12
THERE MAY BE NO BETTER EXAMPLE of the intentions and goals of the bipartisan ruling elites than their commitment to mass immigration and eventually open borders, proving that their quest for monopolistic power is of one piece; that is, it is here, with their transformation of the border and their commitment to letting in millions of illegal aliens, that their goals and intentions, which we have highlighted throughout this book—globalization, free trade, the China class, critical race theory, and twin insurgency, all come together in a powerful mix, demonstrating, without a shadow of doubt, their desire to transform America economically, politically, and culturally.
By May 2021 the border was effectively open for months, allowing the majority of migrants to stream across, thousands each day, arriving in historic numbers, including close to nineteen thousand children.1 The “catch and return” policy of the Trump administration has been replaced with the “catch and bus” policy of the Biden administration, as the US government acts like a tourist agency, distributing these migrants to cities across the nation.2 Each month, fewer and fewer migrants are being sent back and instead the current administration is finding excuses to let them stay, quietly and in the dead of night busing them to the interior of our country.3
While the mainstream press has been discouraged from reporting the crisis at the border, a few intrepid reporters have been embedded at the US-Mexican border for months, reporting on the humanitarian crisis.4 There have been reports of terrorists blending in with the migrants and slipping across the border,5 of the physical and sexual abuse of unaccompanied migrant children,6 and of accelerated illegal activity of drug cartels in recent months.7
For our ruling elites, mass immigration and the quest for open borders may be the single most important and effective way to weaken national sovereignty and transform American society. Even more than the critical race theory that continues its long march through our institutions or the mass rioting in our streets destroying middle-class business, open borders is the most effective way to achieve globalization and bring on demographic, political, and cultural change.8 Biden has made it one of his top priorities and the Republican leadership is mostly silent.
The nature of this bipartisan left-right coalition explains why both Republican and Democrat leaders attacked the America First Caucus platform, especially its views on immigration.9 It also may explain why three days after the America First Caucus platform was leaked, the Biden Administration issued a directive: all immigration enforcement agencies were barred from using the terms illegal alien and assimilation when referring to the people flooding our border. Instead, they were to use the words undocumented and integration.10 But while it seems like it is just a squabble over words, adopting words that are more sensitive to the migrant’s plight, they are attempting to shift the way Americans perceive these migrants and how Americans should respond to them, which is to welcome them with open arms. Andrew R. Arthur, resident fellow at the bipartisan Center for Immigration Studies, concludes, “in the context of the proposed linguistic changes, aliens who enter illegally are not to blame (they are not even ‘aliens’ and their entry was not even ‘illegal’), for they lack the documents, which you refused to give them.”11 Thus the directive can be seen as an attempt to seize the language and control the narrative of the debate of mass immigration and open borders.
In contrast to the Biden Administration’s position on immigration, the America First Caucus platform holds a position affirming that the uniqueness and unity of our country is threatened by mass immigration, “particularly without institutional support for assimilation and the expansive welfare state to bail them out” when they can’t make it on their own.12 “America’s borders must be defended,” the platform continues, “and illegal immigration must be stopped without exception.”13 These are views that until recently were shared by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.14 According to the AFC platform, the immigration situation has reached a crisis point, and thus we need a pause in immigration, which “is absolutely essential in assimilating the new arrivals,” teaching them to “plunge head-first into mainstream American society,” while at the same time rejecting those who “could not or refused to abandon their old loyalties.” Yet the ruling class attacked the platform, belittling those who hold similar views. But the truth of the matter is that by February 2021, many Americans disapproved of Biden’s approach to the crisis.15
The title of a recent book, They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution, captures the frustration of those Americans well.16 For the corporate global elites, President Biden was the Democratic candidate of choice, and he continues to get their support.17 And for corporate CEOs, any talk of nationalism is a direct threat to what they want to achieve—open borders, cheap labor, massive demographic and cultural change, and the rule of the globalized elites. But there are those who believe in the new vital center and continue to push back, showing that a sovereign country has a moral right to defend its borders, protecting its own citizens.18
Some have shown how mass immigration forces wages down for our Black and Hispanic working class, harming Middle America.19 Others point out how unchecked immigration impoverishes our health care system and educational system, making life for the working and middle classes difficult.20 Still others demonstrate how mass immigration expands the welfare system, giving more power to the federal government and creating more dependency among our poor.21 Some critics have pointed out that the goal of mass immigration is to replace White middle-class workers with cheaper workers from foreign countries.22 Finally, critics have attempted to expose the goal of mass immigration—to weaken the electoral power of those who have been in the country for generations, effectively negating their electoral power and in the process transforming the nation into something radically different.23
In sum, what all these critics are exposing is the ruling elite strategy of twin insurgency. And here we see it at work once again—the “war from below” carried out by encouraging migrants to enter illegally, and the “war from above”—corporate America replacing America workers with cheap foreign labor, creating a permanent underclass, and in the process transforming America’s unique culture that is so important to support constitutional republicanism and a new vital center. And who is most hurt? The working and middle classes squeezed from the top and the bottom.
