The Occasional Observer

A betrayal of calculation.
By Paul J Cella

“I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.” That, reportedly, is what Karl Rove pronounced recently as a defense of his boss’s immigration policy. Mark Kirkorian answers it well here. Mr. Kirkorian bemoans the fact that it is now necessary “to explain why this is an obscene statement”; I agree with him. The Republican Party, under the leadership of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, has come to believe and teach that some work really is beneath us, that the lawyer or financial analyst really is “somehow better than the parking-lot attendant.” It is difficult to imagine an uglier trend in our politics than this.

Karl Rove is not alone in his expression of this trend. We have heard its like many times. It is rather horrifying to see this brazen appeal to class interests; and the horror is only magnified by the denigration of some category of honest work. A rather provocative way to state the problem is that the Republican Party, under its current leadership, is advancing a plutocratic theory of politics: an aristocracy of wealth. But even this does not capture the full ugliness of the thing, for in a true plutocracy, no form of wealth is derided. That a man made his fortune by, let us, “picking tomatoes” or “making beds,” does not bar him from entry into power. But here it is indicated that some occupations are dishonorable by nature, and that even success at them is contemptible.

It is noteworthy to me that this position flips the whole “jobs American won’t do” argument on its head. It’s not that there are jobs Americans won’t do: it’s that there are jobs we shouldn’t, because we are better that. Some are born to be served; and some are born to serve.

This sort of arrogance and elitsim, I submit, positively permeates the immigration enthusiast position among political strategists. There are those who are immigration enthusiasts out of a misplaced idealism, an overconfidence in a culture that has lost its nerve, compounded by a complacency with the sedition in the street and treachery in the administration of our laws. But the idealists have a strong and influential ally in the calculators and sophisters, who do not share their admirable idealism. For this latter faction, I do not hesitate to use words like “betrayal,” “treachery,” and even “treason.” They have betrayed the ideals of their party; and the effect of their machinations is to subvert the ideals which are integral to the American political tradition.

I suspect that the betrayal derives from despair or resignation. These men are realists, by and large: they are not possessed of any illusions about the mettle of American culture; they are well aware that the assimilationist ethic has been overthrown; they have seen the failure of such eminently mild things as removing bilingual education, and have read the writing on the wall. Except this writing is not the doom of God’s judgment, but of Mammon’s. They want to get ahead of the wave of the future; plutocracy, servitude, balkanization, the dissolution of the Republic and the dispossession of our inheritance as Americans.

We may not, in the end, be able to defeat their contrivances; but God help us if we join them. If we are to lose this struggle, let us leave a monument for our descendents that, should it survive the scrubbing of history contemplated by the coming regime (a scrubbing already perceptible in our public schools, in our new myths and legends, in the falsification of history our academics peddle), will teach those who care to know that not everyone was lost to despair and false hopes when the Republic was imperiled.