Libertarians and Beck’s Rally
Via John Tabin, I noticed this back and forth between James Poulos and Nick Gillespie on Glenn Beck, public religiosity and libertarianism. James focuses on part of the two sentences that follow:
But they [Beck rally organizers and attendees] also want the government to be super-effective in securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can’t deliver.
James goes on to contest the idea that wanting religious expression in the public square has something to do with wanting something from government. Overall, James is right that these are two fairly different things. When James quotes Gillespie, he elides the first part of the sentence that refers to securing the borders, and this means that James spends most of his time addressing the rally’s religiosity without getting at the things that really unsettle libertarians about a lot of the attendees. While libertarians such as Gillespie may not like religiosity as a feature of the public square, it seems to me that religiosity is not the main thing that bothers them about the crowd at last weekend’s rally. One of the main things that bothers these libertarians is that the crowd was apparently interested in securing the borders, and more than this most were probably interested in enforcing immigration laws in the interior of the country. Indeed, my guess is that many of the people in the crowd would be content with the government being merely mediocre in policing the borders if the government were enforcing those laws with some reasonable regularity. I have to wonder if most of the attendees at that rally believe the government is capable of being “super-effective” at doing anything. Regardless, the crowd’s presumed support for border security is the main thing that prevents Gillespie from taking the “proto-libertarians” at the rally seriously. It is the one thing he mentions that actually has policy implications.
This reminded me of Brink Lindsey’s cover piece for Reason’s symposium on libertarians’ political alliances and Will Wilkinson’s recent post at Democracy in America on the Beck rally. One was written before the pair’s (presumably forced) departure from the Cato Institute last month, and the other was written just a few days ago. Both pieces identify conservative opposition to mass immigration and support for enforcing immigration laws as some of the reasons they regard contemporary conservatism as rotten and unacceptable. Support for border security and enforcing immigration laws is simply proof of conservatives’ “brutish nationalism” and “anti-immigrant xenophobia” for Lindsey, and Wilkinson refers to Arizona’s attempt to enforce immigration laws as a “nativist crackdown.” (Perhaps Wilkinson doesn’t know what nativist means, or that he simply wants to use the word incorrectly for polemical purposes.)
One reason why this stands out when I read these articles is that most of their other complaints against conservatives have something to back them up, but their complaints on immigration policy are mostly hot air. Having defined the enforcement of immigration laws as illiberal, authoritarian and xenophobic, they conclude that this is what most conservatives are on this issue, and that’s all they need to know. It doesn’t enter into their thinking that a significant part of the support for an “enforcement-first” position on immigration in general and the Arizona law in particular comes primarily from a law-and-order attitude. Neither are they interested that the Arizona legislature was acting out of frustration that the public’s strong support for enforcing these laws seems to have minimal effect on the federal government’s attention to the matter. It is difficult to trust Lindsey’s assessment that this is a product of “brutish nationalism” when he pairs the enforcement of existing, constitutional immigration law with foreign wars, and it is even harder to trust Wilkinson’s claims about the “Christian nationalism” at the Beck rally when he believes that patriotism is essentially the expression of deference to the coercive apparatus of the state and that love of country should be merely incidental.
Certainly, Lindsey and Wilkinson have many other problems with contemporary conservatism. Lindsey’s Reason article seemed designed to define support for liberty in such a way that no social conservative, immigration restrictionist or traditionalist Christian could be anything other than anti-liberty. Wilkinson has spent years writing similar things. In the process of denouncing a third of their countrymen as hopelessly anti-liberty, they even get a few things right about jingoism and militarism, but they actually define support for liberty so narrowly and restrictively that many of the people here at TAC who are very critical of many of the same flaws in conservatism or conservatives strongly sympathetic to the work of the Cato Institute are automatically excluded. In the same way, these libertarians will never really consider attendees at Beck’s rally to be truly supportive of liberty so long as they retain any of their law-and-order attitudes and patriotic attachments.
10 Responses to “Libertarians and Beck’s Rally”
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There may well be voters out there for whom immigration is the defining issue. There aren’t many of them. Immigration restrictionism is largely a product of white anxiety. In the end, the Tea Party movement is a movement of white anxiety. Libertarians are nervous because their allies of the past 30 years might figure out that the libertarian program isn’t their salvation.
I happen to like Nick Gillespie. But one important thing to note about him and the other open border proponents like the inane Thomas Friedman is that as talking heads, they work in a domain that is immune from the consequences.
So they can applaud as H-1B immigrants squeeze native born Americans out of the technology labor marketplace, because there are no H-1B’s driving them out of the marketplace.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Imagine the Reason and the NY Times decided to in-source their blogging and editorial content by hiring H-1B Asians to replace Nick and Friedman. Do you think they would then have the same opinion about unfettered immigration?
On the other hand, when you have legislators who helped pass the law claim that law enforcement will be able to tell illegal immigrants from law-abiding citizens by looking at them, you start to get the feeling that maybe there’s an element of racism. I would have no problem at all with the law if it required law enforcement to verify citizenship of everyone they encounter*; when a large majority passes a law that infringes on some citizens’ rights while leaving themselves un-inconvenienced**, I think that law needs to be scrutinized more closely.
* I am familiar with at least one Irish citizen and one Canadian who are in this country illegally. Odds of the Arizona police asking for their passport? Slim and none.
