Michael Anton’s Washington Post editorial entitled “Citizenship Should Not Be A Birthright” has attracted a great deal of attention and attempts at rebuttal by open borders proponents on the Left and nominal Right. Anton’s article is erudite, well-researched, but ultimately does not go far enough from the perspective of American Restoration.
The flaws, however, are not the issues illustrated by David Marcus’s response in The Federalist.
In fact, The Federalist’s response illustrates an even deeper misunderstanding of the issues facing the United States. The immigration debate lies at the confluence of two events in the history of the United States: the breakdown of the American nation into disparate, sub-national communities, and the emergence of the Machiavellian Moment in republican consciousness. While Anton’s article is a fair attempt to deal with the former, it is the latter which forms the existential crisis in the United States which threatens to disrupt the social order of the state.
All community emerges out of a sense of commonality. The classical philosophers describe this commonality as the center of the polis, which unites the people pre-politically and permits the formation of the formal, political structures of the polis. While Aristotle does not directly treat the formation of a new polity aside from a brief discussion in Book I, he affirms in The Politics that a polis cannot function when its citizens exist in a state of mutually incompatible lifestyles. Books V and VI deal with the way that factions and economic conflict lead to the degradation of political systems. The conflict between the urban poor and the urban merchant class, for example, serves as an example of an intractable social conflict which threatens the existence of the polis and must be managed by wise leadership.
In the modern world, however, these simple prescriptions no longer hold valid. Aristotle assumes a commonality of language, religion, and culture, as well as a form of class solidarity among the rich and poor, describing these conflicts as a disagreement over the definition of distributive justice within a given constitution (Book V). In the managerial economy, however, the elite are more devious than a Hellenic demagogue or oligarch. Part of the means by which the elites maintain control is by atomizing the populace and depriving them of the means by which to organize under alternative elite bodies when the elites fail to provide the leadership expected of such a body.
In his article in The Federalist, David Marcus illustrates this process of destruction of commonality and community. According to Marcus, America is not a nation held together by commonalities such as “blood, skin color, or heritage,” but a nation defined as an idea and open to everyone equally. Anything which would provide some kind of commonality or community among the citizenry is rejected as exclusive. The only permitted objects of loyalty are abstract concepts of “liberty and freedom.” Marcus states that “There is nothing wrong with accepting others as equals and partners,” but fails to describe the basis of that partnership. Is it a shared project? If America is an idea, and that idea is individual freedom, how is partnership necessary to achieve that idea?
The project of “do as thou wilt” requires no other; individualism is constricted by community, not enhanced. This is implicit in the liberal notion of freedom as self-actualization. When the greatest good is found within the self, others are merely impediments to one’s atomized “liberty.”
The libertarian impulse of “leave me alone to do as I will” is not a community, but the rejection of community. Like the sad figures in John Locke’s social contract, these isolated and alienated individuals share nothing in common except a market defined by competition. Their partnership is defined by self-interest and desire for gain, not friendship, and in the end no person is necessary beyond the profit that can be gleaned out of an essentially instrumental cooperation. This is a problem of all communities of consent. Any community which one can choose to join must also be a community that one can choose to leave, thus the community becomes a mere instrument to personal gain rather than an intrinsic good. Thus, a very basic understanding of human nature leads to the conclusion that most people will opt into the community for the purpose of receiving benefits but opt out of the community when obligations arise. This, then, is not a community at all, for there is nothing common among them except a desire to exploit one another for the purposes of gain.
Loyalty, as described in this previous Social Matter essay, arises in connection to real human relationships in a community sharing reciprocal obligations, not liberties, which are nonvoluntary. Loyalty cannot be given to an idea because it is impossible to be obligated to an idea. Loyalty cannot exist on a voluntary basis because freedom to enter and exit would mean that there would be no obligation to honor the reciprocal needs of the community after receiving the benefits of membership. Likewise, the nation must be a body of real human beings to whom obligation is owed in order to be an object of loyalty. These obligations form on the basis of a commonality in the form of familial bonds and extended communal relationships by which the individual has accrued unearned benefits over the course of his life which he is incapable of easily repaying.
By being born, reared, educated, and supported, the child emerges into the adult world already deeply in debt to those who carried him, thus the obligation accrued forms the foundation of the common bonds between the individual and their particular society. Marcus is wrong to say that “when a baby takes his first breath within the borders of the United States, he is free.” Anyone who profits from a community and then declares himself free is a thief.
