The Great Comeuppance

Poetic Justice with bad hair

The conservative shuffle over to populism has finally broken into a run.  Unending economic hardship and liberal cultural triumph have torn the white middle class away from their neglectful conservative masters.  While those affluent overlords were swooning over no-capital-gains-tax fantasies and drinking themselves deep of Social Darwinist ideological purity, their downscale cousins were weathering decades of lowered wages and lowered expectations.  The America those workers knew, that sustained them and valued them, has been dying, and they’ve become desperate for a solution.  Now a large section of the supposedly conservative base supports a candidate who has argued for raising taxes and lowering pay for the rich, who opposes free trade and cuts to social welfare programs, and who condemns the influence of money in politics.  Donald Trump is what happens when the interests and sensibilities of such a large constituency are consistently ignored, marginalized and disdained.   Trump is the blowback from conservative failure.

Conservatism has always had a troubled relationship with its own base.  Modern American conservatism began in the 1950’s as a small intellectual movement that coalesced around National Review magazine, which argued over such things as whether the great British conservative Edmund Burke supported tradition per se, or as a means to protect ordered liberty.  They wrote homages to the British ruling class and Generalissimo Franco’s enthusiastically Catholic fascism – hardly positions likely to garner widespread support in a country with such a small-d democratic political culture.  Their anti-welfare-state positions gave them ready-made supporters among the rich and the business community, but little more.

So they went shopping for a constituency.  Their first lucky break was McCarthyism.  The conservatives were staunch anti-communists (opposed to socialism in general and Stalinism in particular) and they were quite happy to support a demagogue who accused liberal Democrats of being Soviet spies.  But McCarthyism was about more than overblown fear of communist subversion, it was also a movement of small town working whites against supposedly unpatriotic Northeastern establishment technocrats.  It was the first stirring of right-wing populism since the decline of the Father Coughlin and the America First crowd in the early 40’s.  That is, it was a base of support conservatives could use to attack the New Deal.

But McCarthyism collapsed and the conservative movement had to keep shopping.  This time they found a more reliable constituency: segregationists.  Opponents of civil rights shared conservative hostility toward the liberal federal government, and conservative’s natural deference to traditional social hierarchy meant they had no compunction about throwing their intellectual heft behind an explicit defense of white supremacy.  In the internal Republican fights of early 1960’s they supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a thoroughgoing conservative who forged an alliance of business interests and segregationists by strongly denouncing both the New Deal and civil rights legislation.  By the time Goldwater had become the Republican nominee in 1964, the ideology of modern American conservatism had hardened into implacable resistance against the three main threats to traditional American order: international communism, the welfare state, and racial integration.  Conservatism was now an alliance of the capitalist class and white supremacists, held together by a program of resistance to the federal government.

As the 1960’s progressed and liberation movements sprung up for not just blacks, but for women, Latinos, gays, etc. conservative opposition to racial equity broadened into opposition to all egalitarian social movements.   Shrewd Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan rode white middle class resentment of those movements all the way to the White House.  The segregationists became the Moral Majority, then the Conservative Coalition and, finally, the Tea Party; but they were always the same rightward-leaning portion of the white working and middle class base, afraid of social change and looking to conservative politicians to halt it.

To achieve political influence and power, conservatism turned itself from a genteel ruling class intelligentsia into a broad populist movement.  But it sold its soul to do so.  It chose expediency over intellectual integrity, and it consistently appealed to the darker impulses of its base.  As the situation called for it, it invoked the threat of Stalinist feds, shiftless Negroes, family-hating feminists, child-molesting gays, welfare bums, union thugs, etc.  It portrayed liberals as snooty, condescending, feminized aristocrats, sipping lattes, nibbling French cheese, disdaining working class values and wasting working class tax dollars on undeserving populations.  Conservatism excused, justified, and encouraged the worst American instincts, and thereby undermined its self-proclaimed project of moral renewal.  It became gutter populism.

