Horowitz is a Bolshevik who has become a Menshevik. He is no conservative. HRS

I want to call VFR readers’ attention to the fact that the ever-fascinating, ever-amusing, ever-infuriating James Kunstler is on our side on immigration. I quote from a recent blog entry of his (his insistence on profanity is disappointing):

“The past two nights, Lou Dobbs of CNN, usually mild-tempered and self-possessed, was nearly beside himself with amazed fury as he interviewed the varied shills and apologists in government who seek to privatize the profits and socialize the costs of illegal immigration. He couldn’t f**king believe what they were telling him: e.g. that millions of Mexicans were needed here to do jobs that Americans won’t do. Anybody notice how many Mexican sheetrockers have been flooding into the Carolinas to finish off the McHouses that Americans are going into terminal debt to buy? A lot of Americans would gladly work to hang sheetrock, but they would expect decent wages consistent with what other specialists get paid in the building trades, including some basic health insurance. The Mexican sheetrockers will work for a fraction of that, off the books, and when they get sick, they go to the emergency room of the local hospital and the cost of doctoring them is passed on to someone like me with $3000-deductable health insurance who ends up getting obscenely overcharged by my hospital for the fifteen-minute use of a minor surgery room for a colonoscopy. All right, I rant a bit.”

http://www.kunstler.com/

You have nailed it on this one. Thats why I can’t stand to listen to Sean Hannity, its always radical left this and bad liberals that. Yes the radical left is bad and is certainly responsible for much of whats wrong with our country, but the Bushpublicans are right behind them. They are selling out our country faster than a New York Minute. Can anyone say Oligarchy?

A correspondent writes:

“Thanks. That’s a good analysis of David’s psychological profile. Within his emotional quirks, he definitely means well, but he has a strong tendency toward us vs. them passions that can get in the way of arriving at a coolly objective view. Anyway, I like to view his glass as half full rather than half empty.”

Here’s my reply:

The glass metaphor is not apt. The empty part of a half-full glass is simply empty, it’s not doing anything harmful. But Horowitz, even as he’s doing good things with one hand (to change the metaphor), such as publishing this article, is actively pushing bad things with the other, like pushing Bush’s immigration plan.

But I think you’re right about his makeup. He so polarized toward “us vs. them” that he can’t even conceive of the idea that some of “us” may also be part of the problem. So when he hears someone like me say something like that, it strikes him as nonsense, as something that it would be a waste of time even to consider.

I think he and some “personal responsibility” conservatives have a real problem with any notion of structural and cultural factors leading to outcomes, like the decline of the manufacturing sector. Everything is a “personal choice.” In the zeal to run away from the left’s relativism, a sort of radical free will notion takes its place. Burke was good at pointing out that between the two extremes of relativism and absolutism is the heart of true political thinking and conservatism.

That all said, I once had lunch with the guy and he seemed like a gentleman and a reasonably thoughtful guy.

Paul,
To elaborate on the mindset of J.H. Kunstler - it must be said that he is a moderate Democrat, an increasingly rare species. His affinity for immigration reform seems to stem from a cautious, conservative desire to prevent the US from getting overpopulated, and to prevent the working class from getting screwed by predatory Enron style management types. It might clarify things to see who is one the most well publicized opponents of Kunstler & his new urbanism devotees. None other than the neoconservative Fred Barnes. Also, David Brooks has written glowingly about suburbia, sprawl & the rise of big box mega malls. Overall, it has been the Barnes/Brooks/neocon milieu that has given ideological cover for the ravenous real estate developers who’ve transformed so much of North America these past 20-30 yrs. These guys are in league with open borders idiots such as Grover Norquist, Stephen Moore & Tamar Jacoby. They seem to think that we’ll all have cheap oil for eternity and that concern for the finite size & resource base of this planet is nothing but eco- scare mongering. In the short to medium term, the real estate developers and the peddlers of massive throw away consumerism/materialism stand to make great profits. The longer term casualty will be the quality of life for future Americans in terms of sprawl, air pollution, ground water depletion, traffic gridlock & lost agricultural land.

