But the fact is that a more expansive view of immigration policy has long been part of the mainstream of the conservative movement — indeed, Ronald Reagan himself held such an opinion. We are moving into very dangerous territory here — territory in which it has been declared that there is to be no debate, no discussion, and no heterodoxy any longer. This is how political-intellectual movements become diseased and sclerotic. This is how they die. ~John Podhoretz, The Corner

Via Andrew Sullivan (who expresses his solidarity with Pod as one of the persecuted)

Consider first the gall that it takes for someone like Little Pod to complain about intolerance of dissent.

Yes, political-intellectual movements can become sclerotic to the point of death when dissent is suppressed and dissenters are driven out the door, and if anti-immigration populists have started doing just that it is because Little Pod, among others, and NR showed them the way to do it. In reality, however, very few people (if any) have declared an end to debate and discussion. Most restrictionists feel no need to suppress debate, as they have been convinced all along that an airing of all the problems of mass immigration would show their arguments to be reasonable and sensible ones.

Some restrictionists may be losing (or may have already lost) patience with those who proclaim “there shall be open borders,” if only because this position seems so ill-considered and dangerous for the country, so some may have started to be short with those who seem more interested in making apologies for lawbreakers and massive demographic transformations of entire sections of the country than they are interested in repairing the damage done. Surely pro-immigration conservatives must recognise that they currently have the burden of proof for showing why there is anything desirable about the “guest worker program” (i.e., practical amnesty) from a conservative or even simply a patriotic standpoint.

Little Pod just happens to be on the losing side of a debate and does not have any of the usual epithets to throw at his adversaries. Unlike during the arguments for and against war, he has no sure-fire way to put the opponent on the defensive and try to shut down debate. So he hides in the last redoubt he can find: a demand for free and open discussion. But very few people are depriving him of this. He is offended that some emailers think he is not conservative, but he acts as if he and his colleagues have never done the same (in far more insulting terms) to others. He’s always been perfectly willing to dish it out, and now finds taking this sort of criticism unsettling and “dangerous.” It is not the most edifying kind of debate, but it is a kind that he and his have cultivated and used for a very long time, and he has little justification complaining when it is turned back against him.

But the statement that the movement has “always” taken a more expansive view is at the very least misleading. When the “movement” was first getting going, the problems of post-1965 mass immigration did not yet exist. I will go out wildly on a limb and guess that more than a few conservatives c. 1965 were as critical of resuming mass immigration as they were of other domestic policy initiatives of LBJ. President Reagan had several things to his credit, but it is fair to say that he did not represent conservatives’ views in 1986 with his amnesty and his “expansive” views on immigration were neither typical of most of his voters nor do his views serve as the touchstone for what conservatives ought to think.

On a policy and commentary level, creating a stifling atmosphere where there will be no debate and no discussion has been the typical tactic of the overtly Open Borders crowd and their well-wishers for two decades. Now that they are losing ground (finally), and the frustrations of the hundred million people they have been studiously ignoring for all this time have burst forth, they start crying foul and moan about the poor quality of debate. Now it is “dangerous.” Not because there is actually a cessation of debate (the debate continues on rather excitedly inside the GOP and the movement), but because Little Pod has happened to run into a few places where pro-immigration views have been stifled. After ten years of post-Prop. 187 hectoring from the Open Borders editorialists that opposing immigration was a political loser and immoral, effectively relegating restrictionists to outer darkness where they, the enlightened, believed they belonged, and after more than twenty years of smearing opponents of mass immigration, we are supposed to take seriously complaints about the need for free and oepn debate from someone like Podhoretz? It’s simply laughable. There should be an open and free debate, and there is one going on. Stories of stifling conformity on this particular issue have been greatly exaggerated.

Remember that these complaints are coming from someone at an institution renowned for its narrow, parochial understanding of conservatism and its all too frequent denunciations of those who have crossed this or that red line. Little Pod, accompanied by Jonah Goldberg, played the role of ideological enforcer most recently at the Crunchy Cons blog, where he satisfied himself with flinging irrelevant and insulting comments at his adversaries with every intent of belittling the participants and spiking every productive line of inquiry. And let us recall something else. What were restrictionists to most of the people of Little Pod’s persuasion six years ago? They were “nativists,” if not out-and-out racists. After Prop. 187 passed and was struck down in the courts, after which followed the alleged (nonexistent) “backlash” against the California GOP, it became conventional wisdom that restrictionists were supposed to stay quiet or else they would be pushed to the margins. The intentionally abusive use of “nativist” (though there is nothing necessarily wrong with the term itself) has started to disappear from some commentary, because they see that they cannot use it to intimidate their opponents any more.