Dangerous Services

     We all know about the hazards involved in joining the armed forces, or becoming a policeman or a fireman. Most of us are aware of the risks to which coal miners, oil workers, and commercial fishermen are exposed. Then there are the prison guards, the bounty hunters, the ice road truckers, the high-steel construction workers, and other occupations where the degree of danger to life and limb is greater than that to which a barista is exposed.

     There are, in short, dangerous jobs. Plenty of them, too. It is appropriate that we appreciate and honor those who do them for accepting the risks involved. However, another dangerous service has recently come to light that’s seldom discussed. Rather than deserving accolades, its practitioners deserve the sort of braying, derisive mockery that’s reserved to those who’ve been caught being really naughty.

     I have in mind the practice of insincere lip service.

     The clips and quotes from Schumer, Pelosi, Obama, and others in which the speaker, a Democrat of some rank, has affirmed his fervent support for a physical barrier along America’s southern border are everywhere. Most of them are only a few years old. Each of them exposes a contradiction between the quoted figure’s position then, when a Democrat was in the White House, and his position now, during the Trump Administration.

     The Democrats whose utterances are quoted were obviously insincere. Moreover, their expressed sentiments were plainly not backed up by action. Some of us noticed at the time. A whole lot more of us are noticing today.

     That’s a position no politician wants to be caught in. It tells Us the People far too much about their agendas and their characters: information they’re desperate to deny us. But the Internet, as I and others have said, is forever.

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     Why did the Dishonorable Charles Schumer, the equally Dishonorable Nancy Pelosi, and the Supremely Dishonorable Barack Hussein Obama express support for a border wall they now stridently oppose?

     At the time of their earlier, pro-border-wall statements, those Democrats were in a pickle. Popular anger over the illegal tide was rising. It was no longer possible for any politician to remain unexpressed on the subject. It had begun to look as if a politician’s future prospects would depend on whether he spoke on it sympathetically to the concerns of the electorate.

     However, it was already Democrats’ strategy to turn a blind eye to the illegal influx. Then as now, they regarded the migrants swarming up from Central and South America as future Democrat voters. Get them in, get them hooked on federal benefits, and encourage them to bring all their relatives. Make sure they know to whom they owe their admission to the Land of Milk and Honey. Collect on the debt at the ballot box.

     But the transformation of America’s demographics could not be accomplished swiftly. The existing electorate was fuming, and the Democrats had an ambition neither party has been able to achieve since FDR and Truman: decades of uninterrupted Democrat hegemony in Washington. So the existing mass of American voters had to be placated somehow, albeit without compromising the overarching strategy. The cheapest approach, as always, was with words.

     Carefully chosen words, the Democrats believed, would suffice to pour oil on the troubled waters of popular sentiment. Such words would buy them time to complete their demographic project. There would be no attempt to act on them, of course. Once Hillary Clinton was in the White House, they could afford to turn away from illegal immigration and focus on their true agenda. So they allowed themselves to speak strongly but insincerely, about the urgent need for a border wall and their support for it.

     But Donald Trump is in the White House, and the Internet is forever.

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     No one can argue plausibly that the Democrats’ earlier statements about the need for a border wall were sincerely meant. Their subsequent stances, especially the most recent of them, contradict those statements too dramatically to permit such a claim. Their demographic project was all that mattered to them. That’s still the case.

     But the information is immensely valuable to Us the People. The exposure of political mendacity always is. The question remaining is what we’ll do with it.

     Far too many persons are “heritage voters.” According to at least one source, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt was pursuing a return to the White House on the Progressive “Bull Moose” ticket, a heckler stood up in the crowd at one of his campaign speeches and shouted: “I’m a Democrat! My father was a Democrat, and so was his father, and his father before him!” Teddy replied, “Well, sir, if your father was a jackass, and his father was a jackass, and his father before him, what would that make you?” The somewhat flustered heckler thought for a moment, then smiled and replied, “A Bull Mooser, sir! A Bull Mooser!” History does not record Teddy’s reaction to that reply.

     The Democrats’ coalition strategy, which depends on their hold on various racial, ethnic, and special-interest voting blocs, is key to their persistence as a power at the federal level. It has been extremely difficult for Republicans to penetrate those blocs. But the massive demonstration of the Democrats’ complete insincerity on the foremost political issue of the day might be the lever with which to pry some of them open. American Negroes and legal Hispanic immigrants have suffered economically because of the illegal tide. Should it continue unabated, it will threaten their children’s futures as well. If this point could be brought home to them, it might win the GOP enough new voters to reduce the Democrats to minor federal players for a decade.

     Let’s get behind it and push.