Obsidian Wings

Family Values

by hilzoy

There are a lot of issues about which I think: Republican politicians have taken the name of something I care a lot about, turned it into something I scarcely recognize, and made it very tempting for liberals to just dismiss it: to accept the idea that the concept in question is what Republicans say it is and reject it, rather than challenging their definitions and reappropriating the values we care about. Patriotism is one example. Family values is another.

I mean: it's obviously better that children grow up in happy families than that they have to watch their parents fight, watch their love slowly turn to bitterness, or try to navigate their way through tension so thick you're tempted to take a blowtorch to it. And it's obviously better that they be allowed to be children whose parents take care of them than that they have to try to figure out, at the age of eight or nine, how to keep mommy or daddy from being so unhappy. No one could quarrel with that, could they? For the most part, it's not the government's job to make parents more loving -- the very idea of someone appointed by George W. Bush popping into people's living rooms to offer friendly marital advice makes my hair stand on end. But the government can do some things to prevent marriages from going wrong, and a lot of the things it can do are things that (in general) Democrats support and Republicans oppose.

For instance, a fair number of marriages go bad because of financial trouble. Sometimes people are just plain irresponsible, and there's not much the government can do about that. But sometimes couples get into financial trouble not because they aren't being responsible, but because a member of the family gets sick and they can't handle the medical bills. The main reason to support universal health insurance isn't that it strengthens families, but it does. And passing universal health insurance would probably mean that a significant number of couples will grow old together who might otherwise have gotten divorced after spending one too many evenings sitting at the dining room table, staring at a pile of bills, and saying bitter things to one another that they might regret but can never take back. It would also mean that their children would not have to listen, through their bedroom walls, to their parents saying those things, crying into their pillows and wondering what they did wrong.

Universal health insurance may not get the ratings that Janet Jackson's nipple or Britney Spears' three-second marriage got, but it's much, much more important to families. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, Democrats spent decades running away from family values instead of just saying that if you truly care about families, you should care a lot more about the Family and Medical Leave Act than about the sexual orientation of Tinky-Winky, or indeed of anyone. Someone's sexual orientation doesn't have to affect anyone else's families one bit, but whether or not a father can take a day off to care for his sick child surely does. And that's a message worth fighting for.

Which is a long, roundabout way of saying: We need more candidates like Angie Paccione in this video (h/t Balkinization). Paccione lost to Marilyn Musgrave by 2.5% of the vote. She'll be running again in 2008. Unless someone truly amazing, like Gandhi, decides to run against her in the primary, she'll have my support.

Big Media Benen

by publius

Steve Benen continues to expand his media empire, with a flattering profile today in the Politico. I particularly enjoyed this:

His wife nudged him, too [to start blogging]. "I would frequently bother (her) with hours of political diatribes. She ultimately encouraged me to take it online."

Some say Iraq, but I'm convinced that the liberal blogosphere owes its existence to unwilling audience members (e.g., friends/spouses/dogs) who were forced to become indentured listeners.

Testing, Testing: Open Thread

by hilzoy

Yesterday, after several years of abuse, my hardy TiBook decided it was time to pack it in (more or less, it still sort of croaks along, but not in a way that fills me with confidence.) So today I went off and got a brand new one -- the 15", isn't it pretty? -- and while the transition has been mostly glitch-free, except for a rather short-lived scare in which I coldn't figure out where my old email messages were (other than on my old computer, the backup disk, etc.), there's one little problem:

I can't comment here.

I regard this as one more sign that the universe does, in fact, have a sense of humor. Ha ha ha.

So part of the reason for this post is just to see whether the problem is just commenting, or whether it extends to posts as well.

Meanwhile: a backlit keyboard! Too cool.

With Friends Like These ....

by von

LOOK, I GET IT.  The Pajama-folks are, by and large, idiots.  Were you to put Roger Simon and Charles Johnson in a room ask them to create a foreign policy, you would end up with a panda bear.  Not a metaphorical panda bear.  An actual panda bear.  Don't ask how they did it: they started with a couple good ideas, discarded them, and then dumped in $2.5 trillion. Add in a wise InstaPundit "indeed," and Huzzah!  Panda bear.  And a pretty cute one at that.