Gutter populism in the service of cynical capitalism, that is. In policy, conservatives stuck to reducing the social safety net, de-regulating the market, and allowing the unobstructed flow of capital, goods, jobs and workers around the world.  The cliché has it that conservative politicians promised the base they would protect traditional family values while all they were really interested in was free-market economics.  That’s true of course.  Reagan made the decision early in his presidency to prioritize undoing the New Deal, not the Sexual Revolution.  But it’s not just that conservative office-holders fought half-heartedly against abortion while fighting like demons for upper-end tax cuts; it’s that they pursued economic policies – free trade, relaxed immigration, social insurance privatization, de-unionization – that working people generally oppose!  And working people haven’t been too crazy about the results of those policies: stagnating wages, the replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs with low-paying service jobs, the immiseration of small-town and rural America.  At the end of the day, conservatives gave them nothing.

To keep working whites in their electoral coalition, conservatives had to do two contrary things: keep the populist fires of resentment and paranoia burning high, but keep them from spreading over into resentment of the rich.  They called a market-friendly healthcare plan socialism; they warned of death panels; they questioned the first black president’s religion and birthplace – all to frighten and anger the base.  They insisted the terrible liberal threat justified the most ruthless tactics – shutting down the government, undermining the government’s credit, stonewalling all compromise – and condemned as insufficiently conservative anyone who dissented.  And all the while they denounced resentment of the rich as envy, progressive taxes as class warfare, reliance on social insurance as irresponsibility, and the slightest trace of pragmatism or moderation as profoundly un-American.

Needless to say, it’s not easy to both intensify and contain populist passion.  Eventually, something had to give.  In theory, conservatives could have directed economic policy more toward middle class interests, as many reformicons have been urging.  But no, that would have undercut the central premise of American conservatism, that individual wealth results from the highest personal virtue.  And for a long time it seemed that thoroughgoing ideological conservatism was spreading and consolidating among the white middle class.  Tea Party activists sure made a good show of hating government programs.  But no, both the traditional populism of American whites and their own real and pressing material interests made genuine widespread conservatism improbable. We are led to the startling revelation that a great deal of the conservative base has never really been conservative.  In particular, they never accepted the notion that what is good for the rich is always good for the rest of us.  It turns out they hate Wall Street as much as they hate Washington and Harvard and Hollywood.  This has all been a terrible shock to the conservative chattering classes.  After spending decades indoctrinating the rubes, firing up their hatred of the liberal establishment and the cultural establishment and the Republican establishment, those rubes now direct that hatred, ironically enough, at their real enemies, those alleged conservative masters themselves!  Working whites have stopped pretending to be conservatives, they’ve stopped fooling both the conservative movement and themselves, and they’ve gone home.

To be precise, they’ve come to the realization that American elites don’t really give a damn about them.  Conservatives promised American unity, prosperity and peace, all while inviting jobs overseas, allowing banks to crash the economy, and invading a country that posed no threat to us.  They carelessly discarded American jobs, American prosperity, American lives, and – maybe worst of all – American promise.  The sold it all for a few extra points on the Dow.

But liberals haven’t done much better.  Conservatives may have had ulterior motives for accusing liberals of elitist condescension, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.  Since the time of Jefferson and Jackson, American populism was generally a phenomenon of the left, i.e. regular people fighting against exploitation by a rich and powerful elite.  But American populism ruptured in the 60’s when the Civil Rights movement put liberals and working whites at odds.  This is the part of the story we didn’t mention above: conservatives were able to attract large number of whites in the 60’s and 70’s because liberals were so willing to let them go.  At first liberals had tried to turn economic populism for whites into economic populism for everyone.  But many whites resisted full racial equality and began voting for thoroughly conservative politicians who, as we noted, were quite happy to profit from white resentment.  Liberals abandoned the project of broadly shared prosperity and instead focused on cultural emancipation for everyone who wasn’t a straight, white male.  That emancipation was and is a tremendously worthwhile goal, but excesses in pursuit of that goal further alienated the white working class that until then had been the heart of the liberal base.  Liberals and whites walked away from each other, each convinced the other had shown itself to be unworthy of friendship.

