Mailvox: the ideas, they spread

 Readers note some familiar ideas popping up in some unfamiliar places.

Holy cow, Michael Anton’s new book reads like he’s been swiping you for years. In fact I’m shocked at how far he and the Claremont Institute are pushing the envelope.

“In sum, America is for the Americans—just as France is for the French, India for the Indians, Israel for the Israelis, Japan for the Japanese, Mexico for the Mexicans, and each of the world’s countries for its particular people. That’s not to say, necessarily, that America should never take in immigrants—though I personally think that, after fifty-five years and at least ninety million newcomers and their descendants, a moratorium is warranted, not least in order to assimilate this latest wave. It is to say that America is not the common property of all mankind, that every one of the world’s nearly eight billion people is not “more American than the Americans.” If everyone in the world is American—actually or potentially—then no one is. The logic of immigration absolutism leads to its own unraveling: in insisting on the universality of Americanness, it strips Americanism of all distinction or meaning. The ruling class welcomes that outcome. Have any of the “conservatives” thought it through?”

It sounds as if he might have read Cuckservative. And then there are these observations on the effects of social justice on an organization:

People like @GadSaad, @ConceptualJames and @PeterBoghossian have been saying once you let social justice in an organization it will eventually destroy it. (Even if well intentioned, it deviates from the core org goals.)

– Dave Rubin

I believe that’s what is called “convergence”. Someone may have written a book or two about it. 

I’m not at all bothered at the fact that the popularizers will be credited for these ideas, as Friedrich von Hayek recognized the problem with social justice and J.S. Mill decades before I did, and the idea that American universality is self-negating is logically inescapable. Anyone who actually thinks the matter through will necessarily reach the same conclusion. We don’t create truth, we can only observe it.

Anyhow, I’m very pleased to observe that my personal radioactivity is proving insufficient to prevent these ideas, and more, from escaping this particular intellectual ghetto and permeating the mainstream discourse.