Which is to say that I'm getting increasingly tired of watching Yglesias fillet the PJ folks into little-bitty panda bear steaks over Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia.  Anyone who thought, pre-invasion, that Ethiopia's experience in Somalia would be both great and grand -- or, God forbid, offer useful "lessons" for us -- likely can't find Ethiopia or Somalia on a map.  Or know much, if anything, about the last 20 years of pain and suffering on the Horn of Africa. 

But that doesn't mean that Ethiopia was wrong to invade Somalia, or that it didn't fit US interests to offer partial support for the endeavor.  A murderous and bellicose regime had just ousted the legitimate Somali government.  Backed by important Somali warlords and Ethiopia's rival, Eritrea, the insurgents had consolidated power.  They stated that they would attack Ethiopia; their public statements also indicated that they regarded swaths of Ethiopian territory as their own.  When Ethiopia warned the insurgents that an attack on the Ethiopian solders protecting the last refuge of the legitimate Somali government would result in an armed response, the insurgents did what insurgents do:  they attacked anyway.

Ethiopia's current government does not consist of "teh good guys," but to assume that they wouldn't or couldn't respond to these provocations is as asinine as adopting a panda bear as a foreign policy.  It was going to happen.  Moreover, given the convergence of interests, it made absolute sense for the US to assist Ethiopia.  A bloody and long-fought insurgency was likely to occur with or without our involvement.  May as well as use it to our advantage, by helping to remove jihadist thugs from power, aid the re-installation of the legitimate Somali government, and hunt real and suspected extremist and terrorist elements. 

This is called "realism."  We need more of it. 

Yet, although Yglesias has done well shooting the pajama-bears in the barrel -- and it's a small barrel -- it bears remembering that Yglesias himself has not been a fountain of wisdom on all things Somali.  He proposed negotiating with the Somali insurgents and granting legitimacy to their government:  "The best way to obtain those [al Queda] suspects would have been to try to cooperate with the ICU in securing custody over them."  This course would have put us directly at odds with the European Union and the African Union, both of which backed the legitimate Somali government.    That's reason enough to reject it.  It's also shockingly ahistorical and ungrounded in evidence.  That's another reason to reject it. 

Here's a third:  the Yglesias plan would have done nothing to stop the war and its aftermath.  Ethiopia was going to invade Somalia.  It had good reasons to do so.  Considering that the invasion was putatively to back the legitimate Somali government, Ethiopia also would have had all the international support it needed in the form of the European Union and the African Union.  Ethiopia also was and is the strongest military power on the Horn. It didn't need the US's permission or help to make a mess of Somalia.

The Bush administration, for once, confronted the situation as it was and devised a plan to make the best of it.  We need more of that.  Not less.  And this remains true regardless who supported the plan.

UPDATE:  Some typos corrected, some thoughts completed.  Some typos still present and some thoughts still incomplete.  We try.

Woodrow Wilson Sucks

by publius

Dear lord am I tired of reading columns like this. From today’s Post:

Democrats today have a problem with democracy. We have lost our voice on the issue of promoting democracy abroad -- which means that what was once a core Democratic foreign policy idea is being ceded to the GOP. . . . Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy must be turning in their graves. Using U.S. power to promote freedom and democracy was central to their foreign policies and legacies. . . . Is the party of Wilson abandoning Wilsonianism?

Let’s hope so.

In all seriousness, I used to be very sympathetic with this foreign policy vision. But no more. I’m tired of hearing about Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, and I’m really tired of hearing about Harry Truman. Frankly, Democrats -- and America more generally -- would be better off abandoning idealistic democracy promotion as a foreign policy goal altogether. That’s not so much because the abstract idea is bad, it’s that attempting to implement it causes more harm than good in the real world.

As for the column itself, its first problem is that it dignifies the Bush administration’s foreign policy by pretending that it (1) is coherent and (2) embodies moral ideals. Putting aside morality, if you look at the administration’s actions (not its words), it’s difficult to conclude that democracy promotion has been a consistent priority. I can’t really complain about that though. The fact that the Bush administration has only selectively pushed for “democracy promotion” is its saving grace. Indeed, the administration’s greatest failures have come when it has tried to promote democracy (e.g., Iraq/Palestine) and/or has taken militant stances in the name of abstract ideals (Axis of Evil).

