Category Archive 'Progressivism'
13 May 2021

“I Will Not Eat the Bugs. I Will Not Live in the Pod.”

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Zero HP Lovecraft refuses to be assimilated.

We have watched each click of the ratchet, as mindless pod people tell us that each new change isn’t really happening, it’s a crazy conspiracy, and also it’s good that it’s happening.

Have you ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Don’t waste your time on any version but the original from 1956. It’s a truly chilling film, one of the great classics of sci fi horror, and also a political allegory, as poignant today as it was then.

In the story, alien seed pods grow exact replicas of the people all around you, and when you fall asleep, an alien consciousness grown from your pod takes over your body. At first it seems like a mass hysteria of Capgras delusion, but the aliens and pods turn out to be real.

“I will not eat the bugs, I will not live in the pod” – this far right hate slogan exists because we know the people in charge want to make us eat insects and house us in bug hives. But Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers us a different way to imagine pod life.

Progressives feel a salacious thrill when they imagine what common, ordinary things will be prohibited in the future. This is the sacrifice that the god “progress” demands – each generation gives up a slice of humanity – and they call this “humane.”

We’ve all heard them say it, that perverted thrill they feel when they imagine their own futureshock. “one day, people will see meat-eating as cruel and barbaric” – These cancerous prohibitions are always latent in the progressive mind, then one day they metastasize.

The first time I was politically awake for it was the normalization of homosexuality. Public opinion flipped over night. One day, Obama himself was against it (lie) and the next day your very own friends were taking you aside in private to tell you to stop calling things gay.

Since then it’s happened two more times in rapid succession: first with transsexuality, and second with Bowels Loose Movement. In 2014 they were a minor nuisance, in 2020 everyone spontaneously bent the knee. They did that because people instinctively submit to power.

Watching my friends and coworkers install the latest kernel updates for progressivism makes me feel like everyone around me is being replaced by Alien pod people. For some, the feeling is mutual, but these are people whose slogan is “Change”, who insist WE are the radical ones.

Whether you can be body-snatched by a rapid norm reversal is pretty much the criteria for whether you are fully human or just some kind of animal. True nihilism isn’t hopelessness, it’s having no anchor.

People who believe in nothing also believe in everything, it’s why cults proliferate in times of social collapse, which is what you are living through. Physical collapse isn’t here yet, but cultural collapse, meta-political collapse, has arrived.

RTWT

HT: Vanderleun.

29 Oct 2018

Sad Progressivism

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E.M. Cadwaldr describes the culture of boundless negativity that is Progressivism.

To someone raised in a leftist family, the drill is all too familiar. There may be variations, but my experience went something like this:

One is immersed from birth in Marxist critical theory like a chicken cooking slowly in pot — not that one is ever told explicitly what Marxist critical theory is. In practice, the dogma is practiced as nothing more sophisticated than a lifestyle of continual dissatisfaction — of one long sad and negative discussion after another. The ideal setting for such discussions really has become the coffee shop — now a kind of secular parody of a church. There, one can ruminate, virtue signal to one’s fellow left-leaners, and sip slowly at the bitter cup of fair-trade, overpriced java picked by scenically depicted (but always comfortably far away) peasants from a third world hellhole du jour. If you miss the wafer normally offered in a more traditional sacrament, have a biscotti. One can tip the transgender barista graciously, earning a kind of progressive equivalent of merit, though not the least shred of actual grace. One can snub America simply by occupying the repackaged equivalent of a European institution. This is leftism by association.

The pilgrimage to the bookstore is another popular rite, though not compulsory. There, one finds all sorts of new and interesting topics to feel bad about. One can educate one’s sense of moral outrage, refining the palate to the subtler nuances of the same eternal whine. The vibrant Red whine: How bad western civilization is in general. The anti-American White whine: How bad America is in particular. All such reading fuels the same peculiarly self-destructive end. The progressive is taught to believe that an entirely unproductive and pathologically disheartened outlook is the mark of a superior being. Life is to be lamented from start to finish. Ordinary happiness is for the stupid. Such an ongoing narrative is as sticky and as lethal as a Venus fly trap. Try reading a little of the public intellectual Noam Chomsky. See how wonderfully acerbic and languid he is? Read a bit of the revisionist historian Howard Zinn. Such a blistering indictment of the West by a man who hasn’t troubled himself to examine any inconvenient historical data. Even a cursory study of leftist literature will make it plain to any conservative how leftists have developed an unspoken longing for cultural suicide. They have few or no children. They have no reason to be bothered if America is eventually transformed into just another Latin American failed state. They have been told their whole lives that it would serve us right.

