August 12, 2003

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Now They're Bullying Private Universities

[See also Mexifornia: The Book and the Future, by Brenda Walker]

From:  Bob Vandervoort

It's interesting, Victor Davis Hanson is a smart guy, but not quite smart enough. He is capable of observing problems, but misses how they are connected with one another. You can see this from his Q&A with Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review Online

For example, Hanson seems incapable of realizing that multiculturalism is inseparable from mass immigration—particularly illegal mass immigration. Note this quote:

"…instead of meeting the challenge to turn illegal immigrants into Americans…"

Conservatives of a certain era or mindset would have said something along the lines of "instead of deporting illegal aliens..."

Other examples:

• "our teachers, our politicians, our government officials have taken the easier route or allowing a separatist culture..."

Well yes, but the point is they feed on it. Mass Third World immigration provides the political class with more constituents, more students needing special public education programs, more caseworkers justifying bigger public budgets. Why should any of them oppose it? 

• "A general self-censorship about honest discussion of the problem..."

Excuse my reflexive coughing, after seeing how the outlet he writes for treats other conservatives who do try to deal honestly—and without self-censorship—with the problem. 

• "A multiracial society works…"

Really? Where? I'd like more than simple assertion. For someone invariably described as a "classical scholar," Hanson ought to give a little more citation.

• "So the trick is to return to controlled, legal immigration..." 

Finally something we can agree on. (Although it probably took a lot of prodding from "outside" sources to get Hanson to start thinking in this new direction).

• "Shed the fears of being called 'protectionist' by the free-market Right and 'racist' by the manipulative Left…."

Gee, sounds like the old conservative position on immigration, until the neo-cons twisted the issue completely around.

• [Lopez] Q. Are there people today thinking and talking realistically about immigration? [Hanson] A. Hardly.

True! (But see above). 

• "Race is so baffling now. Due to intermarriage it would take the machinations of the Old Confederacy to attain any exact racial categorization — not that our ethnic-studies department doesn't try."

While Dr. Hanson may live on the cutting edge of a world depicted in the opening scenes of the movie Blade Runner, this idea that the white race will suddenly just dissolve overnight, thus eliminating all our racial problems, is simply fatuous. For starters, despite the decline of European descendants on the planet, there are still around a billion of them left. Whites have interracial marriage rates at something like less than 4 percent. So, at that voluntary rate, it would still take centuries to eliminate all whites from the planet (a racial solution that no one talks about in the context of any other race).

And even with the complete absence of whites in certain parts of the world, racial friction continues: Chinese versus Indians. Hispanics versus blacks. Fijians versus Indians, and so on. 

• [On Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California]: "Perhaps the idea he is an immigrant might have some social capital in our state." 

How naive is this guy? The Terminator will be viewed simply as white—not as an "immigrant." Set up your racial dynamics from there. 

• "I've learned that we are such an insidious, such a complex society from the Williams sisters playing tennis in Paris, to the Left offering fellowships to America's critics to come to Harvard, to George Bush's top national advisers being both African American, to Real TV being damned by elites and watched by the masses, that we seem to drive the world crazy in exasperation. Good! They need to relax and accept that we are the world's first and most successful multiracial society that is as powerful as it is humane."

What has Hanson "learned"? A few exceptions to the rules here and there? Does that somehow disprove the rule? A certain frisson at some of the more crass elements of American pop culture? I thought he taught classics, not pap.

Hanson seems to be saying, "because Y is non-white and prominent in our culture, therefore America is a successful multiracial society." We just have to kindly ignore the low-level interracial violence that goes on daily in all our American cities.

If you just ignore all the rapes, assaults, and murders—it's working! It's working!

But I'm confused. Earlier in the interview, Hanson urged the rest of America "whatever we are currently doing, DON'T TRY IT!" And he mentions that Mexico and the Middle East are "failed" societies – but we're busily importing all of them.

If California is the first big multiracial state in the Union—and it's the pits—and the rest of America is quickly following suit—then how long will America last?