"Transnationalists" don't take immigration reform seriously

In his 1995 book "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy," the late Christopher Lasch argued that America's political and cultural elites had opened up a gap between themselves and ordinary Americans. "Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse," he wrote. They are increasingly detached from their fellow citizens and drawn to an international culture, Lasch said, or what we would today call a transnational culture.

Consider the current immigration debate in this light. In the transnational view, patriotism, assimilation and cultural cohesion are obsolete concerns. Borders and the nation-state are on the way out. Transnational flows of populations are inevitable. Workers will move in response to markets, not old-fashioned national policies on immigration. Norms set by internationalists will gradually replace national laws and standards. The world is becoming a single place. Trying to impede this unifying process is folly.

The term "transnationals" specifically refers to those working in and around international organizations and multinational corporations. More broadly, it indicates a cosmopolitan elite with a declining allegiance to the place where they live and work, and a feeling that nationalism and patriotism are part of the past.

To some extent, their worldview cuts across Democratic-Republican and liberal-conservative lines, and reinforces the other concerns that prevent immigration control: the desire for cheap labor and Hispanic votes. Old-line one-worlders and enthusiastic supporters of the United Nations hear the siren call. So do many academics, judges and journalists who attend international conferences and tend to adopt a common consciousness and world outlook.

The interplay between immigration and transnationalism is a flourishing subspecialty in the academic world. Ethnic studies departments, once conceived as a sop to campus minorities, increasingly stress transnationalism, though exactly what professors mean when they use the word is often not very clear. It is now common to hear that transnationalism will be to the first quarter of the 21st century what multiculturalism was to the last 25 years of the 20th.

The large-scale movement of populations is often seen as an indicator of the coming world society. To transnationalists, it is a positive development that reveals the weakness of the nation-state and adds to that weakness. Loyalties and commitments are diffused. One transnational scholar writes, "Traditional notions like citizenship, political activity, entrepreneurship and culture are de-linked from specific places and spaces."

This theme hums through some of the immigration debate, but transnationalists have hardly been frank in discussing their views. What appears to be primarily a problem of labor, border control and one particular failed economy -- Mexico's -- is to some people an inevitable and welcome stage in the decline of the nation-state. Besides, large-scale immigration helps to deconstruct the traditional historical narrative of the target nation, a traditional item on the multicultural agenda.

Partly because of immigration, the British government appointed a commission on the future of multiethnic Britain. It concluded that "Britishness" had "has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations." The report said Britain should be formally "recognized as a multicultural society" whose history must be "revised, rethought, or jettisoned."

John Fonte, of the Hudson Institute, notes that "transnationalism," like "global governance" and "multiculturalism," are presented by advocates as irresistible forces of history. Not so, he says. They are "ideological tools, championed by activist elites."

The astonishing aspect of the immigration debate is that the elites think they can override the clear and huge resistance of the American people. As columnist Tony Blankley wrote last week, the Senate was prepared to "legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public."

Lopsided majorities, which normally stay the hand of Congress, want the federal government to take charge and get tougher on illegal immigration. In last month's Quinnipiac University poll, 88 percent of all respondents said illegal immigration is a serious problem (57 percent "very serious," 31 percent "somewhat serious"). Among immigrants or their children and grandchildren, the figure was 83 percent. "Red state, blue state and purple state. Illegal immigration is a serious problem," said Maurice Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. If the majority really wants to win on this, all it has to do is raise the heat on Congress and defeat the amnesty-light non-reforms.

I fear that there is a motivation far more sinister than mere obtuseness which drives the grand elites to pursue their trans-nationalist policies in the teeth of the will of the people. The author has alluded to the motivation. He sees trans-nationalism as the sequela of multiculturalism and he is correct. He also avers that trans-nationalism is but a tool and not a goal in itself for those in its thrall.

These repugnant "isms" are but tools conceived of originally in Marxist doctrine and contrived by THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL to advance the tide of communism. The school was founded by a George Soros of like millionaire who assembled a bunch of intellectuals and tasked them to create the intellectual weapons to undo the defenses of the West against communism after the Russian Revolution. He founded a school and managed to get it attached to the university in Frankfurt. Originally, they wanted to call it a school of Marxism after its model in Moscow but concluded they ought not to give up the game so easily and adopted the name school for social research.

The Frankfurt School offers a comprehensive explanation of the origin of cultural Marxism as a tool quite consciously crafted to undermine the institutions which were effective in resisting socialism. Thus was "political correctness" born. Conceived to attack the institutions which resist socialism: The Nation-State; The Church; The Family; The School; The Culture; The Military; it becomes a computer virus in our very epistemology..

Pan nationalism (which really means the absence of nationalism), anti-Americanism, feminism (anti-paternalism), atheism (anticlericalism), extreme environmentalism (especially extreme global warming), anti-racism (group victimology), homosexual activism (anti-family hatred), etc. are all excressences of Cultural Marxism. This doctrine was explicitly fashioned to break down the resistance of Western civilization to communism.

It was designed to pave the way for the acceptance of the Russian Revolution in Germany in the 1920s. In doing so it carved out areas against the Western culture which it saw as bulwarks against communism: the family, the Church, the school and, of course, the nation state. Thus it was perfectly positioned at the time of the ostensible failure of communism at the fall of the Berlin Wall to convert the left fully from an economic Marxism to a Cultural Marxism. That is what we have today.

Born in Germany, the movement was driven out by Hitler into a modern diaspora in 1933 which unintentionally propigated the theories throughout the western world, especially America and Britain, and throughout our established institutions like Harvard, Columbia, RCA, the OSS and, surprise, The New York Times. Exploiting the anti-draft sentiment in the Vietnam era, the doctrine of political correctness metastasized and rode with the boomers to become the dominant philosophy of our elite culture. But every eruption of political correctness can be traced directly back to The Frankfurt School.

We are often nonplussed by the obtuseness in the left in failing to recognize the obvious dangers of terrorists crossing the Mexican border armed with weapons of mass destruction which could be as small as vials of anthrax. I can recall posting more than two years ago that, if such an attack occurred, George Bush would be vilified as one of the worst presidents in our history. Why is a man so seemingly committed to fight terrorism utterly incapable of seeing the threat in our own southwestern desert?

In George Bush's case I think he is merely a dupe, a useful idiot in the wars of cultural Marxism. The virus of multiculturalism erupts in more symptoms than trans-nationalism. As I said in my about page, "The last refuge for scoundrels of the left is to play the race card." This card has been played so effectively by the disciples of The Frankfurt School that we all of us live in mortal terror of dying as ignominiously as Don Imus, Trent Lott, Senator Allen, etc. etc. The left has merely to breathe the threat of racism and all critical thinking shuts down.

An elite simply will not be tolerated as an elite if he is tainted with even so much as a nano coating of racism.

I divide the left into the elites and their useful idiots. The elites are as cynical as Satan himself and it explains how this portion of the left can swallow the inconsistency of courting an islamo fascist victory in the war on terrorism. One need only contemplate for a moment the Taliban's treatment of women and homosexuals to be astonished that they are not more aggressive in waging this war. To the contrary, they actually undermine the war. Think of the Hitler Stalin pact of 1939. In thrall to their ideology, they risk everything to destroy the nationstate, especially the American nation which stands athwart every one of their ideological goals.

The balance of leftists, the great majority, play the game under orders reacting to stimuli which need not even be consciously applied (such as the specter of racism, sexism, homophobia etc.) like so many chickens in a Skinner box.

How can elitists ram trans-nationalism through the teeth of the American people and down their throats? Because they are living in a parallel universe concocted by The Frankfurt School.

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