George Rebane
A couple of mornings ago NPR’s Morning Edition reported that the illegal entrant rate across our southern border has exceeded over a million per year, and that the border security and illegal alien handling facilities are overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, the Border Patrol has now abrogated the role of the US Customs and Border Protection agency in turning the illegals loose into our society with minimal or no ability to track their identity, origin, or intentions. All we know is that they will quickly disperse and emerge in ‘sanctuary’ communities where all manner of public doles to succor them await.
The national border crisis is daily attested by the reports from the border and testimony from homeland security and border control officials past and present. Recently they were joined by several Obama era higher-ups including former Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson who testified that there is indeed a border crisis in progress.
In the face of this, the country’s anti-American political faction continues to celebrate, promote, and sustain this deluge of indigents, the human trafficked, criminals, diseased, and economic opportunists that are now pouring across our southern border. They also communicate their welcoming message in the “shithole countries” of Central America, well-funded messages that induce desperate people and dubious opportunists to undertake the long and dangerous journey north through Mexico. Our progressives don’t care for the migrants’ welfare or risk involved during the journey. Their only objective is to maximize the number of illegals who successfully penetrate our border, who then become political fodder within a byzantine and broken immigration system. Ultimately their presence and large numbers will serve anti-American ends one way or another.
Astoundingly, there are even many pro-American light thinkers who cannot understand the necessity for and cost-effectiveness of an improved and extended physical barrier to span critical sections of the border. They swallow the argument of the anti-Americans that what we really need is to greatly expand and improve the welcoming facilities to house, feed, care for, and relocate the arriving hordes. All such responses will do everything to increase the flow and nothing to stem it. It is the analog of calling for more bailing buckets instead of patching the hole in a sinking boat. There is no public awareness or discussion of the longer-term impact that these indigents and their now accelerating arrival rates will have on our institutions, economy, and citizens. The existential goal of the anti-Americans is to simply keep the ingress rate high and increasing. No one has asked, ‘How and when will this massive migration of illegal aliens stop?’
For all intents and purposes, socially and ideologically we are already two countries sharing the same landmass and a contentious dysfunctional federal government. The two countries are readily apparent to anyone who pays attention; no longer sharing cultures, values, mores, histories; in short, two distinct ontologies are operational in America today. (An ontology is a comprehensive world view that covers all of one’s perception of existence, and how its particulars interrelate to create what we experience and believe.) Today our leftwing innocents cannot connect our social programs, entitlements, expressions of social justice, higher taxes, more regulations, and ever larger government as waypoints to socialism cum communism (autocracy to tyranny). They have been taught that we are a democracy gone awry, and that we need to get more people involved voting directly for public policies and all political candidates – the notion of a republic is foreign to them and smacks of the corrupt capitalistic elites depriving people of their rightful power and share of wealth. Their history does not teach that democracies ALWAYS end badly as tyrannies.
And most progressives are also taught a very simplistic picture of governance. Most visible today is their denial of their socialist objective. Their constituencies are told daily that since the US does not yet practice all the trappings of socialism, then therefore we are not on our way to that end. For them it’s the all/nothing, yes/no, true/false world they are preaching – nuances, shadings, and obvious precursors are banished from their narrative. A perfect example of such a denial was recently contributed by a local progressive intellectual Dr Milan Vodicka in his essay on socialism (here).
In the Left’s ontology all cultures are equal along the dimensions that really count. For example, they cannot attribute culture as the explanation for why students of Chinese and Japanese descent do well in school, and what has happened to black America’s culture in the last fifty years (e.g. Jason Riley’s ‘Culture Explains Asians’ Educational Success’). They cannot attribute culture as the prime causal factor for entire countries that stay mired in national corruption, crime, stultifying poverty, and/or religious tyranny. And, of course, they cannot foresee what culture clashes have already done and promise in our country as assimilation toward a formerly shared American culture has today become an arrogantly rejected option.
To our Left, the millions pouring illegally across our southern border are either seen as culturally moot, or worse, culturally calamitous to our social order to facilitate the ongoing fundamental transformation. Anyone who points out the cultural bases for social conflicts here and elsewhere is immediately accused of being a brown skin rejecting racist. But cultural clashes have little to do with race as attests the progress in the social and commercial environments of such all-white countries as Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and, of course, Russia.
Our coming apart has a rich literature documenting its progress. Contributors include sociologists, economists, historians, and, of course, national pundits in the popular media (here and on numerous blogs like RR’s Great Divide category). We have covered most of this literature over the years, mostly into an intense and entertaining local headwind of progressives who form part of the Left’s grass roots contingent. Their people are either ignorant of what is going on, since their media outlets eschew coverage of what many now acknowledge the Great Divide, or they belong to the cynical elite. The latter oppose the notion and any discussion of the Great Divide, primarily because they don’t want to wind up with a territorial and/or political division that leaves them with a decimated workforce that is mostly devoid of wealth-generating skills. Since the Left’s recently declared objectives for America have extinguished any hope of a common ground for rapprochement, the Right’s response to these denials and attacks is the biblical, ‘Let my people go!’
[Addendum] We may have passed a major milestone on the road to recognizing the Great Divide. No less than the progressives’ primary policy analysis organization, their august Brookings Institute has finally published Divided Politics, Divided Nation – Hyperconflict in the Trump Era by Darrell West. (more here) As can be seen in the title, the lion’s share of the blame for this lands on President Trump. While at least half the country saw Obama as the most divisive president since FDR, West remains true to his publisher, but does have the insight to conclude “that societal tensions have metastasized into a dangerous tribalism that seriously threatens U.S. democracy. Unless people can bridge these divisions and forge a new path forward, it will be impossible to work together, maintain a functioning democracy, and solve the country’s pressing policy problems.” Of course, the country is divided on much more than “pressing policy problems”, but that insight may have to wait for the passing of the next milestone on the way to the Great Divide. (H/T to reader)
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