August 5, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
REALISM on
Immigration and National Identity – Professor Amy Wax
Is Separation In Our
Country’s Future?
Friends,
Back on July
27 I offered a column in this series titled “Nationalism
vs. Secession: Should America Break Up?
It included references to and a reprint of an essay I had published at
THE UNZ REVIEW (July 26), and then was picked up nationally by a number of
other Web magazines, including LewRockwell
(July 29) and The
Abbeville Institute (August 2). The LewRockwell site gets literally tens of
thousands of readers, so I think it safe to say that the column has by now been
widely read.
For that MY
CORNER essay “Nationalism vs. Secession,” I added a new introduction in which I
briefly discussed a recent “National Conservatism Conference” held in
Washington DC back on July 14-15, and I mentioned that convincing evidence exists
that its organizers (e.g., Yoram Hazony, David Brog, etc.) had as their purpose
to attempt to “corral” and in some way assert control over the increasingly
restless nationalist and populist elements (and they are not necessarily the
same) of the Right in America. In a sense those “dissident” elements had been
unleashed and awakened and given respectability by the election of Donald Trump
who was not by definition an Establishment Conservative, that is, not a card
carrying member of “conservatism inc.”
I quoted
some excellent pieces on this effort to control, in particular essays by Dr.
Paul Gottfried and journalist Christopher
DeGroot (editor of The Agonist).
I refer you to these essays; and since then Christopher has authored a sequel.
Here is a
segment from July 27 with citations to several of those critical articles that may
enable us to understand the origin and the surreptitious and real purposes of
that conference:
What
was fascinating about the over-priced conference was its list of invitees, or
rather the glaring absence of certain significant voices that should have been
in attendance but, very pointedly, weren’t invited, including Professor Paul
Gottfried, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the decline of democracy
and the rise of nationalism and populism globally.
And
there was certainly a very good reason for that. For Gottfried represents
a discordant note and would have thrown a huge monkey wrench into
Hazony’s effort to suborn the unruly nationalist and populist tendencies on the
American Right. Gottfried clearly sees through the transparent efforts by
figures such as the Zionist scholar and some other members of the establishment
to reign in the restive “new Right” which no longer trusts or accepts the
failed program of the nugatory and pallid “conservative movement,” what
Gottfried has rightly called “the
phony right.”
In
Christopher DeGroot’s essays he mentions that even though conference organizer
David Brog announced at the outset that the conference would NOT consider
anything concerning race or ethnicity—these topics were off limits to the
(respectable) “conservatives” gathered there—at least one intrepid conference
speaker, Dr.
Amy Wax, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, transgressed the
taboo. And the reason is quite obvious: how can anyone discuss what is
going on in America today…how can there be any talk of nationalism or so-called
“national identity”…how can we hope to comprehend the rise of populism…how is
it possible to understand the ideological narrative of the lunatic
progressivist social justice warriors who completely dominate one political party
and scare the hell out of the other…without examining the huge pink elephant in
the room: race?
Professor
Wax’s presentation was met by the academic and media establishment with horror
and charges that she was—of course—a racist. But the facts speak for
themselves. In her presentation she focused on race and ethnicity from a
cultural perspective, that is, what the unlimited infusion of essentially “unmixable”
Third World immigrants is doing to what is left of traditional American culture,
and the effects it is having on our historic institutions.
Certainly,
implicit in any such discussion, “race” must also be considered because a vast
majority of immigrants, both illegal and legal, are non-white. And the simple
fact is that race and racial homogeneity do make a critical difference in how our society responds and, critically, how
it exists as a culture and a polity. Historical examples abound, and historical
efforts to meet multi-ethnic situations can provide a roadmap.
Here we
can cite several notable examples. There is, of course, the Roman Empire and
its diverse system of subinfeudated kingdoms and satrapies. Then, of course, there
is the British Empire and how it existed, and for a couple of centuries,
thrived; or the multi-lingual and multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire: just
several examples.
And in these
cases, there were certain “keys,” certain essentials that basically kept those
imperial states more or less in unity or confederation.
Certainly,
in the more recent British and Habsburg cases there were revered monarchs whose
influence and nearly sacral positions went well beyond ethnicity and local
nationality. Those monarchs symbolized the authority which united in very
special ways all the different peoples and divergent states. A Hungarian might
dislike a Croatian and speak a different language, for instance, but both could
revere the emperor in Vienna and the dynasty which reached back to the early
Middle Ages as a symbol of continuity, history, and a quasi-religious and
civilizational mission.
