Culture Matters 1: Tom McCaffrey
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/culture-matters?f=must_reads#ixzz45z9PZMAe
James Fenimore Cooper disliked Yankees. They streamed out of New England in the early decades of the 19th century, invading the staid farming communities of Cooper’s beloved upstate New York. In his novels, Cooper portrayed these descendants of the Puritans as restless, grasping, and mercenary, sharp traders out for a quick buck. Theirs was an alien culture to the Dutch gentry of the Hudson River Valley and thereabouts, and their arrival changed that region forever.
History is one long progression of cultural invasions. England was home to the Celtic Britons. Then came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons, then the Norsemen, and then the Normans. Each time, the new arrivals intermixed with the people already there, giving birth in the process to a new, hybrid culture.
Probably most cultural invasions throughout history occurred violently. But liberalism-and I use the term in its original sense to mean “freedom”-makes it possible for such invasions to take place peacefully. A liberal world is characterized by the free movement of ideas, of goods, and of persons. And all three can be hard on the cultures they come into contact with.
In a free country, to protect a local or regional culture against ideas or goods or persons that originated elsewhere within the country, there are things one may do and things one may not. One may argue against ideas, or choose not to buy the books or newspapers that propagate them. But one may not burn down the buildings where those books or newspapers are produced, nor induce the government to censor the offending ideas. One may refuse to buy goods produced elsewhere, but one may not cause the government to restrict their importation. And as for persons relocating to one’s neighborhood from elsewhere, one may (or should be free to) refuse to rent or sell them living accommodations, or refuse to serve them or hire them at one’s place of business. But one may not ride about at night in white hoods terrorizing them, and one certainly may not induce the government to prohibit their moving into one’s neighborhood.
In other words, a citizen of a liberal country like the United States should be free to use any non-violent means to protect his culture from ideas, goods, or persons that originated elsewhere. But he may not use physical force to that end, either his own or his government’s. To employ force would violate the rights of individual Americans.
So we, who value individual liberty, are willing to see our local and regional cultures subjected to all manner of assaults emanating from elsewhere within our country, rather than forcibly to restrict the freedom of Americans to traffic in ideas and goods, or to move about freely. This exposing of our cultures to harmful outside influences is an unavoidable cost of living in a free country.
Note that if one is happy living where one lives, among people who share one’s culture, it is not necessarily irrational or immoral to disapprove of new arrivals possessing a different culture who threaten to change what one loves. Liberalism is hard enough on local and regional cultures as it is. To suggest, as the Left do today, that it is racist or bigoted to resist-by non-violent means-the cultural invasion of one’s neighborhood is to add insult to injury.
Many sincere liberals see the free movement of ideas, goods, and persons that prevails within the borders of the U.S. as an ideal, which they aspire to recreate on an international scale. The free movement of ideas across our international borders is well established. The free movement of goods is less well established and is under assault today. To restrict the importation of ideas or of goods would, as I have said, violate the rights-or what should be the rights-of American citizens.
The movement of persons into a free country like the U.S. is more complicated. Americans should have the right to hire foreign workers, a right that could be satisfied through the use of temporary work permits. Although, by making it unnecessary for many Americans to work, the welfare state does increase the need for foreign workers “to do the jobs Americans refuse to do.”
But what of foreigners who want to immigrate to the U.S to live? If the cultural difference between, say, Mexico and the U.S. were as small as the difference between Connecticut and Massachusetts, then there might be little grounds for opposing migration between the two countries. But the truth is otherwise. Very few cultures in the world today have given rise to, and have proven capable of sustaining, a political system that protects individual rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and, especially, private property.
A culture is the sum total of the values and practices that are common to a group of human beings. It includes their values and practices relating to manners, morality, family, religion, work and economic matters, technology, language, manhood and womanhood, social and sexual relations, popular and fine arts, schooling, civic and social organizations, leisure pursuits, athletics, epistemology, news and entertainment media, and their own history, to name just a very few of the elements that make up an advanced culture.
It would be difficult to identify all the values and practices that are necessary to sustain a free political system such as the one laid out by the U.S. Constitution. But if a people have proven successful, to one degree or another, at sustaining such a political system, then it is undeniable that, to that degree, they must possess and practice the necessary set of values.
The people of the United States proved remarkably capable of launching and of sustaining a free political system for the first hundred years of their history. They have proven less so since the start of the Progressive era, but more so, nevertheless, than most of the peoples of the rest of the world. In contrast to the Americans, to take one example, the people of Venezuela have proven quite less capable of sustaining free political systems. They clearly do not possess and practice to a sufficient degree the cultural values that freedom requires.