We still live amongst the wreckage of that Great Rupture.  Race, as always in American life, has poisoned everything.  Post-60’s liberals, twisted round by white guilt, abandoned sober color-blind integration for the romance of black nationalism and multiculturalism.  They rejected the heroic and hard task of assimilating blacks into the American mainstream and settled instead for the cheap tokenism of affirmative action.  That is, they chose sanctimony over results.  And, crucially, they condemned all dissent as abject racism.  They so over-reacted to rampant racism, militarism, fundamentalism and patriarchy that they started to wonder if there was something dark lurking at the heart of American culture.  They became suspicious of patriotism and religion and the military per se, and even of the American people themselves.  They adopted a host of problematic cultural attitudes – post-patriotic, post-religious, post-color-blind, post-gender – that were unpalatable to middle America.  They still pushed for programs to help workers – universal healthcare, family leave – but they came to culturally mistrust the very people their economic policies were designed to help.  And after a while they even abandoned those policies.  Many became New Democrats like Bill Clinton, promoting privatization and free trade and curtailing government programs.  They rejected American culture from the left and pro-worker policies from the right.  They became caricature anti-populists.

All these concerns come together perfectly on immigration.  This is one issue on which conservative and liberal ideologues agree: the more immigration, the better.  Conservatives are happy to remove constraints on the labor market, and consequently drive down wages and benefits.  And their free-market dogmatism prevents them from seeing the economic injury caused by flooding the market with cheap labor.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by the lazy and irresponsible desire to avoid honest competition, and nothing matters more to a conservatives than allowing competition to prove one’s moral worth.  Meanwhile, liberals are eager to prove their humanitarian virtue by rejecting any American immigration policy that might particularly benefit Americans.  Their love for the foreign poor blinds them to the damage done to their own countrymen.  Indeed, their cosmopolitan detachment protects them from any pedestrian concerns about American workers or – grab the smelling salts! – American culture.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by racism, and nothing matters more to liberals than proving they’re not racist.  Conservatives have no consideration for American workers as workers, but liberals have no consideration for them as Americans. 

And working people of all races are starting to understand that the people running the country are not looking out for them.  Indeed, when you consider the takeover of American politics by rich donors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that almost nothing constrains elites from pursuing policies that actively hurt working people.  And history and ideology have conspired to leave working people, and working whites particularly, with no responsible leadership.  Both conservatives and liberals pretend to be populists during election time, and liberals even make half-hearted attempts to help working people; but there is no political movement that fights for the interests of American workers as American workers.  Indeed, elites would condemn as vulgar and unrespectable any politics that was both patriotic and pro-worker.

This is where the white middle and working classes finds themselves.  Liberals have abandoned them to the gutter populism in which conservatives have so cynically invited them to indulge.  And behold the result: Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist!  Decades of gutter populist propaganda, combined with genuine economic pain, and good old-fashioned Puritan paranoia have left working whites bitter, angry and desperate.  Many of them are still right-wing populists, fearing blacks and feminists and gays and Muslims.  That hasn’t changed just because they now perceive the damage that conservative policy has done them.  That’s why they should gravely worry us.  And following Trump won’t exactly improve that.

Looking for a real leader

But they love Donald Trump because he perfectly speaks to their fear and desperation.  He shares their deepest instincts: that it’s regular working Americans who make America prosper, that America is strong and good and our standing in the world should reflect that, that economic and political elites have been ignoring those first two points, and at their peril.  Unfortunately, he also shares their darker instincts: that America is morally superior to every other country, that regular Americans are the best people in the world, particularly straight, white, Christian, male breadwinners.  He’s been rightly called the American id, the strutting embodiment of all those impulses.  But part of the reason his shtick works so well is that he’s little more than id himself!  He lacks a coherent ideology or set of policies because all he has are those nationalist instincts and a gigantic, monumental, indestructible faith in both them and himself.  He’s not just looking out for working white people, in cultural sensibility he is them, but independent and strong enough to fight like hell.  He’s not just a genuine gutter populist, he’s a determined gutter populist.  They delight in his irrepressible contempt for decent propriety.  He’s the cocksure naughty boy, breaking all the rules, smirking as the children cheer, and sneering at the grownups who try to shame him.  He is the national will to tear everything down and dance on the rubble.

