Paradise Losers

California is a paradise.

There may not be a more physically beautiful country on the planet. And yes, Californiais a country in any meaningful and every old sense of the word. Like Texas or New England or The South it is a thing large enough to hold an identity of country, the sort of place that would possess a culture entirely of its own within a couple generations were it not for the homogenizing forces of modern media.

California is also a hot mess.

There may not be a more dysfunctional country on the planet. Not in the first world, anyway, although southern Europe would certainly give the competition a full morning’s effort before retiring for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Come to think of it, there are probably some similarities to be found there. When the weather is practically perfect, the soil is practically perfect, and the Earth seems determined to deliver a practically perfect mix of beaches, woods, mountains, and valleys, it is hard not to feel like a lot of the work is already done.

It’s a fascinating mix that has made California a land of contradictions. Its politicians have embraced the most expansive portfolios of socialized services in America, and yet it is among the most unequal states in the union. It is at once one of the hardest states to own and operate a business andthe onlystate where you can really conduct certain types of business. It is responsible for some of America’s most powerful cultural export industries and also the center of the world when it comes to the industry of self-flagellation for cultural ‘imperialism’ and ‘appropriation’. There is remarkable wealth in California and remarkable poverty. There are veritable utopias and crime-ridden slums.

California has problems. Some of them are big problems. And if you think that handling alot of migrants in a short period of time – maybetoo many – may have exacerbated some of those problems, it doesn’t make you crazy, it doesn’t make you a Nazi, and it doesn’t make you a racist. America’s track record for assimilating migrants is very good, and provably better than most people think. But border regions can slow or change the nature of that assimilation, and assimilation is a process anyway. It’s entirely reasonable that too much, too fast can put a strain on various public resources. That’s true completely independent of the race, ethnicity, or origin of the people involved. Just ask anyone who lived, taught, or worked in medicine or other social services in Houston in the year or two after Hurricane Katrina.

But hear me: you are not crazy. You are not unreasonable. And unless you wander onto one of the few dozen university campuses where the word still means “anyone who doesn’t support the wholesale dismantling of society,” you are probably not racist..

Stephen Miller and Brandon Gill, on the other hand, are crazy₁. They are unreasonable. The sentiments embedded in their posts from a few minutes apart on June 9th are absolutely dripping with racism.

President Trump’s Chief of Staff and the representative from the 26th Congressional District of Texas would very much like you to think that what they said here is basically the same thing as the reasonable views that you (and I) hold on this issue. It is similar to the motte-and-bailey technique, in which someone makes an extreme argument, retreats to a more reasonable one, then pretends they’re the same. Only in this case, they have no intention of retreating from the extreme position; they simply want to use us to bolster the perceived reasonableness of their claim. There is nothing new about this technique, especially among national populists like Miller and Gill.

Every national populist movement MUST and eventually WILL abstract complex, multi-causal frustrations into a single cause.

That single cause MUST and eventually WILL be a group of people that represent an external threat.

The movement MUST and eventually WILL coerce a reasonable population into opposing that threat by conflating reasonable, morally defensible views with extreme, often violent, nearly always racist views.

If it is your aim to engineer support for whatever it takes to enforce an aggressive, often unconstitutional, frequently legally dubious mass deportation program, it is not enough to argue that rapid, large-scale immigration can place strain on communities, public resources, state finances, and cultural cohesion.