Getting away from Bush, the bigger problem with this column is on the merits. The working assumption -- one expressed ad nauseum by Democratic foreign policy elites like the author -- is that democracy promotion should be a central and explicit foreign policy goal. I used to agree. I don’t anymore. I’m all for human rights. I’m all for promoting liberal reforms. But I’m through with democracy promotion.

At the outset, I should say that I support democratic capitalism as much as the next guy. I wish the whole world consisted of liberal democracies -- it would be a far better place. But, we conduct foreign policy with the world we have. And as recent history teaches us, the steps taken to promote democracy often make the world worse than it otherwise would be.

Why Did The USSR Collapse?

by hilzoy

Kevin Drum mentioned this article by Yegor Gaidar a few days ago, but clever me didn't read it until just now. It's really fascinating, so if any of you made the same mistake, now's your chance to undo it. He makes a really interesting argument about why the USSR collapsed. Basically, the first part goes like this:

(1) Soviet agricultural policy was a complete disaster. The Soviet population increased; its grain production did not begin to keep pace. There's an amazing graph showing grain production actually declining slightly between 1965 and 1990.

(2) As a result, the Soviets needed to import grain. To do this, they needed hard currency, which in turn meant that they needed to export something. More bad news: their products were so lousy that no one would buy them. So they had to export raw materials.

(3) Luckily, "at almost exactly the time when serious problems with the import of grain emerged, rich oil fields were discovered in the Tyumen region of Western Siberia." Moreover, after the first oil shock of the 1970s, prices were high. The problem was temporarily solved. The USSR could have recognized that this solution was, in fact, only temporary, but no such luck:

"In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet leadership, however, was not intellectually prepared to heed lessons from the School of Salamanca. The shortest quotation about the intellectual capacity of the Soviet leadership came from the Politburo minutes: "Mr. Zasiadko has stopped binge drinking. Resolution: nominate Mr. Zasiadko as a minister to Ukraine.""

(Priceless.)

(4) Then it all came unglued:

"The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. There were three options--or a combination of three options--available to the Soviet leadership.

First, dissolve the Eastern European empire and effectively stop barter trade in oil and gas with the Socialist bloc countries, and start charging hard currency for the hydrocarbons. This choice, however, involved convincing the Soviet leadership in 1985 to negate completely the results of World War II. In reality, the leader who proposed this idea at the CPSU Central Committee meeting at that time risked losing his position as general secretary.

Second, drastically reduce Soviet food imports by $20 billion, the amount the Soviet Union lost when oil prices collapsed. But in practical terms, this option meant the introduction of food rationing at rates similar to those used during World War II. The Soviet leadership understood the consequences: the Soviet system would not survive for even one month. This idea was never seriously discussed.

Third, implement radical cuts in the military-industrial complex. With this option, however, the Soviet leadership risked serious conflict with regional and industrial elites, since a large number of Soviet cities depended solely on the military-industrial complex. This choice was also never seriously considered.

Unable to realize any of the above solutions, the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a policy of effectively disregarding the problem in hopes that it would somehow wither away. Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely.

The money was suddenly gone."

The rest of the article describes the denouement. I think it's fascinating. I'd love to hear your take on the whole thing.

(Personally, I think the Politburo quote -- "Mr. Zasiadko has stopped binge drinking. Resolution: nominate Mr. Zasiadko as a minister to Ukraine." -- is worth the price of admission all by itself.)

Open Thread: 'Muslims In Space' Edition

by hilzoy

Via Unfogged, an article in Discover:

"As Malaysia's space program prepares to send the country's first astronaut to the space station next year, it is confronting some of the standard first-astronaut questions: what scientific research to pursue, which local delicacy to bring aboard, and who among the eager candidates should go. It is also tackling some more unusual quandaries, such as when to conduct the five daily Islamic prayers on an orbiting ship where a day lasts only 90 minutes.

In April the Malaysian national space agency held a two-day conference, Islam and Life in Space, to address these issues. One of the star attractions was a computer program called Muslims in Space, which calculates when spacefaring Muslims should pray and, using spherical trigonometry, discerns the direction of the Ka'aba, the holy shrine in Mecca that Muslims face during prayer. To settle the timing question, the software divides the space station's 90-minute "days" into the same five periods used for prayer in conventional, ground-based Islam. The program then links these periods to standard Greenwich time, so the astronauts can pray at both the correct Earth time and the correct time of day that they perceive on the space station."