We may even see – God help us! – President Donald Trump if enough independents feel sufficiently marginalized and desperate.  But it need not have been this way.  It’s conceivable – isn’t it? – that  we could have had a constructive and enlightened populism, one that picked itself up out of the gutter and fought for the interests of all American working people.  Or does the damnable intransigence of racial hostility make that impossible?  Both conservatism and liberalism, in their current forms, have eagerly exploited and exacerbated that hostility.  Neither is capable of addressing the current crisis, which is at bottom a crisis of political imagination.  Both are too rigid, too wedded to blind and implausible ideologies, too comfortable in their institutional power, too removed from the realities of American life.  They fight their petty, scripted battles over the heights of American society, while the foundation rots beneath their feet.  They have become irrelevant.

It’s unclear where working whites will go now.  They broke with conservatism when they came to understand that the system cannot be indifferent; it can only work for them or against them.  That is, they now know – in their experience and in their bones – that their economic condition is a function of more than just their own actions.  When they make this simple fact an explicit doctrine and a rallying cry and an organizing principle then they will have become full populists.  What they will do with that populism, whether it will be a force for preserving and promoting the best of America, or whether it will degrade and destroy – we don’t know yet.  Only disaster can result if they allow leaders like Trump to drag them further into the gutter.  They have the potential to become a powerful force for unmediated white authoritarianism, and that’s an outcome too awful to contemplate.

If there is to be a constructive populist alternative, an inclusive, color-blind, mature populism, it can ultimately come only from a reconstructed liberalism.  Bernie Sanders has taken liberalism halfway there, with his stress on economic concerns over cultural ones, and his nascent and inchoate economic nationalism.  The rupture between liberalism and white working people must be reconciled, and that can only happen when liberals come to understand the centrality of our shared American identity.  And maybe a program of working class unity could reduce racial tension.  Maybe such a movement could address our actual problems and offer real solutions.  Maybe it could remind us all who we are to each other, what we owe each other, and what we can accomplish together.  Maybe it could elicit the better angels of our nature.  And maybe, finally, it could tell us how we can be healed.

Patriotism Unraveled

Military equipment left behind by the Iraqi Army as they fled from ISIS

No one is a better representative of old-time right-wing populism than Pat Buchanan, and no one understands better than an old-time right-wing populist why men are willing to fight and die in war.  When Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter bitterly complained that the city of Ramadi had fallen to vicious ISIS jihadis because the Iraqi Army lacked the “will to fight”, Buchanan jumped up with the explanation:

Why do these rebels seem willing to fight for what we see as antiquated beliefs, but all too often our friends do not fight? Perhaps the answer is found in Thomas Babington Macaulay: “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?”

Tribe and faith. Those are the causes for which Middle Eastern men will fight. Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists will die for the faith. Persians and Arabs will fight to defend their lands, as will Kurds and Turks.

People who’s primary loyalty is Sunni or Shiite will fight to promote or protect their faith, and people who’s primary loyalty is to their nation (Persians, Kurds, etc.) will fight to promote or protect their nation.  These are natural, visceral motivations; a society, or a gang, or a hunter-gatherer tribe, or a band of chimpanzees – each takes what it wants and keeps what it takes.  As a fundamentalist himself, Buchanan may wrestle with the facts of biological evolution, but he well understands the animal nature of man.

But do liberals?  Pat doesn’t think liberalism can really motivate anyone, or at least anyone in the Middle East:

But who among the tribes of the Middle East will fight and die for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality?

Rod Dreher takes the argument to its logical next step (his italics):

The more unsettling question is coming our way may well be: But who among the tribes of the United States will fight and die for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality?

Would anyone fight for modern liberalism, for the cult of individual expression, for the impoverished post-modern liberation from all commitment?  The question answers itself.  But what about the other side of modern liberalism, the social justice warriors brimming with idealistic commitments to racial and gender equality, etc.?  Those are wholly admirable and laudable ideals, but could that ideological commitment motivate the sacrifice and devotion that are required for an ideology’s survival in an eminently hostile world?  Consider that the objective of the social justice warriors is a world in which everyone, regardless of race, gender, etc., is openly admitted to that aforementioned empty freedom, that emaciated emancipation.  Of course, fighting for freedom is a cliché, but a misleading one.  Fighting for freedom typically means fighting to remove some outside domination over one’s group; it’s about collective freedom, not individual license. And freedom per se, freedom devoid of content or purpose, is just not something worth dying for. 

