The apocalypse of immigration?

Byron York at NRO analyses President Bush’s huge drop in public approval, now at 31 percent. It is not just a loss among Republicans. It has also been a loss among Democrats, then Independents, and then Republicans, a three-stage process:

Where that process ends is anyone’s guess. Perhaps this is the bottom, and the president will begin to rise in the polls. On the other hand, present trends might continue. If they do, the three-step process could ultimately become a four-step process, with more Republicans deciding to abandon the president, leaving him with no dependable base of support.

And, York says, by far the biggest factor in the president’s loss of support among Republicans is immigration, or, rather illegal immigration.

Bush’s stance on illegal immigration, which has so alienated his base, is beyond astonishing. The man won’t even go through the motions of addressing the problem. He shows open contempt for the public’s anguish about this ongoing catastrophe. And this is not just a policy question on which there would be a pro and con, like Woodrow Wilson’s debacle with the League of Nations treaty. This is about a president’s most fundamental responsibilty to enforce the country’s laws and defend the country’s borders, and Bush refuses even to pretend that he cares.

I’ve written before that the Islamic attack on America in 2001 initiated the apocalypse of liberalism, because we are now in a war with the cultural Other, against whom liberalism will not fight. The refusal of liberals to defend America from our Muslim enemies is revealing the true, anti-national nature of liberalism, which, I believe, will ultimately lead to the demise of liberalism. The only question is, will this demise of liberalism take place before or after America itself has died?

Protecting our borders is another basic obligation that liberalism—or, specifically, our liberal president—is unwilling to fulfill. This is because, just as defeating anti-Western Muslims would require fighting the cultural Other, which liberalism absolutely declines to do, protecting our borders would involve keeping the cultural Other out of America, which liberalism also declines to do. The refusal of Bush to defend the country from the Mexican immigrant invasion is revealing the anti-national nature of the nation-of-immigrants ideology, which in turn will lead to the demise of that ideology.

The only question is, will the open-borders ideology die before America has died, giving America a chance to live, or will it only die when America itself dies, in which case America is doomed? Bush’s dramatic slide in the polls gives grounds for hope.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 10, 2006 01:54 AM | Send