In other news, the administration is pushing for mandatory minimum sentences on "nearly all" federal crimes. No word yet on whether they plan to include a special exemption for Scooter Libby. Oregon's governor ordered the state's flags flown at half-mast in honor of Flag Day. And who knew there was an ice cream flavor called 'Staten Island Landfill'?

Open thread!

***

Update: Forgot to add: the last two stories via Governing magazine's 13th Floor, which is a great blog if you happen to be interested in state and municipal government.

Black Shadows

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.

In public, the former Army scout stood tall for the cameras and marched in the parades. In private, he slashed his forearms to provoke the pain and adrenaline of combat. He heard voices and smelled stale blood. Soon the offers of help evaporated and he found himself estranged and alone, struggling with financial collapse and a darkening depression.

At a low point, he went to the local Department of Veterans Affairs medical center for help. One VA psychologist diagnosed Cruz with post-traumatic stress disorder. His condition was labeled "severe and chronic." In a letter supporting his request for PTSD-related disability pay, the psychologist wrote that Cruz was "in need of major help" and that he had provided "more than enough evidence" to back up his PTSD claim. His combat experiences, the letter said, "have been well documented."

None of that seemed to matter when his case reached VA disability evaluators. They turned him down flat, ruling that he deserved no compensation because his psychological problems existed before he joined the Army. They also said that Cruz had not proved he was ever in combat. "The available evidence is insufficient to confirm that you actually engaged in combat," his rejection letter stated.

Yet abundant evidence of his year in combat with the 4th Infantry Division covers his family's living-room wall. The Army Commendation Medal With Valor for "meritorious actions . . . during strategic combat operations" to capture Hussein hangs not far from the combat spurs awarded for his work with the 10th Cavalry "Eye Deep" scouts, attached to an elite unit that caught the Iraqi leader on Dec. 13, 2003, at Ad Dawr.

Veterans Affairs will spend $2.8 billion this year on mental health. But the best it could offer Cruz was group therapy at the Bronx VA medical center. Not a single session is held on the weekends or late enough at night for him to attend. At age 25, Cruz is barely keeping his life together. He supports his disabled parents and 4-year-old son and cannot afford to take time off from his job repairing boilers. The rough, dirty work, with its heat and loud noises, gives him panic attacks and flesh burns but puts $96 in his pocket each day.

Once celebrated by his government, Cruz feels defeated by its bureaucracy."

Read the whole thing. It's horrible. More below the fold.

Taguba

by hilzoy

Major General Antonio Taguba (ret.) talks to Seymour Hersh. Here he's talking about a meeting with Rumsfeld:

"“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.” (...)

Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. (...)

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” (...)

On January 20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, “Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in their possession.”

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.

“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”"

Read the whole thing. The final paragraph sums it up:

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

And one more quote, from the middle of the article:

“The dirt and secrets are in the back channel,” the former senior intelligence officer noted. “All this open business—sitting in staff meetings, etc., etc.—is the Potemkin Village stuff. And the good guys—like Taguba—are gone.”

That's the part that's the most damaging of all, in the long run: that people who believe in loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service, and who try to act accordingly, are being punished and/or forced out. Luckily, Ian Fishback is still in the Army, but I believe Joseph Darby is still in protective custody in an undisclosed location, and Taguba was told to retire. This is a shame. We need them.

What Makes Them So Mad

by publius

It’s official. As predicted, the conservative base is in full-scale revolt over the immigration bill. While this revolt was not unexpected, I’ve always wondered why immigration (or illegal immigration to be precise) gets the base so exercised (particularly bloggers and pundits). What exactly makes them so mad? It’s tempting to attribute it all to race, but that explanation is too easy, and often inaccurate. The answer, I think, is more complex and stems back to the paranoia -- i.e., the “we’re under attack” view -- that animates much of modern conservative ideology.

So again, why does immigration get everyone so riled up? One obvious candidate is race. Don’t get me wrong, race is definitely a big part of the equation, but I think it’s too easy to rely on racism -- and, frankly, it’s unfair. For instance, I don’t think that racism is animating most of the conservative pundits and bloggers opposing reform. Whether they care to admit it, the chattering classes have internalized a lot of “the 60s” values. Accordingly, I suspect few conservative writers justify opposition to immigration reform in their own head through racism. That said, racism does play a role within the public at large, but it’s not really enough (and it’s intellectually lazy) to attribute all opposition to racism.