Yet any attempt to point out the deleterious effects of mass immigration is met with a familiar refrain: racism and White supremacy. As the former Arizona state senator Alfredo Gutierrez, a Democrat, once said about immigration, “We call things racism just to get attention. We reduce complicated problems to racism, not because it’s racism, but because it works,” saying out loud what is often whispered in private—the best way to silence critics is to tar them with the ultimate pejorative: racist.24
This tarring of critics also goes on, perhaps more subtly, in evangelical circles, particularly from those on the progressive left. Calling for border enforcement, restrictions on immigration, limits to the number of immigrants (all within its rights as a sovereign nation protecting the rule of law and common good of its citizens), or job-place enforcement through an identity card, is charged with being unfair, harsh, un-Christian, and going against the Bible. When immigration is in the news, my social media is flooded by progressive evangelicals accusing immigration restrictionists of racism, xenophobia, and being un-Christian. In The Immigration Crisis, James Hoffmeier looks at every major passage in the Bible about aliens and concludes that progressive Christians are confusing the biblical terms for legal and illegal immigrants, leading them to erroneously think that the Bible endorses the same rights for illegal immigrants as legal aliens when it clearly doesn’t.25
While it is often thought that most dissenters to mass immigration and open borders come from those on the right (like the American First Caucus), in fact there have been a number of courageous Democrats who over the years have spoken out, sounding the alarm that the United States has let in people whose “culture and values of their countries of origin differ substantially from those prevalent in America,” substantially transforming the demographics of the country over the past seventy years.26
One of the most significant voices has been Jerry Kammer, a fellow at the bipartisan Center for Immigration Studies, who is a self-proclaimed liberal in favor of immigration restrictions and job-site enforcement. In his recent book Losing Ground: How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked a Backlash That Elected Trump, maybe the best book on the history of immigration policy over the past seventy years, Kammer demonstrates that the Democratic Party once was the biggest opponent of illegal immigration because it took jobs away from the working class and suppressed their wages.27 But over the last decade the party has done an about-face. He says the Democratic Party, pushed by woke progressives, has drifted so far left on this issue that they have actually woken up on the libertarian right. And now the Democratic Party, like the libertarian Republicans, is part of the left-right coalition protecting mass immigration, turning its back on the working class. Kammer writes, “Unchecked immigration is a threat to our ability to hold together as a people, our ability to maintain the Unum while honoring the Pluribus.”28 Unsurprisingly, Kammer’s message has been received uncharitably by his fellow members of the Left.
Because the demographic and cultural changes have been so devastating, we require an immigration pause in order to allow the country to properly assimilate all the newcomers, a position echoed in the AFC platform.
WHEN THE BATHWATER IS OVERFLOWING, TURN OFF THE WATER
If left-of-center voices like Kammer’s are calling for a pause in immigration, there are voices on the right that want an immediate moratorium. Like Kammer, Ann Coulter sounds the alarm over the dramatic “demographic and cultural change” that has taken place and has been “devastating” to our nation.29 Coulter points out that Whites, who in 1960 were 90 percent of the country, by 2050 will be the minority, “If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than White Americans, it would be called genocide.”30 For Coulter, “The only thing that stands between America and oblivion is a total immigration moratorium.”31 If the bathwater is overflowing, you don’t scurry about looking for a towel to mop it up, you turn off the water, she says.
