A pretty good discussion of conservatism and immigration

The National Review assault on Donald Trump brings up the issue of basing one’s political views on values, ideas, and principles. The problem is simply that these abstractions may or may not reflect fundamental interests, and the Trump candidacy is bringing this to the fore. The NR commentary is essentially a brief for the priority of principles, ideas, and values over interests...

Concerns about “limited government” and respect for the Constitution are the main themes running through the comments. Trump just hasn’t been mouthing adherence to either of them, and his critics point to instances, mainly in the past, where he has strayed from these abstractions. (Yes, the Constitution is an abstraction, because as Joe Sobran said (and quoted by Gregory Hood), “the Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”

In all of this, there is no mention of fundamental interests that might  be compromised by adhering to the principles they espouse. As I noted in a recent article on the response to Trump, “Conservatism Inc. may argue that Trump is not a ‘conservative.’ But the reality is that Trump voters are focusing on his big issues—immigration first and foremost. Unless we win the immigration battle, none of the other battles can possibly be won.”

Immigration, more than any other issue, reflects fundamental interests in the ethnic composition of the United States. As an obvious example, limited government is not going to repatriate millions of illegal immigrants, or keep them out in the future. It is an enduring Utopian ideal that limited, constitutional government and individual freedom can survive importing millions of people from radically different cultures—cultures with no history of limited, constitutional government or individual freedom, and often with hatred toward the peoples and cultures of the West. Only the most reality-detached ideologue could believe that it’s all going to work out and something resembling traditional American institutions will be around in a few decades time if current trends continue.

As Jared Taylor points out, “Do they really believe that Mexicans and Haitians and Guatemalans and Vietnamese and Bangladeshis and Chinese are ever going to be made to care about the Second Amendment or Madisonian democracy or limited government?”...

This mindset among NR conservatives reflects a common defect among liberal Protestants that surfaced originally in the nineteenth century — the idea that the very different people crowding the shores of the U.S. would become “just like us.” These immigrants would eventually become good Protestants. What we are seeing now is how important segments of non-White immigrants, most obviously Muslims, are in fact unassimilable. They are never going to “become like us” and be concerned about the principles and values so near and dear to conservatives. It was the realization that so many of the post-1890 immigrants were infected with radical political beliefs that finally made Americans realize that immigrants don’t automatically turn into patriotic Americans. This realization was an important impetus for the 1924 immigration law...

... intellectual rationales for curtailing speech critical of the multicultural ideal are already common in the legal community in the U.S., while in Europe, police-state controls on thought and  behavior intended to buttress the the multicultural revolution are firmly ensconced. For Germany reeling under the migrant onslaught, the first priority is to manage nativist anger, not restricting migration or repatriating migrants...

We have to understand that this way of thinking is the result of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, the intellectual basis for which is discussed in The Culture of Critique. In CofC I discuss a paper by Roger Smith, who shows that until the triumph of the cultural pluralist model with the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, there were three competing models of American identity: the “liberal” individualist legacy of the Enlightenment based on “natural rights”; the “republican” ideal of a cohesive, socially homogeneous society; and the “ethnocultural” strand emphasizing the importance of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the development and preservation of American cultural forms. [1] These three strands are compatible with each other, but only if the US had retained its traditional homogeneous White underpinnings. Recall that the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, with its built-in sense of White identity politics (i.e., biasing immigration to people from Northwest Europe), was essentially upheld over presidential veto not that long ago, in 1952. Yet these principled conservatives act as if their ideals have always been the guiding principles of the Republic. Fundamentally, they have plugged into the leftist zeitgeist in order to make themselves palatable to the powers that be...

The problem is that these self-described conservatives have thrown out all of this except the Enlightenment ideals. By denigrating and religiously avoiding the traditional ethnocultural strand of American identity as well as the republican ideal of a cohesive and socially homogeneous society, these “conservatives” have wholeheartedly gone along with this revolution. It is a revolution that amounts to the suicide of the West. In the end, it is anything but conservative...

If we are in fact seeing the beginning of a politics of more-or-less explicit White identity, the irrelevant cuckservatives at at the dying NR [National Review] must receive a great deal of the credit. And for that we can be thankful.