A second potential explanation is economics. The intense conservative opposition we’re witnessing could be a reflection of populist economic anxiety -- the flames that Lou Dobbs makes a living fanning . Again, I think economics is a huge part of the hostility among the public, but it doesn’t really explain the intense opposition of the conservative chattering classes. For one, these people generally aren’t threatened by immigrants in the same way that working-class whites in, say, Arizona are. More to the point, National Review writers are not exactly champions of populist economics and defenders of higher wages for the working-classes. Just the opposite in fact. As Yglesias astutely pointed out, Mickey Kaus often justifies his opposition by citing the threat to low-income workers, while at the same time writing books criticizing equality as a goal and being passionately anti-union.

A third potential explanation is that the base is simply defending the law. They don’t oppose immigration, per se, only illegal immigration. This explanation, I think, is the weakest. Lots of things are illegal, but fairly common – marijuana use, speeding, Bush administration perjury. But you don’t see the chattering classes rising up with the same passion to defend the “rule of law” in these situations. Illegality is a good rhetorical tactic, but I don’t think it does much work at the end of the day.

To me, the real explanation is that the base sees immigration as a fundamental threat to their idea of “America.” In this sense, it’s another variation of the “fall from the golden age” strand of thought that animates opposition to secular universities, school prayer, the Pledge, “Happy Holidays,” and all the other examples of attacks on “America.”

To be more precise, there is a sincere belief that the influx of Latinos is going to fundamentally alter American culture and, by extension, America. Some people even believe that parts of the Southwest may become part of Mexico. The idea -- articulated by people like Sam Huntington -- is that Latinos won’t assimilate and are therefore distinct from every other immigrant group that has come to America. (It’s noteworthy that critics accused virtually every ethnic immigrant group throughout history of the same thing).

That’s why the push for things like fences and English requirements are actually more than nativist racism. In their heads, these people are defending an America -- their America -- that they perceive as being under siege. It’s an interesting perception – and one that pops up in a number of different contexts, but it’s ultimately wrong. Basically, the logical error is that people are equating their own preferences and social norms with “America.” For instance, all-white communities in, say, Alabama have a set of discrete social norms. As Latinos and Will & Grace move into these communities, these social norms are challenged and people resist by challenging them as attacks on America. Understanding this last move is critical. Essentially, these communities are elevating their contingent social norms and branding them as “America.” In this sense, they are equating “the way things are” with “the way things should be.” And thus, by introducing new social norms, you aren’t merely threatening this community’s social norms, you are threatening America itself.

This perceived threat of assault (on God, on the family, on the unborn, from terrorists, etc.) is a key pillar of the modern conservative movement. Although liberals tend to see social conservatives as an offensive force seeking to impose their will on the nation, social conservatives see their actions as a rear-guard defense against the never-ever-ending assault upon their way of life by secular liberals. That’s why it’s so difficult for the two sides to understand each other -- each of them thinks they’re taking defensive steps to halt the other’s advance. [As I’ll explain in a future post, this was also one of the big problems with Cold War interventions in the Third World, and is also the source of our tension with Iran.]

In short, opposition to immigration reform is more complex than you might think. If you look at the rhetoric closely, it’s less about racism than about the perceived threat to America. In this respect, it is part and parcel of a larger pattern of thought among much of the base.

[UPDATE: To clarify, I'm not saying that race and racism aren't playing roles here. They are, particularly among the rank and file. But what I am saying is that racism (1) doesn't apply to all opposition and (2) can't itself completely account for opposition even among racists (i.e., it's underinclusive). For instance, if you think it's racism, you have to ask yourself why this race and not that one is the current focus. Right now, the two most targeted "races" are Latinos and Muslims (as opposed to say Indians, Chinese, etc.). It's no accident that these two races are intertwined with perceived "threats." Although personal racism-against-blacks is less prevalent today (ignoring for now structural legacies), it's no accident that the then conservative base was more anti-black in the 1960s and 70s when demands for equality were forcing drastic changes in existing social norms.]