I like them both.

video

Legalization of polygamy following legalization of gay marriage already happend in the Netherlands. It could happen here. Stanley Kurtz, in a must read article, identifies the fundamental connections between monogamy and democracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville, that great nineteenth-century student of America, pointed to the abolition of primogeniture (exclusive property inheritance by first-born sons) as the social key to American democracy. Once American children inherited equally, said Tocqueville, landed estates were dispersed, and the ethos of kin unity and hierarchy was replaced by a spirit of democratic equality. Yet America’s abolition of primogeniture was only the culmination of a process begun centuries earlier by the Christian Church. Muslim families arrange marriages to cousins and other kin, thereby reinforcing couples’ identification with family and tribe. But from the fourth century through the Middle Ages, the Church fought to protect individual choice in marriage, while prohibiting marriage between cousins and other relatives. That undercut social forms based on kinship and collective identity, ultimately leading to the triumph of democratic individualism in the West.

Yet the weakening or even disappearance of extended kinship groups from family life in the West poses a problem. If families aren’t going to be held together by collective honor, mutual obligation, and shared economic interest, how will they cohere? The answer is love. Exclusive affection for a unique individual is the structural foundation on which Western families are built. In polygamous societies, where marriages are arranged and wives and children live collectively, too much individualized love (for spouses or children) endangers group solidarity. Yet in a democratic society, individualized love is praised and cultivated as the foundation of family stability. So take your pick. You can have a love-based democratic culture of monogamy, or an authority-based hierarchical culture of polygamy. But–as the Reynolds Court knew–you can’t have both.

The pictures make it obvious.

I’m getting old, so I get up early. And I’m currently living in California (“the fiery furnace”), featuring the Mediterranean style of climate, where nights are cool, mornings are pleasant, and afternoons are hot as hell. The Bay area has about the same population as New York City, and prime time parking is a problem. So, all in all, I like to run as many errands as possible first thing in the morning.

When I roll down the hill onto El Camino Real, the local main drag (whose name reflects the fact that the first settlers of significant portions of today’s United States did not, in fact, arrive via the Mayflower) around 6:30 AM Pacific Time, there is nobody up and about, but my elderly self, and the Mexican guys who work at the car wash, who can be seen crossing over to McD’s to get their modest breakfasts, before starting a long day of car polishing and cleaning.

I get my car washed and waxed at the place they work. It costs $30 for the whole treatment, and it takes time, but we Anglos fill our own gas tanks, give the keys to Mexican attendant, then sit comfortably at umbrella-ed cafe tables sipping lattes, and enjoying balmy Pacific breezes, while large crews of Mexican workers clean, wax, and polish our cars to perfection.

Nobody but desperate, sincere, and strongly motivated immigrants is ever going to do that kind of unpleasant work at low enough wages to make the service possible. Yeah, you might get Americans to do it for $100 an hour, but nobody is going to pay for multi-hundred dollar car washes.

Close the borders, throw them all out, and we’ll all be washing our own cars. Just as we’ll all be cleaning our own houses, not eating out (after restaurants with $100 an hour dishwashers and busboys) become prohibitively expensive and close, and renting small apartments (since you can’t get cheap construction labor, and house prices have sky-rocketed out of reach). Food will be kind of pricey too, once we have to pay the kind of money it takes to motivate the native-born Great Unwashed to do anything. Who do you think picks the lettuce? Who do you think works in the slaughterhouses?

At the bottom of the foothill of the Santa Cruz Mountains I currently reside upon, there is a strip mall with an inexpensive restaurant, where I sometimes drop in for a burger and a pitcher of beer. Several recent weekend evenings (when my wife was out of town on business), I drove down there for dinner, and on Friday and Saturday nights at 7 and 8 o’clock, I saw Mexican workmen hammering and sawing away, well after normal working hours on weekend evenings, fixing up a storefront for a new restaurant. When I see men working hard at 7 and 8 o’clock at night, pulling double shifts on weekend evenings, I am impressed at the character of those men. You won’t find many cars in the nearby parking lots of Oracle or Electronic Arts (where the work produces a lot less perspiration and a lot higher pay) at equivalent hours.

Most illegal aliens come here and work hard. Most of them try to do a decent job, which is more than you can say for lots of people native born. They pay taxes, and they are Roman Catholics with strong family values. When I look at those illegal alien Mexican workers, I see the kind of people who work for a living, who are sooner or later going to vote Republican.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred gets fed up, and tells it like it is.

The time has come once more for SC&A to unload.

