In an earlier article, “The Democrats vs. The Deplorables: The New Class Struggle Comes to the Midwest,” this author detailed the Democrats’ systematic campaign against the interests of American energy workers, many of them unionized—a curious stance for the presumed party of working people and labor unions. In this piece, I will outline an even more curious stance: the Democrats’ systematic campaign against American border security and American sovereignty.
Of course, I’ve had plenty of help from my colleagues here at Breitbart. Anyone familiar with this publication knows that it has closely chronicled the deleterious impact of unlimited immigration, legal and illegal, on American life.
Breitbart has reported on the damage done to America by immigrant crime and terrorism. It has also accounted for the negative impact of open borders on workers’ incomes, national security, and epidemic disease.
Moreover, as a stalwart champion of American sovereignty—that is, the right of American citizens to determine what’s best for America—Breitbart has argued that we can yet control our national destiny. After all, border fences have worked to keep Israel safe, even as similar security fences are finally, in the wake of the refugee influx, going up all over Europe.
Closer to home, Breitbart has closely watched the domestic politics of immigration. One particularly contentious issue is the federal program known as DACA, or Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals.
DACA was never enacted by Congress; it originated in 2012 as a unilateral executive order from the Obama administration, which has aggressively championed DACA ever since. As Breitbart has reported in hundreds of articles, DACA is a costly amnesty program for young illegal aliens.
Another hot issue is the resettlement of Syrian refugees—almost all of them Sunni Muslim—into the U.S. Most Americans oppose this policy, which also was never approved by Congress. Yet even so, the resettlement continues, even accelerates, across the nation; whereas the target for Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016 was 10,000, the actual number moved in was 12,430—an overrun of more than 24 percent.
Such resettlement has costs—and not just financial costs. In Twin Falls, Idaho, for example, a horrendous crime allegedly occurred earlier this year; a five-year-girl was sexually assaulted by three Muslim refugees—all of them and their families resettled, to be sure, at taxpayer expense. In the course of more than 20 pieces on various aspects of that scandalous facilitation of criminality, Breitbart has delineated not only the crime, but also the astonishing cover-up by local authorities.
Moreover, readers here have learned that a new multi-billion-dollar industry has been created—that is, the myriad taxpayer-subsidized NGOs across the country that specialize in putting refugees into local communities. This entire archipelago of agencies might be dubbed Refugee, Inc.
Meanwhile, Obama’s anointed would-be successor in the White House, Hillary Clinton, has pledged to keep going with DACA and the entirety of the Obama open-borders agenda—and, indeed, to accelerate it. Hence this Breitbart headline from June: “Census Data: 10 Million New Immigrants to Enter U.S. During President Hillary Clinton’s First Term.”
Others on the left are eagerly joining the open-borders push. The American Civil Liberties Union is now promoting the notion that America’s taking control of its borders is somehow unconstitutional. In addition, the untrammeled flow of refugees has long been the main focus of George Soros, the mega-plutocrat who has spent billions to build up left-wing pressure groups. So we can see where the immigration issue is headed if Clinton wins this November.
To be sure, there’s another side to the story, and Breitbart has covered that, too. As everyone knows, Donald Trump’s signature issue has been the reassertion of American national control over the U.S.-Mexican border, and, yes, building a wall.
Moreover, Trump has been vocal on the issue of U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, he has endeavored to personalize that somewhat abstract issue; he has met many times with Angel Moms, the mothers of those murdered by illegals, and spoken forcefully on their behalf. So it’s little wonder that those public employees still determined to actually enforce our border laws have endorsed Trump.
Okay, so that’s the political lay of the land. Yet there’s a deeper question: What are the intellectual foundations of this controversy? As they say, ideas have consequences, and all around us, we’re seeing the consequences.
So let’s ask: How did we get to this point—the point where the West is under siege? (We know, of course, that refugees and migrants are not an issue in other parts of the world, such as Asia, for the simple reason that Asian countries won’t let them in.)
Specifically, how did we—more precisely, the American elite—abandon the old idea that America should be one country, patriotic and secure, and instead take up the new idea that America should be globalist and insecure? In that vein, how did we end up with a Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, who throws up his hands and admits that terrorist attacks, including homegrown terrorist attacks, are “the new normal”?
Without a doubt, the Founding Fathers would be horrified at what’s happening to America in the 21st century. After all, the Preamble of their revered document, the U.S. Constitution, is decisive on this point: The new federal government will “insure domestic tranquility” and “provide for the common defense.”
And here’s Alexander Hamilton, going further, arguing that national unity is the key to national security:
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.
Of course, circumstances changed, and in the 19th century, waves of immigration came to America, seeking honest work and opportunity—legal immigration, we might stipulate.
