Henry Dampier

From a commentary on Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia:

The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations and antipathies against others it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils It has been often likely to compromit the interests of our own country in favor of another The permanent effect of such a policy will be that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men of whom there may be just grounds of distrust the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader .

…

To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country as recommended in the message would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.

This debate perennially recurs throughout American history. The only thing that’s really changed is that we’ve developed a boundless faith in the ability of education to eradicate all differences between races, religions, and political beliefs. This belief seems to be immune to the accumulation of evidence over centuries that it isn’t quite possible.

What’s also sometimes missed by some libertarian analyses of the history of immigration is that they create a false dichotomy between the international regime of border control that developed in Europe after World War I and the more liberal state of affairs which existed before. Besides technology, one of the major developments was that of mass immigration between newly popular nation-states, most of which were eager to create ethnic and religious uniformity within their borders.

Intellectuals then say that it would be wonderful to go back to the time when borders were more liberal — that is, to the time before the Reformation and the religious wars that followed it. The mostly free travel within Christendom didn’t also include complete freedom for everyone to swap their allegiances. There was some freedom of travel — entirely within the minorities which were not tied to a fief of some kind. Industrialization made it so that the masses were no longer tied to the land, which made mass migration something conceivable even during peacetime.

Owing to the doctrine of equality, it’s become far more difficult to make what would be a reasonable statement of policy in most times and places throughout history — to grant liberality in travel to certain classes of people with certain characteristics (such as brilliant scientists or merchants), and to restrict it more for other classes of people with other characteristics (such as masses of Islamic paupers or Latin-American Communists). This is also what the formal laws in most Western countries call for — but various parties tend to subvert the intentions of those laws with broad cultural support.

It used to be that you had to fly all the way to Africa to get the perfect selfie. Some time in the near future (and in the present within many cities throughout the Western world) there’ll be no reason to travel terribly far at all to get the right portrait partner.

Where we should be concerned is that there might not be much of a home country to be able to support that kind of short distance humanitarian tourism.

When you select for an administrative, bureaucratic elite based on how maudlin their essays are about their trips to Africa and South America — along with how crowded their extracurricular schedules were, and how well they filled in bubbles on exams with no. 2 pencils — you may discover that you’ve selected for a group of feckless and sentimental morons who are nonetheless disproportionately good at lacrosse and cheating on take-home exams.

This group will be completely immune to persuasion that it might be a bad thing for all the nice people who posed so nicely in those photos when you were on your international community service trip might be less than compatible with the countries that you have been charged with ruling. When the only pilgrimage you recognize as valid is the one taken for community service hours to buffer your application to Harvard, it’s going to be hard to empathize or understand cultures that take things like pilgrimages to Mecca seriously.

It’s hard to impress upon people not familiar with religious trends in the temples of high progress as to how different the march of the global south must look to them as it does to people with less elevated affinities. To the undereducated, it looks like an invasion. To the enlightened, it appears like the deserving poor on the threshold of attaining justice. These two worldviews are irreconcilable.

If, your whole life, you have been raised to believe that your highest and most sacred mission is to shower money, attention, and resources on the third world, it’s not terribly likely that it’ll be possible to persuade you out of it. This is more frightening than the conspiratorial vision of elite behavior, which tends to interpret self-destruction as part of a hidden plot instead of dreamlike self-annihilation. Rational evil can be dealt with in rational terms, through argument and persuasion. Holy insanity can only be opposed directly or survived by hunkering down.

Conor Friedersdorf is the Atlantic’s resident right-leaning columnist. He wants you to know how problematic the conservative movement has become.

Conor has done a good job bringing up the faults of the movement: mainly, that it exists as a sort of entertainment, providing emotional catharsis without actually having any roots in the governing structure of the United States. Rush Limbaugh can make hilarious jokes about illegal immigrants, but he has no real constituency in the think tanks and public bureaucracies which actually administer the country. These entertainers can electioneer for politicians, but those politicians have little real ability to foster change.

There are a set of solutions that would work. Conor is throwing a tantrum about people taking their civics classes at face value, believing that elected officials have authority, and that the legitimacy of the state flows from the consent of the people that the state governs. Faced with what the people actually believe, Friedersdorf is shocked and horrified that they are governed more by emotion than reason, by ressentiment rather than a sophisticated understanding of political philosophy. Yes, the people are xenophobic, antisemitic, boorish, and low class.

Yes, all this is true. The people are morons, and most probably shouldn’t be permitted to drive a compact sedan — much less to have any say in the operation of a government.

The most direct way to both make the United States more conservative, overall, in its governance while also ending the demagoguery is to put a stop to the tyranny of the popular vote. Without the popular vote, popular political entertainers will lose much of their ability to interfere with the political process. It will also formalize the existing arrangement of the state — which diverges dramatically away from the civics-class arrangement that people tend to believe exists, in error. Ending the popular vote will also give Washington more flexibility to keep society progressing to a glorious future. A good second step would be to kick the most recalcitrant states out of the union. Reconstruction was tried; Reconstruction failed. A smaller, leaner, more progressive United States will emerge, while the rest will be able to regress at their own pace.