Then,
both the Brits and Habsburg understood—in some cases, had to learn the hard way—that
regionalism, local control, and autarky were essential if the empire was to
stay together. Thus, the functioning British Raj in India and the series of “sub-monarchies”
and states under the British crown. Thus, the Habsburg understanding in 1867
that Hungary must have its own local and national authority, but, of course,
under the old Kaiser (and then King/Konig), Franz Josef. And Franz Josef’s heir, the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand wanted to extend that regional autonomization under the Kaiser to
Slavic regions of the empire as well. Indeed, that was one of the precise
reasons he was assassinated in July 1914 by a Serb nationalist—to keep him from
following through on that program (which might well have prevented the break-up
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Interestingly,
as a kind of an aside confirmation of this: the famous Czech composer Bedrich
Smetana (1824-1884), whose Slavonic Dances and opera The Bartered Bride are world famous, was a fervent supporter of
what could be called “Czech nationalism.” In a real sense he was the founder of
modern Czech classical music. Yet, in 1853 he composed his “Triumphal Symphony”
which combines the Habsburg national anthem, “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” in
an incredibly moving final musical apotheosis—celebrating the young Habsburg
monarch in Vienna, with a hope expressed in music that the empire would
recognize the regionalist and popular aspirations of the Czech peoples UNDER
THE GERMAN-LANGUAGE HABSBURGS…perhaps like what later occurred with the Hungarians.
All of
this is to say, in summary, that countries with divergent populations, with
differing ethnicities and historical backgrounds may only successfully exist with a modicum of liberty if those
differences are fully taken into account and acknowledged publicly and in law
constitutionally…and if those differences do not reach a breaking point where conversation and commonality and
adherence to certain central principles cease to exist.
What Professor
Wax understands, and what the Establishment Conservative movement fails to
understand, is that the creaky old American “nation,” certainly since the
defeat of the forces of Constitutionalism on the battlefield in 1865, has
become what the authors, the Kennedy brothers (Donald and Ronald) call the “Yankee
Empire,” an administrative state where a concentrated and
largely-untouchable and unelected managerial bureaucracy and political and
academic class, essentially governs the rest of us as virtual retainers and enslaved
subjects.
The Achilles’
Heel and undoing of this “empire”—and it is something Dr. Wax notices—is its
glaring acquiescence to the
continuing waves of non-white, non-assimilable immigrants, enthusiastically supported
by open borders groups (progressivists in league with corporate business types).
And what has occurred has been a heretofore uncontrolled influx and a resultant
frenzied multiculturalism, enforced by an equally frenzied and rigid political
correctness in both law and practice…and not just at the behest of the new
immigrants.
For the
open borders template is only part of a
vision of America as a kind of “global nation” in which there is no
nationality save “citizenship in the world” and in which regional character and
historical traditions, ethnicity, religious belief and heritage, and shared
common experience are all subsumed and, in effect, abolished in the name of an
amorphous concept of “humanity,” to be guided by progressivist ideologies of
race and gender, and zealous opposition to heritage and historic identity.
This
globalism, let it be said, is not so much the opposite of American nationalism
(which it attempts to harness and divert), as it is the inverse of a genuine
and rooted American populism which has never been completely extirpated, despite
the best efforts of the administrative state.
The
result, then, of this process has been the de
facto centrifugal “break up” of the “American empire,” into divided belief
structures and uncommunicating divisions which are very probably not reparable.
In other words, the genie is out of the lamp, and Humpty-Dumpty has fallen and
shattered into a thousand pieces, and most likely very little can be done to
put those pieces back into an American whole.
The
Progressivists recognize this, and, in a way, it explains their relentless efforts
to suppress any and all opposition to their plans and ideological template,
including de-legitimating any discordant voices, enacting new “civil rights”
laws, and now Internet censorship. In other words, the suppression and
subjugation of one part of America by another part, with no limitations on
methods, all to control a nation that in fact appears to be breaking up.