RTWT

11 Jun 2018

The Religion of Progressivism

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When Zman is right, he is right.

[It] is a recurring theme with the American Left. It is the reason they embraced the term “Progressive” as their preferred label. They start with the unspoken belief that the story of man is written. It is the duty of the righteous to live it out in order to reach salvation. It’s why “being on the right side of history” comes up so often. They think of the struggle as between those on the side of the great historical force and those who are standing in the way of it. The righteous are always looking forward and moving forward.

It is also why they think of the past as a dark age dominated by the sinners. There is no romanticism on the American Left, because the past is by definition further away from the glorious future. Instead, the past is filled with monsters that were either slain by the righteous, or locked away, but ready to return at any moment. For example, they remain forever vigilant about the return of Nazis, as if they are a real thing that still exist. In the mind of the American progressive “Nazi” is just another name for Old Scratch.

Notice in that Times piece that the Trump voters are described as “left behind” rather than unhappy or in disagreement. In other words, the people voting for Trump did so because they were sad for having been left behind by the righteous. Voting for Trump was a cry for help. It’s tempting to see this as part of Obama’s narcissism, but in reality his narcissism is also the result of this deep belief in the flow of history. He was chosen to lead the faithful, so of course he is a narcissist. What savior would not be a bit full of himself?

You’ll notice that Progressives are forever warning about some attempt to “turn back the clock” and return us to a former state of sin. It resonates with Progressives, because for them, the eternal quest for salvation means going forward, breaking away from the degraded past. Trump’s “turning the clock back” is viewed as the wages of sin. Obama thinks he tried too hard to deliver his people to the promised land. The result was the great leap backward into Trumpism. It is a lament and call to redouble the efforts of the faithful.

American Progressives are the purest form of true believers, because they have disconnected their beliefs from practical considerations. Therefore, they are immune to facts and reason. When you examine the language they use to describe politics and the culture, you see the extreme mysticism. Obama does not even really know what “left behind” means, but he is sure it is a bad thing. For him, it is a purely a spiritual issue to be thought of in those terms. Practical considerations simply have no salience for him.

The error the Right has made for generations is to think it is possible to prove the Left wrong, and therefore force them to abandon their agenda. That’s like thinking you can disprove sections of the Koran and cause the Muslims to abandon their faith. In fact, efforts to do so will always be met with a fierce defense of the faith. Practical arguments always embolden the righteous, as it confirms their belief in themselves as moral agents in a holy cause. Your irrational resistance is proof they are on the righteous path.

RTWT

13 Oct 2017

America the FUBARed

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Bill Jacobson feels gloomy (with good reason) on the occasion of Legal Insurrection’s 9th Anniversary.

I don’t know if there are any uncorrupted institutions left that matter. The education system, from public grade school through public and private higher ed, is gone. The frontal assault on free speech on campuses is the result. If you think this is just a Humanities and Social Sciences problem, stay tuned. In 3-5 years, if we’re still here, we’ll be writing about how the social justice warriors have corrupted the STEM fields. It’s happening now, it’s just not in the headlines yet.

There is a rising tide of absolutism in ideas and enforcement of ideological uniformity that is palpable. I feel it in the air, even at Cornell which is far from the worst. Incredibly, the new Cornell President has charged a newly-formed task force to explore, among other things, “legal mechanisms [which] are available to the university to prevent, address and counter situations in which protected expression on campus is harmful to those vulnerable to its effects.”

Even language as a means of communication is corrupted, with terminology manipulated and coerced to achieve political ends. It started on campuses, and it’s moved into the AP stylebook and the mainstream.

The press could stand as a bulwark against this slide, but it too is corrupted. The greatest threat to freedom of the press is not Donald Trump’s bloviating about FCC licenses (which has been a favorite threat traditionally of Democrats), but the mainstream press itself which has abdicated even the pretense of neutrality and joined #TheResistance.

