Sensing disaster after last night’s debacle, Jon Podhoretz suddenly starts talking sweet and cuddly:
The immigration debate is a very heated and passionate one, and the heat and passion on the part of those on the restrictionist side have been useful tools for pushing the conversation in your direction. But there’s a difference between heated disagreement and the insistence on lock-step uniformity. Suddenly, immigration restriction has become one of those issues about which one is not permitted to disagree, because to disagree is to join with the forces of Evil….
We are moving into very dangerous territory here — territory in which it has been declared that there is to be no debate, no discussion, and no heterodoxy any longer. This is how political-intellectual movements become diseased and sclerotic. This is how they die.
I’d argue that they die when they become hollowed-out shells of what they used to be, when they substitute pragmatism for principle, say black when they mean white and become indistinguishable from their nominal opposition. What Podhoretz is describing is a symptom, not a cause.