A Widening Ideological Gulf

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, meets with Republican and Democratic legislative leadership Wednesday, January 2, 2019, in the Situation Room. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

“From race, to environmentalism, to wealth, the gulf between ideological rhetoric and reality has rarely been wider,” writes Victor Davis Hanson in NRO.

It’s a spot-on piece that one reader also finds so depressing he is threatening to partake in early morning cocktails.

Modern progressivism makes all sorts of race, class, and gender exceptions for politically incorrect felonies, argues VDH. These appeasements lead to an absence of deterrence and eventually even more transgressions.

The Arrogance and Inconsistency of Progressivism

The common thread to the paradoxes that we encounter daily is the inconsistency of progressivism itself — or rather its ad hoc adoption of any means necessary to be justified by an anointed end, which is the quest for power and control.  Progressivism is not an empirical or coherent creed, but contrary both to human nature and the record of history — in its arrogance that an elite, if only provided with enough money, power, and good intentions, can create heaven on earth rather than hell.

Paradox No. 6: Moral/Amoral Immigration.

By any definition, illegal immigration is amoral, VDH writes.

• Open borders penalize legal immigrants — who wait years under audit for green cards — in favor of those who cut in line and rush the border.
• Illegal immigration renders federal law a joke.
• Sanctuary cities are a neo-Confederate idea of state and local nullification of federal law.
• Unlawful entry punishes the law-abiding citizen, in driving down wages, and in de facto exempting of crimes such as felonious identity theft that would ruin the career of a U.S. citizen.

To the U.S. citizen returning from abroad who presents a passport at customs, and who is hounded about whether he has food on his person, or too much cash, or undeclared purchases, illegal immigration delivers a message: You are an utter fool, and if you had just broken the law, you could have entered the U.S. with no audit at all. It is racist, in that it privileges Spanish speakers south of the border and treats them in a fashion not accorded to Eastern European, Australian, Japanese, or South Korean would-be immigrants.

And illegal immigration is an affront to the poorer and lower middle classes, whose schools, neighborhoods, and safety are often compromised by the influx of millions who have not been audited in terms of health, criminality, and skills — all while illegal immigration and open borders are pushed by the upper middle classes and elite who by their power and money are exempt from such concerns. How did something so abjectly amoral come to be passed off as moral?

VDH’s Answers to the Paradox of Illegal Immigration

1. Vested interests are multifarious across the political spectrum. Latino activists want more political power and careers as the self-appointed spokesmen for a permanent (but revolving) underclass of Spanish speakers. Leftists want more states to flip blue as well as more voters who will be dependent on generous redistributionist bromides. Employers want cheap labor. Elites like inexpensive domestic help. Mexico wants a steady relief valve of social tension in lieu of domestic reform, a psychological getting even with the Yanquis, and a constant revenue stream of $30 billion in remittances, often subsidized by generous U.S. entitlements and welfare.
2. So-called Third World poor are romanticized as noble — and useful. Were millions of middle-class conservative Poles, right-wing Chileans, or Taiwanese Reaganites swarming the border, we would build walls 30 feet high.
3. Radical progressives often enjoy flux if not chaos, in the sense of disruptions to staid and reactionary U.S. customs and traditions. When 60 million U.S. residents are not native-born, good things accrue from disregarding the perceived norms of the English language, Christianity, American history, and the Constitution.

To read more from VDH on Blinkered Enlightenment, to Green Filth, to Merchants of Hate and Hip Hop Hate, to Billionaire Badness, click here.