“If you’re … pathetically weak, the country is going to be
overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any
heart, that’s a tough dilemma. … I’d rather be strong.”
So said President Donald
Trump, on issuing his order halting the separation of children from parents
caught breaking into the country. Trump’s enemies are celebrating a victory.
Yet the issue remains.
Under U.S. law,
teenagers and tots cannot be detained for more than 20 days and must be held in
the least-restrictive facilities. But if the children cannot be separated from
the parents as they await trial, both will have to be released to keep families
together.
We are back to “catch
and release.”
When that welcome news
hits Central America, the migrant stream moving north will become a river that
never ceases to flow.
The questions America
and the West face might thus be framed:
Is there a liberal,
progressive, Christian way to seal a 2,000-mile border, halt millions of
migrants from crossing it illegally, and send intruders back whence they came?
Or does the preservation of Western nations and peoples require measures from
which liberal societies today reflexively recoil?
Does the survival of the
West as a civilization require a ruthlessness the West no longer possess?
Consider what our
fathers did to build this country.
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The English settlers
brought in 600,000 slaves, ethnically cleansed the Indians, joined their
cousins in a war to expel the French, then revolted and threw out those cousins
to claim all the land to the Mississippi for ourselves.
Jefferson grabbed the
vast Louisiana Territory for $15 million from Napoleon, who had no right to
sell it. Andrew Jackson drove the Spanish out of Florida, sent the Cherokee
packing on the Trail of Tears, and told a dissenting Chief Justice John
Marshall where he could go.
Sam Houston tore Texas
away from Mexico. “Jimmy” Polk took the Southwest and California in a war
Ulysses Grant called “the most unjust ever fought.” When the South declared
independence, Lincoln sent a million-man army to march them back in a war that
cost 600,000 lives.
William McKinley sent
armies and warships to seize Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. The
indigenous peoples were not consulted. “God told me to take the Philippines,”
said McKinley.
The conquest and
colonization of the New World and the creation of the United States and its
rise to world power required acts of aggression and war of which many among our
elites are ashamed. They exhibit their guilt by tearing down the statues of the
men who perpetrated the “crimes” that created America. But of these elites, it
may be fairly said: they could never have built a nation like ours.
Which brings us again to
the larger questions.
While our forefathers
would have not hesitated to do what was needed to secure our borders and expel
intruders, it is not a settled matter as to whether this generation has the
will to preserve the West.
Progressives may parade
their moral superiority as they cheer the defeat of the “zero tolerance”
policy. But they have no solution to the crisis. Indeed, many do not even see
it as a crisis because they do not see themselves as belonging to a separate
tribe, nation or people threatened by an epochal invasion from the Third World.
They see themselves as
belonging to an ideological nation, a nation of ideas, whose mission is to go
forth and preach and teach all peoples the gospel of democracy, diversity and
equality.
And this is why the
establishment was repudiated in 2016. It was perceived as too elite, too
liberal, too weak to secure the borders and repel the invaders.
“If you’re really,
really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of
people,” said Trump Wednesday. Is he wrong?
Since the Cold War ended
with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has grown apparent that the
existential threat to the West comes not from Czar Vladimir’s Russian divisions
returning to the Elbe.
The existential threat
came from the south.
Half a century ago,
Houari Boumedienne, the leader of a poor but militant Algeria, allegedly
proclaimed at the United Nations:
“One day, millions of
men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And
they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it.
And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us
victory.”
This is the existential
crisis of the West.
Thus, Trump seeks to
build a wall, turn back the intruders, and bring Vladimir Putin back into the
Western camp, where Russia belongs. Thus the new populist regime in Rome blocks
boats of refugees from landing in Italy. Thus Angela Merkel looks like
yesterday, and Viktor Orban like tomorrow.