After America

had a per capita income of $24,800 but a city management that awarded themselves million-dollar salary-and- benefits packages. It comes as no surprise to discover 90 percent of its inhabitants speak a language other than English at home. Bell is an impoverished Latin American city, and so, like thousands of others south of the border, it has corrupt, rapacious Latin American government. Celebrate diversity!

Ask not for whom Bell tolls. Joe Klein, the novelist and columnist, was one of the most adamant of media grandees that the Tea Party’s millions of “teabaggers” were “racists and nativists.” “Sarah Palin’s fantasy America,” he explained to his readers at Time magazine, “is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals… to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.”⁵⁷ Joe, naturally, is entirely cool with all that. “The things that scare the teabaggers—the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism—are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country.”

Joe Klein finds “the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism” of America so “exhilarating” that he lives in Pelham, New York, which is 87.33 percent white. By contrast, Sarah Palin’s racist xenophobic hick town of Wasilla, Alaska, is 85.46 percent white. (Percentages courtesy of the 2000 census.) As for those “furriners of all sorts” that Klein claims to dig, Pelham’s “uppity blacks” make up only 4.57 percent of the population, and Asians, whether of the southern or eastern variety, just 3.96 percent.

Unlike Wasilla, which is a long way to go, Pelham is within reach of splendidly diverse, urbane, and cosmopolitan quartiers—the Bronx, for example—yet Joe Klein, Mister Diversity, chooses not to reside in any of them, and prefers to live uppitystate of the uppity blacks. Statistically speaking, he lives in a less diverse neighborhood overrun by fewer “furriners” than that chillbilly bonehead’s inbred redoubt on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Yet she and her supporters are the “racists and nativists,” while Joe preens himself on his entirely theoretical commitment to “diversity.”⁵⁸ He would seem to be volunteering himself as a near parodic illustration of the late Joseph Sobran’s observation that “the purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”⁵⁹

I don’t mean to single out Joe Klein, who I’m sure is the soul of kindness to lame dogs, l’il ol’ ladies, uppity blacks, and South Asian furriners, where’er he encounters them. No doubt Pelham has the occasional African- American college professor, East Asian hedge-fund manager, and perhaps even a Muslim software developer or two sprinkled among its 87.33 percent upscale honky populace. But Joe Klein is like a lot of Americans of his class: “diversity” is an attitude rather than a lived experience.

And it will be ever more so: the more starkly we Balkanize into Bells and Pelhams, the more frenziedly the Kleins of the world will bang the “diversity” drum. The more rarefied the all but all-white communities get, the more “COEXIST!” stickers they’ll plaster on their Priuses: hybridity is for your cars, not your municipal demographic profile.

In an age of political correctness, older people sometimes express bewilderment at the lack of “common sense.” But you can’t have common sense in a society with less and less in common: What does a gay hedonist in San Francisco have in common with a Michiganistan mullah? What does a Mississippi Second Amendment gun nut have in common with a fall Berkeley diversity enforcement officer? What social conventions can bind them all? Even as we degenerate into ever more micro-regulations ever more targeted for ever more bewildering permutations, assertive identities will figure out ways to wiggle free.

But forget gays and Muslims and consider two sixtysomething white-bread Wasps living side-by-side in Yonkers, New York: At Number 27 is a lady who retired from teaching in the local school at the age of fifty-nine and lives on an annual pension of $78,255, exempt from state and local tax, with gold-plated health benefits, and everything inflation-proofed. At Number 29 is a guy exactly the same age who owns a hardware store, can’t afford to retire, has health issues and crummy provision for amelioration thereof, yet will be working till he dies, while his neighbor enjoys a lavish two-decade retirement that he paid for in his taxes. This is a recipe for civil war, and no gay hedonists or firebreathing mullahs need be involved.

The “happy” ending for a statist America is an ever more self-segregating patchwork of cultural ghettoes from the barrios of California to the mosques of Dearborn to the beaches of Fire Island, each with its own TV networks, fashions, churches, mores, history, even children’s names (Connor, Mohammed, Tyrone), but presided over by a bloated centralized government that presents itself as the sole legitimate arbiter between these factions, as they compete for its favors while ever more onerously taxed.

What kind of America would that be? E pluribus who-num?

BORDER COUNTRY

“Would it not be easier,” wrote Bertolt Brecht after the East German uprising in 1953, “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

The thought has occurred to several governments over the years, and I don’t mean the dictatorships. The easiest way to elect a new people is to import them. So the Eloi not only turn a blind eye to mass “undocumented” immigration, but facilitate it, and use the beleaguered productive class to subsidize it. Grade schools are not allowed to ask parents if they’re in the country legally, so there has been a massive expansion of “bilingual education” from the Rio Grande to municipalities within a few miles of the Canadian border: a school system that can’t teach its charges in one language has smoothly diversified into not teaching them in two. Across America, school district taxpayers are funding the subversion of their own communities.

Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false.

“Sober-minded economists reckon that the potential gains from freer global migration are huge,” writes Philippe Legrain in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. “The World Bank reckons that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere three percent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion.”⁶⁰

$139 billion? From “a mere” 14 million extra immigrants? Wow!

As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the aggregate gross domestic product of the world’s advanced economies for the year 2008 was estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion. So an extra $139 billion works out to an extra, er, 0.0035. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Dr. Evil’s triumphant announcement (in the film Austin Powers) that he’s holding the world hostage for one million dollars!!! “Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.”⁶¹

As for that extra $139 billion divided between the inhabitants of all the world’s “rich countries,” that works out to less than what the U.S. Government spent in 2010 on unemployment insurance ($160 billion).

So much for the economic argument in capitalist terms. In welfare terms, Europeans were told they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: in reality, Germany’s Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) are heavy on the Gast-, ever lighter on the -arbeiter.

Turkish immigrants have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is fifty.⁶² Foreigners didn’t so much game the system as discover, thanks to family “reunification” and other lollipops, that it demanded nothing of them. Entire industries were signed up for public subsidy. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.⁶³

Does the World Bank set their welfare checks on the debit side of that spectacular 0.0035 economic growth? Or does that count as valuable long-term investment in the critical economic growth sector of incendiary mullahs? A dependence on mass immigration is neither a goldmine nor an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness.

“Moderate” Republicans often say that the party base represents a declining demographic (too white) and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Hispanics and other fast-growing segments of the population.