Category: War and Peace

In Part I, I argued that in the current state of affairs in the USA, our  political opponents are not mere opponents, but enemies. Given that this enmity is a contingent state of affairs, one that could have been otherwise, I am not defining political opposition or the political in terms of enmity.  This distinguishes my position (in progress, and thus tentatively held) from that of Carl Schmitt’s. For Schmitt, the essence of the political (das Politische) consists in the Freund-Feind (friend-enemy) distinction. (See his The Concept of the Political.) By contrast with Schmitt, I am not trying to isolate the essence or nature of the political; I am merely saying that at the moment, as a matter of contingent fact, our opponents, the Democrats, are our enemies. They are our enemies in that they pose a clear and present threat to us and our way of life. And increasingly this threat is being executed, and in the worst way, by assassination, attempted assassination, calls for assassination, celebrations of assassination, and refusals to condemn assassination.  What is the source of this enmity? In Part I a case was made that our political opponents are enemies. In this Part II, I will proffer an explanation of why we are enemies. In a future Part III, I will consider what we can do to ameliorate our nasty and highly dangerous predicament. 

With our (mere) opponents we share common ground; with our enemies we do not. The source, then, is the lack of common ground. We do not share ground sufficient to keep enmity at bay if we don’t agree on many things. For now, I will mention just  three things we need to agree on, but on which we no longer agree, borders, reality, equality.

BORDERS.  Nations need enforceable, and enforced, borders to maintain their cultural identity and their security as sovereign states. There is no right to immigrate. Correlatively, there is no obligation on the part of any state to allow immigration.  The granting of asylum is not obligatory but supererogatory. Illegal immigration cannot be tolerated. What’s more, legal immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. For each nation has the right to look to its own interests first. More that that, a properly functioning government has the duty to look first to the interests of the nation of which it is the government. 

America first is merely a special case of nation first; it does not imply that America ought to dominate other nations. So only those persons can be allowed into the USA  who are likely to assimilate and accept our republican system of government and our culture. This implies that certain groups  ought to  be favored over others, English speakers, for example, over those who do not know our language, other things being equal.  Ought we “welcome the stranger?”  Yes, but not unconditionally: only if they satisfy the conditions I have specified and some others I do not have the time to specify.  There must not be any blanket “Welcome  the stranger.” Squishy Catholic bishops take note.

Immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, leading as it does to Balkanization, ‘no go’ zones, and endless civil contention. Europe and the U. K. are committing cultural suicide by failure to grasp the importance of this principle. Sharia-supporting Muslims must not be allowed to immigrate into the West, and in particular into America, the last hope of the West. If we fall, the West falls. The rest of the Anglosphere has pretty much abdicated. Sharia law is antithetical to our founding values and principles. Only those people from Muslim lands who renounce Sharia are admissible. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

But isn’t diversity good? Diversity of various types is of course good, but diversity as such  is precisely not our strength, as foolish and/or deliberately destructive leftists mindlessly repeat. Full-spectrum diversity would be our undoing, and was in process of undoing us until Donald Trump came along.  If any one thing is ‘our strength,’ it is unity, not diversity. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”  To call a sane immigration policy that benefits the host country ‘xenophobic’ is a  typically vicious and typically mendacious leftist smear. And the same goes for ‘Islamophobic’ used to dismiss what I wrote one paragraph up. A phobia is an irrational fear, by definition, but there is nothing irrational about fear of full-strength, Sharia-based Islam, which is not merely a religion, but is also an expansionist political ideology, one that poses an existential threat to us.

REALITY. A second thing we need to agree on, but no longer agree on, is that there is a real world out there independent of our thoughts and dreams, wishes and desires. No doubt there are social constructs, but nature herself in her abiotic and biotic strata are not social constructs.  Money, a social construct, does not grow on trees, but leaves do.  Foliage, tectonic plates, and animals, including human animals, are quite obviously not social constructs. The world cannot be social construction all the way down. And so you cannot change your sex. Once a biological male, always a biological male.  It follows that it is morally outrageous to allow biological males to compete against women in sporting events.  Metaphysical nonsense leads to moral nonsense. Nor can you change your race, as I argue rigorously, at Substack.  You can change your political affiliation, and you should if you are a Democrat; but membership in a race is not a political form of belonging. 

EQUALITY and EQUITY.  The transmogrification of the former into the latter is a third bone of contention between us and our political enemies. An old lie of leftists is compressed into one of their more recent abuses of language: ‘equity.’ So-called ‘equity’ is woke-speak for equality of outcome or result. ‘Equity’  in this obfuscatory sense cannot occur and ought not be pursued. It cannot occur because people are not equal either as individuals or as groups. Leftists won’t face this fact, however, because they confuse the world as they would like it to be with the world as it is. The default setting of the leftist  or ‘progressive’ is utopian. Utopia, however, is Nowheresville and he who pursues it is a Nowhere Man. 

‘Equity’ ought not be pursued because its implementation is possible only by the violation of the liberty of the individual by a totalitarian state apparatus precisely unequal in power to those it would equalize. Paradoxically, the pursuit of equality of outcome presupposes an inequality of power as between the equalizers and the equalized, which is to say: equality of outcome cannot be achieved.  The latter is a form of equality only if it is equal for all. But it cannot be equal for all for the reason given.

Again, people are not equal, by any empirical measure, either as individuals or as groups.  That “all men are created equal,” as per the Declaration of Independence, is not to the point.  Jefferson & Co. were obviously not making the manifestly false assertion that human beings  are equal in point of empirically measurable attributes.  As the word ‘created’ indicates, the Founders were maintaining that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, the Creator. From a God’s eye point of view, all empirical difference vanish and we are equal as persons, as rights-possessors. And so each of us, regardless of race, sex, level of intellectual or physical prowess, etc., has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

CONCLUSION. Our political opponents are not mere opponents but enemies: they pose an existential threat to us. The source of that enmity and this threat is lack of common ground. We lack common ground as regards the three issues mentioned above, and for others as well. We are in dire straits and headed for full-on hot civil war.  That is an outcome no sane person could want. How avoid it?