The American Conservative

Stephen Cox, editor of Liberty, sets out a very good one, with which I’m mostly inclined to agree. Particularly this point:

Poor people, and ethnically self-identified recent immigrants vote overwhelmingly for modern-liberal candidates, and modern-liberal candidates, once elected, take as the whole duty of life the effort to raise taxes and expand government programs and entitlements. They seek to bless their constituency with affirmative action programs, ethnic quotas, foreign-language maintenance programs, socialist and race-conscious school curricula, and every other modern-liberal institution that has any potential for transforming the United States into the Canadian or Mexican version of a progressive country. The expectation of political support explains why modern-liberal politicians are such vigorous proponents of immigration, why they are, even now, trying to enlist illegal immigrants in the electoral process (see “The Election of 666,” Reflections, August 2006 – a commentary that prompted a nice little flurry of hate mail). The same goes for labor unions. They used to be the biggest opponents of immigration. No more. Now most of them are endorsing every open-borders proposal that comes along. Why? Because they too have identified their natural constituency: unskilled, politically unsophisticated workers, just waiting to be organized in support of higher minimum wage laws, universal social welfare, and whatever other political demands the unions want to make.

Is it possible that politicians and labor leaders know a few things that libertarian theorists don’t? Is it possible that they have correctly identified the current immigration from third-world countries as the ultimate weapon in the attack on limited government?

To a considerable extent, as much of Cox’s evidence elsewhere in his piece suggests, poor immigrants are a constituency for greater government services whether or not they can vote. They can still exert statist political pressures in a number of ways, relatively weak though they may be. Probably the most serious source of such pressure is the opportunity poor immigrants give liberal (and all too many conservative) do-gooders to show their generosity and compassion by taxing the rest of us. Even if immigrants don’t clamor for social services, their mere existence is enough to provoke bleeding hearts into demanding that government provide for them.

Plainly enough, the potential harm poor immigrants can do to our liberties is mightily exacerbated if they get the vote. But illegal immigrants aren’t queuing up for naturalization and citizenship, right? Perhaps not; but any children of theirs born here are automatically American citizens, thanks to the prevailing jus soli interpretation of the 14th Amendment. If I could have just one immigration reform, this would be it: I’d restict citizenship to the children of citizens and to naturalized immigrants.

It’s true, of course, that by no means do all poor immigrants who get the franchise use it to vote for greater government. Can you exclude the libertarian few in order to keep out the socialist many? Absolutely. To do otherwise would be to sacrifice liberty to democracy. Some libertarians will object here that, hey, maybe tomorrow the odds will change and poor immigrants will be more likely to support less government. My reply is: the probabilities matter. Until we have good reason to believe that such a change has come about, we shouldn’t be gambling on enfranchising hundreds of thousands of unskilled, low-wage workers.

A more challenging objection might be to ask whether the outcome Cox outlines is really so bad relative to the alternative: higher taxes and greater support for affirmative action are certainly bad things, but they have to be weighed against the militarism and corporate cronyism that the other major party supports. (Though in fact both parties are in favor of militarism, affirmative action, and corporate cronyism, and whatever advantage Republicans appear to accrue from being for nominally lower taxes they lose by supporting deficit spending, which has to be paid by taxes or devaluation of the currency sooner or later.)

Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948, was one of the books that (so it’s often claimed) helped define postwar American conservatism. Today the title, which wasn’t even Weaver’s — he planned to call the book The Fearful Descent, but his publisher insisted on something less pessimistic (see also Kirk’s Conservative Mind, which was originally to have been The Conservative Rout) — is a cliche among movement conservatives, many or even most of whom have never read Weaver’s succinct, 190-page book.

How much of a relationship is there really between Weaver’s thought and latter-day conservatism? Perhaps a pretty strong inverse relationship. My host last week when I spoke on “Where the Right Went Wrong” at North Carolina State University was a very principled student named James Lawrence. Although I didn’t recognize his name immediately, I was familiar with his work from long before my talk: I’d seen footage of him at a YAF conference a year or two back taking Rich Lowry to task over David Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” and I’d also seen Lawrence’s excellent LRC article “Rethinking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” He tells me he caught some flack over the latter, with a few warbot conservative friends of his calling him a leftist on account of it. After all, weren’t those American atom bombs incinerating an enemy people? You’d have to be a leftist to object to that, wouldn’t you?

If so, then Richard M Weaver was a leftist and ought to be taken out the right-wing canon forthwith. At the very least, Weaver was one of those “unpatriotic conservatives.” Just look what he wrote to a friend in 1945, a mere two and a half weeks after the the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, about the outcome of the war:

And is anything saved? We cannot be sure. True, there are a few buildings left standing around, but what kind of animal is going to inhabit them? I have become convinced in the past few years that the essence of civilization is ethical (with perhaps some helping out from aesthetics). And never has the power of ethical discrimination been as low as it is today. The atomic bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity. I cannot help thinking that we will suffer retribution for this. For a long time to come I believe my chief interest is going to be the restoration of civilization, of the distinctions that make life intelligible.