**One of our video engineers is a Peruvian-born American citizen. Another is a generic Caucasian. If we’re doing a show in Scottsdale, Julio needs to carry his passport, because his California driver’s license isn’t proof of citizenship per the Arizona law. Luke has no such worry.
We have never had an illegal immigrant problem we have had an illegal employer problem. If the jobs aren’t there they won’t come and if you put employers in jail who hire illegals there won’t be many illegals. Of course we must make an exception when it comes to agriculture or we will all starve to death.
The irony of the Republican party pandering to their xenophobic base on this issue is that is the corporatist sponsers of the Republicans who have tried to keep immigration, legal or illegal, alive to drive down the wages of the xenophobic base.
BubbaDave explains exactly why Arizona SB 1070 is nativist. In the “attempt to enforce immigration laws”, Arizona policeman will require hispanic citizens to produce citizenship papers, not just illegal immigrants. Maybe racial discrimination is closer to the truth because some hispanics have been in Arizona longer than some whites. But nativist fits pretty well.
The issue with the Arizona law is not an abstract ideal of enforcing immigration laws. It is how the law attempts this. Specifically, requiring policeman to ask for citizenship papers when they believe the person might be an illegal immigrant. The problem is in practice.
Some people are calling enforcement of immigration laws racist, but that’s not what’s racist; it’s the rhetoric being used to support said enforcement, and new laws like SB 1070. (See: Jan Brewer and her beheaded-corpses-in-the-desert nonsense.) It’s a mistake to conflate the mindset of the loudest people pushing for tighter borders with what anyone who supports tighter borders must believe, but that rhetoric should have a spotlight shone on it and be declared unacceptable.
“We have never had an illegal immigrant problem we have had an illegal employer problem. If the jobs aren’t there they won’t come and if you put employers in jail who hire illegals there won’t be many illegals. Of course we must make an exception when it comes to agriculture or we will all starve to death.”
This is also why attempts to more tightly police the border are, in the end, self-defeating. There are always going to be jobs for illegal immigrants here because the economic situation in the U.S. is just about guaranteed to be much better than Mexico’s for quite a long time, and a reliance on them has been built into certain segments of the economy. (Americans don’t want to know what fruit would cost if it was picked by other Americans demanding livable wages.) It would be much more beneficial to reform immigration law so that the people who are benefiting our economy are no longer here illegally. But that’s, you know, hard.
“The issue with the Arizona law is not an abstract ideal of enforcing immigration laws. It is how the law attempts this. Specifically, requiring policeman to ask for citizenship papers when they believe the person might be an illegal immigrant.”
You can stop after “papers”. In practice Hispanics will be targeted, which makes the law de facto discriminatory, but beyond that, American citizens don’t carry papers. They never have and shouldn’t be expected to unless you like the concept of a police state (not to mention the inherent risks of theft involved when everyone must carry proof of citizenship). But a properly applied, non-discriminatory law with this requirement would demand exactly that- everyone with a passport or birth certificate on hand at all times. There may be good ways to improve immigration law enforcement, but the Arizona law is the opposite of that.
Indeed Lindsey and Wilkinson appear to be Liberty ideologues who want their formula to be the solvent in use for everybody.
I would reserve the tar brush of “Brutish Nationalism” for more dire behaviors than a simple yearning for borders that are reasonably under control. Otherwise it will be of no use when it is really needed. The “brute” facts are that the borders are not under control, have not been under control for a very long time, and the authorities that the man in the street pays to keep them under control have given little evidence they are up to the job. Hence, he is sick and tired of it. In places like Arizona, he is very sick and tired of it. If such as Lindsey and Wilkinson want to call him a brutish nationalist for it, they should expect he will have a name for them as well, something on the line of think tank morons.
The paradox libertarians won’t mention is if a lot of socialists immigrate into a libertarian society, it will become socialist. Or for that matter if they simply refuse to obey the existing laws, whatever the enforcement. Even in “Atlas Shrugged”, they have an invisibility shield which keeps the moochers and looters out.
My view is that Liberty, in the sense the founding fathers understood it as embodied in the Constitution and bill of rights is a creed which must be converted to and assented to, not unlike you become christian, Roman Catholic, or other religions, but the key element is agreeing to a typically small but critically important set of dogmas. Hence there is a path to citizenship which requires accepting the civil creed on independence day as much as a catholic convert must accept the nicean creed on the easter vigil.
But to the overall point, Beck is absolutely right – we must govern ourselves first, and until we can and do we cannot reduce those who would do it over us. Too many libertarians think that those in the audience are too stupid because they believe, but part of the beliefs include not injuring, stealing, lying, etc. all of which the typical libertarian would probably admit are required for the society as a whole and would even use violence to enforce (if only personally and in retribution). But they seem to prefer having atheists steal by the proxy of the tax collector, or even murder like Mao and Stalin who they might even applaud for stamping out religion except the use of violence.
Daniel Larison:
Perhaps Wilkinson doesn’t know what nativist means . . .
What does it mean, in your opinion? I asked that once before and didn’t get an answer.
tz:
The paradox libertarians won’t mention is if a lot of socialists immigrate into a libertarian society, it will become socialist.
Sorry to be blunt, but it seems you don’t know libertarians very well. That problem has been much discussed among libertarians, and is one reason some libertarians do support immigration control.