Dear Ross,
I found your conversation with Matthew Continetti somewhat
disappointing. If as you say Continetti is a leading intellectual of the conservative right,
it would have been more illuminating to hear him argue why, as a matter of
public policy rather than politics, conservatives have it right, especially on two
key issues you talked about: woke versus slept, and immigration. So here are
some public policy ideas I wish you and Continetti had taken up.
On Woke versus Slept
We progressive liberals on the woke left believe that social
and economic justice demands affirmative action. That’s based on our reading of
19th century American history, in which millions of black and native
American lives were shattered by the institution of slavery and ejection of
native Americans from their land. We believe that if you break it you own it, and
so as a society, we own the legacy of social and economic inequality that results
when deeply unequal amounts of human and
financial capital are transferred from one generation to the next for many
generations.
We reject the myth of
meritocracy, which says that after 100 years, any remaining inequality can only
be explained by differences in talent and hard work. The way we see it, America
has become an inherited meritocracy, in which parents’ ability to invest in
their children’s human capital – the “merit” metric that drives unnatural selection
in our competitive society – is entirely a function of how much parents can
afford to spend.
The central message of Critical Race Theory, which we
endorse, is that the socio-economic status of anyone living in America today is
heavily dependent on the legacy of human capital investment from which she has
benefitted, or of which she has been deprived, not just in her own lifetime,
but over the generations of her ancestors. Human capital investment, or lack
thereof, is above all an inter-generational phenomenon. Which is why today we
live in an inherited meritocracy.
The slept right rejects this way of thinking. It believes that
it is unfair for an institution – for example a school or a fire department – to
reject an applicant with a higher “merit” score and select someone with a lower
score. The woke left sees things differently. We don’t frame the question
through the eyes of the rejected individual alone. In that frame, his rejection
doesn’t seem fair, but in our frame, he is a citizen of a country and a member
of a society that has historically treated some classes of people unjustly. The
legacy of that injustice lives on. and justice is served through affirmative
action to discriminate in favor of those who are victims of that legacy.
On Immigration
As for immigration, your conversation did not elicit any
ideas about immigration as a public policy issue – only a political issue. Of
course it works politically to oppose immigration – legal and illegal, past and
present. But the question for a leading intellectual on the right should have
been whether what Stephen Miller is doing is good for our country.
Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain offers a pertinent
commentary contrasting vividly the woke and slept perspectives on immigration.
In1854, the 19
year-old Sam Clemens left Hannibal Mo to spend a few months working as a
compositor in a print shop in New York City. Here’s Chernow’s account:
“However
entranced he was by New
York City, Sam Clements was
still blinkered by small town bias, and revolted by the racial and ethnic mix in lower Manhattan. Shaped by Hannibal,
he spewed forth prejudice. His daily stroll to work led him through the tough immigrant
neighbourhood of Five Points and he gazed with sheer
loathing at the diverse inhabitants:
‘Niggers, mulattoes,
quadroons, Chinese and
some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white but the dirt on whose faces leaves one
uncertain as to that fact. To block up the little narrow streets and wade through through this mass of human vermin would raise the ire of the most patient
person that ever lived.’”
Chernow writes, “A massive tide of German and Irish immigration had spawned the nativist Know Nothing party in the 1850s and Sam echoed their xenophobia,
squawking to his brother Orion
that:
‘There are so many abominable foreigners here [in Philadelphia] who hate everything American. I
always thought the eastern
people were paragons of uprightness, but I never saw so many whiskey-swilling, God despising heathens as I find in this part of the
country.’”
Chernow then tells us that Clemens saw the matter very
differently twenty years later, when “[Clemens] left a withering portrait of
his youthful self as ‘a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass,
a human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodelling the
world, and is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance,
egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful
chuckle-headedness, and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is
what I was at 19 or 20.’”
Clemens’ blinkered 19-year old self is where slept nativist Americans
are today. Clemens’ awakened 39-year old self is where the woke left is today.
So here are the policy questions I wish you had asked
Continenti: notwithstanding the recurring bouts of American nativists’ antipathy
towards immigrants,hasn’t immigration always been good for the American economy
and American society? Does it make sense to decry the rise of the non-native
born share of the population from 4.7% in 1970 to 14.9% in 2023 (US Census
Bureau data), when demographers report that the 2023 total fertility rate of native-born American women was 1.7 (below
the replacement rate of 2.1) versus 2.2 for immigrant women? The overall average
rate of 1.8 is well below the replacement rate, and it will be even lower if
Stephen Miller gets his way. Does the right endorse the idea that it’s better
to have a shrinking country, with all the economic problems that would entail, if
that’s what it takes to keep the country white?
And how about crime? According to the most recent data, the violent
crime rate for native-born Americans was 213 per 100,000, while the rate for
illegal (i.e. undocumented) immigrants was 96.2. For drug crime, the numbers
are 332 for native-born Americans and 135 for illegal immigrants. By deporting illegal
immigrants, Stephen Miller is increasing the overall rates of violent and drug
crime in the US population. Does Continetti think this Is good public policy?
As always,
Daniel Badger
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