The Importance of the Wall and the Cold Civil War
TL/DR: How the wall goes beyond symbolism and speaks to the core of American identity and hatred of the Political Establishment.
Content Warning: Photographs of real-world violence
The wall has brought American politics to a standstill while the country itself keeps spinning. In Florida at least, it seems that the Federal shut down has little effect on the day-to-day affairs of most folk, and the economic boom trucks on. Republican and Libertarian voters rejoice at the deadlock, as many of their most hated Federal overlords fall prey to the shutdown.
The F.D.A., E.P.A., T.S.A., and a host of other powerful acronyms, have either halted or reduced services and oversight. The freeze in permits to businesses have many Republicans questioning why they need permission to conduct business in the first place. Furloughed and unpaid workers are mocked in political Facebook groups as the bureaucrats and tyrants of the bloated Federal Government, paid with the taxes of American citizens, to harass American citizens. The deadlock and shutdown of the Federal Government will not lose Trump a single member of his base, but his surrender on the Wall would.
Democrats believe they have a winning symbol in the Wall. They believe in opposing it, they take a stand for American values, minority ethnic communities, and against the dog-whistling white supremacy of the New Right. By taking such a strong moral stance, they have also backed themselves into a corner. If a foot of chain link goes up on the Mexican-American border, they will have handed Trump a photo opportunity and victory.
With no end in sight, it is important to understand the arguments and counter-arguments about the border wall. The Right is being portrayed as gun-toting, Bible-thumping, pearl-clutching, xenophobes, while the Left are being portrayed as polyamorous, amoral, culturally relativist, soy-drinking traitors. The wall is representative of our worst fears about each other, and our worst angers.
Lady Liberty vs. The Wall:
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
In this beautiful sonnet is the spiritual charter of the United States. Lady Liberty is a beacon to the oppressed of the world, a destination for those sick of kings and despots, a land for the landless, a home for the homeless, a place of hope, light, opportunity, and strength.
Her direct antithesis is the wall, simply stating,
“Buzz Off!
One says send us everyone. The other says we have enough problems, we don’t need yours.
And in this we have the duel between our ideals and our pragmatic reality. We are a nation of colonists and immigrants, and we have a host of problems that are as complex as our citizenry. But there is one thing that can be never given up if America wants to be as it claims, Liberty, and this is the crux of the argument. Freedom defined by whom, protected by whom, and for whom.
Truth is, Liberty is rare. Of all human inventions it is our least practiced. More common throughout history is tyranny and autocracy, and those who have lived in free societies are skeptical of the stranger. Conservatives are fearful that with the stranger will come the mischief, dangers, and poverty of the Old World.
The wealth and power of America is undeniable. Our nation’s poorest members have access to food, drugs, and services that would make a medieval king envious.
According to the Right, this wealth and power is a direct result of our Constitution, the limited government it outlines, and the freedom and industry of the American people.
The Progressive Left has a more cynical take on this wealth, chalking it up to the conquering of a rich continent, the barbarism of slavery, and the cutthroat geopolitics of the 20th century.
So to the Right, freedom and wealth are earned through having the right cultural values, and the American outlook. These values must be protected and adopted by newcomers, or else they should not be allowed in. These values are the right to Free Speech, the right to self-defense, and the belief in a limited government.
To the far Left, American cultural values and outlook are nothing but myths to justify conquest, theft, and exploitation. The only benefit to the American experiment has been the multicultural melting pot with its increasing diversity of semi-peaceful human coexistence. Continuing this tradition of multiculturalism is not just our historic charter, but our penance for the sins of our fathers.
We don’t even agree on who we are, let alone how to proceed.
The Two Great Threats:
The two great threats that the Right fears are Islamism and Socialism. Since Jihadist Terrorism can be blamed on Western foreign policy, and Scandinavian Socialism is the goal of modern Leftists, many Leftists and Liberals are happy to dismiss and minimize the concerns of the Right. In their attempts to do so, they have alienated a large portion of the center, and driven it to the Right.
On an existential level, Socialism is far more dangerous than Islamism. However, Islamism seems particularly perfidious in its efforts.
Firstly, let’s get our terms straight.
- Muslim is an adherent of the Islamic faith. They come from all nations of the earth, hold to their religion with different levels of fervency, and are only required to believe in God, the Last Day, and to do good works.
- Islamists are fundamentalists, who attempt to spread the faith into all realms of life.
- Jihadists are men and women who believe that only through holy struggle can Islam assert itself in the world, and this struggle is often violent.
Islamism is the belief that the religion of Islam should be the cornerstone of a nation’s politics. There are open Islamist organizations operating in every Western nation on earth. Notable members include the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir. These organizations do not necessarily advocate violence, but they do believe in the Prophet’s message that the world will not know peace until it is united in belief. This belief is opposite and parallel to Evangelical Christians, who have a similar goal, and similar belief.
Conservative Evangelicals see a threat and a competitor in Islamism. Republicans see theocracy as threatening to the core tenets of American identity. Everyone, including moderates, knows that with mass Muslim immigration comes the increased probability of Jihadist terrorist attack.
I want you to look at this picture.
This is a girl killed in a Jihadist terrorist attack in Nice, France. We know that she had a better chance of dying from a heart attack, cancer, or a car accident, but she wasn’t. She was murdered for the crime of being a Westerner, in a Western nation, by a Jihadist terrorist, invited into her country by her countrymen.