Thus America became known as the “melting pot”—that is, the crucible in which peoples from around the world, but mostly Europe, came here to be made into English-speaking Americans.
Such “patriotic assimilation,” as it was once quaintly called, proved to be a challenge, as the country was riven by ethnic and industrial unrest. And yet the elites of that era were equal to the challenge: They had an inclusive vision of the United States that included newcomers, even while at the same time holding them to the high standard of Americanism. And that’s why, for example, the Pledge of Allegiance emerged in 1892; it was a symbolic tool, a way of uniting disparate peoples around a common civic liturgy.
So when Donald Trump said in Cleveland this summer, “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he was well within the greater American historical tradition of nation-building at home.
Yet to many, probably most, in the elite today, Trump’s language, and the sentiments it evokes, are deemed to be hopelessly antiquated and obsolete. In fact, they are often judged to be worse than that—as racist, chauvinist, and hegemonist.
In New York, D.C. and other islands of blue enlightenment across the country, the question is asked: Who are we to impose our will on anyone else? What gives us the right to propagate traditional values—even such values as women’s rights—on the “authentic” culture of Third Worlders?
Such views are by no means confined to professors in their ivory towers, or to think-tank scribblers in their cubicles, or to foundation heads in their tax-exempt suites, or to donors in their penthouses: it is now the common discourse of the Democratic Party.
We can be very specific about this: In 2003, Hillary’s husband, the 42nd president, laid out his vision for the world; here’s the Breitbart headline: “Bill Clinton Calls For Creation of ‘Global Community’: ‘America Has Greater Obligations to Open Our Borders.’” In that speech at Yale University, Clinton declared,
I think the great mission of the 21st century is to create a genuine global community, to move from mere interdependence to integration, to a community that has shared responsibilities, shared benefits and shared values.
Lest anyone miss his point, Clinton got more specific, asserting that “open borders” and “easy immigration” were two of the “forces of interdependence”—the interdependence that Clinton sees as central to the global community he yearns for.
We can quickly point out that the US has a population of around 320 million, while the population of the world is more than seven billion. Moreover, most of the world’s politics and culture are, shall we say, a good bit different from that of the US. So to the extent that the world is “integrated”—that is, reduced to common denominators—it’s safe to say that what used to be called, with justifiably patriotic pride, American Exceptionalism is doomed. (And also, of course, the once exceptionally high American standard of living.)
Yet for some, the submergence of America in the global soup isn’t an accident—it’s the intended goal.
And why is this? It all goes back to ideas—consequential ideas. So here we can pause to note that “exceptionalism,” like “Americanism,” is, to be literal about it, an “ism.”
Thus we can see the intellectual roots of the elite campaign against the once-dominant idea of Americanism: In the progressive mind, exceptionalism and Americanism are simply isms, period. And to the left of today, all isms are automatically bad.
Here too, Breitbart has grappled with these questions; this website has argued that innocent words, such as patriotism and nationalism, have wrongly been conflated with “racism,” “sexism,” and so on. And that conflation has taken some on an “ideological conveyor belt that ends in ‘fascism.’”
So we can see: To the progressive mind, patriotism and nationalism are simply “gateway drugs” to even more wicked isms.
As an aside, we can observe that this slippery-slope thinking would be confounding to such Democratic patriots as Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Each was regarded as a progressive in his respective era, even if, from the perspective of today, they seem more on the right than the left—they were, after all, in favor of jobs for blue collars and other “deplorables.” And perhaps most notably, for all three of them, when international trouble came unbidden, they were mightily resolved to mobilize the full force of Americanism against fearful enemies.
Indeed, as far as they were concerned, the only way that America could succeed militarily was through the invocation of patriotic fervor and national unity. As FDR said on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor,
Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. . . . With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph–so help us God.
Why, to read those words today, one could be forgiven for thinking that FDR was a Republican! And it would seem that Democrats have noticed just that: There’s a reason that today’s Democrats rarely talk about Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman. They were, after all, white heterosexual males, sitting at the pinnace of “intersectional” privilege.
For those who might be curious, intersectionalism is the politically correct ideology that discerns everything through the filter of racial, gender, and sexual oppression. In this telling, straight white males are on top (although such would be news to victims of affirmative action and racial quotas). Next in line, depending on the intersectionalist adjudicator, are straight white women—or maybe it’s gay white men, in which case, straight white women are reduced by another notch. Then we go down a dolorous hierarchy of discrimination and injustice, until we get to the faces at the bottom of the well, namely, gay women of color. These distinctions might seem alien, or just plain silly, to most Americans, and yet they are at the core of many college curriculums; in recent years, they have fired up millions of Social Justice Warriors.