The lack of respect for the vote is also what has alienated me from the so-called conservative movement. There now is a cottage industry of self-appointed guardians of conservatism whose main job is to delegitimize the vote, and to encourage a soft coup because they didn’t get their way in the primaries.

The Republican Party? Hah. Don’t get me started.

So I’m thinking through what it will mean to live without institutions.

Sorry to be a downer on our blog birthday. I’ve always tried to be honest with you, and honestly, this blog birthday I’m filled with dread, not good cheer.

It’s impossible not to agree. Just name an institution, from the Boy Scouts to Colleges and Universities, from the NFL to the Entertainment Industry, everywhere you look Progressivism has taken over, revolutionized, gutted, and destroyed.

02 May 2017

Squirrels Used to be Common Pets

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John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Atlas Obscura informs us that a once common custom was obliterated by a change in fashion which then became cemented into Progressive Era regulation.

In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.

“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”

Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep. …

While many people captured their pet squirrels from the wild in the 1800s, squirrels were also sold in pet shops, a then-burgeoning industry that today constitutes a $70 billion business. One home manual from 1883, for example, explained that any squirrel could be bought from your local bird breeder. But not unlike some shops today, these pet stores could have dark side; Grier writes that shop owners “faced the possibility that they sold animals to customers who would neglect or abuse them, or that their trade in a particular species could endanger its future in the wild.”

Keeping pet squirrels has a downside for humans too, which eventually became clear: despite their owners’ best attempts at taming them, they’re still wild animals. As time wore on, squirrels were increasingly viewed as pests; by the 1910s squirrels became so despised in California that the state issued a widespread public attack on the once-adored creatures. From the 1920s through the 1970s many states slowly adopted wildlife conservation and exotic pet laws, which prohibited keeping squirrels at home.

RTWT

18 Mar 2017

How the Medical Profession Was Hijacked By Leftism

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Sir Samuel Luke Fildes KCVO RA, The Doctor, 1891, Tate Gallery.
In 1949, Fildes’ painting “The Doctor” (1891) was used by the American Medical Association in a campaign against a proposal for nationalized medical care put forth by President Harry S. Truman. The image was used in posters and brochures along with the slogan, “Keep Politics Out of this Picture.” 65,000 posters of The Doctor were distributed, which helped to raise public skepticism of the nationalized health care campaign. In 2008, the AMA was no longer defending the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship and the independence of the Medical Profession, but was instead supporting Obamacare and the nationalization of health care.

Dr. Publius, at Ricochet, explains how all this happened.

For the medical profession, there is one ethical obligation that surpasses all others. It is the very obligation that defines a classic profession, and once it is abandoned, members of that so-called profession no longer have any claim whatsoever to any of the special regard, respect, perquisites, or considerations that commonly accrue to true professionals in our society.

Physicians have referred to this obligation as the doctor-patient relationship. Like the lawyer-client relationship and the clergy-parishioner relationship, the doctor-patient relationship is supposed to be a sacred, protected, fiduciary one, in which the patient can feel safe in disclosing private information they may not even willingly tell their spouses, and in return the doctor agrees not only to keep that information private, but also to act on that information in such a way that furthers and optimizes the individual patient’s own best medical interests, without regard to which actions or recommendations might be to the doctor’s interests — or to society’s.

The abandonment of this sacred, fiduciary obligation (honored by physicians for over 2000 years) cannot be blamed on Obamacare. It was formally abandoned years before most of us had ever heard of Mr. Obama. The doctor-patient relationship, never as pure in practice as it was in concept, began to significantly erode in the 1990s. This, of course, was the heyday of for-profit HMOs, when the insurers used extreme coercion to make certain that doctors learned who their real customers were. Doctors who did not place the payers first had their reimbursements slashed, and often found themselves excluded from panels, and therefore from access to patients. In a surprisingly short time doctors by the thousands were signing “gag clauses,” in which they agreed to withhold from patients certain information that might be adverse to the interests of the HMOs.

It would be wrong to say that doctors did not mind these things. It troubled many of them deeply. Indeed, by the turn of the millennium many members of the profession were feeling, and occasionally publicly expressing, tremendous guilt for having had to abandon their chief ethical obligation to their patients, in order to continue practicing medicine.

