Should the Democrats Become an Anti-Immigration and “Anti-PC” Party? (SPOILER: No)
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If they open a Pundit’s Fallacy Hall of Fame, Peter Beinart will go in on the first ballot:
In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Yes, it is very plausible that if Hillary Clinton had given a speech at a campus denouncing use of the term "microaggressions" and demanding action against "the slowing rate of English-language acquisition," she would totally be president today. This is the centrist equivalent of “Clinton would have if Lena Dunham hadn’t saturated her campaign with CELEBRITY GLITZ by appearing on a panel at Duke. If the election of Donald Trump proves anything it’s that Americans hate celebrities. I am not a crank.” Indeed, it’s one of the most egregiously bad “Dems should move right” arguments since…Beinart endorsed Joe Lieberman for the Republican nomination.
One good thing came out of this article, though: a superb critique by Dylan Mathews you’ll actually learn something from:
It’s certainly interesting fan fiction, not least in that it implies that America’s most radical pro-immigration agitator is UC president Janet Napolitano, who dramatically ramped up deportations as Secretary of Homeland Security. The essay as a whole is similarly far-fetched and confused. Beinart appears to want to both make a policy argument that Democrats are mistaken to support mass immigration, and a political argument that they have to turn right on the issue to survive.
The piece conflates the two arguments at points, but they’re very different. One is an argument about the economic and cultural effects of immigration, about which Beinart is wrong. The other is an argument about what policies on immigration Americans are in fact demanding, about which Beinart is also wrong, but in a more interesting way.
Read the whole etc.