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.

Deals With The Devil

     Sarah Hoyt has a plaintive piece today about those who advise us to “go along to get along:”

     [T]he deals with the devil people make — the real ones, which apply whether one believes in the devil or not — are not the kind made at twilight at a crossroads with a being of distinctly evil shape, and imbued with a suspicious smell.

     Instead, they’re made in nice rooms, in meeting rooms, at conferences, with well-dressed people who are so benign, so kind, so full of wish to help us. And also, inevitably, powerful and full of the aroma of success.

     They stand in our way and without quite saying anything political (some of them do. One of them was stupid enough to at least hint at politics to me when I was in the political closet, but most don’t) make it clear that if you want to advance, succeed, or even “just” remain employed, you must say the right words, believe the right things, hang out in the right circles.

     Is this a sin only of the left? I don’t know. For my entire life, the half century or so I’ve been cognizant of such things, the people in control, the people who were rich, famous, well put together, were leftist.

     The thought that we might have been deprived of a multitude of good things because of political differences is enough to wring tears from a stone. But it’s been going on for decades; it’s only recently come out of the closet and strutted boldly before us.

     The espousal (or mute acceptance) of a particular set of convictions -- especially political ones -- to gain entry to a specific circle, or acceptance in one's educational or working environment, is commonplace. Yes, it's insincere. Yes, it's a deal with the devil, in more than one sense. But it is appallingly common.

     A university with which I'm familiar once had the academic equivalent of a purge in its Economics department because the chairman had decided to admit a young Friedmanite as an assistant professor. The sitting professors were heavily to the left, of course, and they didn't want this heretic among them. The chairman didn't just lose her chair; she lost her tenured position. So the disincentives to divergence can be severe.

     Families can be like that too. Especially the sort of family that's geographically compact and whose members frequently gather for holidays or other special events. A friend of mine who has seven siblings is unable to attend his family's holiday get-togethers for that reason: he's a conservative and the rest of them are hard-left. “Conform or be ostracized by your own family” is quite a threat. I admire my friend for his refusal to bend...but there are many who surrender simply for the sake of familial peace and a place at the Thanksgiving table.

     It's evil. Standing firm against it can cost you everything. And it is shredding much of American society.

     It’s largely a sin of the Left – their “the personal is political” mantra requires it of them – but a dilute form of it affects the Right as well. On the Right it’s manifest in a person’s mimicry, often encouraged by his peers, of those whose approval and support he hopes to gain. “Dress like the boss.” “Spend your free time and money on classical music and museums, not rock concerts and saloons.” “Don’t date her; the people who count think she’s vulgar.”

     As usual, C. S. Lewis has an insight for us:

     The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.

     [From The Screwtape Letters.]

     Being true to oneself can seem “obvious,” even “automatic,” to one who has yet to confront the contrary temptations. Today those temptations are all around us, for politics has infiltrated itself into every cranny of human involvement. Nor is any man’s strength of conviction guaranteed to resist them when threatened by poverty, ostracism, and ridicule.

     This is one of the handful of cases where the other Leftist mantra, “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” really does apply. Think about it and how you can be part of the solution – not for yourself, but for others.