AJStrata is appalled (as am I) by the positions being taken by some of the most respected conservative bloggers, and concludes that the conflict within conservatism may split the movement.

I feel like politics in this country has entered the twilight zone. People I respected for brilliant logic and insight and top notch debate have become emotional, simplistically surreal in their proposals. The level of the discussion has dropped way down into fevered accusations in some places and pure denial in others…

Most people in this country are not crying for retribution against people who have worked to make a living and raise a family. The folks who started with “deport the criminals”, and who moved on to “make the criminals felons”, and who have since moved on to “starve them out by making it impossible to get a job”, have rightfully been labled extremists. The anti-reasonable-solutions crowd is motivated by emotion, some strange combination of a need for retribution and fear of a future they cannot control…

The extremists who think any sign of compassion (i.e., any deviation from humiliating people working without the proper papers) is ‘amnesty’ are a small minority. The American People are a smart, caring, reasonable people who have led the world in many areas solving many problems. When I see numbers like these in polls where emotion is not a driver (the Dubai Ports World issue was the one exception in many, many years) I see the wisdom of a great nation. To some they see only the ignorant masses who are simply mistaken because the have not seen the light.

Well, from here it is not hard to see what happens. The 25% who cannot stomach a comprohensive bill will destroy the governing coalition of conservatism. In an 80-20 world you are never going to get what you want. The anger in this minority and being rejected is hot and I doubt these people will ever be able to deal with losing. The fact they have been forced to say democracy should not lead on this issue because there is not majority in the Republican caucus (which is being whipped by special iinterest money, not the national interest) shows the vacuousness of their position. The shifting goal posts from mass deportations to starving them out of jobs indicates these people know, deep down they are losing this debate. They do not have the President or the people on their side. But my feeling is they have invested too much emotion to come back from the brink. Somehow Durbin was able to survive is 80-20 moment. The conservative coalition will not survive this I fear. But if that is the price we pay to retain our humanity and compassion, then that is the price we pay. So be it.

I’d say it goes beyond humanity and compassion. Conservatism is all about a preference for freedom and spontaneous order, for allowing the voluntary choices made by individuals interacting freely to proceed wthout coercive interference.

Illegal aliens are here because we need inexpensive low-skilled workers and want to employ them. They are illegal because our immigration policies and regulations are unresponsive to that reality. This unfortunate situation has gone on as it has for so long because denial and hypocrisy are uncontroversial and politically cost-free.

We ought to enforce the laws we have, but we shouldn’t have laws we really do not want to enforce. I’ve heard a lot of shrieking recently about unusually high gasoline prices. What do you suppose would happen to food prices, housing prices, service industry prices, if there were no Latin American immigrants here willing to do the hardest and most unattractive jobs at the lowest wages?

AJStrata is perfectly correct. We are not going to create an immigration Gestapo to perform door-to-door searches. We are not going to uproot and deport families who have been living here for years. It won’t happen. The American people will never stand for it.

John J. Miller, in National Review, offers a list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs.

No Zappa? (There’s a reason they put up statues of him in Vilnius and Prague.) No Zevon? (Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner will be annoyed.) No Randy Newman? (Not even Political Science?) This list could be much improved.

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Hat tip to Brice Peyre.

Differences among conservatives nationally on the Immigration issue are beginning to produce a genuine rift. We can see the impact of these tensions today on the right-side of the Blogosphere, where late last night Lori Byrd, a popular guest blogger on Polipundit, informed readers at her own site:

I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: “From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com.” I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: “It’s over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It’s time to go our own separate ways.”

And Polipundit replied:

The blog has focused on various issues, but one issue on which I cannot give in to the elites is illegal immigration. On that, this blog’s position must be clear, not ambivalent. As a legal immigrant, I feel very, very, strongly about this. Back in 2004, I nearly withdrew my support for Bush’s re-election when he came out with his suicidal immigration “reform” plan.

So far, I’ve allowed the guest bloggers here to write pretty much what they pleased about all issues, including illegal immigration.

But on the illegal immigration issue, I now find myself having to contend with at least three out of four guest bloggers who will reflexively try to poke holes in any argument I make.

