Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Dems and Deportation

Democrats upset over deportations ought to look in the mirror. Prior to Biden-Harris they did little to secure the nation's borders, and by supporting Biden-Harris they embraced the  destructive open-border policy of that administration. That nations need enforceable and enforced borders not merely to flourish, but to continue to exist, is well-nigh self-evident.  Those in a nation who blind themselves to this self-evidence are reasonably viewed as wanting the destruction of the nation they are in.

Promotion of illegal immigration being the Democrats' greatest crime, Donald J. Trump's securing of the border is his greatest achievement so far, as is recognized by most of the populace.  But the Biden-Harris mess will be with us for a long time to come.  Deportation of illegal aliens must proceed if the rule of law is to be upheld.  There will inevitably be mistakes and injustices. The law must be enforced, but the enforcers are finite and fallible, and a small minority of them are as bad as the criminals they are charged with protecting us against. This obvious point I am making will be resisted by those with an authoritarian personality structure, but leftists, who tend toward the opposite extreme, that of the rebellious protester who reflexively takes the side of criminals and underdogs, regardless of their criminality, ought readily to accept it.

There are bad cops. We all know this. You do not have to be a member of a minority to have experienced bad behavior from law enforcement agents. Give a man a gun, a badge, and a uniform and it may go to his head. It's not that power corrupts; the problem is that we are all more or less morally corrupt inherently so that any power we acquire is subject to misuse.  

So I say to Democrats, you have brought about this situation by your support of perverse and deleterious policies. Blame yourself first for any excesses. 

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Bill Vallicella

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5 responses to “Dems and Deportation”

  1. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    Bill,
    Here’s a question for the philosopher’s mill: Do tens of millions illegal aliens in our country constitute a Schmittian “state of exception”? if I remember my Schmitt, one of his criticisms of liberal constitutionalism is that it, in its seeking of legal regularity and uniformity, remains woefully unable to anticipate and therefore deal with the sorts of unique existential crises that inevitably occur and are by nature “exceptional” and require making steely choices between “us” and “them.”
    For my eyes, all this hectoring and judicial obstruction about “due process” from the left presupposes that aliens get all the same constitutional legal protections as the rest of us, rendering them by gavel both as de facto and de jure citizens. But surely this is absurd. Again, referencing Schmitt, how could the Founding Fathers really anticipate that their descendants would be so decadent and foolish so as to permit tens of millions of illegal aliens into the country they were founding, and that this Constitution they were drafting was meant to apply equally to both the citizens and those same tens of millions aliens, thus simultaneously exploiting and subverting the very legal order they were setting up?
    Apparently, the implication is that our Constitution is a suicide pact. It doesn’t exist to serve, differentiate, and secure the common good of a particular people/nation, an American nation. It exists to defang us politically — in very much the Schmittian sense of friend v. enemy — where it’s forbidden even to distinguish between the bastards from Tren de Aragua and MS-13 from the rest of us and then act accordingly. It really seems like these days judges and lawyers, not the people, are sovereign because they are the ones who decide when and to whom the laws apply, i.e states of exception, granting clemency and leniency to the alien and the criminal while enforcing the COVID lockdowns and facilitating the prosecution of the Democrats’ popular opposition in Trump, who is the avatar of the “Deplorables” intended to reclaim their country.
    Or am I, as a post-liberal, a statist authoritarian in waiting? I’d appreciate your thoughts.

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  2. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    And sorry about the HTML tag errors. I wrote my comment on my phone, so please excuse my fat fingers.

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  3. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ben and others:
    Please do not use HTML code unless you understand it, and are VERY CAREFUL to turn off any commands that you turn on. If you fail to do that or do it improperly, and I fail to catch your errors before approving your comment, it screws up the display of everything ‘south’ of your comment, both in comboxes and in main posts, and makes work for me.
    Do you want to signal that a word or phrase is from a foreign language? Enclose it in asterisks, like this: *de facto,* *de jure,* *ex opere operato,* *Freund und Feind.*

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  4. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    That’s a fine comment, Ben. Well said!

    Reply
  5. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ben,
    You’ve got me re-reading books by and about Schmitt. More on this topic later, I hope.

    Reply

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