Agreement and Dissent

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Oct 4, 2015 at 15:08

While I share Dr Pipes view that a considerably darker view can be taken of the results of the 1965 immigration act, and that Multiculturalism as an ideology has a very dark side politcally, I am in dissent that the alternative is a "cuture of individualism and freedom" as those virtues are presently defined, at least on the Right side of the dangerous partisan divide in the country.

For at least the past 20 years those two classic American virtues have been defined as "individualism and freedom" for the very rich and greedy, not for the great mass or average of the American population, whether native or foreign-born. This is illustrated by allowing unchecked floods of money into the electoral process, drawing a distinction between bankruptcy law for the rich (easy) and hard or impossible for straitened homewowners or students drowning in debt, and many other measures that tilt the economic and tax landscape in favor of the rich. (I said illustrated rather than proven, because a relentless barrage of propaganda has successfully obscured these realities from public view, especially in the minds of the base of the party on the Right).

This is important, because if we have a problem with the party on the Left which remains blindly naive with regard to foreign dangers, the party on the Right, while aware of those dangers, has domestic polices which must hamstring the economy and make it far more unfair than it already is. Which means that the more the general population is stressed by policies which promote greater inequality and a wider sense of unfairness (reflected by surging Populisms from the left and the Right) the harder it will be to mobilize the necessary will and even attention of the populaiton to face the mounting dangers from without.

Put another way, the party in favor of ever more reckless Inequality may well be discredited even when what it saying is much closer to being correct in foreign affairs. (I say closer to being correct, because the Right still joins with the Left in a bipartisan refusal to identify Islam itself as the enemy of the United States, Israel, and Europe. The two sides also join each other in bleakly foreseeing a struggle for "genenaraions" rather than decidng to seek Victory over the ideology responsible for terrorism, 99% or more of which is in the name of islam)

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