This was
the message of my columns, and it is something that lurks as a underlying cautionary
note in Professor Wax's address. No: she does not advocate secession or
separation. But her well-thought-out observations and commentary offer a dire
warning: our present policies of immigration and domestic favoritism of
discordant Third World populations are pointedly against our native population which
is—speaking the unspeakable—mostly white.
As a part
of the swirling maelstrom and rapidly devolving, unbridgeable divisions in our
society, this may well lead to a situation where at least one the three
potential scenarios I wrote about in my essays will assuredly occur:
Either a
continuation of the present course, with one group—the post-Marxist
Progressivist—basically subjugating any opposition, and the disappearance of
America as we have known it.
Or, there
will be some climatic event, a mammoth depression or war that could cause
people to come to their senses (but may well will not), followed most probably
by a fierce dictatorship: political order abhors a vacuum.
Or,
finally, and despite our hesitation to entertain it: a kind of separation or
secession (and there are such movements even now in California and elsewhere),
including progressive steps such as state interposition or nullification.
Indeed, this is already occurring with states and cities basically ignoring the
Federal government on sanctuary city status.
Thus, Dr.
Wax is in her remarks attempting to raise (as Thomas Jefferson once wrote about
the Missouri Compromise) “a fire bell in the night.” Our national policies that
favor Third World immigration and an open door are destructive of what is left
of the country’s unity. And, she adds, it may already be too late….And, then,
what is left? Chaos, dictatorship, or separation?
And, with
this, I again refer you to my earlier essay and the response to this very
question. We do not have the good sense of the Habsburgs or the Brits; rather
after 1865 we commenced a journey of frenetic empire-building, we continued to
destroy the already gravely-wounded and impaired rights of the states and the
citizens of those states. Our government elites erected what my late mentor
(and founder of the Old Conservative movement) Dr. Russell Kirk called the “Pax
Americana.”
And now, with many decades of academic post-Marxist
revolutionary indoctrination in our schools and our colleges, and the
perversion of our cultural environment, and the sovietization of our media, those
“factions” that James Madison wrote about in The Federalist have emerged with a terrible ire and desire for vengeance,
and an irreducible nature that forces us to consider what will happen and how
we should prepare for it.
I pass on
a transcript of Professor Wax’s presentation. It isn’t long, but it is to the
point. I follow that with some questions and responses. I hope you will read these and then think
about what our future holds…and what it may hold for our children.
Here’s What Amy Wax Really Said
About Immigration
Here’s the transcript of what
University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax said at the National
Conservatism Conference on July 15, 2019.
These remarks were made during the
immigration breakout session chaired by Ryan Williams. The panelists were Amy
Wax, Scott McConnell, Mike Gonzalez, and Luma Simms. Here’s the full transcript
of Wax’s remarks, which were quickly attacked by a Vox writer.
Well,
thank you very much for having me here. My task in these few minutes is to
address the question of how American immigration should be structured to support
a constructive American national identity—American greatness, as I put it in
the title. My argument is that mainstream conservatives should take much more
seriously the case for reducing and slowing our current levels of immigration.
I will not address the economic reasons for curtailing immigration, although I
myself believe they are, on balance, fairly compelling. Rather my focus will be
on what I term the cultural case for
restriction, a much thornier topic.
My
position here is that conservatives need
a realistic approach to immigration that best serves and preserves our
country’s status and identity as a relatively high-functioning, at least for
now, Western and First World nation. That status will not automatically
maintain itself. It is fragile. It is precarious and vulnerable to erosion. We
ought to worry more about its fragility than we do.
In
a recent paper in a Georgetown Journal, I distinguished two versions of a
cultural nationalist position on immigration policy. The first I termed creedal
nationalism based on the belief that American identity and culture are mainly
propositional. They depend on fealty to abstract ideals, concepts, and
principles such as human rights, property rights, the rule of law, honest
government, capitalism, et cetera.
Some
creedal nationalists maintain that because it is open to anyone, at least in
principle, to believe and support these ideas, there is no reason to favor
immigrants from one background or another. I don’t think that conclusion
necessarily follows. Many, indeed most, inhabitants of the Third World, don’t
necessarily share our ideas and beliefs; others pay lip service, but don’t
really comprehend them. There are exceptions of course, but most people are not
exceptional. Thus, creedal nationalism could support a low and slow approach to
immigration.