(The letter is cited in In Defense of Tradition: the Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver.)

It was that line of thinking that led Weaver to write Ideas Have Consequences. As he wrote in his introduction:

The book was written in the period immediately following the second World War, and it was in a way a reaction to that war–to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in place of the peace and order that were professedly sought.

If Richard Weaver — one could just as well say Robert Nisbet or Russell Kirk or Peter Viereck — were alive today and in his prime, would he want to call himself a conservative and associate with the Right — with the likes of, say, Max Boot?  I think the answer is pretty clear. And in any event, he would probably find himself coming in for denunciation from David Frum and have heroic warbloggers calling him a “traitor” or “blame  America firster.”

You know how Harper’s frequently uses a “cover flap” — a partial cardboard wrap added to the cover to advertise stories inside the issue? Well, Vanity Fair has produced a special flap for The Weekly Standard, which readers can cut out and staple to their favorite neocon magazine.

More classic truthiness from America’s no. 1 news source, the Onion.

I leave for North Carolina in a few hours — another Amtrak adventure, as it happens. Since I may be away from the blog for a few days, I thought I’d try something this site hasn’t done before, an open thread. The comments section is by far the best thing about this blog anyway, so fire away! If you haven’t commented before, say hello and / or put something provocative out there, and if you have commented before, do so again.

And if you’re in NC, come to my talk in Raleigh on Tuesday at 7:30 pm. Directions here. (Clark, I’m working on making them more exact — I’ll post the GPS coordinates as soon as I have them.)

I don’t think I’m adding to my enormous hipster cred by admitting that I’m rather taken with much of the work of the French band (or “project”) Nouvelle Vague, which takes new wave classics from the 1980s and covers them in styles ranging from bossa nova (“Nouvelle Vague” is itself a multilinguistic pun on “bossa nova” and “new wave,” the three terms being rough equivalents in French, Portuguese, and English) to, on the new album, “‘unplugged’ reggae,” mostly sung by alluring French or Portuguese indie chanteuses. It all sounds horribly pretentious, but it actually works better than anyone has right to expect.

The first album, released in the U.S. last year, came to my attention when I heard it playing over the PA in a local bookstore. How can you go wrong with a French girl purring along to an acoustic arrangement of the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton”? Obviously you can’t. I wasn’t familiar with “Guns” at the time, in fact, though I recognized XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel” a song or two later. The eponymously titled first album succeeds in part because the quality of the sources — the Clash, XTC, the Dead Kennedys, Joy Division, the Undertones — but it’s not all down to that. Even the covers of the Cure, Depeche Mode (Vince Clarke-era, at that), and the Sisters of Mercy sound surprisingly good. The take on “This Is Not a Love Song” is far and away better than the PiL original. I’d almost say the same thing about the cover of the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” (even if it earns me a visit from the furious ghost of John Peel) and several of the other tracks, for that matter.

The new album, “Bande a Part,” covers more mainstream material and misses the mark several times. The world doesn’t need any more covers of U2 songs, no more than it needs any more originals. A reggae arrangement doesn’t bring out much that’s new in Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” The more obscure selections on the new disc, meanwhile, tend to come from the more electro end of new wave: ESG, Heaven 17, Visage. When a relatively aggressive track like “Guns of Brixton” or “Too Drunk to F—” is translated into bossa nova, the result is often melodic and accessible without being twee. When songs that were originally radio friendly to begin with get the treatment, though, the result is perilously close to schmaltz. That said, the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen In Love?” works, as do the two New Order covers on various formats of the album (“Confusion” and “Blue Monday” — to my surprise the latter is the better of the two, despite how overexposed the original is), and the interpretations of songs by two other one-time Factory Records acts, the Wake and A Certain Ratio, are also solid. The limited edition of the album has a very good take on the Smiths’ “Sweet and Tender Hooligan” as well. And whether or not it’s any good, Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” done as a near showtune certainly is a revelation — between that and getting covered on Paul Anka’s last album, Mr. Idol may be in the midst of a revival he’ll soon want to forget.

A few sample songs from both albums are on-line here, including “Guns of Brixton.” Or if all this Gallicism makes you feel unpatriotic — the Washington, D.C. date of Nouvelle Vague’s North American tour is going to be at the French Embassy in September — you can always visit the Right Brothers website instead and listen to samples from their new album, including “That’s Why We’re Here,” “Freedom Is Not Free,” “Stand Up,” and the all-American classic “Bush Was Right.”

I don’t have strong feelings about A.N. Wilson either way, but bravo for Bevis Hillier if he really was the one who tricked Wilson into including a fake letter (complete with coded insult) in his John Betjemen biography. Auberon Waugh — who once sabotaged the Spectator‘s list of contributors to credit George Gale as “Lunchtime O’Gale” — would be proud.