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Correcting some things I said about John Fund
My recent critique of a Wall Street Journal column by John Fund had some phrases in it that require comment and correction. When I said I’ve known Fund as a “staunch open-borders ideologue” since I met him 15 years ago, that was not strictly true or fair. When I met him he was certainly strongly pro-open borders, but in personal terms he was pleasant and engaging to talk with, and, though unswervingly convinced of the rightness of his side of the argument, he did not have the ruthless, scary streak about open immigration that characterizes many libertarian and WSJ types. I only began to think of Fund as an ideologue in February 2002, when I was on a panel with him at a conference of the Council for National Policy, as I explained to him in this letter. (Here is the speech I gave on that panel.) It was Mr. Fund’s conduct at that meeting, recounted in the letter, that made me think of him as someone who is not above demagoguing the issue. As I wrote in the final paragraph:
And there’s another thing I want to tell you. If we’re ever together again on a panel on immigration and you start gratuitously warning people not to be “hostile toward immigrants,” I won’t wait for your third repetition of the warning before I challenge you on it. You had one intention and one intention only when you said that—to scare people away from discussing a vitally important national issue.I recognize that my use of the word demagoguery to describe Mr. Fund’s conduct at the conference may seem wrong to some people including Mr. Fund, as he was not, to use the dictionary definition, making impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the audience. Yet while his manner was not demagogic, his substance was. I believe his repeated warnings against ”hostility to immigrants” had the intent and effect of reinforcing the feeling in his audience that immigration restrictionists are morally bad people, without his having presented any specific evidence of such hostility or shown its connection to the arguments being made my me and others on the panel. Fund was not stirring up the crowd, in the classic demagogic sense. Yet he was reinforcing an unthinking mass feeling against immigration restrictionists. And I think that can fairly be described as demogoguery. Further, when I consider the total marginalization and suppression of restrictionist opinions that has been effected by Mr. Fund’s newspaper and other mainstream “conservative” publications (as an example of such marginalization and suppression, the panel on which we appeared was literally the first time the CNP had had a panel or speaker addressing the immigration issue in its 15 year history of thrice-yearly conferences covering a wide variety of social and political issues), and the fear evidenced by the typical grass-roots Christian conservative that any concern about immigration makes him a bad person and is therefore off-limits, and when I see the way these conservatives simply turn their mind off on the subject, my view is reinforced that Mr. Fund’s warnings against an unspecified “hostility to immigrants” were demagogic, though I also recognize that there are reasonable grounds for finding the characterization excessive. (In fact, Fund’s comments about “hostility” reminded me of the dark imprecations uttered by Bob Dole in his 1996 acceptance speech about unspecified “haters” in the GOP for whom “the exits are clearly marked.” At the time, I took these unspecified haters to include myself, and so on election day 1996 I switched my registration from Republican to Independent.) Having said all that, I add that there are a couple of references I made to Mr. Fund in the blog entry that I cannot stand by. There is my imaginary reference to the “sweat popping out on Fund’s normally complacent forehead.” This is gratuitously personal and nasty, and not my style. Also, I wrote, “For a true believer like Fund, calling for real immigration enforcement, let alone reduction of legal numbers, would be like a vampire kissing the Cross.” I think this image does capture, in graphic and humorous terms, the total, indeed metaphysical disdain that the WSJ has consistently shown toward any concerns about immigration and toward any people that show such concerns, and it also suggests that paper’s unwavering, ruthless, Soviet-like commitment to open borders. We only need to recall Jason Riley’s attack on the very moderate Center for Immigration Studies as a “repugnant” organization. However, my putting this phrase in personal terms about John Fund was not right. At the same time, I stand by the main argument of the blog entry, which is that Fund was not calling for immigration enforcement because he believes in it, but only because he sees the absence of serious law enforcement as posing a political threat to President Bush and the GOP. Since Fund doesn’t want border enforcement for its own sake, but is only being pushed into that position by his concern for the political health of the Republicans, it can be fairly said that his default position is as a believer in open borders. I made a similar argument about Fund in a blog entry last February, though without the personal angle. John Fund has written to me insisting that he is not a supporter of open borders and that it is not fair to ascribe to him a “default” position for open borders. I am open to further arguments from him on that score.
Instead of covering up my verbal excesses by revising or deleting the recent entry, I will leave it posted as is, with a link from it to this article. Email entry |