The Pity Party (10 page)

An extreme case of Christians turning Christ's ambiguities into absolutes is the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted by an American peace convention in 1838 and published in William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, the
Liberator
. “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government,” it stated, because “we recognize but one
King
and
Lawgiver
, one
Judge
and
Ruler
of mankind.” Thus,

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence, we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury. The
Prince of Peace
, under whose stainless banner we rally, came not to destroy, but to save, even the worst of enemies.
²¹

Garrison's higher patriotism, unlike McGovern's, explicitly obliterates all lower patriotisms—all attachments of sentiment and obligation, that is, to individual nations and their citizens rather than to the entirety of the human race. Rendering unto God what is God's means rendering nothing unto Caesar, whose legitimacy to demand any tribute Garrison rejects. Garrison was, in effect, invoking the long-lost moral and political unity of Christendom, when the church was both powerful and confident enough to make plain its opposition to “sovereign political bodies” whose “will to power” in the words of political theorist Pierre Manent, led “both princes and subjects to address their wishes to the earthly city and to set themselves up as ‘independent,' to the detriment of the divine kingdom and the human vocation.” For secular moderns, Manent argues, the analogue to Christian universalism is a dubious “religion of humanity,” which posits “a humanity virtually unified and healed, as, beneath the separate activities of separate human groups, there is present or latent a humanity that nothing separates or distinguishes.”
²²

Even if McGovern had been disposed to follow his own argument to Garrison's ultimate conclusion, his reticence on the point is understandable, since few politicians have become the leader of a country by promising to hasten its disintegration. There is another problem with McGovern's patriotism: the higher standard to which true patriots are called to make their country conform is much less clear than the standard Garrison invokes. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the words of historian Walter Russell Mead, “an aggressively proselytizing and self-confident Protestantism was the home and natural ally of the feminist, prohibitionist, peace, and antitobacco movements.”
²³
But over the course of the thirteen decades separating Garrison's statement from McGovern's, liberalism came to embrace a skepticism that, however selective, was reliably vigorous. Liberal relativism insists, contrary to Garrison, that conflicting value judgments cannot themselves be judged right or wrong, superior or inferior. To deny this truth is presumptuous, and lays the foundations for tyranny.

Such intellectual diffidence, however, reduces McGovern's patriotism, which discards blind acceptance of official policy in favor of calling the nation to a higher standard, into a command to be passionately devoted to one's own political preferences. Activists, partisans, and intellectuals are
already
passionately devoted to their own political ideals and agendas, however. McGovern's formulation provided them gratuitous encouragement but, more important, also offered the reassurance that simply by virtue of being politically engaged they were already as patriotic as they needed to be, and indeed as patriotic as they possibly could be.

The highest patriotism requires making the nation conform to higher standards, in McGovern's view. But to invoke high
er
standards implies that there are high
est
standards, truths from which any and all departures will lead us into error and vice rather than toward greater wisdom and virtue. To put this Platonic point another way, if there are no highest standards then there can be no intelligible basis for supposing that one standard is higher than any other. But modern liberalism's all-in bet on relativism commits it to the contradictory proposition that the only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths. Since tolerance requires accepting different strokes for different folks, we are obliged to respect all standards, variously and idiosyncratically understood, which means conflicts among them cannot be resolved by appeals to higher standards. The lower patriotism, in this view, honored and practiced by vulgar patriots, stands revealed as blind acceptance of official policy and bloodthirsty ethnocentrism.

In their desire for moral unity and moral diversity we note, again, liberals' wish to have it both ways, desiring the piety of religion without having to traffic in the religiosity of religion. They are especially envious of religions that offer all men everywhere hope for salvation by worshipping the one true God. Universal faiths broke down the pagan power of deities worshipped and rituals practiced solely by a particular tribe, all of which reliably intensified its chauvinism. The marriage of liberal universalism and liberal skepticism proclaims the brotherhood of man while rejecting the fatherhood of God. Where religious universalism declares that the brotherhood of man rests on the most fundamental cosmological truths, however, the only nourishment liberal universalism offers is the empty calories of Rodney King's wish that we all get along.

The historical evidence shows that humans are strongly inclined
not
to get along, an inclination unlikely to be reversed by stale sanctimonies about the wickedness of clinging to national attachments rather than discarding them in favor of universal ones. The new, improved humans for whom nationhood will be obsolete and the only legitimate political authority global are clearly different from, though not clearly better than, the ones we have known to this point in the history of the species. Liberals can only reply to this mountain of historical and anthropological evidence by affirming, as Mario Cuomo put it, “the simple truth that peace is better than war because life is better than death.”

The ultimate resolution of the problem of doing right by both Betsy and Mpinga is to get beyond nationalism, making the Wilsons and the Bombokus fellow and equal citizens of a “nation” that comprises the whole human race. In it, liberals would finally wield the powers of a planetary welfare state, a mechanism adequate for assessing global needs and apportioning global resources. They would also acquire a moral clarity that presently eludes them. With the advent of Strobe Talbott's single global authority, Cuomo's “sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all” would at last mean
all
all, not just some all. And denouncing the “failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might to avoid pain” would apply to
any
anywhere, not just those anywheres that happen to fall on one side of a line somebody drew on a map.

That day is not at hand, however, and this book's author and readers are unlikely to be in a position to verify whether Talbott's prediction of its arrival by the year 2100 came true. Liberals must find other ways to cope with the problem in a meantime likely to last generations. Public opinion surveys always show that American voters greatly exaggerate, and greatly resent, the rounding-error amount in the federal budget representing the allocation for humanitarian foreign aid. Liberals have every reason, then, to decline the suicide mission of branding the Democratic Party as the one committed to multiplying such expenditures.

