A reply to the libertarian open-borderites

Dean Ericson writes:

I followed a link to Vdare, and it took me into the thickets of that site, where every other word is hot-linked, and only the most careful reader finds his way, undistracted, to the end of the article and doesn’t let himself be led astray. Well, I let myself be led astray (as is my vice), and found myself at Reason Magazine, where Nick Gillespie was holding forth on immigration, to the effect that open borders are just peachy-keen. Then I read through some of the comments to see what Reason-able people think of that, and saw that, by and large, they’re just peachy-keen with it. I was aghast at their insouciance at the prospect of their own demise, and was inspired to post this comment:

You kids don’t get it. You sit here splitting libertarian hairs, counting angels on pinheads, spinning out your abstract theories as if they mattered. Listen: in your open-borders fantasyland libertarianism is dead, dead, DEAD! And you and yours are dead. What the hell do you think happens when 100 million foreigners from around the world come pouring in here? That they all sit around sipping espresso while discussing the finer points of libertarianism? It’s laughable! Listen: they wage a merciless politics of my-group-against-all-others, a savage struggle of competing peoples to see who comes out on top and garner the spoils and who shall be plundered and ruled. For Pete’s sake use your imagination, try to see what would actually happen, try getting your thinking out of the lazy rut of your precious ideology and imagine the reality.

If you need some inspiration just crack any good history book and observe the savage struggles of competing peoples contesting over disputed territory. That we have been at relative peace here in America for some centuries tends to lull the mind into thinking it shall always be so, but that is illusion. Take care to safeguard what you have, protect it, the same way and for the same reasons you have locks on your doors and don’t leave them wide open; so too you must guard the borders of your nation and consider carefully who you let in. You act as if the only thing in the world worthy of being protected is your precious ideology! You are oblivious to the great history of culture, biology, and civilization that was given you by your forebears, who gave you life itself, who gave you a language and system of laws, who gave you great art and architecture and everything you are, including the ability to sit idly constructing coffee house theories, and you think not to protect it and safeguard it and pass it along intact to your descendants? Fools! What monstrous treason to say it matters not for your entire inheritance to be submerged and forgotten, as long as your precious ideology remains.

When your inheritance, your people, your language, your laws, your family, and your country are entirely submerged, well there too goes your little ideology, glug, glug, glug, that ridiculous tin god enthralling you for the moment, which ridiculous god would vanish leaving you without so much as a Lincoln penny if your crackpot notions were ever to be realized, God forbid. Grow up. I was a Randian libertarian, too, in my younger days, but I am no longer and from my vantage point higher up the mountain I look down now and see how libertarianism can be a cult, like Scientology, it traps your mind in a circular little room. Get free. There’s a larger world, a world that extends back in time and forward in time, extends up to the heavens and down to hell, and you are a link in the great chain of being, and not just some atomized individual. I have been sent by your forebears to knock some sense into your wayward skulls full of mush.

(The only thing I wish I’d added to that screed would be “religion” in the list of things given them by their forebears.)

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Thomas Bertonneau writes:

I recently broke off communications, sustained over several years, with a libertarian, more or less Randian, correspondent, who, in a discussion of immigration, responded to my case for borders and restrictive admissions by resorting to four-letter language. I had the impression that my correspondent thought of the flood of campesinos crossing with impunity into Texas and California as perfectly fungible with a Kaffeeklatsch of young Objectivists meeting at Starbucks to discuss Atlas Shrugged. It amounts to a refusal to grapple with the very objective reality in which the Objectivists are eternally keen to rub everyone else’s nose.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2011 11:22 AM | Send