I saw Professor Hanson on a CSPAN2 program that got over just a few minutes ago called “California Immigration Issues.” It was a tremendous program. Amazing statistics and ideas throughout. Steven Camarota from CIS had the most interesting things to say, in my opinion. They also pointed out at the end that the new issue of National Review has the cover title “Mexifornia.” I don’t believe that I can link directly to this video, but here is the page that it is on for now:

http://www.c-span.org/videoarchives.asp?CatCodePairs=,

Scroll down to “Panel Discussion on ‘Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.’” If anybody can find the permanent link, they might want to post it.

“In fact, that idea is not as fatuous or cynical as it sounds. It fits with the eminently sane logic of an “entente cordiale” between paleocons and neocons that was recently proposed by one of our posters: the paleocons support Israel, and the neocons support immigration restrictions.”

I have been trying to say the same thing myself here at VFR, and elsewhere, for some time now. I truly hope that such an agreement is possible. That more than anything could help to revive a genuine conservative movement in America.

My bet is that the paleocons are ready. Just as soon as the current immigration laws start to be enforced with vigor, and the White Anglo Saxon Preference in Immigration Act of 2004 and the Deportation of Moslem Infidels Act of 2004 pass Congress we’ll see paleocons and neocons marching together. Actually the Acts don’t have to be passed in order for the March of Conservative Solidarity to start; we just have to see all of the major neocon pundits come out unequivocally in favor of them. Now if only we could get the American Conservative to publish its cover story “Israel Is Our Friend and Helping Them Is In Our Own Self Interest” at the same time we’d see the beginning of the Big Conservative Kumbaya.

All the newly married gays can “man” the guard posts at the southern border, and Buchanan in return can write an op-ed about how gay “marriage” will improve monogamy and help keep abortion safe and legal. Lew Rockwell will retire as a pundit and become a bombadier in the Global War on Terror.

Wasn’t this a Coke commercial back in the seventies?

Matt in the pursuit of satire is taking my notion of an entente cordiale far beyond anything I suggested. I didn’t propose that the paleocons had to sign on to a neocon-style global war, only that they would support the existence and safety of Israel, which is not now the case. Also, somehow Matt throws peleocon support for gay rights into this entente; but neocons, though some of them may be getting ready to surrender to homosexual marriage, are not actively pushing it.

The problem with Matt’s satire is that he’s simply equating neoconservatism with left-liberalism, and supposing that any such paleocon/neocon friendship as I am proposing would involve paleocons becoming left liberals.

Why blow a useful thought out of the water like that? I’m obviously not saying that my proposal has some immediately realistic changes for success; when I first discussed it in the other thread, I described it as my dream of a sensible politics. When Plato described the Republic, it was not as something he expected to happen, but as a standard by which existing reality could be understood and judged. The neocons are wrong in their support for immigration; the paleocons are wrong in their hatred of Israel. A reversal of those two positions could cure many of the ills of contemporary politics. Even if there’s no chance of its happening, thinking about it helps clarify where things have gone wrong.

Mr. Auster is correct that my attempted satire was heavy on the venting and light on any coherent thesis, and as such probably less than the usual standard at VFR. Chalk it up to my current lack of time available for reflective thought, if I may ask for that generous courtesy.

Certainly it would be a positive good for the paleos to set aside their irrational hatred of Israel and for neocons to simultaneously acknowledge the good in restricting immigration to favor white Christians. I am not terribly optimistic, but optimism is not required when one attempts what is necessary.

Also, w.r.t. the aside I introduced, I think the preemptive neocon surrender on gay “marriage” is a natural consequence of what they have held all along: that the State has no business authoritatively regulating consensual sexual behavior. So I don’t see it as a dramatic turnabout, and indeed the neocons themselves don’t seem to view it as such.

Any exchange of hostages on immigration and Israel would be a welcome good, but even after such an exchange neocons would remain the implacable enemy of traditionalist conservatism. And there is always the legitimate concern that one who extends an olive branch to a neoconservative is likely to draw back a bloody stump.

Matt wrote:

“Any exchange of hostages on immigration and Israel would be a welcome good, but even after such an exchange neocons would remain the implacable enemy of traditionalist conservatism.”

This may well be true, but I did not suggest that my (utopian? quixotic? Platonic?) proposal, even if somehow enacted, would end all the problems of liberalism, only that it would remove a particularly poisonous set of conflicts from our current politics. By the same token, suppose the Democratic party (this is fantasy of course) came out in favor of a drastic reduction of immigration. Wouldn’t that be a positive good to welcome, even if liberalism remained liberalism on other issues?

In the real world, I acknowledge the likely truth of Matt’s “bloody stump” prediction. Nevertheless, I still say that the entente cordiale idea is very useful as it presents a positive vision of a sensible politics and thus a critique and challenge to the current politics.

Washington said at the time of the Constitutional Convention, when passage of the Constitution was far from assured: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest may repair. The event is in the hand of God.” That saying does not presuppose that the standard referred to is necessarily pragmatically achievable under current political conditions; it means, here is a standard that men should be called to.

“It fits with the eminently sane logic of an “entente cordiale” between paleocons and neocons that was recently proposed by one of our posters: the paleocons support Israel, and the neocons support immigration restrictions.”

If it were not for the obscurantist rhetoric of neoconservatives such an “entente cordiale” might be feasible. To a neoconservative any argument that we restrict immigration for economic or cultural reasons — reasons for security might get a pass — is treated as attack against the leitmotif of America. To a neoconservative any failure to support foreign spending on Israel and lump Arafat in with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is seen as being against Israel. Opposing American intervention in Israel and opposing Israel’s right to exist are very different things. Pat Buchanan has even said that if the Arabs organize a military force and seek to wipe Israel off the map, he would — if President — summon American forces to protect and defend Israel. So surely Pat Buchanan and other conservatives do support Israel, just not in the manner in which neoconsevatives prefer.

Leaving aside Evy Pejouhy’s views on paleocon support for Israel, with which I disagree, the argument that neocons would never accept immigration restrictions because that violates the leitmotif of America used to be true, but is no longer necessarily true. Why? Because the leitmotif of America as the neocons understand it—that America is the land where ethnicity doesn’t matter—has now now been officially discarded under Grutter, and, secondly, the neocons are barely even protesting that fact. Every non-European immigrant now is elligible for race preferences so as to have all groups, even the most recent arrivals, equally represented in every sphere of life. As I said in my article, “The Grutter decision as felix culpa”:

“The replacement of the liberal idea of individual equality under the law by the leftist idea of racial equality of results is … a major catastrophe in the history of our country. Yet this disaster also means that the establishment conservatives have lost the underlying premise of their open-borders agenda, the utopian notion that all peoples can be assimilated into America’s individualist ethos. And that is an opportunity to be seized.”

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001670.html

There are many people, some with alot of clout and money, who view the diversification (or multiculturalism) of this (once great) nation as a “good thing” in clear view of the massive population gains projected for year 2050. I suspect they have an ulterior agenda and hope to unleash it if they hope they will attain enough democratic votes in most of the 50 states.