Faced with an ethical dilemma which was increasingly difficult for them to tolerate, an outcry arose from within the medical profession demanding that their leadership take up the problem, and do something about it. Most doctors had in mind some sort of organized action by which the profession would attempt to reclaim its ethical grounding. And so, conferences were convened, debates (of a sort) engaged in, and at last, action taken.

What doctors in the trenches failed to realize was that the physicians who dedicate their careers to leading professional organizations are almost always Progressives, because this is what Progressives do. So the action that was finally taken was the official adoption of a new set of medical ethics, which was published in 2002: “Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter. “(Annals of Internal Medicine, February 5, 2002). This document described a new ethical precept which was to be formally adopted by the medical profession. That new precept was, of course, “Social Justice.” Under the precept of social justice, doctors, in making medical decisions at the bedside, suddenly became obligated to take the equitable distribution of healthcare resources into account. Covert rationing at the bedside at the behest of payers (who presumably knew more about equitable distribution of resources than individual physicians did), was not only acceptable, and not only a positive good, but an ethical requirement.

During the intervening years this new charter of medical ethics was indeed formally adopted by virtually every medical professional organization in the world.

Adding social justice to the ethical obligations of physicians or course did nothing to ease the discrepancy between the needs the patient and the needs of the payer. But its addition at least assuaged some of the guilt of some of the doctors who chose not to think too deeply about it.

This modernized, progressive version of medical ethics was not the result of Obamacare, but it has served Obamacare well. It was a matter of mere moments before doctors noticed that it would behoove them to shift their efforts from making the insurers happy to making the government happy.

Today, when a doctor makes a medical recommendation to a patient, that patient can no longer be confident that the recommendation is truly the one the doctor believes is best for him or her. For it may instead simply represent what the doctor has decided the patient deserves, given his/her needs in relation to the needs of all the other patients in the Accountable Care Organization, the state, the country, or the world.

13 Jan 2016

Reynolds’ Law

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MiddleClass

Philo contends that Professor Reynolds’ aperçu ought to be awarded the status of a law.

    The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental.

Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, Democrats—but not only Democrats—have fretted that the middle class is shrinking due to the power of large corporations, and that only government action to “level the playing field” can save the middle class. The “middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity.” Obama? Hillary? No, that’s Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (The New Freedom). It’s striking to realize that progressives have been playing the same tune for a century, no matter what’s actually taking place in the economy—indeed, in the midst of the greatest expansion of affluence in the history of the world—with the same set of proffered solutions: greater government power, regulations, higher taxes, and subsidies for the markers of affluence.

Reynolds’ Law thus strikes at the heart of progressivism as a political ideology. Progressivism can’t deliver on its central promise. In fact, it’s guaranteed to make things worse in exactly that respect.

29 Oct 2015

Lippmann in 1937 on Progressivism

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progressiveswilldecide

Nick Short quotes Walter Lippmann (of all people) full-throatedly critiquing Progressivism’s enthusiasm for statist coercion.

In his book entitled “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society“, the once avid progressive Walter Lippmann wrote, “Although the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. Their weapons are the coercive direction of the life and labor of mankind. Their doctrine is that disorder and misery can be overcome only by more and more compulsory organization. Their promise is that through the power of the state men can be made happy.”

Lippmann continued, “Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. …the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men… the only instrument of progress in which they have faith is the coercive agency of government.”

Though this statement in itself is an extraordinary indictment on the direction in which liberalism would inevitably lead us, Lippmann’s next statement is what truly brings home the notion of what we today would consider the modern idea behind progressivism. Noting how progressives seem to imagine no alternative but to rely on the coercive agency of government, Lippmann writes that they can’t even “remember how much of what they cherish as progressive has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion. For virtually all that now passes for progressivism in the United States calls for increasing ascendancy of the state: always the cry is for more officials with more power over more and more of the activities of men.”

I had not been aware of there ever having been a classically liberal Lippmann. When I was young, Lippmann was an aged whited speculchre reliably defending Big Government Progressivism (then called: Liberalism) de haut en bas.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

30 Jun 2014

And the Winner Is…

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Ingres,_Napoleon_on_his_Imp
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, 1806, Musée de l’Armée.