As part of the growing populist backlash against immigration, voices on the right and the left are calling to “shut off the bathwater.” While some like Kammer want a temporary pause followed by new restrictions at the border and strong enforcement at the workplace, others like Coulter want an immigration moratorium, maybe forever. But whether the pause is temporary or forever, these critics agree that something must be done soon. Therefore, attempting to shut off the bathwater, proponents have proposed a number of strategies, including building the border wall, enforcing employment compliance through E-Verify, ending chain migration and birthright citizenship, terminating the asylum program, and outlawing the H-1B visa program.
While I agree that an immediate pause is necessary and that we need to end all immigration laws that have put us in this crisis, there is something even more important that we must address—assimilating those immigrants who are already here. According to the Pew Foundation, since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, “nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the United States.”32 These immigrants are not going anywhere. And if mass immigration is indeed weakening our e pluribus unum, as Kammer, Huntington, and other voices conclude, then it is vital that along with calling for a pause we also take seriously those who are already here.33
We can’t limit our response to just turning off the bathwater. Along with the negative, pausing mass immigration, we need a positive, a once-upon-a-time narrative that inspires new immigrants as well as citizens. There must be both a negative project (a pause) and a positive project (a call to citizenship) for both immigrants and citizens. In the words of Duke University professor Noah Pickus, we need a positive project that lays out “a unified nation that embraces newcomers” and “requires making demands of immigrants and of Americans.”34 It is a plan to turn the resident alien into an enthusiastic American and transform the alienated resident into a true citizen.
But even this is not without problems. If there really are ninety million legal and illegal immigrants in the country, do we really want them to assimilate, asks Peter Skerry, especially if what they are assimilated into is a woke public philosophy, one that teaches immigrants to hate America, grab as much welfare money as possible, and never fully embrace the nation?35 If this is the only option, the answer would have to be no. To assimilate them into a culture of dependence, victimhood, and anti-American sentiment would just perpetuate the problem and continue to divide America.
But thankfully in the new vital center there is another option: assimilating all immigrants and citizens into a fundamentally different and attractive narrative. As P. P. Claxton, a leader in the early Americanization movement in the 1920s, wrote, “Americanization is a process of education, of winning the mind and the heart through instruction and enlightenment. . . . It must depend . . . on the attractive power and the sweet reasonableness of the thing itself.”36 And the secret to this instruction is in the word sweet, what the new vital center calls the sweet offer of assimilation, a call to embrace the best of America, an invitation that still attracts millions of immigrants, Black, Brown, and White, from all over the world. It is to this sweet offer of assimilation, a call to full citizens, that we now turn, and in the process it will give us a better idea how the new vital center can restore unity in our country.
THE SWEET OFFER OF ASSIMILATION AND THE FOUR SOULS
A good place to begin fashioning a sweet offer of assimilation is David Miller’s Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration, where he outlines the available options for “integrating immigrants,” and, I would add, alienated residents, including many Black Americans who see assimilation as a bad thing.37 Miller contends there are generally three options, “social integration,” “civic integration,” and “cultural integration,” and all three have been bitterly argued over by scholars and practitioners, and all three can be seen in the disputes between our quadrant positions. Generally, freedom right libertarians prefer social integration; freedom left liberals prefer civic integration, and order right conservatives defend cultural integration.
Miller argues there is truth in each option and that our best path forward isn’t to cling to just one option, which distorts and leads to extremism, but to find a way to combine the best aspects of all three. As we are about to see, these three options of integration, along with the need to spread them with an evangelist’s fervor, are similar to the four souls of the new vital center.
THE INVITATION INTO THE MIDDLE CLASS SOUL (FREEDOM RIGHT 1)
Miller begins with the first option, “social integration,” because he believes it is the least controversial of the three options, involving “not only creating a rich pattern of social interaction but also interaction of the right kind—involving friendly, respectful relationships between equals.”38 It may also be the easiest to gauge. Miller indicates we will know social integration has taken place when certain patterns of behavior take place, for example, when the new immigrant (and citizen) becomes socially integrated in how things are done here. This is not, however, an invitation to crass materialism (come here to get rich) or a globalized mass culture (where everyone dresses and looks the same) but an invitation to join our market economy as workers, bosses, and entrepreneurs and in the process be shaped by participation in the market. As Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant, wrote, “the established rules of morality and justice” on which America is grounded teach Americans that they
are bound to keep their promises, to fulfill their engagements, to respect the rights of property which others have acquired under contracts with them. . . . Without this, there is no end of all distinct ideas of right and wrong, justice and injustice, in relation to society or government.
