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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: The Ever-Expanding Expansionist Compact, II: Empire Abroad, Empire at Home Imperialism naturally subverts democracy. Owing to an elected government's need to either appease or manipulate popular sentiment, campaigns of misinformation are necessary to create the illusion of necessity for military expansion; these campaigns amount to assaults on the first lines of defense--the press and public opposition--before the effort goes abroad. Experience has demonstrated that if the war is deemed "won" and the later exposure of the subterfuge brings no real or lasting consequences, a precedent is set (in fact for us was long ago set), relieving the executive branch of its obligation to truthfully represent the nature of foreign threats; to tell the truth. Most of us have been complicit in this. Military adventurism is a requirement of global ambition but bears little actual resemblance to national defense. Therefore it must be shielded from the the Constitutional scrutiny specifically intended to discourage it. Thus is born the "authorization to use force" in place of the Congressional declaration of war. Legislative authority for declaring—specifically in voting not to declare—war, combined with its authority over war-funding, is the only real check we have on the near-dictatorial power over the military the president now wields. The momentum that takes over once war is engaged—as the nation finds itself bound by national honor, by the need to stave off the consequences of defeat and humiliation, the expansionists’ primal fear of retrenchment following defeat ("retreat into isolationism!"), and the state of crisis created by the war (that grates away at civil liberties)—ensures that starting a war is orders of magnitude easier than ending one. It took the Administration little more than a year to overpower the cowed and outnumbered opposition to the Iraq war—this was the first phase of the war effort, a breakout offensive against legal lines of encirclement intended to reign in just this sort of imperial ambition. Once this has been accomplished, with "troops in the field", those behind the war can count on this momentum (like a giant ship at sea requiring two lengths to turn about) resisting all efforts to reverse course and bring the military force home. Now even most who concede military victory in Iraq is not possible maintain the occupation must continue, for a matter of years or indefinitely, to "stabilize" Iraq. Of course we know a long-term occupation was always intended, albeit anticipating far lower material and political cost (indeed, expecting net gains), and a compliant host government operating in close alliance with an ever-more powerful center in Washington. In light of this, what might be called war's "sticky" nature, granting the president blank-check authorizations to use force provides him with a ready means of producing such faits accomplis as the current quagmire in Iraq. The Legislature abnegates clearly defined duty to collude with the president in his misappropriation of the military and the swindling of the public purse to pay for it. One can argue that a declaration of war needn't be necessary for every instance of military action, but he cannot argue that it isn't necessary for the invasion and occupation of entire nations. Of course, if a mobilization the size of Operation Iraqi Freedom doesn't require a declaration of war, then nothing does. Any time Congress cedes some of its power one has to ask what greater power it intends to collect in return--or what consequence it seeks to avoid. In this case elected representatives trade their constitutional authority now for a contingent plausible deniability later; if a war proves unpopular, legislators can claim innocence, ignorance even. Witness the current slate of Democratic candidates for president. Somehow we consider elected representatives taking up their responsibility and failing less honorable than voting it away for political expedience, essentially discarding their constitutional charge, like cowards dropping their rifles, and fleeing. Our next president will likely be selected from this bug-out brigade. A fictional threat accomplishes the initial invasion; "nation-building” provides cover for the occupation, a means disguised as an end. As a consequence we find ourselves responsible for overseas, non-citizen constituencies numbering in the millions and as alien to us and our way of life as we are ignorant of theirs. Thus, the constitutional compact to "establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, (and) promote the general welfare" is conferred on an ever-greater share of humanity. But millions of foreigners cannot be made effective wards of the American state without diluting and distorting its constitutional promise to its true and legal citizenry. The compact ends at our borders and is broken by its extension beyond them. Having the successful instances of nation building in Japan and Germany in our history has proven disastrous now that an overly aggressive administration, emboldened and empowered by the rupture in the national psyche of 9/11, has decided to declare a similar mandate in the Middle East, where there is no basis for one. In any given nation there, there is no common enemy such as the Soviet Union or Red China against whom a unified populace (there is no unified populace) wishes to ally with us. The "nations" we seek to decapitate and restore are revealed as something very different from nations as we understand them, as we tear the scab from the still recent scarring of the region by the mostly arbitrary borders drawn less than a hundred years ago. So the compact between our government and those for whom it is responsible is extended to a restive, hostile population under myriad complex states of siege with elements of itself. These foreigners, thrown into a state of chaos we've created, effectively become subjects of the United States, with a claim against it to security, certain rights, and even material well-being--subjects in a state of crisis. As long as we remain we cannot choose to ignore this claim even if we wish; it will be enforced by the need to pacify the occupied, by the law, convention and judgment of the world community, and by our need to husband our resources of "soft power" (rapidly draining away at this moment). Our aggressive post 9/11 policies make an experiment of sorts, plumbing the depths of these latter two. But it gets worse: as a liberal republic holding certain rights inviolable and inherent, "God given", declaring the universality of those rights and thereby claiming the mandate to enforce them globally, we become responsible for the impossible task of bringing the falsely "liberated" up to our level of civil rights and individual liberty--whether they want it or not. Of course other nations, being separate societies that are the product of foreign cultures, have very different ideas of rights--inevitably investing them in kin, clan and creed. This imperial expansion of the American Commons directs inward as well; twelve million or (likely many) more illegal squatters, invited by a willfully negligent government acting in defiance of popular will, now lay claim to certain rights, through the