If assistance cannot be sent to where the neediest people are located, however, perhaps those people can be brought to where it is already available. Massive immigration to rich countries from poor ones is not a
policy
of planetary redistribution, exactly, but we achieve much the same result by treating such immigration as a social and economic development we have neither the practical capacity nor the moral standing to resist. Should the Bombokus relocate from Kinshasa to Kansas, American liberals will have a simple way to work around the problem of calibrating their compassion. Mpinga will now join Betsy in the ranks of sufferers whose needs demand a generous response from a decent society.

A welcoming immigration policy serves the additional, related liberal purpose of ascribing bigotry to conservatives. In the words of
Salon
's Sally Kohn, “racial discomfort is the overwhelming motivation behind opposition to creating a path to citizenship for millions of aspiring Americans.”
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In the twenty-first century, being anti-anti-immigrant assists those keen to demonstrate they've transcended racial discomfort while condemning those who resist that spiritual progress. Restricting immigration in the twenty-first century, after all, consists largely of lighter-skinned, wealthier people asserting authority against darker-skinned, poorer ones. As a result of its melodrama of victims and oppressors, liberalism has come to incorporate the belief that in
any
dispute between individuals or groups, the darker-skinned is presumptively aggrieved and the lighter-skinned presumptively culpable.

Conservatives are unconflicted about patriotism, and disposed to believe that Europeans' (and Euro-Americans') historical transgressions against non-Europeans are not categorically different from non-Europeans' transgressions against one another, or against Europeans. In any case, they believe that getting on with moral and political life requires subjecting all such offenses to a historical statute of limitations, since purging the world of every effect of all prior exploitations and cruelties would be an eternal, impossible project. Thus inclined, conservatives approach immigration as a practical problem: How do we, the citizens of this particular country, let in the people we want to let in and keep out the people we want, and have every right, to keep out? As blogger Steve Sailer says, “In contrast to America, countries like Canada and Australia treat immigration the way Harvard treats college admission or the New England Patriots treat the NFL draft: as a way to get the talented that can benefit the institution and keep out the untalented. Here in America, we increasingly treat immigration as if it were a sacred civil right possessed by 7 billion foreigners.”
²⁵

We do so because immigration is more complicated for liberals. Indeed, the question of whether immigration policy should be this or that presupposes the idea that some kind of immigration policy may be rightfully enacted and enforced in the first place. As Sailer suggests, however, this proposition is one of the things the immigration debate is about, not a shared premise from which it proceeds. Journalist Matthew Yglesias has helpfully made explicit what is usually implied when liberals bring compassion to bear on the question of immigration. Restrictionists' desire to “kick unauthorized migrants out of the United States and curtail the ability of future migrants to come to the United States,” he writes, “involves completely discounting the interests of human beings who happen to have been born in Mexico or Morocco or Mali. [There] are perhaps reasons for deciding that people born in Boston or Birmingham count more than people born in Bangladesh or Bolivia, but they're
nationalistic
reasons not egalitarian ones.” They're bad reasons, that is, not acceptable ones.
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Yglesias allows that there are contestable practical questions about the feasibility of an “open borders regime,” which might lead some to disagree with his conviction that such a regime “would substantially increase overall human welfare.” But those who raise such objections have a heavy burden to prove their motives are not indecent, since the practicalities will never “resolve the question of whether or not, morally speaking, it makes sense to simply not care about the interests of foreigners,” as do, implicitly, the heartless, chauvinistic opponents of open borders.
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Thus does immigration solve the problem Mpinga poses for liberalism: his distant suffering is brought within America's borders, the moral and practical realm wherein liberalism operates confidently. Doing so, or at least advocating so, dispels all doubts about liberals' self-identification as the champions of compassion while reaffirming their conviction that cruel indifference to suffering is the exclusive, defining quality of conservatism.

Ideas, like people, often settle down where they're useful. The idea that the United States cannot legitimately discount the interests of people who happen to have been born in Mexico, by frustrating their desire to leave Mexico and come to the United States, appears notably popular among . . . people who happen to have been born in Mexico. That country's per capita GDP was $15,700 in 2012, 69 percent less than that of the United States. (The only other countries adjacent to one another with comparably stark economic disparities are special cases: Hong Kong and China; North and South Korea; and Israel in contrast to all of its neighbors—Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and the Palestinian West Bank—except Lebanon, which is about half as prosperous.) It's not surprising, then, that Mexicans frequently cross the border that their country shares with the United States, a border nearly two thousand miles long. They often do so in violation of American laws, in 2012 accounting for 52 percent of America's 11.7 million “unauthorized migrants,” the term used by the Pew Hispanic Center.
²⁸

A survey taken by the Mexican Migration Project of 1,353 Mexicans living in their native country found that 52 percent believe “Mexicans have a right to be in the U.S.” and 66 percent agreed that the “U.S. government has no right to limit immigration.” Only 9 percent of those surveyed said they intended to migrate to the United States illegally. (In that nation of 116 million, 9 percent represents more than 10 million people.) Not surprisingly, 82 percent of the people within that subset thought Mexicans have a right to be in the United States, and 86 percent thought the United States has no right to keep them out. The remaining 91 percent of the Mexicans who took the survey said they do not intend to cross the border illegally, but seem disinclined to foreclose the option, or condemn those who would pursue it. Within that larger subset, 49 percent thought Mexicans have a right to be in the United States, and 64 percent believed the American government could not rightfully bar them.
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