For Hamilton, without this moral and ethical behavior, which needs to be present and to be shaped, “there can be no such things as rights—no such thing . . . as liberty.”39 This is Tocqueville’s “self-interest well understood.” It is not a call to greed or selfishness but an understanding that in pursuing proper self-interest we are not only benefiting others but being shaped, becoming more virtuous, in the process.
No contemporary thinker captures the option of social integration better than Thomas Sowell, a Black economist at the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto, California.40 Sowell contends that multiculturalism and its emphasis on group rights and victimhood have led Blacks and Mexican Americans to believe they are victims of racial discrimination, that America is an evil and exploitive place run by Whites, and that success is impossible for them. Further, they believe that the only way to get ahead is to extract wealth from the majority culture. According to Sowell, once a group starts to believe this, they become locked into a culture of dependency and victimhood, incapable of getting out.41
Rather than seeing themselves as victims dependent on government handouts, Sowell wants them to see America as a land of opportunity despite continued discrimination, a land that rewards hard work, thrift, prudence, and trust. In many of his forty-five books, Sowell makes the case that Blacks and Hispanics must realize (as the Asian community already has) that the key is education, hard work, and developing the habits of social integration that engender success. In Race and Culture, Sowell highlights what is key for new immigrants: “Those aspects of culture which provide the material requirements of life itself—the specific skills, general work habits, saving propensities, and attitudes toward education and entrepreneurship—in short, what economists call ‘human capital.’”42
In books like Discrimination and Disparities Sowell has spent a career debunking the notion that discrimination and racism are the main causes of economic disparities. He believes the best way to help racial and ethnic minorities is to invite them to acquire the right skills, habits, and attitudes, all things that for centuries have propelled new immigrants in this country into the middle and upper classes.43 In one example, the nation’s biggest charter school network dropped its slogan “Work hard. Be nice” because it “support[ed] the illusion of meritocracy.”44 Nothing could be more damaging to immigrants, according to Sowell.
Since possessing these personal qualities is so important for individual success, Sowell believes that our immigration policies should prioritize people who have these skills, habits, and attitudes, not only because they are so necessary for personal achievement but because immigrants who possess these characteristics can best contribute to our common national cultural identity. Sowell believes we need to look for people who possess enough of the right cultural habits when they come here, and when they do arrive they will develop more of these qualities as they participate in our moral economy.45
Finally, in rejecting the excuse of discrimination, Sowell believes the offer to immigrants and citizens is not the dead-end offer of welfare dependency and victimhood but “social integration” (to use David Miller’s phrase) and the openness to the virtues of thrift, hard work, dedication, and trust, which are engendered by involvement in our market economy.46 When these virtues are significantly cultivated, we can safely say an immigrant and a citizen have been socially integrated. For Sowell, commercial virtues or the middle-class soul come about by adopting and living into the right vision, not the cosmic vision of the anointed but a vision that sees capitalism as moral and ethical, as rooted in our constitutionalism, not in greed, and that can thrive only when the “moral sentiments” of a people are strong.47 Here is the first part of our sweet offer to immigrants and citizens: come join, be a full participant in our deeply ethical economic system, and be changed in the process. When this offer is embraced, we will see immigrants and citizens become deeply “socially integrated.”
THE INVITATION INTO THE CONSTITUTIONAL SOUL (FREEDOM LEFT 1)
The second part of the sweet offer is what Miller calls “civic integration,” which fits with my label of the “constitutional soul.” For Miller, civic integration happens when people come to “share a set of principles and norms that guide their social and political life.”48 For the new vital center, this entails a certain public philosophy, grounded in nature and history, and a view of constitutionalism.