Is it conceivable that a society composed of only social justice warriors would take up arms to defend itself against military incursion by religious fundamentalists or Ayn Rand supporters or any other similarly retrograde group?  Barely.  But would they defend America if it were under attack?  How can we suppose that when it’s not clear that they would defend their own hypothetical Social Justice Utopia?  And they tend to be some version of pacifist.  And they generally consider national allegiance to be old-fashioned, foolish and destructive.  Some of them are skeptical that America is a place worth saving.  But some are not.

Fascists and communists in the inter-war years were also quite certain the liberal democrats would prove feckless when push came to shove, that they would not have the courage or determination to resist the totalitarian onslaught.  They were a little right at first – Chamberlain at Munich, 1938 – and very wrong later – Hitler in the Bunker, 1945.  So, hasn’t liberalism proven itself?  No, the liberalism that defeated fascism was a very different liberalism than the modern kind; or more precisely, it wasn’t just liberalism.  It’s true that the American leaders and American military men and women were fighting for liberal values like freedom and equality, but they were also fighting for their homeland and their people.  They fought because they loved their country, and a country is much more than just its political principles.  The British fought for their empire, the French fought to repel the Nazis, as did most of Europe.  Even the Soviets fought for Mother Russia.  Buchanan’s truth wins again. Liberalism alone without pre-liberal, pre-modern commitments of blood and soil is incapable of eliciting the devotion and sacrifice needed to withstand the invader’s onslaught.

Even now, most of the men and women in the American military are true patriots (and those who needed a career or a simply a steady job).  And patriots in America today are more likely to be conservative (sometimes excessively so).  So, if we can’t rely on liberals to fight for America, we always have conservatives to fall back on, right?

Well, maybe.  Rod Dreher, conservative but thoughtful Christian, worries that America, in becoming more liberal, more sexually liberated, is becoming hostile to traditional Christianity.  And he’s not happy at the thought of his own children fighting overseas for an America that no longer solidly represents him and his values:

And I don’t want them killing or dying to replace the very real evils of traditional societies with the evils of our own civilization — especially when our civilization, in law and custom, is in the process of turning on people of my religion, and seeing us as the enemy within. Put bluntly, I don’t want my children to risk death — their own or somebody else’s — for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality, especially when the most important American value — freedom of religion — is going into eclipse.

Dreher contends, not entirely without reason, that opposition to gay marriage (and other aspects of the sexual revolution) has evoked social condemnation of traditionalist Christians as homophobes and bigots.  He is, in effect, saying that traditionalists have become something of a persecuted minority in their own country, and it’s not fair to ask them to fight for a country that doesn’t treat them fairly.  That is, Christians now are a little like blacks were in the bad old days.  When Muhammed Ali refused to fight in Vietnam for a country that denied his equality at home he explained, “No Vietcong ever called me n----r.”  Dreher is saying, “No jihadi ever called me homophobe.”  Apparently, both he and Ali knew who their real enemies were.

Who's he talking to?

To be sure, Dreher’s hesitation to fight for America only applies to overseas missions; he would be only too eager to defend America herself from attack.  And it’s not clear how much Dreher’s pessimism regarding anti-Christian persecution is felt among the wider conservative Christian population.  But conservatives are becoming more and more aware that the America they thought they owned is slipping away from them.  What will happen when conservatives as a whole conclude that defending America is for them a losing proposition?  Will both sides disdain America as belonging to the other?  Is every version of American patriotism unraveling?

If it does come to pass that conservatives, in effect, opt out of American identity – as liberals have already substantially done – then almost no one will willingly fight for America in a foreign land.  Would our expeditionary forces then be only mercenary?  But there can be no doubt – can there? – that if America were being invaded almost every American would come to her rescue.  And we know that conservatives will.  That is, conservatives, being conservatives, will always love the land and their piece of it, and always be willing to fight and die for it.  Even if they no longer feel compelled by America as a whole, they will always be compelled by some version of Buchanan’s ties of tribe and faith.  That is their strength and their failing.