fait accompli of their residency, abetted by the lobbying of their native countries and their alliance with political power groups such as La Raza, through implicit compacts of questionable legality with "haven" cities, industries and even with the Catholic Church, that sees its own salvation through fortifying its ranks with the souls, and liberation theology, cast off from Latin America. A fatal flaw in democracy is exposed: both political parties, each covetous and fearful of the emerging demographic plurality, can only seek to curry its favor through legislation. In this way legislation is extorted from congress through the mass, illegal migration of a group drawn primarily from one nation--a distinct foreign faction. Calling it an "invasion" is more accurate than even some who use the term know. This elite-abetted invasion rests on the same notion of individual rights above national sovereignty that brings the disaster of the Iraq war--and just as in that case the moral argument is disingenuous cover for crasser goals. Just as the Iraqi became a quasi-citizen of an expanded American state, so too does the illegal immigrant. Expansion abroad is entirely consistent with expansion inward: our own border is ultimately as meaningless as any other. And just as the same liberal values ostensibly to be brought to the world through military conquest are in fact destroyed by it, they are similarly sacrificed to the inward expansion of the elite's imperium. Democracy will not survive the racial factionalization accelerated and aggravated by the current cycle of passive border enforcement relieved by periodic amnesties. And in our bizarre, perversely postmodern time, the same disregard for the customs and culture of Iraqis at home becomes a disregard for our own customs and culture--but not for any particular group of newcomers, who are expected to maintain their own customs as a bulwark against the colonization of, yes, the majority culture of their new home. And just as patriotism is used to bludgeon opposition to war, political correctness is used to bludgeon any who dare cite this ongoing factionalization, which can come to no good end. In the post-Western multicultural age, minority communities within a democracy naturally come to think of themselves as separate, colonized nations ruled by the majority; economically underperforming minorities feel this more keenly and can only attribute their relative poverty to this colonization (ethnic pride will allow no other analysis). The same tendency toward ethnic factionalization we see taking place in Iraq becomes our fate at home. The political classes' rigging of the legislative process to pass immigration "reform" without meaningful debate constitutes an assault on the native population, diluting its electoral strength with the illegal addition of millions of new citizens--with largely competing interests. Taken in light of the, remarkably, open talk of the resulting demographic's usefulness to either political party's future claim to power, this can only be described as a purposeful, partial displacement. The flooding of parts of the nation by illegal migrants by the political/activist coalition is not very different from the U.S. government flooding western America with settlers to displace native populations there, or any number of migrations, forced, intrigued, or natural, that are continually altering the regions of the world. The post-modern American empire turns inward, against it's own population. The elite effectively occupies the nation against its will through the invading force that is the illegal alien mass, illicitly, even illegally, trading off to a foreign population a stake in the American Commons for greater power and the economic needs of their lobbyist overlords. This invasion is accomplished by similar means of deception. War relies on the populace's natural affinity for its own, and fears of foreign threats; the war waged inward relies on the twisted and severely proscribed discourse of race. Each operates from a distinct, inborn advantage. Part of the reason for our high migratory inflow is our relatively generous system of government assistance; therefore the alliance of politicians with an illegal population of squatters is nothing less than elected representatives colluding with foreigners to rob the American taxpayer; divvying up the take in political power. It is not merely citizenship granted to long-term illegal residents, but an enhanced, privileged citizenship conferred upon them and their offspring (in fact, the illegal immigrant, of a favored ethnicity, has already managed a preferred status for his children over the children of natives of disfavored ethnicity). Most illegal immigrants are pre-approved for a host of racially discriminatory government programs upon amnesty. Their citizenship is worth more. There is no "White Privilege"; there is only the mundane, depressing reality of white success. There is something that could be accurately called "Brown Privilege", codified into law and constituting an ongoing transfer of wealth and political power, that seeks to perpetuate itself in part through immigration. And somehow the irony is missed: people fleeing their homelands, crossing deserts, leaving family behind, uprooting themselves; all to live in a society that deems their thusly enhanced position as terrible oppression for which it must continually atone. Only in America. And just as our folly abroad will not make Americans of Iraqis and Afghans, our folly at home will not make the offspring of Mexico's peasantry indistinguishable from the high-achieving offspring of other immigrant groups, past or present. What's lost in the touchy debate over racial inequality is that the cause of racial inequality--whether it be discrimination and "White Privilege" (to which Asians are somehow wondrously impervious--oh those wily Celestials!) or dreaded racial differences in IQ--is mostly irrelevant, because all historic evidence indicates whatever its cause inequality, and its anti-democratic effects, will persist for many generations, if not indefinitely. One convinced of the standard discrimination model explaining it may wish to argue that a demographic upheaval putting ethnic underachievers in the majority is the cure, but the barest common sense suggests we should not count on this. Even as the post-civil rights experience has brought into gut-wrenching relief the impossibility of achieving proportional ethnic representation throughout society without costly, degrading and unfair discriminatory government coercion, the elite proposes an ethnic mix that ensures a higher proportion of aggrieved to "privileged." This can only be assuaged by extra-democratic means: affirmative action, welfare statism, "civil rights" litigation, the great unknown and immeasurable cost to business from defending against lawsuits and self-imposing discrimination; etc. None of this can be achieved without a subsequent siphoning off of the rights, representation, and wealth of native and legal residents of the United States. Using a mercenary force paid in legislative spoils, the elite wages a war of imperial expansion and plunder against its own citizenry, with power as the prize.
Poster Comment: Exceptionally thoughtful and insightful.
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