One of the best exemplars of the constitutional soul is William Galston, who worked in the Clinton White House and is one of the few left-of-center thinkers who has not succumbed to a view of the creed redefined by the second and third-wave of liberalism (freedom left 2 and 3).49 According to Galston, the constitutional soul is not neutral when it comes to questions of the good. Rather, the constitutional system of checks and balances, the separation of powers, federalism, and the rule of law were arranged by the founders not only to restrain factions and protect freedom but to cultivate virtue in our citizens. When we invite immigrants (and citizens) into the constitutional soul, we are not asking them to accept procedural neutrality or so-called American values of pragmatic relativism or even identitarianism, diversity, or the welfare state, but rather a view of the Constitution undergirded by the new vital center.
In his essay “Public Morality and Religion in the Liberal State,” Galston contends that “certain traits of character are to be valued because they are needed to sustain liberal institutions.” Arguing from the position of a “non-Lockean Locke” (an interpretation of Locke that does not place him in the “godless constitution” camp of freedom left 2), Galston sees in Locke’s Second Treatise and his Thoughts Concerning Education a view of liberal democracy that requires virtues like civility, self-denial, industry, trust, and justice. “Moral virtue,” contends Galston, “is more than individual self-restraint, it is also the display of due concern for the legitimate claims of others.” But it is more than a procedural republic too. “Moral virtue is more than a system of rational demands we make on one another,” a kind of “rights talk” that always devolves into group identity politics. Rather, “it requires . . . taking responsibility for oneself, and cultivating one’s humanity while tempering one’s passions and desires.”50
This vision is diametrically opposed to freedom left 2 and freedom right 2, which are built on a kind of instrumental reason and the selfish utilitarian self, eroding our creed to nothing more than individuals and groups using the system to extract cash payments and gain political power. But the invitation into the constitutional soul understands that our system is built on a certain kind of individual with a definitive kind of character and that the system in turn helped to “encourage . . . the formation of good character.”
For Galston, while religion plays a huge role in cultivating virtue, he is not willing to say that the Constitution is without the means to cultivate virtue. In fact, he believes that the “first wave of liberalism,” far from carrying the seeds of its own destruction, far from promoting a neutral proceduralism, “contains within itself the resources it needs to declare and to defend a conception of the good life.” That is, “it is unnecessary to import these virtues from the outside, for they are immanent in the liberal practice and theory.” This means that if constitutionalism is going to be sustained, it must draw on all the resources it has within itself, doing the best it can in a fallen world. And when it comes to virtue, it must work toward “the traits of character that individuals must possess if they are to uphold liberal institutions and to pursue their good with these institutions.”51
So the sweet offer of “civic integration” is not to group rights or utilitarian individualism (both pull the individual away from the new vital center) but to a robust view of the Constitution that says to the immigrant (and citizen) that our wonderful system won’t last without citizens of character, “and that at some point the attenuation of individual virtue will create pathologies” that will destroy the system, which are on display in so many areas of our country. At the same time the system itself, when staying true to its original designs, “engenders a virtuous citizenry.”52 Acting as a “soft perfectionism,” concludes Galston, the constitutional soul engenders
general virtues (courage, law-abidingness, loyalty), Virtues of Liberal Society (independence, self-sufficiency, self-restrain, family solidarity), Virtues of the Liberal Economy (imagination, initiative, drive, determination, punctuality, reliability, civility, and adaptability) and the Virtues of Liberal Politics (citizenship, respecting the rights of others, moderate in their demands, willingness to sacrifice for the common good).53
Galston rejects the poison pill view of order right 2 that would lump the constitutional soul into the three waves of modernity, thus throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For Galston the constitutional soul was not a harbinger of progressive liberalism but, rather, it remains the best hope for restoring our country and for assimilating immigrants and citizens. For Galston and other thinkers of the freedom left 1 quadrant, the constitutional soul believes “daily life in the liberal polity is a powerful if tacit force for habituation to at least the minimal requirements of liberal virtue.”54 In other words, for the immigrant and the citizen, “the sort of things regularly expected of us at home, in school, and on the job shape us in the manner required for the operation of liberal institutions.” Moreover, “while hardly models of moral perfection, citizens of modern liberal communities are at least adequately virtuous and not demonstrably less so than were citizens in the past.”55
