Comment on Belmont Club "Wilders"

Where will a man like Wilders find refuge? No country in Europe will have him, will the US or China? Ideally some Civil Libertarian of the Left will invite him into America. The best would be if it was Deval Patrick and Bobby Jindal that pushed for him together.

The United States, like other nations, developed a full range of tools, legal, administrative and cultural, for protecting itself from subversion. They did this while grappling with the problem of welcoming and assimilating immigrants and becoming a great power with a global trade network. It took 150 years to build and refine these tools after the failure of the first effort known as the Alien and Sedition acts. It took less than 30 years to abandon those tools. Worse they were not actually destroyed but only abandoned, left unused against the threat of infiltration by the left or a foreign political-religious movement but available for those same forces to pick up and use against the decaying Establishment or other vulnerable minorities.

There are similar cases in history. The Romans ceased the persecutions and offered toleration to the Christians by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 and in 380 Theodosius outlawed Paganism. The Christians were only to happy to pick up the discarded tools of oppression.

Jan 21, 2009 - 5:07 pm