First, the survival of political liberty
and a political community depends on a shared culture and the habits of
character that protect it.
One of these notions read that “to occupy
nature, the soil, as exclusive property, this no individual has the right to
do. ” Another said that “labor has an incontestable claim to the value of its
product” and if “the capitalist” did not agree, then the government “has to
interfere” to secure this right. A third called for the government to pay for
instruction in German to the children of immigrants.
Is President Donald Trump’s call for
patriotic assimilation, which is a part of his immigration package, a step
toward totalitarianism and fascism? These are the hyperbolic claims made in a
contentious op-ed by Fabiola Santiago, a columnist at The
Miami Herald.
Santiago highlighted my own work in this
field, citing a 2016 paper. While ordinarily I don’t react to
criticism, especially when over the top, in this case a response makes it
possible to elucidate some points.
For starters, she’s wrong.
As it is often the case with those whose
proposals actually lead to a reduction in our freedoms, Santiago wraps her
argument as a rousing defense of liberty: Assimilation would mean “the end of
the romantic notion that we are a free people who can speak as we like, feel as
we feel, be who we are, without fear of government reprisals,” she writes.
Let me make three points about this.
First, the survival of political liberty
and a political community depends on a shared culture and the habits of
character that protect it.
Second, the leading thinkers of the
multiculturalism Santiago defends no longer even pretend to be on the side of political
liberty.
And third, the comparison she draws between
America and totalitarian Cuba gets things exactly backward.
Let’s start with the survival of political
liberty. Some cultural traits and habits are necessary to self-rule, and others
undermine it. A government charged with protecting our freedoms must promote
the former and discourage the latter.
Thrift, self-reliance, a strong work
ethic, perseverance, volunteerism, and moderation are qualities that make a
population free and prosperous. These also are virtues long associated with
America, a nation ahistorically free and prosperous. They must be instilled and
practiced. They don’t come in the bloodstream.
A statist, bureaucratic mindset that does
not prize the right to private property, the right to freedom of speech and
conscience, or the belief that all humans are born free and equal, would on the
other hand render our society less free. Immigrants who come freighted with
these habits of mind must be invited to forget them and take up new ones.
And indeed, immigrants from countries
with these cultural habits always have faced pressure, from the American
government and civil society alike, to leave them behind and adopt new ones.
A prime example is the wave of German
immigrants who came to America in the 1800s, economically due to the
dislocation of industrialization and politically because of the failure of
revolutions in 1848. Culturally, many had statist proclivities that were
unknown among most Americans.
In 1854, their political leaders in
Kentucky adopted a “Platform
of the Free Germans of Louisville” that had radical anti-property notions.
One of these notions read that “to occupy
nature, the soil, as exclusive property, this no individual has the right to
do.” Another said that “labor has an incontestable claim to the value of its
product” and if “the capitalist” did not agree, then the government “has to
interfere” to secure this right. A third called for the government to pay for
instruction in German to the children of immigrants.
That same year, German immigrants in
Richmond, Virginia, passed a similar platform calling for these same rollbacks
of freedom and adding funds for a German-language university. The Virginia
platform also called for a government takeover of the railroads, taxation of
church lands, and abolishment of religious schools.
The Americans of the day decided pretty
quickly to protect their way of life and compel the new German immigrants to
adopt the American worldview, not import their own, thank you very much. The
immigrant was not obliged to give up his beer and wiener, which were adopted
into the national cuisine. We should all be thankful for all aspects of that arrangement
today.
The process worked. By the 1880s, the
German-born Wisconsin congressman Richard Guenther was rallying crowds with these
words: “After passing through the crucible of naturalization we are no longer
Germans; we are Americans. . America first, last, and all the time. America
against Germany; America against the world; America right or wrong; always
America.”
The multiculturalism that Santiago
defends is at odds with the liberty she purports to advocate, which brings us
to our second point.
Santiago-who seems never to be have
considered the allure of understatement-maintains that patriotic assimilation
“and all the nationalist jargon that comes with it-is the concoction of
right-wing think tanks that detest multiculturalism.”
“What Trump proposes,” she writes, “has
the markings of the type of domination we fought against in World War II:
Fascism.”
A fondness for multiculturalism seems
nearly always to go hand in hand with an attachment to cosmopolitanism, or the
belief that we are all citizens of the world, with loyalty first to all human
beings rather than our own nation. They are both the opposite of assimilation.
Thus, contra Guenther’s hardy call for
“America against the world,” Santiago seems oddly vexed that Trump’s call for
merit-based immigration would “gut countries of their best minds”-as if they
were compelled to come to America. (Doesn’t she care about their
self-determination?)
But
cosmopolitan aspirations, writes my Heritage
Foundation colleague Arthur Milikh, “lack the power to constrain and tutor
strong natural proclivities toward anger, pride, and selfishness” and it is the
restraint of passions such as these that produce civility and the ability to govern
oneself.
So
it’s no surprise that the purveyors of multiculturalism no longer hide their
disdain for natural rights. Progressive academics from Catharine A. MacKinnon
to Louis Michael Seidman, Frederick Schauer, and Kathleen M. Sullivan all have come
out against free speech because, in the words of MacKinnon, the
First Amendment “has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists.”
As
the most famous textbook on multiculturalism, “Critical
Race Theory, an Introduction” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, puts
it, critical race theorists “are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely
rights” because they “believe that moral and legal rights are apt to do the
right holder much less good than we like to think.”
These
beliefs already have been put into practice, with foreseeable consequences, in
Cuba, an unfortunate country that Santiago appears not to understand very well,
though I gather she was born there.
Before the revolution’s triumph in 1959, Cuba’s culture had accrued organically, going back to the colonization of the island in 1511 and the founding of Havana in 1519. The Cuban revolution has gone out of its way to eradicate this culture and destroy even its physical manifestations, which is why Havana’s once stately architecture has been purposely left to putrefy.
Cuba’s innate traditions prior to Year Zero are thus rendered by the revolution as corrupt and immoral, a narrative that the international left is only too happy to propagate. In the place of this culture, the revolution has imposed through force a fabricated one.
It
is this process that a return to American norms would hope to arrest in this
country.
An
invitation to assimilate to practices that produce freedom and solidarity and
have been part of the American character for centuries-truly the inclusive approach-would
be a last-ditch attempt to return America to its organic traditions.
The post The Real Inclusive Approach to Immigrants appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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