It has not yet been made clear to our chattering ideological courtesans that the border/migration issue and the welfare state stability issue are strongly linked. In all the accusations between President “Cheeto” and the Democratic duo of Chuck and Nancy, for example, the great truth about the long-running government shutdown seems to have been lost.

It is almost as if we feel compelled to talk past each other about the border wall.

But it’s not about the border. Not really.

It’s about raising the debt level to accommodate continued increases in federal government borrowing. It is about stressors long ago placed upon the American union.

The border wall hysteria is, in a sense, very convenient. It allows everyone to keep avoiding any serious discussion of runaway federal spending and skyrocketing government debt, and, instead, play to each side’s constituencies’ prejudices. 

Why, it is almost as if no one wants to confront the fragility of our governmental way of life!

Democrats, of course, talk up the freewheeling idea of unrestricted immigration and “being inclusive” . . . while gleefully contemplating the naturalization of illegal and legal immigrants who are far more apt than not to vote for the party with an ass as its mascot.

Republicans, on the other hand, devote their elephantine bellows to border security and the common-sense notion that “good fences make good neighbors” . . . all the while eagerly blaming on foreigners the perceived immiseration of the middle class — which, to the extent it is happening, is largely the result of bipartisan government policy and not free trade or free immigration.

And though it is true that President Trump could have advanced his pet populist promise of “the Wall” while he had Republican majorities, is he really doing anything new? 

Democrats say he is holding America hostage to get what he wants.

But Trump merely mirrors what Democrats and establishmentarians do every debt-ceiling round: hold Americans hostage by pitting a working federal government against politicians’ addiction to ridiculous overspending. “Let us spend more than we have and we will let you have everyday governance.”

Increasingly, the prisoners’ dilemmas and games of chicken dominate our politics.

To repeat, the border issue is in an important sense a distraction from the real issue, out-of-control federal spending, and the ever-increasing debt.

But how big a distraction is it?

Super-sized

While socialists build walls to keep citizens in, the better to hold them captive, welfare states build walls to keep non-citizens out, to avoid over-exploitation of resources.

Meanwhile, free societies let people move about peaceably, letting populations find an unplanned, natural balance.

But we do not live in that kind of free society. A fact that is rarely recognized. Both Republicans and Democrats pretend that we are free, though, if for different reasons. 

By pushing for free migration that only makes sense in a freer society, Democrats jeopardize the solvency of their beloved welfare state. Is this just for the thrills? No. By undermining the solvency of the welfare state they send it into crisis. Which is awfully convenient for them, since they always have a ready response for a funding crisis of mini-socialism: more socialism. For them, the failure of government must always be more, more, more.

And I’m not being paranoid. Or, my paranoia finds ground in experience. What we witness from the Democrats looks suspiciously like an actual strategy famously advocated by respected leftists, the breathtakingly brazen Cloward-Piven strategy — but in this case using illegal immigrants to precipitate the crisis that would drive politics leftward towards their ersatz “utopia.”

Republicans have a different reason to deny the truth. They pretend that border walls are what free republics typically ballyhoo. Not true. It was the Progressives who put immigration quotas and controls into place in America. And, as Milton Friedman famously suggested, a responsible welfare state requires such controls. But we approach a rich vein of antinomy when we witness Republicans proclaim they are against the welfare state, for, no matter what they think of it, their border obsession serves as an attempt to save the welfare state, not peel it back. By pushing “border security” they avoid the uncomfortable task of confronting their own divided loyalties. Which is it, conservatives: a free society or the Redistributive Leviathan State?

That’s enough repressed ideas to send the whole country to the psychiatrist’s couch.

For Whom the Cuck Clucks

The conservatives manqué are not the only muddleheads.

Progressives have to live with all sorts of contradictions and cognitive dissonance. Internal contradictions are what it means to be a progressive, these days. Perhaps not one contradiction is more richly droll, though, than the fact that they jeopardize their beloved welfare state to let poor people in, who, to the extent they actually support themselves and not behave like leeches do so chiefly by flouting the labor regulations and taxing policies that progressives hold so very dear. And for which they would gleefully send in men with guns to take down . . . “evil white rich people.”

But libertarians have no standing to gloat, for they are in an even sorrier predicament. We want to live in a free society. And so, naturally enough, we want to support migration, even illegal immigration, and of course oppose the Trumpian border wall. But libertarians should be worrying about whether, in so doing, they are not introducing a moral hazard into the mix by going along with the progressive inclusion-über-alles mob.

Ideologies have their own entelechies. “Ideas are forces,” wrote G. H. Lewes, “the existence of one determines our reception of others.” And once a people embraces the welfare state, the draining of its funds through the tragedy of the commons almost never leads to the divvying up of said commons into a distributed division of responsibility. Government failure breeds more government.

It is an old and sad story.

I just do not see how opening up the borders to economic refugees could, in the current context, lead to a freer society. That is not how actual politics works.

The more I analyze our current situation, the more certain I am of the cucking of the libertarian mind. Trendy libertarians so want to be thought of as “on the left” that they let leftists push policy into what Sam Francis aptly called anarcho-tyranny, where government increasingly lets criminal and dependent elements dominate public life while directing the heavy hand of the State onto people who are basically peaceful, who are not subsidized, who earn their keep and don’t steal, murder, and grift their way through life. That heavy hand is the increasing burden of the regulations progressives love.

I have actually had one young libertarian correspondent berate me and ridicule me (ah, these ideologues really know how to persuade!) for my skepticism about the efficacy of open borders for bringing about freedom. This particular interlocutor to whom I am referring actually welcomed the degradation of the welfare state, offering up his own libertarian variant of the Cloward-Piven strategy: initiate a crisis to change policy in a libertarian direction. How he thought libertarians could convince a national government to go in the direction they do not want to go I have no idea.

The word “cuck” is made for libertarians such as these. Just as the cuckoo bird destroys the eggs of other species of birds and then lays its own eggs in their nests, tricking those hapless marks into devoting all their effort to support cuckoo life, not theirs, libertarians who think that opening up borders within the context of the welfare state are tricked by progressives — in a perhaps unwitting grift, I admit — to expending their wealth on others’ children for their benefit and not libertarians’.

And definitely not the general, public benefit.

Now, if these libertarians would dare confront progressives, telling them, in no uncertain terms, “if you want open borders and an end to ICE, then you have to end the welfare state first, and stop placing the institutions of the rule of law in jeopardy,” that might work.

The left could be met square on, disallowed from their haphazard course towards the fake anarchy and real tyranny.

It might be a workable strategy. But I have never heard one of these “principled libertarians” ever dare confront progressives in such a way.

Have you?

They seem, instead, to merely fall back in line as the meek marks of progressives.

And when libertarians or anyone else show any real independence of mind on this subject, they will get called racist.

To be continued…