But
the second type of nationalism is what I want to concentrate on. I term it
cultural distance nationalism, and it goes further. It is based on the insight
and understanding that people’s
background culture can affect their ability to fit into a modern advanced
society and to perform the roles needed to support and maintain it – civic,
occupational, economic, technical, and the like.
According
to this view, we are better off if our
country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in
fact if not formally, by people from the First World, from the West, than by
people from countries that had failed to advance. The obstacles to making
the case for this cultural distance nationalism are formidable. No surprise.
This
position requires forthrightly acknowledging the stark differences between the
First and the Third Worlds, their deep roots, and being honest about the
homegrown conditions and failures that hold countries back—kleptocracy,
corruption, lawlessness, weak institutions, and the inability or unwillingness
of leaders to provide for their citizens’ basic needs, and also asking the very
hard questions about why these conditions continue to persist. But these are
toxic topics that lie outside the Overton window in polite society, as
evidenced by the outraged reaction to Trump’s profane and grating question,
“Why are we having all these people from sh-thole countries come here?” That
needs to be regarded as a serious question and not just a rhetorical one.
There
is currently tremendous resistance to thinking rigorously about the causes of
persistently chaotic conditions in the Third World and to addressing the
implications for immigration policy. Despite much ink spilled, the non-cultural
explanations for chronic underdevelopment, and here it’s everything from
colonialism, the all-purpose favorite, to geography, to lack of salt are
routinely trotted out despite their evident implausibility, and their obvious
foundation in PC strictures rather than facts.
And
when it comes to immigration, few dare to challenge a pie-in-the-sky version of
what the dissident right has called “the dogma of magic dirt.” People who come
to the U.S., no matter from what cultural background, will quickly come to
think, live, and act just like us. They will celebrate, embrace, and support
our ways. They will function effectively to maintain them. Everyone is strictly
equal in the potential to contribute to American life.
I
admit that questioning the transformative power of “magic dirt” is hobbled by a
lack of rigorous data and systematic study. But, in large part, that is because
social scientists today don’t want to
really confront the significance of cultural differences between the West and
the rest, their stickiness, and their implications for immigration, yet
these issues have commanded the attention of the rare, brave politician and a
number of scholars.
Take
Enoch Powell, a prophet without honor in the last century. He argued that a large influx of non-Anglo and non-Western
immigrants would sow division in Britain and undermine its core
Anglo-Protestant culture. He knew that numbers
matter and that the way to maintain
stability and dominating demography for the original peoples in a democratic
society was through cautious immigration policy—a low and slow approach. As
many of you may know, his name is mud today. He is an outcast, unjustly I
think. He has a lot to teach us. Scholars such as Lawrence Harris and David
Landis and Sam Huntington have expressed similar warnings about our own
country.
Most
recently, Larry Mead in his new book “The Burdens of Freedom” has argued that
individualism, a key source of Western and American order, dynamism, and
strength, is a distinctly First World attribute that is difficult to impart to
outsiders and that it is key to maintaining our freedoms and prosperity. These
insights are supported by the European experience with Muslim immigration as
Dan Pipes recently spoke about and by the multi-generational trajectory of
Hispanics in the United States.
The
culturalist approach, the issues of cultural compatibility, were very much on
the mind of the drafters of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as the debates in Congress
revealed, and of course, that is the legislation that is with us today. Yet
these culturalist ideas and the scholarship of these individuals is mostly
ignored and marginalized in academia.
This
marginalization is largely political, but let’s face it, it’s also
methodological. We must acknowledge that there’s a lot of unknowns when it comes
to culture and how it operates. Our convener, Yoram Hazony, tells us we should
attend to the ways in which traditions and nations are formed and what it takes
to strengthen them and maintain them. But it is striking how little we
understand about where distinctive habits and traditions come from, how they
are transmitted down the generations, and the conditions that are needed to
preserve and protect them.
There
are a lot of possible explanations. One I favor is that cultural transmission
is importantly shaped by the small-bore interactions within families, or
mother-child, and that flies under the radar screen of the big-think theorists
who tell us about cultural significance. And if you doubt that, just go to the
South of France where I was recently, and you watch three-year-olds sitting for
two hours at the table, their mothers prodding them every step of the way.
Somebody ought to study that.
Perhaps the most important
reason that the cultural case for limited immigration remains underexplored has
to do with that bête noire – race. Let us be candid. Europe and the First
World, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white for now; and the
Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing
cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the
position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer
non-whites.
