proof that our elite class have become hopelessly degenerate. Consider David French’s argument that, unlike those of us who were born here, “immigrant citizens have actually done something to earn their status.” Well, what had Ilhan Omar done for America when she was naturalized at age 18? Less than my father did. Dad was an Alabama farmboy when he joined the Army at age 18 and he earned the Purple Heart in France in 1944. Is David French implying that being my father’s son makes me less worthy of American citizenship than Ilhan Omar? Isn’t this insulting insinuation at the heart of the open-borders argument, the idea that all immigrants are better than any America, because Americans are the worst people in the world? If you are a native-born American — and especially if you are white — Democrats consider you infinitely inferior to Ilhan Omar. The tone of David French’s argument suggests he agrees with this assessment, and one does not persuade people by insulting them. […]

  3. Understanding “Oikophobia”
    July 25th, 2019 @ 5:04 pm

    […] For those trying to understand our present social dilemma, it proves useful to know the term oikophobia: […]

  4. Saturday Links | 357 Magnum
    July 27th, 2019 @ 10:33 am

    […] The Other McCain – ‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’? […]