My personal nominee in the most-bat-shit-crazy-Progressive-editorial-of-all-times sweepstakes is Christin Scarlett Milloy’s “Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn” in the current Slate.

Imagine you are in recovery from labor, lying in bed, holding your infant. In your arms you cradle a stunningly beautiful, perfect little being. Completely innocent and totally vulnerable, your baby is entirely dependent on you to make all the choices that will define their life for many years to come. They are wholly unaware (at least, for now) that you would do anything and everything in your power to protect them from harm and keep them safe. You are calm, at peace.

Suddenly, the doctor comes in. He looks at you sternly, gloved hands reaching for your baby insistently. “It’s time for your child’s treatment,” he explains from beneath a white breathing mask, shattering your calm. Clutching your baby protectively, you eye the doctor with suspicion.

You ask him what it’s for.

“Oh, just standard practice. It will help him or her be recognized and get along more easily with others who’ve already received the same treatment. The chance of side effects is extremely small.” This raises the hairs on the back of your neck, and your protective instinct kicks your alarm response up a notch. …

t’s a strange hypothetical scenario to imagine. Pressure to accept a medical treatment, no tangible proof of its necessity, its only benefits conferred by the fact that everyone else already has it, and coming at a terrible expense to those 1 or 2 percent who have a bad reaction. It seems unlikely that doctors, hospitals, parents, or society in general would tolerate a standard practice like this.

Except they already do. The imaginary treatment I described above is real. Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents’ consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It’s called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It’s a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring’s genitals.

We tell our children, “You can be anything you want to be.” We say, “A girl can be a doctor, a boy can be a nurse,” but why in the first place must this person be a boy and that person be a girl? Your infant is an infant. Your baby knows nothing of dresses and ties, of makeup and aftershave, of the contemporary social implications of pink and blue. As a newborn, your child’s potential is limitless. The world is full of possibilities that every person deserves to be able to explore freely, receiving equal respect and human dignity while maximizing happiness through individual expression.

With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby’s life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished—both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent. This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life.

Read the whole thing.
———————-

In the post-Christian Left’s topsy-turvy philosophic world of inverted values, the madman-with-a-sob-story, the outcast traditionally looked upon with contempt and consequently filled with ressentiment must be treated as the representative of the worthiest of causes, and his ravings and absurdities taken seriously.

In the above piece, we are told that mere recognition of actual physical reality, identifying an infant as a boy or a girl, is really a species of traditional societal oppression, which assigns identity and limits possibility at “terrible expense” to some percentage of unwilling victims.

“You can be anything you want to be,” Mr. Milloy (who is a male pretending to be a female himself) contends is the way it ought to be. But why limit the human infant’s choices to boy or girl (or LGBTQ)? Isn’t the system also limiting possibility and potentially thwarting the happiness and self-realization of some small percentage by defining the infant as being the offspring of Mr. & Mrs. Jones and a mere ordinary citizen and member of the Jones family. What about the case of the minority individual whose inner being rejects such pedestrian mediocrity and feels, deep down inside, that he is really the Emperor Napoleon?

Can it possibly be fair or just to impose conventional stereotypes and concrete expectations and deny Jones Minor his desired Imperial titles and regiment of Guards Cavalry? If personal whim is sufficient to deny the physical reality of the sexual organs you are born with, if you can reject that kind of unchosen, externally-imposed role and select a different one at will, why shouldn’t you also be entitled to reject every other decree of fate as well?

If a boy is entitled to redefine himself as a girl (and vice versa), shouldn’t short people be able to demand to be treated as tall, and to have access to height-reassignment surgery? Shouldn’t unpleasant and unattractive people be permitted to demand popularity? And why should anyone be forced by the power structure to be born in poverty and obscurity? Surely, if everyone is entitled to be anything he wants to be, we are all going to demand to be made rich and famous, if Nature neglected to arrange our birth appropriately.

Why, one wonders, limit the protean possibilities to gender. If you can reject gender assignment at birth, why not species assignment? Some people would probably prefer to be lions or wolves or dolphins.

12 Jun 2014

Nativism Isn’t Conservative

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FrankPetruskyFuneral
Funeral of my great great uncle Frank Petrusky [Lith.: Pranas Petrauskas], killed in the mines, May 3, 1892, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.