Thus, the ideology of The Federalist is an expression of the power structures in the managerial economy. By purposefully depriving its citizens of communities based upon commonalities, repudiating the bonds of obligation to one another that protect communities from the predatory institutions that make up the managerial corporate-media-bureaucratic structure, Marcus’s article serves to justify the disorder and demolition of the American community. By introducing individuals into the state who bear no obligations, hold no loyalties, and are themselves shorn from the fabric of commonalities with the rest of the community, the open borders policy accelerates the process of dissolving the delicate ties that bind one man to another, cutting off people from those who share the reciprocal obligations which turn isolated individuals into polities bound together by communal friendship. Marcus desires a society of every man a stranger to the other, but somehow seems to thing they will find commonality in their isolated alienation and transform into a nation.
From here, the weakness of Anton’s article emerges: the end of birthright citizenship is too little and too late to preserve the Republic. If the American nation existed as a strong, national community and the immigrant communities were merely isolated outposts surrounding a strong civic culture, then his policy prescription would be a reasonable stopping point to preserve the social capital of the community. However, even ending all immigration will not change the fact that the former American community has already been shattered by the forces of the managerial elites in their desire to atomize and homogenize the nations of the world into a plastic body of passive, slavish consumers. With the collapse of the American nation, the United States has entered a Machiavellian Moment.
A Machiavellian Moment is comparable to the moment of existential dread in the individual. According to J.G.A. Pocock, the Machiavellian Moment is the point at which a national culture realizes the possibility that it may dissolve amidst the chaos of immediate history and attempts to preserve its existence through potentially radical reorientation. In the Republican tradition, the nation attempts to realign itself toward a source of moral and political order which offers stability amidst seemingly irrational world events. This is a moment of fluidity in the national order which serves as a historic nexus point, wherein multiple real paths toward the future open up before the national community, many of which end with the destruction of the polity.
The varied cries of “this is not who we are” illustrate the realization by the supporters of the old older that the United States has reached a point where change is possible. The fact that it is now possible to be “who we aren’t” or to claim that “Anton is disconnected from the traditional vision of America” shows that the horizon has widened beyond the atrophied and constricted boundaries of “traditional” (read “permitted by the current elites”) opinion. In the existential crisis of the Machiavellian Moment, space is opened up for a new establishment by the Machiavellian Reformer whose goal is the restoration of social and political order within a new paradigm of statecraft.
The Machiavellian Reformer is the late republican counterpart to the Founding Father. Like the Founding Father, the Reformer is a great and gifted leader with a mind toward history and concerned with the perpetuation of his nation into the historical horizon. The Founder creates a nation out of nothing, but the Reformer finds his nation amidst the chaos of the Machiavellian Moment. The genius of the Reformer is that he takes the decayed foundation of the Republic and forms it into a new structure suited to sustain the weight of the nation, thus following in the Founder’s footsteps as a Second Father of the nation. The New Foundation will not be identical to the old and may alter or change many of the most cherished Founding principles but will nevertheless carry many of the names and symbols associated with it in new forms. Examples of such leaders in the Roman Republic include Camillus, Sulla, and Augustus; writers like Harry Jaffa suggest that this kind of reformation has already occurred in the United States under Lincoln.
Ultimately, in this Machiavellian Moment, policy fixes are insufficient to deal with this moment in history. Attempting to preserve the institutions and ideals which failed in this historical moment is like trying to put new wine in old wineskins. The appeal to the policies and ideas of the Founding Fathers or any other attempt to force adherence to the failed ideologies of the current, dying paradigm of politics is a sure way to fail in this Moment and march down the path of every other decadent empire which preceded the United States in history.
Ultimately, nothing lasts forever and the United States will join the rest as a chapter in a history book. Perhaps the Machiavellian Reformer will not arise. Perhaps he already has. It is openness to real change, not the false, superficial change of the progressives but a world-historic change in civilizational course upon principles distinct from this decaying Third Age, which might permit, if we are lucky, the preservation of this particular American social order. Immigration and public policy are symptoms of the fact that this historic era is coming to a close, much as the Classical and Medieval periods decayed into their successors.
The cure is a Restoration, a New Age, a New Founding for America.