We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Protestors march the streets again and wave their signs, this time to object to some unspecified legislation, but mostly to object to the rising sentiment towards taking our border security more seriously. Details are all over the blogosphere. Here are some examples.

These protests are far from spontaneous. ANSWER, a Communist front group, was reportedly involved in organizing them, as were various Spanish radio stations. In the first round of protests about a week ago, the marchers unwisely carried Mexican flags. This time around they were advised not to do so. Some did anyway.

Let’s avoid the contents of the immigration debate itself, and instead view it from the outside. Underneath the current shouting, the immigration issue doesn’t follow the usual fault lines and group loyalties of American politics. It moves in a different direction.
Here’s my theory American politics: It always works on a single axis. We’ve always had two major parties, with each party being an endpoint of the big axis or dimension along which American politics is fought. Each party is in fact a bundle of disparate groups, each with its own agenda. Each group determines how close it is to each party, and picks sides accordingly. So the major political axis is an average of all the little issues, and none of the little issues align exactly with the major axis. It’s like a bundle of sticks bound together.

Each group and its corresponding axis is always in motion, and the party struggles to hold them together by persuading each group that the advantage of party unity outweigh the price of compromise. Eventually the forces inside the bundle become too strong, and the bundle breaks open, sending the sticks flying in all directions to find some new axis around which to bundle themselves.

It’s tempting to think that the big issues of politics are timeless, but in fact the axis changes every few decades. Probably the most dramatic was the death of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party in 1856 over the slavery issue. Gold versus silver was the burning issue in the late 1800s, in what was really a debate about how to handle monetary policy in an age of rapid economic growth.

The axis hasn’t moved much in the past few decades. Ever since WWII, the issues have been pretty stable: Communism, hedonistic liberation, and government control of the economy. Two of those three are weakening.

Communism is Dying

I include in Communism all of its little branches ideologies that encourage people to form group identities and hate their neighbors: feminism, racial separatism, class envy, environmentalism, unionism, etc. Communists always need people to hate each other; the particular type of hate doesn’t really matter.

The Cold War is over; there’s no USSR for the conservatives to fight, or for the liberals to surrender to. And Communism’s worldwide failure has pulled the intellectual foundation out from beneath its offshoot ideologies. There’s still plenty of rage burning in the fringes, but none of it has any future. If you went back forty years and asked a Black Panther what the point of all the violence was, he would probably have lots of rhetoric handy about some type of socialist utopia—for them, I think it was a race war—that was just around the corner, if only enough blood could be spilled.

The feminists’ utopia was less well-defined, but something wonderful was going to happen as soon as women were freed from the shackles of maternity, closed the mythical wage gap, claimed control of large swaths of language, won an unrestricted right to abortion, etc. And they largely got everything they wanted, but somehow utopia failed to appear. They should have studied Stalin more closely: Every generation the populace needs a new enemy for your followers to hate. The feminists were too effective: They reached the horizon and didn’t find the Promised Land, leaving their followers to wonder what the point of all their hatred was.

There are still plenty of Communists out there, of course, with many more who adhere to its branch ideologies. And they’re going to cling to their beliefs just as long as they can, which will be for many more years. But only the most obtuse among them can fail to notice that they’ve lost. Their belief is going to die. A hundred years from now there will be only a handful of Communists, if any. They’re like Southerners in the 1850s: They must have known that their way of life was going to end eventually, because the mechanization of the world was going on all around them. But they fought ferociously to the bitter end. So it will be with Communism.

Hedonism

The national move to hedonism is younger than American Communism, and will take longer to die. But it has the same problems: Its roots are gone.

By ‘hedonism’, I mean organized political hedonism—ideological hedonism—not just the individual pursuit of pleasure. In the sixties and seventies, lots of people really thought that they could live lives of unrestricted consequence-free pleasure. This was the ideology of Hugh Hefner and Timothy Leary, the age of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. The younger crowd may not appreciate it, but many of those committed hedonists were quite sincere in their belief that their pleasures wouldn’t hurt anyone. Many thought that hallucinogenic drugs would lead to spiritual enlightenment, and that kids were better off with divorced unmarried parents than unhappy married ones.

Fortunately, ideological hedonism was never particularly well organized, except when it intersected with Communism. Its inherent strength is in its natural appeal to human nature. Most people would like to believe in the virtue of pursing their animalistic pleasures, but their likelihood of doing so was tied directly to their awareness of its consequences. It was easy to advocate divorce for the children back in an age when divorce was rare. Today, the real consequences of divorce are too obvious for anyone to make that argument with a straight face.