If you want to identify the proper American policy, the sensible and correct way of doing things, I commonly observe, all you need to do is go back a bit in history to a point in time before Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism, Reformism, Statism, and Goo-Goo-ism had hijacked the American Experiment and messed everything up.

What, then, was the real, traditional American policy on Immigration?

Well, boys and girls, before 1875, immigration to the United States was utterly and totally unrestricted. The Page Act of 1875 was the very first US law restricting immigration in any way. The Page Act was aimed at restricting the immigration of cheap Chinese labor and “immoral” Chinese women. This was the first of a series of laws aimed at restricting Oriental Immigration, based on philosophically questionable principles (excluding cheap labor competition, racism) as well as more reasonable practical considerations (the disinclination of Oriental immigrants at that time to assimilate and their continued loyalty to alien cultures, polities, and princes).

There was no federal role in naturalizing immigrants at all before 1906. Prior to the Naturalization Act of that year, naturalizing people was entirely up to the individual states. The 1906 Law federalized, and standardized, the naturalization process (and, for the first time, insisted on recording the names of wives and children of immigrant men becoming naturalized as citizens). Things were a lot more informal before 1906.

Additional legislation followed, in 1907 and 1908, and in 1917 and 1918, banning the entry of the disabled and diseased, requiring literacy on the part of non-elderly immigrants over 14 years of age, and placing more barriers to immigration from Asian countries. But, there remained no quotas at all on non-Asian immigration until 1921. In 1921, a national negative reaction to the recent arrival of people like my Lithuanian grandparents, all the Italians, the Poles and Slovaks, and the Eastern European Jews produced the Emergency Quota Act, which restricted the number of immigrants admitted from any country annually to 3% of the number of residents from that same country living in the United States as of the U.S. Census of 1910. This was, we need to recall, the great era of the second creation of the Ku Klux Klan, not to be confused with the original Reconstruction era Klan which was dissolved in the 1870s, whose membership peaked in the mid-1920s at 4-5 million men (roughly 15% of the eligible, non-Negro, non-Jewish, non-Catholic population). The quota system of the 1921 Act remained in place until 1965.

Restricting immigration is a Progressive Era policy constituting a radical break with earlier American practices and, I would argue, with the philosophy the country was founded upon.

The 13 colonies which united to become the United States were not culturally or ethnically uniform. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and the Cavaliers of Virginia both originated from England, but they had been cultural opponents, blood enemies, and opposing parties in a Civil War in their home country. Rhode Island was founded by religious radicals who would not live under Massachusetts law. Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers; Maryland by Roman Catholics. New York had originally been a Dutch colony. The Swedes first settled Delaware Bay. The original colonies, before the Revolution, contained significant populations as well of Scots Irish, German religious dissenters, French Huguenots, Scots Highlanders, and various other European groups.

Benjamin Franklin famously complained about Germans with “swarthy complexions” coming over, settling in Pennsylvania, refusing to learn English and not assimilating.

Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation…and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertained. Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it. I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties…In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.

Those rascally Germans, in some well-known cases, have never assimilated and it isn’t hard, even today, to find in Pennsylvania Amish, Mennonites, Dunkards, Schwenkfelders, and so on who still speak German. But Franklin was obviously wrong. They never did take over culturally or politically. Most of their descendants did assimilate, and the ones who didn’t we look upon today as quaint and think that they make an excellent tourist attraction.

Attempting to restrict the free movement of people, proposing to restrict the supply of labor in order to prevent competition, undertaking to have government favor a particular culture, and attempts to exclude hopelessly inferior people are all classic Progressive policies.

Hispanic immigrants come here because Americans need affordable low-skilled labor not otherwise available and we hire them. I would contend that the federal government has no business trying to come between me and Jose the Mexican, if I want to hire Jose to mow my lawn and Jose wants to take the job.

I’ve gotten around a good deal in the last decade, and my own experience persuades me that, in much of the country, all the low skill manual labor these days is being done by illegal Hispanic immigrants.

People who think that the government can stop illegal immigration (when Americans need and want to hire affordable low skill labor) are just as crazy as the people who think the government could successfully ban private gun ownership or who suppose that the government can win the War on Drugs.