But, for the immigrant and the citizen alike, to “resist this civic education would be irrationally contradicting their own self-interest, rightly understood.”56 To attack the constitutional soul, to resists its shaping power, is to choose a life of “stealing and dealing,” which always leads to a life of poverty and the impoverishment of the very real virtue needed to sustain the system, one built on honesty and trust. Without this trust, life becomes that much harder for the immigrant and citizen alike to succeed. And to the extent that our liberal democratic system tries to remain neutral, to “betray its own deepest and most defensible position,” the immigrant and citizen, those who accept the sweet offer of the constitutional soul, will demand their government promote the “civic core.” That is, they will ask their leaders to protect “those beliefs and habits needed to bolster the institutions that secure liberal rights,” utilizing civic education, political speeches, and the rule of law. In sum, to do all it can to protect a notion of the good, a life built on liberal virtues that will lead to civic integration in the best possible way.57
THE INVITATION INTO THE CIVIC REPUBLICAN SOUL (ORDER LEFT 1)
The third part of the sweet offer to immigrants and citizens is what David Miller describes as “cultural integration,” which happens “when they share a common culture, which might mean having the same values and experiences or, on the other hand, having a common cultural identity.”58 As Miller rightly concludes, cultural integration is more controversial than social or civic integration because it is asking immigrants to not only accept an idea about America but to “abandon their own cultural matrix in order to assimilate” into America—in other words, exchanging one nationality for another and becoming fully American and doing so gladly. As they embrace being American, immigrants and citizens will embrace the unique culture and the habits of the heart (moral, ethical, and religious) at the core of the new vital center.
Integration is more than adopting a version of the Protestant work ethic or the principles and constitutional practices of our democracy while remaining Mexican or Indian or Swedish or African. It means becoming American (without the hyphen). This may not happen overnight, but it nonetheless is an invitation for immigrants and citizens alike to join our “common public institutions—social, educational, economic, political,” and in doing this they slowly exchange one set of cultural and ethnic practices for another.59 While it is okay to hold onto some elements of our ethnic past (food, songs, national sporting teams), it is necessary to adopt a thicker view of cultural integration, a more robust public side where the immigrant is integrated into our “feasts and holidays, artistic and literary icons, places of natural beauty, historical artifacts” and religious history.60 As Miller says, “cultural integration matters because it allows immigrants to identify with that society more fully and to adopt its national identity as their own.”61 This will allow America “to solve collective action problems more effectively,”62 to establish trust between groups that would not usually trust one another, creating a sense of oneness and solidarity with the nation. In other words, immigrants are going to want to embrace it. It’s a good thing.
For this thicker view of cultural integration to happen, immigrants (and citizens) need to be clear about the invitation. What exactly are they being invited into? Is it more than a “brutal bargain” and attractive enough to put down their own country’s flag and pick up the American one? Will this kind of cultural integration, a thicker integration than just believing that America is an idea, also benefit the immigrant as much as the nation?
While he is not addressing immigrants directly, Harvard’s Michael Sandel is one of the best thinkers to make the sweet offer of the republican soul to immigrants. In his Democracy’s Discontent: America’s Search for a Public Philosophy, no one is more enthusiastic for a “republican political theory” than Sandel, probably the best-known of the civic republican thinkers. As Sandel summarizes, “if liberty [constitutionalism] cannot survive without virtue, and if virtue tends always to corruption [because of human nature], then the challenge for republican politics is to form or reform the moral character of citizens, to strengthen their attachment to the common good.”63
Recognizing the tension in the founders’ synthesis between constitutionalism and republicanism (see chapter eleven), Sandel says that the way to heal the tension is by recognizing that “the public life of a republic must serve a formative role, aimed at cultivating citizens of a certain kind.”64 This means that citizens and immigrants embrace this cultivating role of public life because without this our nation not only is lacking the kind of citizens it needs to sustain the synthesis—the new vital center—but it lacks the unity, the glue it needs to be strong. To accept the sweet offer to become Americanized, then, means allowing our institutions (civic, moral, religious, and political) to shape citizens and immigrants alike and in the end to become part of a family that also nurtures—a country worthy of the immigrant’s love.
