Victor Davis Hanson
As one resident told me, when I asked what was going on in his compounds, “It’s like our home in Oaxaca, only better.” Once, the former Fox Nation reporter Lara Logan brought a film crew out here to film the illegal alien environs. She told me that she had found the entire environment quite frightening (I told her more frightening for me if any of my neighbors found out they were filmed).
A third cause of the civilizational collapse out here was the general decline of rural life in America in general. It was symptomatic not just of the asymmetry of globalization that enriched the coastal elites and destroyed the outsourced and offshored in-between deplorables. The culprit for the breakdown was also the laissez-faire Right which felt culture was an irrelevant incursion into free (but not fair) global trade. Or as one prominent economist once told me, “Illegal immigration will stop when wages are identical on both sides of the border. So just relax and let the market adjudicate.” (He lived in the nicest area of a then quite nice San Francisco, far from the process of “adjudication.”)
McCainism and Romneyism and Paul Ryanism saw conservatism only as free markets, which was fine, but they had no interest in culture and the cultural contradictions of opening the border or allowing China to cheat in trade or the costs of policing the world. Rural America had become Dickensian London circa 1860, as the British Navy and foreign service sent thousands abroad to spread British civilization, even as it eroded at its center.
So, the Right liked cheap, imported labor, no questions asked (I have met very few corporate farmers out here who live among their fields). And many preferred investing in communist China rather than in southern Ohio or the southern San Joaquin Valley. That all made economic sense of a sort, but no sense given the untold damage it did to thousands of rural people.
And the Left?
They saw open borders as an agenda. And the more cynical and overt it became, the more they libeled any on to them as “racists” and “nativists.”
In a word, millions of illegal immigrants meant millions of new residents for the census and the remaking of congressional districts. And millions of illegal border crossers meant millions of new constituents, some quite rapidly as the protocols of auditing mail-in ballots in states like California became a bad jest. President Obrador, rather than lamenting the loss of millions of his own citizens, brags they are in the U.S. and form a powerful expatriate lobbying community. (The longer and farther a migrant is from Mexico, the more likely he is to romanticize something in the distant abstract rather than living it in the immediate concrete.)
The Left, despite the current Biden reelection mantra, gave us defund the police, the Soros-district attorneys, critical legal theory, and its various bastard dogmas. The law became a construct as if it was illegal to steal sneakers only because rich white men did not steal sneakers. Or rich people made arbitrary laws against squatting because they don’t squat.
One common denominator was thus to divide us into victims and victimizers. The illegal alien was transmogrified from one who broke and kept breaking the law, from one who cut ahead of the line with disdain for the patient legal immigrant, and from one who felt the laws of his host were likely to be as unenforced as the nonexistent border—into a noble victim.
The victimizers, of course, were the citizen hosts. Why did they have property or nicer cars or nicer homes than the children of Oaxaca or Chiapas or El Salvador?
In such a zero-sum binary, exempting illegal immigration was one way of leveling the playing field, as well as growing government services and with them higher taxes and with them, better redistribution.
The final irony? The racist Left bragged about and high-fived their great replacement theory in books and essays such as “Demography is Destiny” and “The New Democratic Majority” and then slurred any who concurred as racists peddling “The Great Replacement Theory”!
So, are there any of the old small farming families left?
A few. But they live as if they are in North Africa circa AD 450. And their farmhouses are our versions of the ancient centenaria—fortified farms of sorts of the aging, with walls and fences and gates on their driveways with cameras on their barns and roofs, and arms in their closets. Waiting I supposed for their own end, or for the madness to stop, or for the miscreants of today one day to become property-owning middle class and then to transmogrify from the dumper of trash to the custodian of the land—who stops the dumper of trash.
The End
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>From Rural to Surreal—Once Small Farming Became Latifundia: Part Eight appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.