the american order
making america american again
this has become a popular sort of meme and line of thinking lately.
on the one hand, i think it carries some important truth; on the other i think it represents a materially incomplete framing and embodies a sort of semantic and logical sleight of hand.
i think both sides are worth fleshing out.
let’s look.
on its face, one can certainly accept some of the obvious truths herein.
the US and liberia are very different places with very different standards of living, societal mores, levels of safety, freedom, and experienced rights. clearly “just having the same constitution” is a far from dispositive societal determinant and this is essentially a complete and more or less indisputable refutation of the idea that “we just need better rules and utopia is right around the corner.”
dropping the US bill of rights into haiti would accomplish nothing. a set of laws is not enough. it cannot create a society or a people. it is not civilization. it is not justice or fairness or equity. it’s an attempt to lay out and instantiate and codify the ideas of a people about such things. it cannot put onto the streets that which was not already in the people who walk them.
this is a topic upon which our framers themselves were highly conversant and that they regarded with the utmost gravity.
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
―George Washington
where i take issue with the framing advanced by logan and a number of others is this:
a constitution is not an idea. it’s a document. it’s a set of rules. like a speed limit or a set of medical ethics, it’s only as useful or impactful as the people who live under it make it.
the idea does not reside on paper, it resides in the hearts and minds of we the people.
codes of law will be honored or ignored or twisted to advantage and predation based upon those hearts and minds.
ideas are not enough.
to have meaning, societal or otherwise, ideas must be put into practice.
this is why i advanced this framing the other day:
america is more than an idea.
america is more than a place.
america is a way of life, a set of expectations, a golden rule begetting a golden age.
so, yes, america is not exclusively “an idea” but it is inclusively one.
it is an applied idea, a way of life and a set of values that came to embody our golden rulership of ourselves and that unlocked and enabled such human flourishing as has never existed elsewhere on earth, a truly grand experiment, undertaking, and achievement.
this applied idea, this set of expectations, this high trust high freedom society truly is a city on a hill and protecting and nurturing it is absolutely the hill to die on.
that said it’s also one we need to be very careful about because just what we are fighting for and how we fight for it matters greatly.
consider: one thing that america and liberia have in common these days is that they honor their near identical constitutions increasingly in their breach rather than their adherence.
this accrues to the ill effect of both.
no set of laws can make men ethical or just. this they must do and enforce of themselves. laws, like fire, are fearsome weapons when wielded by immoral men.
there is a concept in political science called systems and orders. a system is what you design, what you try to do. an order is what it winds up actually doing, how it works in practice. in essence, we’re talking about the distinction between intent and outcome.
there seems to be a powerful nativist sentiment rising in america, one that basically argues that “america is for americans. they built it, they invested in it, and they should not have to compete with others coming here and taking their jobs and hogging the opportunities.”
in effect, this argues that america is a neighborhood, a sort of living community with an HOA who gets to veto who gets to move in. taken to extremes, it obviously gets sort of silly and arbitrary. shall we have “wisconsin for wisconsonians” to protect them from competition from those crafty illini always looking to sneak across the border in search of better cheddar? madison for madisonians to keep job seekers from just milwauking in? just what is the “correct” line supposed to be? there’s really no way to know in any objective sense.
“well, we have a national identity so it’s not really immigration. these people from illinois are just like us!”
well, what’s the greater threat to the way of life in a small population state like utah, immigration from mexico or india or immigration from california? (it’s not like they get smart when they leave and stop voting for the stuff they just fled)
worry about the character of newcomers has always been with us. anti-chinese leagues, anti-irish leagues, all manner of anti-emigree gangs and political movements have existed and held varying levels of sway in the US for centuries and despite their claims, america both as a nation and as an applied idea has for long years thrived, expanded, and flourished both of itself and through immigration.
i’ve seen folks using this picture to say “go ahead, call them lazy. tell them they didn’t build this” but that seems like a problematic framing to me for a number of reasons.
what someone did 100 years ago seems a poor basis for current entitlement. if you built it and own it, sure, it should be yours, but if you were paid to help build it for someone else, then how are you any different than someone being paid to build something today?
further, i look at that picture and my suspicion is that a lot of the people on that girder were immigrants.
this was the depression era construction of the building currently known as “30 rock.” the exact names of the folks in the photo seem lost to time but a fair bit is known about the construction project itself.