Modern liberals make truly admirable political and social and intellectual leaders, but terrible soldiers.  Just as conservatism un-moderated by liberal notions of individualism and equality slips too easily into parochialism and intolerance, liberalism unmoored from national affection and commitment slips too easily into cosmopolitan affectation and universalist uselessness.  We need each other.  And more to the point, America would be much better off under an intelligent synthesis of both world-views, alloyed with good amounts of pragmatism and conciliation.  Conservatives need to understand that America is more than a vessel and instrument of static conservatism.  It’s a growing, changing, evolving, living thing.  And liberals need to bring their idealism back down to earth.   They could think globally and act nationally, but only if the nation actually means something to them.  And all that really means is recognizing that they are Americans, essentially and irrevocably.  Liberalism is as much an organic outgrowth of American history as is conservatism.  We are all heirs of our common history.  But that history has hope of continuing only if we’re all willing to accept that inheritance, and the responsibilities it brings, and each other.

My Family, My Country, My Self

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

The Open Borders movement, which seeks to remove all barriers to immigration, has recently been working hard to gain attention and credibility.  Consider this argument from economist Bryan Caplan:

What would you think about a law that said that blacks couldn’t get a job without government’s permission, or women couldn’t get a job without the government’s permission, or gays or Christians or anyone else? So why, exactly, is it that people who are born on the wrong side of the border have to get government permission just to get a job?

He’s saying, of course, that denying someone a job because they’re from another country is as unjustifiable as rejecting them because of their race, gender, religion or orientation.  At first glance, it almost seems plausible.  There are plenty of practical arguments in favor of increased immigration – for example, that it would raise both American and world GDP – and some seem persuasive, though some are controversial.  But what’s fascinating about Caplan’s pitch – and what makes it representative of much Open Border thought – is that it makes a moral case against restricting the flow of individuals across borders: it calls any such restriction unjustifiable coercion.  The University of Colorado's Michael Huemer claims that border control clearly violates every would-be immigrant’s human rights; it represents the violent power of the state infringing the right to sell one’s labor wherever there’s an employer willing to pay for it.  According to Caplan, Huemer and others, no country anywhere on Earth has the right to restrict immigration at all.  It sounds quite implausible, even ridiculous, right?  It completely violates our normal intuitions about the nature of sovereign states.  Well, in this case, intuition is correct.

Imagine an extended family that, through a somewhat unusual set of events, includes both whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, men and women (of course), straights and gays.  Now imagine the rich patriarch of this family is a terrible bigot and distributes his largesse (in gifts, in cash, in jobs, etc.) only to the straight, white, Christian men of the family.   Obviously, he’s being unfair to the others.  It’s immoral to discriminate against anyone simply because they’re black, Jewish, female, or gay.  Now imagine the patriarch has a change of heart, discards his bigotry and gives freely to everyone in the family, regardless of race, religion, gender or orientation.  Yea, fairness is achieved!  Oh, but he never gives to anyone outside the family.  Is that immoral?  It might be a little stingy, a little ungenerous, but is he violating the rights of non-family-members?  Clearly not.  Here’s the point: there’s nothing wrong with favoring those with whom you have a special bond.  Being outside the family is different than being black, Jewish, female or gay.  You’re allowed to love and nurture family members more than non-family members.  You’re not just allowed to love them more, of course, you’re required to.  Isn’t that the point of a family?  To love everyone the same is to not really love anyone.  Generosity can be global, but commitment must be local.

And what applies to families applies to countries, too.  Imagine a remote, undeveloped country, call it Aggressia, ruled by a belligerent tyrant who invades and terrorizes his small, poor, defenseless neighbor, Miseria.  Let’s stipulate that the invasion will not affect the rest of the world in any substantial way: neither country has any important natural resource, there’s every reason to believe that the tyrant won’t invade any other countries, etc.  Would you advocate sending the American military to kick Aggressia out of Miseria?  Almost certainly not.  You would feel terrible for the people of Miseria, you would probably applaud if America sanctioned the invaders or isolated them diplomatically, but you would strenuously resist placing Americans in harm’s way for sake of Miseria.  The world is a messy place and we can’t fix every problem (neo-conservatism notwithstanding).