Well, that is the result anyway. So even if our immigration philosophy is
grounded firmly in cultural concerns, doesn’t rely on race at all, and no
matter how many times we repeat the mantra that correlation is not causation,
these racial dimensions are enough to spook conservatives.
As a result, today we have an immigration
policy driven by fear—the fear of being accused of racism, white supremacy,
xenophobia—which
has cowed and paralyzed opinion leaders, policymakers, politicians across the
spectrum and impeded their ability to think clearly. That fear leads conservatives
to avoid talking about cultural distance or questioning the happy fantasy of
“magic dirt” or discussing forthrightly the practical difficulties of importing
large numbers of people from backwards states into successful ones. And as long
as these taboos exist and respectable mainstream conservatives defer to them,
it will be hard, maybe impossible, to change course.
Our country’s future
trajectory, however, will not be determined by political correctness, but by
reality and facts on whether cultural differences really matter, whether they
are stubborn, and whether they have consequences. And by the time that becomes
clear and that dynamic plays out, it may be too late to turn the ship, and it
may well be too late already.
Our
legacy [e.g, native white] population is demoralized, beleaguered, and
disorganized. They may no longer be able to serve as a model for anyone to
emulate, which brings me to another important development which undergirds
hostility to cultural distance thinking but also strengthens the case for
taking it seriously. And this is, the rise of multicultural identity
politics—topic for this conference, a hot topic for discussion among
conservatives, and an ideology increasingly championed by minority and newcomer
elites.
Multiculturalist
elites resist the assimilation of immigrants to a uniform American way of life
or to any Western prototype. But here’s the key point. This resistance is
fueled by resentment of the First World’s primacy and hostility towards
European dominance, traditions, and achievements. Reihan Salam of the Manhattan
Institute calls this punitive multiculturalism. I prefer [the term] revenge or
adversary multiculturalism. And for the definitive expression of this, look
no further than the writings of Indian-American NYU journalism professor,
Suketu Mehta. In his book, “This Land Is Our Land,” the author depicts the West success as entirely illicit, built on
violence, on exploitation, built on theft from Third World peoples.
Ingenuity, honest effort,
well-functioning institutions have nothing to do with it. Because the West is
to blame for all the Third World ills, unlimited and unregulated mass Third
World migration to the West is mete recompense for the victims and just
comeuppance for Western crimes.
According
to Mehta, immigrants should not join the mainstream or try and preserve and
protect what makes America great, but should just take over from the “white
power structure.” And of course he pays no attention, he is heedless to the
task of keeping the goose alive that lays the golden eggs. It’s not hard to
fathom the appeal of this philosophy. Insisting that the West’s advantages are
ill-gotten is a convenient, face-saving device that explains Third World
failure and avoids the burdens of assimilation. And although it’s hard to know
how many average newcomers embrace Mehta’s narrative, the increasing dominance
of revenge multiculturalism among immigrants rights leadership classes should
be cause for concern.
I
believe the conservatives need to push back against the ungrateful habit of
blaming the West by pointing repeatedly to the self-inflicted wounds of the
Third World. Admittedly, this is not considered nice. We have learned that from
the response to Trump’s disparagements, but the alternative is to give free
play to anti-Western moralizing that is unfair and grounded in falsehoods and
dangerous to our country’s future.
Now,
I want to make one additional point about immigration, which conservatives also
do not emphasize enough and which frequently gets neglected in the immigration
debate. We are told repeatedly it is our
duty to rescue the inhabitants of poor, unstable places by allowing them to
move to our well-functioning country. The United States must continue to play
this rescue role. But as David Miller in his book “Strangers in Our Midst” has
noted, and others as well, this imperative amounts to a vain and short-sighted
rescue fantasy that hurts most Third World peoples. We cannot possibly help
more than a tiny fraction of the world’s denizens.
Lately,
there has been talk of reforming the law to favor skilled immigrants, as do
countries like Canada and Australia. Although unskilled immigration should be
reduced, I believe, replacing the less educated with higher-skilled foreigners
is not the answer either. By draining talent and energy from places that
desperately need them, and especially people who are educated at public expense
abroad, an overly generous immigration policy will inevitably damage the
countries left behind.