Part of the sweet offer is to accept what Sandel calls “republican political theory” (republican soul), and this includes the exciting invitation to self-rule, which immigrants from corrupt authoritarian and totalitarian societies have never experienced. “Sharing in self-rule involves . . . deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.”65 But this deliberation “requires more than the capacity to choose one’s ends and to respect other’s rights to do the same”—in other words, to live and let live.66 For this wouldn’t take us much past the unencumbered self and the procedural republic of freedom left 2. Sandel calls immigrants and citizens alike to a thicker view of belonging where they are concerned for the whole, where there is a moral bond between all members of the community. It invites immigrants to bring their character and virtue (or at least the aspiration) into the group, working with the group to promote virtue in its members and the larger society, and to be open to a process that will shape them along the way.67
As immigrants or citizens willingly and enthusiastically join civic, religious, and political organizations, they will learn that their freedom must be balanced with obligation, that the pursuit of happiness is intrinsically wedded to the happiness of others, and that the more they live for others, the more happiness they will experience. They will realize that we understand ourselves as particular persons with rights and dignities by understanding that our self is embedded in “loyalties and responsibilities . . . as members of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic.”68
The cultural integration that takes place through the republican soul happens, says Tocqueville, by “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself.” By joining associations or “mediating structures” (e.g., the Rotary Club, the local church, neighborhood watch organizations) that stand between the government and the individual, immigrants and citizens learn self-government, and along with fellow citizens develop the habits of the heart. In Tocqueville’s words, they “practice the art of government in the small sphere within [their] reach,” not through coercion but through invitation, not through threat but through persuasion.69 Once immigrants or citizens experience the joy of being part of the moral fabric of families, neighborhoods, or communities, they learn virtue, gain character, deepen in self-government, experience freedom balanced by obligation, and not only become the kind of persons needed for our democratic republic to work, but also in the process of cultural integration are transformed into citizens who love America.
In a sense, then, the sweet offer of the republican soul is an offer for immigrants and citizens to join our unique institutions that “include the townships, schools, religions, and virtue sustaining occupations that form the ‘character of mind’ and ‘habits of the heart,’” according to Sandel, that “a democratic republic requires” and keep our nations “from dissolving into an undifferentiated whole” of separate groups.70 So the invitation is more than a “brutal bargain” of begrudgingly trading one’s cultural heritage for another cultural heritage (just to be successful in America); it is so much nobler. It is an invitation and a call for immigrants and citizens to join the American project, to strengthen it, to fight for it, to shape it, to extend it into the future, to fully own and love our country and what it stands for in spite of its weaknesses.
THE INVITATION INTO THE STATESMEN SOUL (ORDER RIGHT 1)
According to David Miller, the three areas of integration—social, civic, and cultural—need to work together for real integration to happen. And at the heart of this threefold assimilation or integration is a kind of learning, an education of citizenship. But while Miller mentions the need to expand the citizenship test to include more cultural elements than simple facts about the principles and practices of our democracy, he doesn’t go into much depth about the kind of education needed for thick integration. That’s where our statesman soul can be helpful, laying out a program for the Americanization of citizens and immigrants.
In thinking about the Americanization of citizens and immigrants, no book is more helpful than Thomas West’s magisterial The Political Theory of the American Founding.71 For West, the founders embraced the natural law/natural rights grounding of constitutionalism (freedom left 1) that protected individual rights. But these rights also included obligation to others, and for individuals to understand this they needed to possess a certain amount of virtue or character (order left 1). For the founders these habits of the heart preceded the adoption of our constitution, but for the Constitution to survive, leaders in every area of the society, including parents, teachers, school principals, pastors, and elected officials, need to promote “the learning of liberty.”72 Primarily, the statesman’s soul (order right 1) reminds immigrants and citizens that virtue must be at the heart of our constitutionalism. Laws alone, while helpful, are not enough to cultivate people of virtue.
Our founding statesmen, says West, saw “virtue as a condition of freedom and a requirement of the laws of nature.”73 West points to the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, ratified two years before the Constitution was signed, saying, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The need for this continual education is at the heart of the statesman soul and the invitation to citizens and immigrants alike. From the Northwest Ordinance, says West, we learn that education has public (good government) and private (happiness) dimensions.