Now imagine that Aggressia hasn’t invaded Miseria but instead manages somehow to invade and occupy the state of Maine.  But you live in Arizona, and let’s stipulate that the occupation of Maine doesn’t affect you or anyone you know in any material way; we have good reason to believe they won’t invade any other states or hurt the United States in any other way.  Let’s say you’ve never been to Maine or ever even met anyone from Maine.  From your point of view the invasion might as well not have happened.  Now, in this scenario would you advocate American military action to expel the invaders?  Hell, yes!  You might even grab your firearms (you do live in Arizona) and drive to Maine as quickly as possible to join in the fight!  But why?  Why would you be willing to risk your life for Maine but not for Miseria?

The answer is obvious: you love your country, and you love it more than other countries.  You are committed to it in a way you’re not committed to any other.  It’s yours.  The people in Maine matter more to you than the people in Miseria.  Your concern, your tax money, and your protectiveness flow to your fellow Americans more generously than they do to those in other countries.  There’s nothing immoral about that.  Some people take it too far, of course.  They turn patriotism into chauvinism or jingoism or nativism.  They consider America politically and morally superior to other countries in some essential way.  They care about foreigners very little or not at all.  Such people give patriotism a bad name.  But you can be a patriot and still be a generous humanitarian, just as you can love your family more without loving humanity less. You can care about all your fellow humans, you can feel you owe all of them your sympathy and your material help (when practical), but still feel a special bond and obligation toward America and Americans.  Despite what cosmopolitans and pacifists think, patriotism is not a species of immorality.  How can you call that Arizonan immoral when he’s rushing off to Maine to fight for strangers?

But the Open Borderers ask:  If there’s nothing wrong with being choosy with one’s loyalties then why was it wrong in the bad old days for white employers to favor white workers over black ones?  Why are patriotic special considerations justifiable when racial ones are not?  Here’s Huemer again:

We do not cringe to hear that American businesses should hire native-born Americans rather than immigrants, any more than Americans three generations ago would have cringed to hear that white-owned businesses should hire white people in preference to blacks. Naturally, nationalists may attempt to devise explanations for why nationality is different from race, and why nationalism is really justified. This is not the place to attempt to argue that point. I would like simply to put forward for consideration the thought that perhaps we have no right to feel ashamed of our ancestors, and that our descendants may feel about us the way we feel about our ancestors.

(Actually, no one today would defend hiring a native over a legal immigrant, but Huemer seems to mean that no one objects to favoring American workers and products over foreign ones.)   To Huemer, attaching one’s primary social loyalty to one’s country is arbitrary.  How is it any better than attaching it to one’s town, or one’s profession, or one’s race?  Wouldn’t it be much better if we attached it to humanity as a whole and avoided all this petty squabbling?

The answer is that some distinctions between people are arbitrary and some are not.  If a group of people share the same physical and social space with a dominant majority, are citizens of the same state, are part of the same national culture, but differ only in skin color, then it’s not morally justifiable to discriminate against them.  Racial differences are not relevant to loyalty.  National ones are, mostly for practical reasons.  Democracy, individual liberty and broad affluence need something like a culturally homogenous modern polity to nurture them.  Modern individualism requires state protection.  Moderation of capitalist excess requires a reasonably robust regulatory and social insurance state.  Modern capitalism itself requires a reliably enforced legal framework.  And modern politics demands national loyalty, as does the common defense.  Part of the problem with those old-time racists was that they wanted it both ways: they expected blacks to fight equally in war for a country that didn’t otherwise treat them equally.  They embraced patriotism when it benefitted themselves but not when it benefitted the racial other.  Eventually America expanded patriotic blessings to include blacks; that seems a happier ending then if they had abandoned patriotism and group loyalty altogether.