Once again, I would ask, what
important conservative voices are emphasizing this point? Who is willing to
fault the short-term thinking and moral preening behind our immigration regime,
which however generous, cannot lift up the Third World, but only a fraction of
the people from it? Who will emphasize that failed countries must, they have no
choice but to, improve themselves by reforming cultural practices that impede
progress, that instead of moving here, their citizens should concentrate on
emulating what makes us great? This should become a central conservative theme. Thank you.
Q & A:
[….]
Q….why doesn’t the President of the United States have the power
the say, you know, we are overwhelmed. We can’t care for these people. There are
limits in everything in life, as opposed to just congressional delegations
flying down to say, “Isn’t it terrible? And we won’t change the law, we won’t
do anything.” Where is the political will in this country to defend the
country?
Amy Wax: There isn’t any. Short answer. But this is…you know, the dominance
of…I’m going to go back to the universities. I mean, I am a professor at, you
know, an Ivy League university, and I see the ideology—the moralized, the
highly moralized, globalist ideology that just pervades the place.
The president of my university, Amy Gutmann, I counted them, has
issued over 25 ukases in the forms of emails to the entire university opposing
every single aspect of Trump’s attempts to curtail and discipline the situation
at the border. So the notion of neutrality, it’s just completely gone. And
we’re influencing young minds. We’re propagating these ideas.
And many of the students at Penn and places like it, they are so
far removed from the border. They are, they are protected from the wages of
untrammeled diversity. In the summers, they go off to Stockbridge or the North
Fork of Long Island or wherever the watering holes of the elites, and they
write papers about the virtues of diversity. I mean that’s really what’s going
on.
[….]
I would go back to this concept in my talk that numbers
matter. The Hart–Celler drafters, you know, the legislative record is just full
of assurances that the numbers would not be great, that the demographic profile
of the United States would barely change, that the legacy groups that are here
would still be demographically dominant, would still be numerically dominant,
and I think you could attribute all sorts of dire motives to them saying that,
but I think there is a core insight there, which is, in order to have
assimilation, you need to have demographic dominance, numerical dominance of
the group that forms the culture, and that to which you are going to
assimilate.
Sam Huntington said as soon as you start getting these large
influxes from particular places, particular societies and cultures, they will
form these enclaves. They will start to associate with each other. They will
not have any incentive or imperative to integrate, to make the brutal bargain,
to change their ways towards a common identity that’s just, once again, a
matter of the numbers. So the numbers that we have are a problem.
[….]
Q….Most of you, all of you, have been speaking of what you
think should happen. I wonder if any of
you would speak to what you think is likely to happen, and if that amounts to
conservatives losing the immigration question, what is your plan B?
Amy Wax: I think we are going to sink
back significantly into Third Worldism. We are going to go Venezuela, and you can
just see it happening. I mean one of my pet peeves, one of my obsessions, is
litter, and I… If you go up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or Yankee territory,
right? Or versus other places that are “more diverse,” you are going to see an
enormous difference. I’m sorry to report. You know, generalizations are not
very pleasant, but little things like that, which aren’t little, they really
affect our environment, attitudes towards public space.
I think Adam Garfinkle did a
piece in The American Interest, where he talks about
this—about noise levels, about the public space, about people’s deportment in
public spaces, about respect for other people’s privacy, about things like
heckling and, you know, sexual harassment. I mean all of this stuff sounds
really silly, but when you add it up, these cultural habits, you know, make a
difference to our environment.
And I think the celebration of diversity means that we lose some
of these norms, these mores, that you know, make our life what it is. And I’m
very concerned about it. Of course, it goes a lot deeper than that. Of course,
it’s not just these superficial things, but I’m just mentioning that as
emblematic of the way that I think we really are going, and nobody is willing
to say anything about it, let alone try and stop it. I mean I guess I am, but…
Scott McConnell: I mean, there are a lot of obvious dystopian
scenarios. Amy’s is similar to George Kennan’s, like the Third Worldization of
America. There’s…Reihan Salam talks about whites and Asians in increasingly
gated communities, and a sort of re-segregation of the society. And obviously,
there’s various civil war type versions. There’s a novel by an
Egyptian-American called “The American Civil War,” which takes place in, like,
2070, and I think culminates in use of biological, genocidal biological
weapons. So you know, probably Amy’s Venezuela is the best case, if nothing…
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