Possibly interesting debate here about English v American views of mass-immigration. Here is my own latest comment: In a sense, this debate is not going anywhere. All we have on the surface is a “Yes it is” – No it isn’t!” shouting match. I will also observe that one of the reasons Thomas is putting up what looks to us a very feeble defence of his position is that he’s having to argue with five people at once, each of them with a slightly different objection to mass-immigration. In a deeper sense, however, the debate is one of the most productive this blog has hosted. One of the reasons were are stuck at go is – as Ian B said about a dozen postings back – that each side is arguing from different assumptions that have not been explained to the other. Indeed, we may not have fully explored them in our own minds. Let me speak for the English side in the debate, and I do ask people to bear with me while I set out the case. For us, the highest value is not liberty in the abstract, but England. Because, for obvious reasons, we tend nowadays to express ourselves in the language of American libertarianism, and because the two values are so close that they generate the same answer to most questions, we normally get along with the Americans. One of the different answers, though, is on immigration. We believe that England should be as it was in the good old days – rather, we believe it should be more like it was in the good old days than it actually was. We believe in freedom of conscience and speech, and in general toleration, and in freedom of enterprise, and in limited government and due process of law. We also happen to believe that the overwhelming majority of the population of England should be English as reasonably defined. For us, England without freedom is not really England. At the same time, England without the English wouldn’t be England either. Freedom is good for all manner of reasons – but ultimately because it is part of our ancestral ways. You can denounce this view with whatever epithet comes into your mind. But that is how it is. Moreover, since all libertarian doctrines are a refined and intellectualised account of our ancestral ways, I think we have a right to be left to believe as we do without being called names for it. Moreover again, I am not sure that the American libertarians can really claim that their highest value is liberty without particularist attachments. A few posts ago, I responded to an accusation from Thomas by saying that, while true in the abstract, the law of comparative cost may not wholly apply in the world as it is. He didn’t jump up with aggressive accusations of crypto-protectionism. He turns self-righteous only when the rest of us disagree with him on open borders. Now – and Ian B is better on this than I am – Americans have a very weak sense of nationality. Even before the mass-immigration that began around 1890, the country was composed of radically different groups that got on only because of the vast spaces between them, and that, even so, had fallen into civil war at least twice since 1776. Such American patriotism as does exist is mostly loyalty to a distant and unaccountable Federal State – loyalty that has been produced only by endless propaganda. They have no language that is specially their own, nor any sense of peoplehood that stretches back into the mists of time. One thing that does unite Americans, though – white Americans, I emphasise – is an almost paranoid guilt about the genocide that created the initial space for America, and about the slavery that remained there long after every other civilised country had abolished it. Indeed, I think it fair to say that the abolition of slavery in England in the early 1770s did far more to bring about the colonial rebellion than the stamp taxes. Today, about the only Americans who don’t feel guilty about negro slavery are those who’d like to bring it back. Therefore the obsessive PC view on immigration even of Americans who are not cultural Marxists. For Thomas, immigration control means the privileging of one group over others. That leads in turn to thoughts of segregation, and petty apartheid, and men in white hoods running about with burning crosses, and so on and so forth, all the way back to the bits in the American Constitution that entrench slavery and the slave trade. In fairness to Thomas, because his people have so weak a sense of nationality, it’s natural for him not to feel the same discomfort when whole areas of the country change from what they used to be. We must also bear in mind the liberal hospitality a people can afford when there is almost unlimited empty space yet to be filled up. It’s unreasonable to expect him to share the concerns of people who conceive themselves as children of the soil on a rather densely-populated island. Ian B has suggested that those of us who live in “NotAmerica” should stop calling ourselves libertarians. I don’t think that is necessary. But it would be helpful if we could stop calling each other deviationists and hypocrites when we disagree over the precise applications of libertarian principles. libertarianalliance.wordpress/2013/06/05/emma-west-and-the-state-the-state-has-its-way-sort-of/#comment-63173
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:02:01 +0000
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