But all of this is fairly obvious.  So why don’t the Open Borderers see it?  Mostly, it seems, because of their general animosity toward the sovereign state.  They tend to be extreme libertarians and anarcho-capitalists; they oppose almost every intrusion of the state into economic affairs, or any affairs.  To them, borders between sovereign states are merely artificial constrictions on the flow of goods and labor.  If a poor man from Tijuana wants to work in San Diego for wages lower than the American minimum wage but higher than his wages at home, then stopping him at the border is a cruel deprivation of his human rights.  And if more immigration brings down the wages of some Americans (how much is unclear) then that’s too bad, that’s just how the free market works:

The Americans who lose from immigration are those who are very low-skilled, who also don’t speak very good English to begin with, and also don’t own real estate. It's a quite small group. If you’re a real nationalist who cares about all Americans, then you should favor immigration because only like 5 or 10 percent of Americans are losing.

Oh well, only 15 to 30 million Americans would be screwed by open borders; that’s OK because they’re the poorest and least educated, so we shouldn’t feel so bad.  It’s not like we as a people have any responsibility to them.  Besides, the state has no collective authority; state regulation of the marketplace is no different than inhuman barbarism:

If we rely on the analogy between states and clubs, then the state could require citizens to cut off their left arms, refrain from expressing political opinions, refrain from voting if they are female, and so on. Whatever the law requires, one could propose that abiding by that law is a condition on membership in the civil society. Thus, the state may demand that anyone who wishes to retain their citizenship should follow these laws.

That’s right, there’s no philosophical middle ground between stateless freedom and abject totalitarianism.  The Open Borderers do get points for ideological consistency; they drive their libertarian principles to the farthest logical conclusions, undisturbed by pragmatism, charity, or any other apparent consideration.  Put another way, they’re fanatics. Only under the strain of such ideological extremism is imposing a minimum wage equal to forced amputation and a nation protecting its demographic integrity equal to immoral coercion.

Such a radical stance makes the Open Borders movement a natural ally for the Global Citizen movement, which seeks to neuter or abolish the sovereign state altogether. Both groups make dubious arguments against patriotism, and both would radically weaken the state (though some Open Borderers do maintain some minimal commitment to the state).  And both groups think of citizenship as little more than an easily acquired and easily surrendered legal contract; here’s Nathan Smith of openborders.info:

As for “the view that citizenship in an actual country is merely arbitrary or contingent,” this isn’t so much a “view” as a plain fact. I’m a US citizen because, by accident of birth, I was born a US citizen.

Actually no, that’s wrong.  Citizenship is a legal status, of course, and therefore can be changed; but it’s a superficiality, a technical legal expression of an existential fact.  Smith is an American, not because he was a person who could have been born anywhere but just happened to be born here; he is an American because he is the person that America created.  America forged Smith.  To confuse citizenship with national identity is to confuse a marriage license with a marriage.  Post-modern life sees all social relationships as incidental choices, but such a view leaves no room for real connection. But we are all born with commitments, connections and obligations and these are not so easily abandoned or absolved, nor so easily acquired.  It is this unavoidable condition of human existence – that we are products of unchosen social contexts – that is the source and justification for all group loyalty, for better or worse.  I love my country because I love myself.

But the constricted ideology of the Open Borders movement essentially misunderstands the sovereign state and its constituents; it sees patriotism as meaningless, economic regulation as totalitarian, and national belonging as just one of many contingent, arbitrary choices one may tenuously adopt.  To be honest, though, there is definite appeal to that libertarian vision of a world without borders or states.  In many ways it’s a world to be devoutly hoped for.  It would presumably have no widespread wars, less poverty, more education, less irrational hatred.  Imagine there’s no countries.  But it doesn’t withstand closer scrutiny.  A world where countries have been replaced by many diffuse loyalties is one without any real commitment or sense of community.  It’s a world without any protection against capitalist exploitation.  It’s a world with no protections for workers, consumers or the environment.  It’s a world where cultural and local and individual distinction all blur into the broad materialist, consumerist haze.  And it’s quite possibly the world toward which we are heading.  You may rejoice in its arrival or you may grieve, or both.  But what you cannot do is deny the right of nations to resist its dull triumph.