In at least one earlier post, I mentioned a common error, though I don’t think I gave it a name then. The error is that of assuming that a phenomenon has only a single cause. This usually happens when two possible causes are being considered and an argument develops because people assume that the cause they favour is somehow threatened by also allowing the other. In nature, most phenomena actually have multiple converging causes. This error is common enough to warrant its own name, so, by the powers vested in me, I hereby baptize it the “single cause fallacy”.
Now, I’ve argued in the past that the Democrat resistance to controlling the national borders and booting the illegals out was due to the Democrat impulse to increase its own voting base. Hell, if the democrats could, they’d include the dead among the voting citizenry! Oh, wait, they did do that during the ill fated Obama election! Sigh. There's been quite a lot of interest in Zombie movies lately and even weird Zombie romantic novels, so I can see the time right for an Obama and the Zombies movie featuring waves of the Living Dead lumbering towards the voting booths. Whoops, too late again. Wasn't that what happened during the last election?
But, lest I commit the Single Cause Fallacy, let me admit here that there are more motives than one driving most Democrat Progressive stupidities. I add below, therefore, another motive to the increasing voter population one.
I’ve argued in many posts now that one of the things that Progressives hate more than their vegetables is nationalism. Yes, yes, I know that the Nazis were nationalists (gee whiz, it’s right there in their name), but that’s not why the Progs hate it. The fact that the Nazis were nationalists was just a very convenient talking point against the nationalism they had inveighed against since Woody Wilson promoted progressivism from seedy Harvard faculty common rooms to the international stage. But why? you ask anxiously. There is a reason that is rooted in the Progressive’s most fundamental conviction.
The Progressive begins with the doctrine known as “humanism.”
Arguably, this doctrine had its most powerful expression in the mistaken but hugely influential ethical theory of Immanuel Kant, specifically in the version of his “categorical imperative” that demands one treat each individual as an end in itself, never as a means. What this means is simply, never use a person like an instrument.
But, whatever its historical origin, the doctrine known as Humanism has at least this thesis implicit in it:
People are important in themselves, property is not. Where human rights come into conflict with property rights, the former automatically trump the latter.
But this very general conviction carries with it an implication that is even more far reaching, going from morals into very radical political theory. The reason is that the nation state is itself conceived by Humanists as no more than a kind of larger property. For the Humanist, national boundaries are indistinguishable from the boundaries of private property, and all property boundaries imply a restrictions on the needs of those who have no property at all.
Thus, Marxist Socialism simply supplies a large pseudo scientific narrative to the very visceral convictions of those who love humanity and therefore hate private property. That much is already obvious, but what I want to stress here is that the same Humanism that implies the hatred of private property ALSO implies a hatred of nationalism, since nationalism is nothing more to these people than an indecent and disgusting pleasure in a property one is immorally withholding from those who have none.
What is, however, equally disgusting is that many of those who have strong Humanist impulses in the abstract, tend to get quite aggressive when their own property borders are threatened. Streisand, for example, one of the more vulgar and obnoxious of the Progressives waged a legal battle over a photographer’s taking aerial photographs of the California coast where her large and expensive mansion sits. And the late, great Humanist Ted Kennedy fought an ongoing battle with the new wind farm industry that wished to put up their wind turbines in the distant waters visible from his Cape Cod “family compound.” Teddy lost the battle only after he passed on. And, oh, Al Gore has just purchased an 9 million dollar ocean-view villa in southern California. Now, none of these properties have open borders, they have "security perimeters" complete with armed guards and scary big dogs. But these progressive Humanists don't feel that their country should have the same security they insist on for themselves.
Many, therefore, of the Progressives blocking all efforts to stem the tide of illegals across the Arizona border are doing what they do because they see the national boundary as a kind of metaphysically indefensible “occupation” of humanity’s common land. The only ownership they respect is all of human kind’s (and, of course, their own ownership of their own lands!).
In their fevered imaginations, the U.S. insisting on its borders is very much like the cliché of the old western dramas of the rich landowner keeping all the water on his land for his own use. Damn that rich landowner! Who cares whether he bought it! Who cares whether he fought the Indians for it! Who cares whether he worked the land! We need it, we want it, and, goddam it, we have a right to it! Laws? We don’ need no stinkin’ laws! Laws are just artificial devices contrived by the rich and the powerful to keep the pretty orchards and the pretty buildings and the lovely barns to themselves. Well, that’s how the Mexicans feel about it, and that’s how their supporters among the enlightened Progressives feel about it.
But what must not be forgotten is that that is exactly how Attila and his boys felt when looking down on that pretty, pretty Rome before they descended, like Sennacherib, like wolves on the fold, to sack, to pillage, to rape, and to burn.
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