So can readily see: In this sort of PC intellectual climate, Dead White Males, even Democratic DWMs, don’t have much of a chance. (And of course, memories of even earlier Democratic presidents, such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk, has long ago been purged; they were, after all, straight white male slaveowners who fought Indians and Mexicans.)
So now to today’s Democrats. After having consigned most of their party’s heritage down the memory hole, what are the influences that shape them? Who are their new heroes? Let’s take a look:
We know that Barack and Michelle Obama spent 15 years listening to the sermons of the ardently anti-American preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright, famous for saying, “Not God bless America, God damn America.”
And we know that on February 18, 2008, Michelle Obama was moved to say, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” (She was born in 1964.)
In the opinion of conservative classicist Victor Davis Hanson, President Obama is a harsh judge of America—even after it elected him twice to the presidency:
On his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as “lazy.”
In fact, he went on to deride Americans for a list of supposed transgressions ranging from the Vietnam War to environmental desecration to the 19th century treatment of Native Americans.
Hanson went on to observe that Obama has publicly sided with the memory of the late mugger Trayvon Martin and also, more recently, the anti-American football player Colin Kaepernick.
So now the picture of the emerging Democratic ideology is coming into focus. Thus Hillary Clinton’s famous recent rant to Democratic donors seems to be perfectly part of the pattern:
You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.
So now we can begin to define Clinton’s worldview: On the one side, the admirables—the globalist integrators. On the other side, the deplorables—racists, sexists, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. In her mind, it’s a profoundly necessary battle; it’s really, in fact, a struggle of the good (plus Goldman Sachs) against the evil. And so it’s easy to see why she and her allies seek more immigration; they need the additional numbers to crush her enemies.
Under pressure politically, Clinton expressed regret for those revealing “deplorable” remarks, and yet unsurprisingly, just two weeks later, she was right back at it. In her September 26 debate against Donald Trump, she took aim at what she called “implicit bias”—thereby taking aim at all Americans:
I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. . . . But when it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers.
To be sure, Clinton said that “everyone” is guilty of implicit bias, thus implicating herself and her fellow progressives, albeit in a highly non-specific way.
Still, the notion that we’re all guilty is a key part of progressive thinking. In fact, in its self-questioning inwardness, progressivism is akin to philosophy, even theology. Yes, that’s a safe enough statement: In its all-encompassing totality, progressivism is a kind of secular religion. And so just as Christians believe that everyone is a sinner, well, so do secular progressives. The difference, of course, is that a Christian seeks forgiveness from God, while a a progressive might seek absolution by resolving not to think implicitly biased thoughts, and, of course, by spending more tax money on immigrants.
Yet in the meantime, the everyone-is-guilty mantra is politically precious to the left, because it advances the notion that all extant institutions are inherently racist—and thus justifying massive legal and political intervention to “fix” them.
Of course, some might conclude that an endless battle against such a free-form concept as “implicit bias” is really just a recipe for an endless battle against human nature. Others might wonder if one can retrain, for example, the police and still keep the crime rate down. And still others might be curious to know if such “fixing” is really the best plan for growing the economy, creating jobs, competing with the world, and defending ourselves against Iran, Russia, and China.
And finally, some will ask if America can declare itself adamantly opposed to implicit bias while still keeping a level head about border- and national security. That is, if the new progressive ideology tells us to oppose anything that anyone on the left could label as “racist”—that is, any institution that purportedly perpetuates the patriarchy of pale people—then just about every institution must be toppled. And that must-be-toppled category includes such vestiges of the old ways as national borders.
So once again, it’s the Democrats against the Deplorables—we can give ourselves a capital “D,” since, thanks to Clinton, we now have a common identity. Still, as we all know, in the context of this election, the Democrats vs. Deplorables fight is a close match; indeed, the latest polls show Clinton slightly ahead.
And yet the Deplorables have been awakened. So no matter what happens this November, our ranks are sure to grow, because their 2016 vote notwithstanding, in the end, the vast majority of Americans want this country to survive, not to be globalized into some progressive world order.
Indeed, in the years to come, we will likely discover that the ghosts of such scorned old-fashioned Democrats as Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, FDR, and Truman—those white patriots, now deemed to be politically incorrect, maybe even Deplorable—are marching, as well, at our side.
And thus, with thoughtful and far-seeing coalition management, we can see the makings of a big center-right political army. That is, it’s possible to envision an alliance of present-day Republican voters, plus old-fashioned Democrats, all arrayed in formation against the new progressive Obama-Clinton Democrats.
If so, if then the Social Justice Warriors, currently riding high on their stallions of self-righteousness, will be in for a hard and resounding fall.
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