She was murdered by a man who believed that Islam is the one true faith, there is no God but God, that the faith of Islam is under attack. This man also believed that the appropriate response was to slaughter disbelieving men, women, and children. This is not an aberration, this is not a fluke, this is a viable and persistent interpretation of the Quran.
This man is not alone. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of men and women who believe the exact same thing he does, and also see no problem with the intentional slaughtering of civilians. The statistics are clear.
I want you to look at another picture.
This photograph is symbolic of the Left Wing response to Jihadist terrorism. Clear out the bodies, wash the blood off the sidewalk, patch up the bullet holes, sing John Lennon’s Imagine, call anyone who is alarmed by Jihadist terrorism a racist.
- When satirists and journalists are murdered, Leftists say they shouldn’t have been so provocative
- When soldiers are beheaded in Western streets, Leftists say it’s caused by Western geo-politics
- When terrorists publish manifestos about their worldly and religious motivations, Leftists practically call them liars without reading the source material
It is absurd, and it is the mythological defense-mechanism of the Ostrich. If I do not look at the problem, I won’t have to deal with it. This position has alienated so many Liberals and Centrists, shocked by the consistent denialism of Progressives and Leftists.
As sensational and infuriating as Islamism and Jihadism are, the more existential threat to American Liberty is Socialism.
Socialism is a vague term defined as a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
With this definition comes a series of bizarre considerations:
- Are our representatives speaking for the community as a whole?
- Do they not already regulate production, distribution, and exchange?
If the answer to both of these is yes, then the United States and most Western European nations are already Socialist. Of course this is not the definition that Socialists push for, nor is it what has occurred in practice.
Exalted as the prime example of Socialism are Scandinavian nations with generous social benefits, a dutiful and hard-working population, and some of the highest levels of self-reported happiness and social trust on the planet.
America, by comparison, has a hole-filled social safety net, a ten percent lower workforce participation rate, and middling reports of happiness and social trust.
Leftists point out that if Americans shored up the social safety net, created a work environment where people felt rewarded and valued, then perhaps happiness and social trust would increase. Right Wingers are quick to point out that while Scandinavia has generous social programs, they are still market-based economies, leading to a fight over definition and degree. Despite these arguments, Republicans and Conservatives reject this vision of the world because of their conceptions on trust, power, and government.
Built into American views on Capitalism and life, is the belief that human beings can be trusted to do one thing, pursue their own self-interest. Sure, there are self-sacrificing individuals and groups, but all in all, human beings look after themselves. The political landscape was thus left as a battleground between corporations, lobbyists, political figures, unions, and the individual, so that all might have their say, and all will tug at the reigns of power. In this way, no single group dominates the other, and through the struggle, and through the Constitution, individual Liberty is preserved.
What has occurred however, is a marriage between government, corporations, and the military-industrial-complex, creating a hyper-wealthy and entrenched oligarchy.
Both the Left and Right agree on the problem, but they don’t agree on the solution.
- The Left says that government must be empowered to bring corporations to heel, and to drag back the runaway defense industry.
- The Right says that you cannot use more government to reign in runaway government.
The Right fears government because how it conceptualizes power. The government is a legislative body, and passes regulation. Regulation itself is inert because words are wind. What gives something the force of Law, is its enforcement. If you break a law, your civil assets and personal freedom are under threat. If you fail to comply with the proceedings, armed men will be sent to drag you, kicking and screaming, in front of a court. If you resist this apprehension, you may be injured or killed by agents of the state.
So to compel people to speak a certain way, to secure themselves a certain way, to spend their earnings a certain way, to pursue only certain lifestyles, through governmental fiat, is a kind of moral horror because it all comes at the barrel of a gun. From this perspective, government should be limited, government should have a narrow scope, and government should be checked by the power of the people.
Socialism is the antithesis because it is the empowerment of the government to regulate society without constraint, as long as it’s for “the good of the people.”
Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Venezuela have all pursued their Socialist goals claiming to be pursuing “the good of the people.” In that pursuit they perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in world history. A new rash of apologists have started promoting and apologizing for Socialism, leading to renewed fears about the Communist menace.
This is not helped by Leftist mainstreaming of anti-white racist propaganda, the promotion of childhood drag and gender-transition, the celebration of sweeping demographic changes, punitive Gun Control legislation, the call for a repeal of the 2nd Amendment, and with them, a feared cultural change that is alien and hostile to the founding principles of the nation.
Many Leftists openly mock and despise their flag-waving, American-exceptionalism spouting, Christ-worshiping, gun-toting, neighbors, and their disdain is obvious.
Which brings us back to the wall and Hispanic immigration as a political cudgel.
2-to-1, Hispanic citizens vote for Left-wing politicians. This is both because of immigration policy, but also because Latin America has a history of flirting with Socialism. The Right fears that through political manipulation, Hispanic immigrants and their descendants will vote in the authoritarian governments and corruption they originally fled from. This is particularly true of illegal immigration, where there is no ideological or political vetting of those who come into the United States.
Through unchecked immigration, birthright citizenship, an ideological stranglehold on higher education and media, it is clear that Leftists have a long view on their pursuit of power. Trump, the Wall, and anti-Social Justice Warrior rhetoric is the Right Wing’s thrashing attempt to gain some form of control. What comes this year, the next, or in a generation’s time, who knows, but we have to grapple with this issue because it cuts to the core of American identity.
We are fighting a Cold Civil War over the Wall because it is a fight over who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.