So the sweet offer to the immigrant and citizen is to embrace the genius of the original Constitution, support it, champion it, for it is the very thing that protects our rights and brings national unity. But education is more than civic; it also includes the habits of the heart. So the statesman is continually exhorting immigrants and citizens to the “learning of liberty,” acquiring the knowledge, the habits, the virtue needed for good government and happiness. This knowledge must include religion and specifically Christianity. According to West, “no government that expects to provide security of natural rights can ‘simply assume’ that there is sufficient virtue,” or assume that the present cultural habits are enough.74
For the statesman soul the need for the education of citizens and new immigrants never ceases. Citizenship education takes place first and foremost in the home, then in school, and later in university. Ideally, the healthy assimilation of immigrants and citizens happens through our national holidays, our seals and symbols, patriotic music like our national anthem, an appreciation of our national architecture, our shared common history, and public opinion. It also happens in our associational life. For the founders, “government made use of divine revelation, rational insight, laws with coercive force, and the promotion of a healthy ‘law of private censure’ in the minds of the citizens.”75
Thus we see that the statesman soul’s invitation to immigrants is an offer to enter into, be shaped by, and be integrated into Americanism. This means developing the virtues—justice, moderation, temperance, industry, frugality, and piety—needed for happiness and success as well as good government that protects one’s rights and the pursuit of happiness in the first place. And once immigrants have become citizens, they are called to take up the mantle of the new vital center, teaching it to their children, their families, building schools and other institutions that support and promote the new vital center.
EMULATING THE NEW VITAL CENTER
Taking seriously this call to emulate the statesman soul with my own children, I sat down with them to watch a documentary on George Washington, a three-part series produced by the well-known presidential historian and progressive Democrat Doris Kearns Goodwin. In the first of three episodes, one of the historians asked this arresting question: “What makes this a Nation?” His answer: “Two things—The Constitution and George Washington.”76
Throughout the documentary the historians, most on the political left, stress that while Washington was not perfect (they mention that he lied on occasion, that he had a fiery tempter, and had slaves —though he freed them upon his death), no one resolved and worked harder to overcome their weaknesses as did he.77 Washington, better than any of the founders, exhibited the persona and civic virtues, the four souls (and what would become the Union Narrative) needed for statesmen in our democratic republic.
At the end of the third installment of the documentary, selections of his Farewell Address are read and discussed. I was amazed that his address was not mere advice for the new nation to stay out of foreign entanglements but a sweet offer of assimilation to citizens and immigrants alike. There may be no other historical document that captures so perfectly this invitation, what makes America special and why the four souls of the new vital center are needed to restore unity.
Washington’s sweet offer, his invitation to “citizens, by birth or choice”—those that have “every inducement of sympathy and interest”—is an invitation to a “common country,” a nation that has the ability “to concentrate your affections.”78 It’s an invitation to love, cherish, and protect the nation in spite of its flaws and hypocrisy. In a sense, while the sweet offer may have four souls, it only has “one heart,” the heart of patriotism, of a profound affection for our country, always wanting the best for it, always reforming it, always calling it back to the new vital center.
Listen to Washington’s sweet offer of patriotic assimilation:
The name of American, which belongs to you . . . must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.79
THE QUESTION OF RELIGION
As much as I appreciated the Goodwin documentary on Washington, I noticed one glaring omission: the documentary and its discussion of his Farewell Address completely ignored his admonitions on religion and virtue, skipping right over Washington’s clear advice that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”80 In fact, by avoiding the topic of religion and virtue, the documentary did the very thing Washington so strongly advised against: it ignored the importance of religion.
Washington warned,
In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.81
In Washington’s own life and that of the country, religion and virtue are the “foundation of the fabric,” the ultimate grounding of our four souls and that which makes our country so great. Undoubtedly, most of the historians in the documentary either didn’t believe Washington was sincere when he said these things, that his comments were just religious rhetoric, or they decided to ignore his teaching because they disagree with him.82 In either case, by ignoring his comments they clearly believe that we can have a strong nation without religion. Washington disagreed; without religion there would be no virtue, and without virtue there would be no liberty. Without liberty there is no republic. Without the republic, that is, one unified nation, there is no sweet offer to immigrants and citizens. And without the sweet offer, one grounded in natural and divine truth, there is no way to unify the nation, leaving us divided, polarized, and caught in a cold civil war. Since religion is so important for the new vital center and national unity, we must discuss it next. What we will discover is that the new vital center will unlock the secret of national renewal.