We don’t care who we insult or who takes offense. Unlike the other brilliant therapists who regularly blog, we are dead and thus don’t give a rat’s ass about what you think. Further, we are smarter than you, better looking than you and the object of desire of fabulous and good looking women. For you whiny,metro-sexual and sensitive bastards out there, we concede you look very nice in your pink shirt, yellow paisley tie and dress flip-flops with tassels

Onwards.

Let’s get real about immigration. The same cheap ass bigotry that is on display today in much of the right wing blogosphere, predates you. That’s right- your high minded bigotry, couched as ‘concern,’ is nothing new.

When the Irish Catholics came off the boat in New York, escaping from famine and certain death, high minded Americans beat the crap out of them because the freakin’ Catholic papist evil bastards were going to ruin the country.

When the Italians and the Jews got off the boat in New York, there were those who met them at the docks and welcomed them with baseball bats- literally. Why? Because the damn Jews and more papist evil bastards Italians were going to ruin America. Later migrations of other ethnic groups were met with similar experiences. If the welcome in New York wasn’t enough, that human flotsam that boarded trains to middle America had it even worse. There was no ‘neighborhood,’ there was not much of an immigrant community to find refuge. Immigrants to these shores faced hatred and bigotry that was unimaginable. Some of this fine and caring ‘immigrant aid societies’ sold children into servitude in theMidwest (Norman Rockwell never got around to painting pictures of Italian and Irish kids being beaten and worked like farm animals), to never again see their parents. There are countless, similar stories, but they are irrelevant. The only saving grace this country had is the truth that Europeans were even crueler and in other parts of the world, the kafir was treated even worse.

Incredibly, immigrants survived despite the bigotry of many of this country’s citizens. Now, pay attention lefties and stop touching yourselves. Your as racist and bigoted as any on the left. We’ll get to your sorry and miserable asses later. As for the Hispanics reading this, stick around- you too, are in need of a reality check.

Here’s the deal- Hispanic immigrants aren’t going to ruin America. You know why? Because they come here as ‘wretched refuse.’ They have no other place to go. They see the buffet and smorgasbord of possibilities and are willing to work for their share. They have crossed mountains and deserts because they have a dream- they are not broken. That has always been the American way.

Hat tip to Dympha.

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.

Digby admires a country western song. He thinks that “Gretchen Wilson and Merle Haggard’s song “Politically Uncorrect” perfectly captures the sense of exceptionalism and specialness of southern culture.”

I’m for the low man on the totem pole
And I’m for the underdog God bless his soul
And I’m for the guys still pulling third shift
And the single mom raisin’ her kids
I’m for the preachers who stay on their knees
And I’m for the sinner who finally believes
And I’m for the farmer with dirt on his hands
And the soldiers who fight for this land

Chorus:

And I’m for the Bible and I’m for the flag
And I’m for the working man, me and ol’ hag
I’m just one of many
Who can’t get no respect
Politically uncorrect

(Merle Haggard)
I guess my opinion is all out of style

(Gretchen Wilson)
Aw, but don’t get me started cause I can get riled
And I’ll make a fight for the forefathers plan

(Merle Haggard)
And the world already knows where I stand

Repeat Chorus

(Merle Haggard)
Nothing wrong with the Bible, nothing wrong with the flag

(Gretchen Wilson)
Nothing wrong with the working man me & ol’ hag
We’re just some of many who can’t get no respect
Politically uncorrect

And Digby wishes his own camp enjoyed an equivalently strong cultural identity:

The non-southern Party appears to exist mainly as a repository of opposition to conservative policies. Is that true?

Perhaps the big question is this: If you could write a country song about Blue State identity, what would the lyrics say?

That sounds like an invitation, doesn’t it?

FBI agents reportedly searched the House office of Rep. William Jefferson, D-LA, on Saturday evening and last Sunday in connection with a bribery and corruption investigation.

Prominent Repubican Congressional leaders, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and current Speaker Dennis Hastert, have criticized the FBI’s conduct, and raised Constitutional objections.

Some of the most respected voices on the right side of the Blogosphere, including Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, and Roger L. Simon have objected to the position taken by the Speakers.

Our good friends need to pause for breath, and reflect seriously. The principle of separation of powers matters greatly. Congressional immunity from arrest matters tremendously. These principles of Republican government are infinitely more important than the successful conviction of one more corrupt democrat congressman. History demonstrates abundantly that we can survive the culture of political corruption of the democrat party. But free government could readily be brought to an end by the domination of the several branches of the federal government by a single branch.