Suppose three out of four columnists at the Old York Times were pro-Republican. You can bet publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger would do something about that right quick.

Suppose a Bush administration official came out openly against amnesty. The Bushies would show him the door.

Similarly, the writers at PoliPundit.com need to respect the editorial position of PoliPundit.com on the most important issue to this blog, as the “publisher” sees it – illegal immigration.

I’d say that Polipundit and others deciding to make a fight over this are making a very serious mistake. A lot of people on the Right, myself included, have said very little about this issue to date, out of affection and respect for some of the people on the Right who have strong negative opinions on Immigration, combined with confidence in the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to acquiese to a Nativist crackdown.

If the anti-Immigration side of the Conservative Movement continues to try to operate under the erroneous impression that it has any prospect whatsoever of calling the shots on this issue, it is only going to succeed in underminding the respect of their readers for the good judgement of certain commentators. There is no prospect of the anti-Immigration Right compelling either the Administration, or the libertarian portion of the Conservative Movement, to join in opposition to naturalizing people already here.

And don’t give me any of Polipundit’s “I’m a legal immigrant, and I feel strongly” stuff; my grandparents were legal immigrants. It was obviously a lot easier for them to immigrate legally in the 1890s than it is for Hispanic immigrants today, but the basic circumstances are much the same. American needs cheap labor, and people living in unfavorable conditions abroad are willing to come here to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do in return for a better life. In the context of existing American labor market demand, there is no valid reason that it should be any more difficult for a Mexican or Salvadoran immigrant to come to the United States to work in 2006 than it was for a Pole or Italian in 1906.

David Frum wonders in this month’s Cato Unbound lead essay, Republicans and the Flight of Opportunity, whether the collapse of the Gingrich Revolution of the 1990s and the emergence of George W. Bush has resulted in the squandering of “The fairest chance to achieve the limited-government agenda.”

Frum observes:

The state is growing again—and it is preprogrammed to carry on growing. Health spending will rise, pension spending will rise, and taxes will rise.

Now I still continue to hope that the Republican party will lean against these trends. But there’s a big difference between being the party of less government and a party of small government. It’s one thing to try to slow down opponents as they try to enact their vision of society into law. It’s a very different thing to have a vision of one’s own.

And the day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.

He notes three reasons:

First, while small-government conservatism remains an important faction within the Republican party, it is only a faction. When Republicans held the minority in Congress, the small-government faction could act as an important blocking group against big-government over-reaching—as happened for example with Hillarycare in 1994 or the Carter energy plan in 1978. But when the Republicans won their majority and the small-government faction tried to enact an affirmative agenda, suddenly we discovered that we were not strong enough to enact a program by ourselves — and had instead rendered ourselves vulnerable to blocking action by others…

..Second, I think it’s been fairly established now that the Republican party responds far more attentively to the practical needs of business constituencies than to the abstract principles of free-marketeers. Tom Delay’s “K Street Project” attempted to harness the might of the business lobbying community to Republican goals. It ended instead by subordinating the Republican party to the wishes of the business lobbying community…

..Third, for the GOP to reinvent itself as a limited-government would require it to repudiate much or maybe close to all of the domestic agenda of the Bush administration.

His ultimate conclusions are gloomy.

Edward Feser on TCS Daily responds to Jeffrey Hart’s recent essay which proposes uniting Burkean Conservatism with Pragmatism by evoking the memory of Richard Weaver’s (author of Ideas Have Consequences) Metaphysical Realism.

Hat tip to Jonathan Berry.

2004 Documentary on Republican in Hollywood reviewed:

Hollywood has a richly-deserved reputation as an extremely liberal town populated by celebrities who rarely hesitate to assail their audiences with their political opinions…

But just as there may be a few Britney Spears fans at a death metal concert, surely there must be some Republicans in Hollywood; and Democratic speechwriter and independent filmmaker Jesse Moss set out to find them in his short documentary Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood, which initially ran on the American Movie Classics channel in September 2004.

Right Reason‘s Maxwell Goss interviews with Roger Scruton on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the publication of his book The Meaning of Conservatism.