Sunday, March 04, 2007

What's a Democrat to do?

In "Return of the Native" (The American Conservative, December 4, 2006), Kara Hopkins explores the dilemma in which the Democratic party finds itself. How can the self-professed champions of the working class be taken seriously, while continuing to push its multicultural agenda?

Can the Democrats' current flirtation with "populism" be harmonized with its avid support for immigrants--illegal and otherwise? Can members of the party continue to denigrate those Americans, who challenge mass immigration policies, as "xenophobes" and "racists," and expect to win a majority vote?


And, most importantly, will black and Hispanic opponents of open borders, who are greatly impacted by unlimited immigration's downward pressure on wages, be shut up and kept in line by the Democrats' old politically correct platitudes regarding "minorities?" Having stretched themselves so far in the realm of identity politics, where can the Democrats turn? Hopkins writes:

After Republicans joined them on civil rights, Democrats crawled out on the multicultural limb to maintain their supposed monopoly on public virtue. In so doing, they became a new breed of oligarchs, using powerful institutions and the cudgel of political correctness to enforce an artificial state of affairs.

Thus, when they speak of trade they employ the vague language of human rights rather than American equity. And when they bring themselves to mention immigration, it's to indict populists like CNN's Lou Dobbs for "hysteria and jingoism" as The Nation [magazine] did. . . . As long as diversity is enthroned as the highest political good, concern for Joe Six-Pack cannot be primary . . . .

The question the Left must answer, therefore, is whether concern for foreigners outweighs loyalty to citizens, for the American minorities they claim to protect are most vulnerable to the flood of unskilled labor. That is their entry point into the immigration debate and the first step back to authentic populism.
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Unalloyed Imperialism

When one powerful country invades and conquers a small, weak country thousands of miles away with a very different culture, language, history, religion, and society in order to replace its regime permanently with one resembling the occupier’s own, change its economic structure, control its most important resource, and use it to dominate and change other regimes in the region, that is classic, unalloyed imperialism. To refuse to admit this and cover it up with transparent dodges of liberation, democratization, self-defense, and Global War on Terror is to indulge still further in the comforting lies that are ruining America’s capacity for world leadership and even for democratic self-governance.

-- Paul W. Schroeder, "Liberating Ourselves," The American Conservative (October 9, 2006) Read more!

Mindless Interventions

In 1999, in his book, A Republic Not an Empire, Pat Buchanan presciently wrote: "If we continue on this course of reflexive interventions, enemies will one day answer our power with the last weapon of the weak--terror, and eventually cataclysmic terrorism on US soil." And two years later, we lived through that cataclysmic terror.

In a recent syndicated column, Buchanan writes:

Now let me repeat the warning: If this Prodigal Nation does not cease its mindless interventions in quarrels and wars that are not America's concerns, our lot will be endless acts of terror until, one day, a weapon of mass destruction is detonated on American soil. What is it about global empire that is worth taking this risk?
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