In recent history, Congress has been far more guilty than the Executive of arrogating unauthorized powers to itself, and attacking the Executive on the basis of trumped up and exaggerated charges. But, it is certainly possible to imagine an aggressive ultra-liberal president trying to remove Congressional opposition by false allegations of corruption. Some of us believe that the House Majority Leader was successfuly removed by false charges lodged by a partisan county prosecutor in Texas.

It is on rare occasions like this, in which political leaders take principled positions, ignoring their own party’s interests, that our faith in our system of government and its institutions is justified and confirmed.

Read the US Constitution, Article I. Section 6 which states:

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.

I think it is impossible to avoid considering Congressional offices as part of the “going to and returning from the same” aspect of Congressional attendance. And the 18th century concept of a felony would apply to what were then commonly capital crimes of violence, not to ordinary bribery and corruption.

Of course, the determination of all this may, and should be left to the wisdom of Third Branch of the Federal Government, the Supreme Court. But, in the meantime, we should be proud that Republican Legislative leaders will defend the rights of their branch of government, even in the case of its least worthy member.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania supplied a model for the rest of the nation on Tuesday, when a rebellion of state conservatives threw out a dozen deserving long-term GOP incumbents (including my own State Senator back home).

The Wall Street Journal gloats:

It is an understatement to say Pennsylvania conservatives were in a nasty mood. Despite the fact that conservative challengers were outspent on average 8 to 1 in these races, the two top senate leaders were thrown out and 13 incumbent House members bit the dust. (A few of the races are still too close to call.) The two senate leaders had been institutions of power in Harrisburg, with 56 years of incumbency between them. But so displeased were the GOP primary voters that they both could only muster slightly more than one-third of the vote. Senate majority leader Chip Brightbill got knocked out by a tire salesman dubbed “Citizen Mike” Folmer.

In a Mt. Lebanon race, 21-year-old-college student Mark Harris delivered a stunning defeat to long-time big-government incumbent Tom Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson tried to save his job by attacking Mr. Harris as too young and inexperienced to hold office, but Mr. Harris responded by sending the incumbent a copy of “Economics for Dummies.” That tactic evidently sealed Mr. Stevenson’s fate. (We can think of many Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who would benefit from that book.)

“All the incumbent Republicans who lost were complicit in the advancement of [Democratic Governor] Ed Rendell’s borrow, tax and spend agenda” notes Matt Brouillette, the president of the conservative Commonwealth Foundation. Over the past three years the GOP majorities in the House and Senate have expanded the budget by twice the inflation rate and rubber-stamped an unpopular Rendell income tax hike. The final straw for voters in this economically struggling industrial state (it ranks 49th in job creation over the past 20 years) was that, in an act of remarkable arrogance, the Republicans violated the state constitution against a midterm pay raise by voting at 2 a.m. to hike their own salaries as much as 50%. It’s clear now Pennsylvanians don’t think these raises were for a job well done.

“We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania,” conceded a dazed and now deposed Senate President Bob Jubilirer. We hope the tremors are felt by Republicans in Congress and in state capitols around the country. It seems this is a message GOP politicians have to relearn over and over: When they run as Reagan Republicans they win; when they run as big government Democrats they lose.

The New York Times quotes Captain Ed.

A lot of unreliable Congressional Republicans can get ready to start packing their bags this Fall too.

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.

Shelby Steele wonders why we just don’t win.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Steele identifies white guilt as the reason for post-WWII America’s inclination to approach wars half-heartedly and our willingness to accept substitutes for victory, right up to, and including, defeat. The ascendancy of ressentiment certainly plays some significant part in all of this. But I think Steele is overlooked the significance of the estrangement of the American haute bourgeois from participation in the military; and the rise, in the era of endlessly expanding prosperity and security which followed the victory in 1945, of a sense of invulnerability, particularly on the part of American elites.

Americans born post-WWII are commonly rather spoiled, never really having experienced hardship, never confronting the necessity of sacrifice. That’s precisely why so many Americans today are completely irresponsible and frivolous with respect to patriotism, why they don’t believe there is any real obligation to support elected governments in time of war.

They think America is so rich, so powerful, so secure, that war is just a game. “We destroy the credibility of the Administration. We undermine domestic support for the war, and compel Bush to withdraw US forces by helicopter from Baghdad. Then we’ll write triumphant editorials in the Times, and elect a democrat in 2008. Everything will be wonderful.”

They don’t believe the US can really lose anything that matters. They don’t believe that a US defeat has any consequences affecting them. “US withdrawal will just put those Red State warmongers in their place, and get us back in the saddle where we belong,” they think. It has not occurred to them that they just might be very wrong. That this time American defeat might have real consequences.

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.