Lawrence Auster is making an important point here that applies even more clearly to the case of Australia. Australia has been transformed within the last 60 years from an ethnically homogeneous nation (at the end of WWII) to an increasingly multiracial one of today. Although this was initiated by the left (the Labor Party) it has been mostly carried out by two supposedly right wing, conservative Prime Ministers, Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard. So, if you want to explain what went wrong you have to look at the politics of the “mainstream conservatives”, just as much as of the left.

When I looked through the political beliefs of these two men I did find a personal conservatism (both good family men and proud of their Anglo-Australian heritage). However, their formal political beliefs were liberal: their aim was freedom for the individual, understood to be the removal of impediments to the pursuit of individual aims (especially in the marketplace) of the abstracted, atomised individual.

The result was something of a mishmash, but in general they looked on their own conservative values as a merely personal sentiment that either should not, or in the long run could not, hinder the general progress of liberal politics. In practice, therefore, they proved themselves to be right wing liberals (or more simply “right liberals”) rather than genuine traditionalist conservatives.

As far as I can see the same thing applies to even the most conservative members of other right wing parties, such as the Republicans or the British Conservatives.

Chris:

Thanks for the insight. Despite his quirks, I prefer Kunstler.

And here’s frontpagemag again today, with another article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11832

“Most would, as the Bush administration has proposed to do, reward them with some kind of amnesty, thus providing incentive for even more illegals to make their way through our porous borders.”

But the article still largely fires away at the left. “But ACLU, MeCHA, MALDEF and other radical leftist groups have continued their assault on our nation’s borders seeking to further undermine its security, all the while aided by politicians…”

Edwards and Kerry want every illegal alien who has a job and pays taxes to become a citizen:

Edwards:

“The right kind of immigration reform will ensure that immigrants who work hard, pay their taxes, and play by the rules have the opportunity to become permanent members of the American community.”

http://www.johnedwards2004.com/page.asp?id=507

Kerry:

Bush’s proposal fails to address the plight of immigrants coming to work in the United States by not providing a meaningful path to becoming legal permanent residents…. As president … I will immediately resume our dialogue with President Fox and put in place an earned legalization program that will allow undocumented immigrants to legalize their status if they have been in the United States for a certain amount of time, have been working, and can pass a background check.

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0107b.html

On a slightly different topic, Kerry also says:

“Bush has also failed to follow through on his promise to work with Vicente Fox, leaving that relationship in tatters.”

This is the classic Kerry who always blames America first. Mexico manifested in an openly hostile way toward us regarding the Iraq war debate and other things. This put the relationship in the cooler for a while. But to Kerry, this is all Bush’s fault. Kerry is inherently unable to see things from an American point of view or to act in America’s interests. He conceived an alienation and condescension toward America when he was in Vietnam, and that still informs him today.

When he was in Vietnam, or when he was at Yale? The Yale of Kerry’s day was probably as anti-American as the Viet Cong. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t changed a bit. Come to think of it, Yale gave us all those Bushes, and Clintons too. What a nursery of leadership… HRS

In defense of Yale, many of the most interesting conservatives in recent decades have been Yale graduates. I don’t think that could be said of any other Ivy League school.

Kerry was born in 1944, was in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970, so he was out of Yale before the late Sixties revolution really kicked in. The Atlantic article on his Vietnam experience quoted many of the letters he wrote at that time, and that was the basis of my comment. The impression they gave me was that it wasn’t just that he didn’t like the way the war was being fought or questioned the whole purpose of it. It was the tone of disgusted contemptuous offended superiority toward the American government that he expressed in those letters, and which has been his keynote through his whole public career.

My best friend went to Yale. He thought it was already pretty bad in the 1960s.

Of course Yale was already bad in the Sixties. But there was a vital conservative counterculture at Yale, which continued at least through the 1980s, and which was fostered by Yale’s own decision to admit outspokenly conservative and highly individualistic students. For example, one Yale graduate I know told the admissions officer that he was an anti-Vatican II Catholic and a supporter of Francisco Franco. Can you imagine Harvard admitting such a student?