Writing at Tech Central Station, Jerry Bowyer, an avowed conservative Republican, poses a question he says he recently put to Pat Buchanan:
If 200 years from now America will be filled with people who know and love the ideas of Jefferson and Madison — but these people are overwhelmingly dark skinned — will this be good or bad?
Buchanan’s measured response: “a disaster and a tragedy”–identifying him obviously enough as as a “blood-and-soil conservative,” as against the “we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident” kind, of which Bowyer is one. The problem for Buchanan and his ilk, says Bowyer, is that they’re on the wrong side of history.
America is a highly dynamic country. In fact, dynamism is the point of it, especially racial dynamism. When the first Congress commissioned that Adams, Franklin and Jefferson create a ‘great seal’ which would represent the ideals of our country, the (eventual) results included the Latin words “E Pluribus Unum”, From many, One. From many what? From many races. How could Jefferson and Franklin (who worked together on the Declaration of Independence) see it any other way? When they ‘declared’ to the world that rights were self-evident, they staked everything on the notion that the software of liberty runs on all varieties of human hardware.
History proved them right. …
But, wait, if we don’t send ’em all back to where they came from and erect electric fences from sea to shining sea won’t we, you know, utterly destroy the West and everything Anglo-Americans hold dear?. Well, no.
Immigration doesn’t represent the ‘death of the West’ it represents its renewal. People go from places that they don’t like to places that they do like. This implies that they ‘buy in’ to what we’re about to some degree. I would argue that immigrants tend to buy in to America more fervently than those of us who are born here. …
Immigrants start businesses at significantly higher rates than the native born. Entrepreneurship is risky. It’s difficult to imagine Silicon Valley occurring without immigrants from India. Immigrants have more children, which, of course, parents will recognize as the ultimate risk.
Do they change the culture? Of course, they do. Living cultures change, dead cultures don’t.
All of which strikes me as sensible, obvious, true, reasonable, humane…etc. That it makes Bowyer something of an outlier among his Republican pals–and not just the paleoconservative Buchanan types–is as alarming as it is ludicrous.