If persons from such a country immigrate to the United States in sufficient numbers, they can derange the culture that sustains our political freedom. To prevent this from happening, Americans should encourage newcomers to learn American values. And it might not be sufficient that they learn only our political values. Since political freedom depends on the sum total of the values and practices of a culture, the newcomers might need to learn much of our culture, to “assimilate,” as we say.
Consider, for example, the long-standing American belief that legitimate law rests on a moral foundation. We see a remnant of this belief in the idea that slavery is fundamentally wrong, and that no statute, no matter how democratically arrived at, could make it right. The American Founders called this “natural law.” It has been crucial to maintaining Americans’ rights, and most of the world’s cultures do not subscribe to it.
Or consider Americans’ willingness to obey the laws not out of fear of punishment but out of a belief that the laws are just. This is related to the natural law idea, and it plays a greater role in sustaining free political institutions than many of Americans appreciate. (This belief in the justness of the laws deteriorates as limited, republican governance is replaced by the hyper-regulation and redistributionism of the social democratic welfare state.) Not all cultures share this belief in the justness of the laws or the consequent willingness to obey them.
A free people can absorb a small number of immigrants from unfree cultures without suffering significant cultural or political derangement. The larger the number of immigrants at any one time, however, the more likely it becomes that the people of the host country will suffer some degree of harm to their political institutions and a consequent diminution of their liberties.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. was flooded by immigrants from Europe, many steeped in socialist ideas. This great influx coincided with the rise of Progressivism in the United States, a movement committed to transforming the U.S. from a constitutional republic into a “democracy,” a first step on the way to making us the social democratic welfare state we are today. I suspect that the votes of those immigrants and their descendants might well have been decisive in making possible Wilsonian Progressivism, FDR’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Given the economic forces that drove that great wave of immigration-especially the demand for labor to man America’s rapidly proliferating factories, it might well have been politically impossible to restrict immigration at that time. (Today, the opponents of open borders are called racists; then they were dismissed as “Know-Nothings.”) There is no denying that those immigrants and their progeny made inestimable contributions to American culture. But if I am correct that they also helped transform America from a republic of free individuals into a social-democratic welfare state, then the people of the United States surrendered a great deal of their liberty, and perhaps initiated their own dissolution, to pay for those cultural contributions.
Or consider California. In 1970, non-Hispanic whites comprised over three quarters of the population of California. But by 2014, they comprised only 38.5 percent of the population, the majority of the rest being immigrants or the descendents of recent immigrants. California was already leaning leftward in 1970. Democrats won control of both houses of the California legislature that year, and they have not surrendered it since. But Californians voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, and 1988. They have not voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988, though. And in 2012 the Democrats won a supermajority in both houses of the legislature for the first time. It is hard to deny that immigrants have been decisive in transforming California from a moderately left-leaning state in 1970 to an overwhelmingly left-leaning one in 2014.
Today Republicans are virtually powerless to stop the Left from having their way in California. So the Democrats have commenced an all-out assault on the Second Amendment. They have prohibited professional counselors from advising sexually confused young people to pursue heterosexuality rather than homosexuality, in violation of the First Amendment. They have forced schoolgirls to accommodate boys who want to be girls in their bath and locker rooms. And they have diminished the meaning of U.S. citizenship by authorizing the issuing of drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens.
To appreciate the role that immigrants play in the Left’s strategy to “transform” what remains of the American republic, consider Mr. Obama’s cynical throwing open of the southern border, his unconstitutional refusal to enforce immigration laws, and his efforts to import as many Moslem refugees as he can before his term is up. Mr. Obama aims at nothing less than the California-izing of the rest of America.
Mr. Obama’s open borders policy is related to his expansion of the welfare state, and the latter is as immoral as the former. For a government to seize the wealth of a private citizen in order to buy the vote of another citizen is the epitome of corruption. It does not matter how democratically the welfare laws were enacted, nor how many courts have sanctioned them. The welfare state is a moral abomination. When immigrants from illiberal cultures are brought in to provide additional voting power to sustain and enlarge the welfare state, then those immigrants have become a threat to the rights of American citizens. At all times and under all circumstances, a free people are morally obligated to limit the flow of immigrants to such a level as can readily be assimilated and can pose no threat to their rights.
I am not blaming immigrants exclusively for our political deterioration. I am only arguing that they have been a contributing factor. Our own inability or unwillingness to defend our culture from continual assaults from the Left is more to blame for our political dissolution than is immigration.
Finally, in placing some of the blame on immigrants, I am not suggesting that race or ethnicity has played any role at all. I am blaming the cultures that immigrants have brought with them, which means, the ideas at the root of those cultures. An individual’s destiny is not determined by his race or ethnicity, but it is determined by his ideas. And people can change their ideas.
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