“However, what is known is that these workers included not only Irish-Americans and Irish immigrants, but Italians, Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans, Germans, and even Mohawk ironworkers from Canada.”
i’ll bet you dollars to donuts that at the time there were anti-immigration nativists howling about these job stealing irishers and italians too and this leads to an important question:
in a nation where nearly everyone’s family immigrated here at some point, why is there some magic temporal line where new immigration suddenly becomes bad?
how is it not hypocrisy for the grandson of immigrants to claim as a blanket statement that this is “their america” and that other immigrants coming in and having children and grand children are going to wreck the place?
how is this not “well, now that i am in the castle, let’s pull up the drawbridge?”
because to my mind, it seems like it is.
we need to be very careful around that because if america’s culture is its superpower (and it is) and that culture is rooted in the incredibly rare and excellent process of golden rules begetting golden ages (and it is) then trying to bake a violation of the golden rule into our immigration policy starts to look a lot like the sort of “we had to burn the village to save it” thinking one sees from people demanding more patriot act violations of rights “to protect the republic.”
one cannot save a culture by enshrining the violation of its tenets.
that said, it’s not so simple as to therefore say “ok then, open the floodgates and all immigration legal or illegal is good.” that’s obviously not the case and we’re currently learning some really nasty lessons around it and the order than has emerged from the H-1B visa system and the “sneak in and get free hotels, healthcare, and free lunch” has been a $2 trillion debacle of unassimilated and possibly unassimilatable people.
america had, for most of its history, pretty open borders. you came, signed in, signed up, maybe changed your name to something more locally intelligible, and you set out after your dream.
the fact is it worked really well for a long time.
the fact is it’s not working well right now.
and so it would seem that the key question to be asking is simple:
what changed?
why did benefit turn to harm?
my thoughts:
american exceptionalism is real, but it did not spring unbidden from the native stones. it was built. it was attracted. it came to our shores in wave upon wave of hard working best and brightest yearning to be free, yearning for america.
the new world was a collector and a crucible.
their lives were hard. the test was stern and unforgiving. there was no safety net, no special rights or preferencing. there was no “bending over backwards to accommodate your culture.” there was discrimination and stiff demands to get with the program, learn the language, assimilate, and keep up. no unexceptional need apply.
so the exceptional came and they strived because they too were a part of the applied american idea, the way of life that built the city on a hill. america is not a ring fence to preference locals. it’s a test. can you make it here? do you have what it takes?
fenced paddocks drive stagnation. challenge breeds competence and construction.
america is not the ethos of “slow down.” america is the ethos of “let’s fucking go!” carved in massive sans serif letters in the living granite of mountainsides.
we break this in every way with DEI, ESG, big government, regulatory capture, crony corporatism, totalitarian statist destruction of schools, the vilification and suppression of achievement, and the coddling and elevation of failure and dependence.
we have inverted the very idea of exceptionalism and cast it as blameworthy.
this societal ill health is what allows the opportunistic infection of “bad immigration.” it’s all of a piece. borders should be controlled. immigrants should not get free stuff and be allowed to prey upon high trust, high empathy, high freedom structures and break them. and once upon a time no one needed to say this.
it was fricking obvious.
it was simply known.
and it can be again.
it must be again.
i think at core much of what is so incensing people is not “immigration” per se, but colonization of culture.
“bad immigration” is a symptom of this (and likely an intensifier as well) but it’s not a root cause.
toxic colonization never used to happen because the applied american idea would not allow it. people who tried got pummeled. the immune system for the american way of life was strong, confident, and brass knuckles unapologetic.
and so it must become again both at home and abroad.
i don’t care if it’s tren de aragua, somali CMS grifters, corporate abuse of H-1B indentures, BLM, entitled DEI takers, or kindergarten teachers empowered to pick your child’s gender:
the immune system for the american way of life needs to stop being frightened, stop being contrite, and resume being muscular and assertive.
and the immune system is us.
it all comes down to this, everything from building a business to raising a family to the persiflageous pursuits of polemicist pussycats:
only we can save ourselves. no one can do it for us.
so get up. i didn’t hear no bell.
only we can be the moral, high trust, high freedom society that we wish to inhabit. no one can build it for us. no one can police it for us.
and that means we need to get our minds right and to once more normalize normality.
the time for “american shame” and the self-hatred of presuming that american exceptionalism is something over which one need be apologetic or for which one must make restitution is over.
we have valorized vandalism and created amoral systems of the low trust low ethics of low people.
we need to remember who we are and stop falling for all this critical theory claptrap that makes the best of our societal substrate out to be the problem.
wanting america does not make you a bad person.
it makes you a part of the best of humanity’s dreams.
and sometimes dreams need to stand up for themselves.
this is the pivot.
we must fix this for if we fail to, no set of rules is going to help. we have built a system from which the order we want cannot emerge. time to rip it out as restore what was.
it is not immigrants seeking the american dream that pose a threat to us. it’s americans seeking to tear that dream down and decry it as despicable and evil and using issues like immigration, race and gender war, crony corporatism, and regulatory dictatorship to do it.
the solution is not to raise the drawbridge.
the solution is to apply our ideas, defend our way of life, and make america america again.
LFG.
It was John Adams that said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Excellent essay.
Nothing shows the downfall of America any better than the present President being the leader with a 50 year background of stupidity at best and absolute corruption at worst.
We have allowed it.
It's time to stop it.