In the first year of law school, they teach students the difference between things which are malum in se, things like theft and murder, which are wrong in themselves, and things which are malum prohibitum, things which are wrong only because the government says so.

It’s pretty easy to enforce laws against things which are malum in se. Even the criminals who break those kinds of laws know they are in the wrong. But malum prohibitum matters are different. Normal people just perform a mental calculus about how likely they actually are to get caught, and when they recognize that the state is in no position to catch them, they commonly just ignore those kinds of laws and do as they like.

People who get bent out of shape because somebody crossed the border illegally to come here to do honest work are crazy. They suffer from an excess of law worship.

Wake up and smell the coffee. There are something like 12 million illegal immigrants living in this country. This is exactly like guns. We are never going to go from door to door, searching through every innocent, law-abiding person’s house to confiscate all the guns. And we are never going to go door to door and round up 12 million, mostly honest and hard working people, then march them off, with women and children crying, at bayonet point to the cattle cars to be deported. Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union under Stalin, could pull off that kind of thing, but it is not in the American character.

I agree that we should not be providing welfare to illegal aliens, but straightening out our domestic politics and policies is our responsibility, not theirs.

Ever see my traditional memorial day posting? This country let my grandparents in. My grandparents were Roman Catholics (shudder!). They were Lithuanian, representatives of a people with a lot fewer ties (Thaddeus Kosciusko built West Point!) to American history and culture than the Mexicans, whose ancestors owned, settled, and explored what? 8 or 9 states before the first Anglo-Saxon ever set foot in them. What did the US get in return? They got labor in the coal mines, dangerous work that most Americans didn’t want to do, which labor played a key role in building industrial America and keeping the offices and homes in American cities lighted and heated for generations. America also got from my paternal grandparents three sons and one daughter who served in uniform during WWII.

If this country ever has another serious war, it will be damned glad it failed to deport all those illegal alien Hispanics, whose children will probably actually serve (unlike our privileged elite intelligentsia).

08 May 2013

Tolkien’s “Philomythus to Misomythus”

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Tolkien wrote Philomythus to Misomythus as a rejoinder to one [C.S. Lewis] who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

20 Jan 2013

The Perennial American Struggle for “Reform”

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Obama uses children as stage props as he signs his silly and pointless executive orders.

Dan Greenfield, in another of his intelligent essays, describes the national dynamic operating behind the current gun control debate.

The designated victim, like the ancient saint, is a martyr to a cause. And with the left, the cause is invariably really big government. The suffering of the saintly victims is monetized by the cause as unquestionable moral authority. The victims are designated, made famous and milked for their victimhood, and then the victimhood is bottled into white jars and shipped to Washington D.C.

Americans are suckers for a sob story. But a lot of them are also suckers for personal freedom. Whenever a bullseye is put on freedom for the greater good, two narratives battle it out for the soul of the country. “We have to fix this” and “Leave me alone.”

Think of We have to fix this” and “Leave me alone” as the devil and angel on the shoulders of every cartoon character for the last hundred years. “We have to fix this,” wears an earnest expression and her appearance is calculated to suggest nurse, teacher or PTA member, when in reality she’s usually an Ivy League grad with a lot of time spent in government and political advocacy and whose kids are raised by Elena from Guatemala, whose immigration status is that of Undocumented Democrat. …

The other figure on the shoulder is a familiar one. You can see him on the news talk shows where he shows up as the designated target. Usually he wears his best suit, combs his hair and comes prepared to explain why we shouldn’t give up our freedoms just because a California Senator has decided that this is her chance to create a lasting legacy over the bodies of dead children. …

But there’s still a great deal of visceral sympathy for “Leave it alone” from millions of Americans who have their privacy violated and their rights abridged by government officials every day. They like the thought of a little rebellion, even symbolic, and every time a gun ban is put on the table, they begin buying up the stock of sporting goods stores.

The ordinary Americans may have to account to the government for how he heats his home, mows his yard, feeds his hogs, fuels his car, teaches his kids, sells his crops and fixes his roof, but the 2nd allows him to hang on to the illusion that he is his own master and that at any moment an uprising can sweep away the petty bureaucrats who have their Vibrams on his neck. And maybe one day it can.

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