So ideological hedonism, like feminism, succeeded too well. The Age of Aquarius did not dawn. Pleasure still has consequences, and we all must live like humans rather than animals. Most people understand that today, though they don’t know what to believe instead of hedonism. The rich and powerful, relatively insulated from the consequences of their pursuit of pleasure, still adhere to their childhood religion.

This elite tenacity on hedonism is most obvious in the same-sex marriage debate, which the Left begins on the premise that each person’s defining characteristic is his preferred method of reaching orgasm. Legislation pending in the California Assembly right now would mandate the rewriting of public-school history along those lines. And there are still many stalwart advocates of drug legalization out there.

The problem with ideological hedonism is that—like Communism—it has no future. Is homosexuality such a great idea that everyone should do it? Should each person pursue his own pharmacological pleasure, regardless of the effects on society? Is promiscuous sex without shame a source of liberating pleasure, or does it leave its practitioners unhappy, and their children miserable? Everyone knows the answers.

The peculiar problem with hedonism is not so much defeating it, but finding something to replace it with. Many people find it difficult to frame any sort of moral argument in non-hedonistic terms. Some have even claimed that there are no moral arguments that don’t boil down to hedonism, that a hedonistic utilitarianism is the only rational morality. The counterpoint and eventual replacement will likely be a revival and modernization of some form of Christianity.

The Wobbling Axis

The Cold War is over. The Sexual Revolution failed. The only big political axis left is the size of government, and that debate will likely go on for the foreseeable future, though it could easily devolve into non-ideological pork-barrel politics.

So what will we fight about in the politics of the American twenty-first century? I think that we can get an idea from the current immigration argument, which has split both parties. The Democrats welcome the prospect of more likely voters, though the influx of cheap labor is bad for the unions.

The big business that largely fund Republicans like illegal immigration for the same reason: More labor supply means cheaper prices for labor. The libertarians are ambivalent; they like freedom, but they also generally respect law and public order.

The conservatives have the serious complaints about illegal immigration: It’s illegal. Leaving laws unenforced undermines our idea of law. Most of the illegals aren’t assimilating, which tears at our national and cultural unity. And now we have security concerns: If thousands of poor Mexicans can easily slip into the country, then surely a few dozen Muslim terrorists, well funded and well trained, can do so too.

So ignore the Communist idiots with their signs, except to note that the lack of assimilation is real, and occurs on a massive scale. Politically, the fight is within the Republican Party, between its donors and its voters.

I’m not saying that immigration will be the next great axis of American politics, or even a significant part of it. But I think that it’s a harbinger of what’s coming. Combine it with the War on Terror and the various Muslim excesses in Europe, and I see an overall theme of national confidence and strength versus pessimism, self-hatred, and isolationism. That’s where we’re headed: Will America protect its interests abroad and maintain a cohesive culture at home, or will we cower before foreign dictators and allow masses of unassimilated immigrants dissolve our culture?
This type of question isn’t new in American history. We’ve been through several of them, from the Louisiana Purchase to Manifest Destiny to the Spanish-American War to WWI to WWII to the Cold War. The history books mercifully forget them, but each assertion of national confidence faced domestic opposition that was at least as bitter and passionate as what we’re seeing today. Here is an account of a filibuster designed to delay our entry into WWI:

A dozen senators who agreed with La Follette’s [filibuster] spoke around the clock until 9:30 on the morning of March 4. When La Follette rose to deliver the concluding remarks, the presiding officer recognized only those who opposed the filibuster. The Wisconsin insurgent erupted with white-hot rage and screamed for recognition. While Democrats swarmed around the furious senator to prevent him from hurling a brass spittoon at the presiding officer, Oregon Senator Harry Lane spotted a pistol under the coat of Kentucky Senator Ollie James. Lane quickly decided that if James reached for the weapon, he would remove from his pocket a heavy steel file and plunge its sharp point into James’ neck.

I would suspect that WWII isolationism was just as fierce—and more successful. I’m old enough to remember how hysterical the opposition to Ronald Reagan was. They said he was a moronic madman who was going to start a nuclear war and get us all killed—right up until the wall fell.

This wave of immigration protest don’t deserve nearly the attention it’s getting. I think of a strong old man flexing his muscles: It’s mildly interesting to note how much strength he’s got left, but it’s not particularly important, because he won’t be around for much longer. The important point is that immigration as a political issue doesn’t follow the same axis as other issues, and it’s probably a sign of where American politics is headed.

 Update: Rick Lowry has a piece on JWR and NRO that’s mostly consistent with what I’m saying.