Dr. Putnam’s Bunker-Buster
by Patrick J. Buchanan
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
If you were looking for a truce in the immigration wars once the Bush-Kennedy amnesty went down to defeat, look again.
Communities, cities, states are passing tough new laws to deal with the 12-20 million illegal aliens in our midst. Town likes Hazelton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Texas, which sought to punish landlords who rent to and businesses that hire “undocumented workers,” have been hauled before federal judges by the ACLU. Arizona has passed a law to de-certify and close businesses caught hiring illegals twice. Protests have begun over removal of National Guard troops from the border.
The Department of Homeland Security is getting off its posterior to demand that businesses, when told the Social Security numbers of employees do not match Social Security Administration records, clear up the discrepancy in 90 days, or fire the workers, or face stiff fines.
Mitt Romney is raking Rudy Giuliani for maintaining New York’s status as a “sanctuary city,” where cops cannot ask criminal suspects to prove they belong in the country. Failure by New York cops to learn the illegal status of four thugs and deport them enabled them to stay in town, where they kidnapped and sexually assaulted a Queens woman for three hours in a shack near Shea Stadium.
Comes now a blockbuster report by political scientist Robert Putnam, author of the runaway bestseller “Bowling Alone.” Putnam provides supporting fire from Harvard Yard for those who say America needs a time-out from mass immigration, be it legal or illegal, like the immigration moratorium we had from 1924-1965.
“E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century” is the title of Putnam’s five-year study, which makes hash out of the politically correct cliché, “Our diversity is our strength.”
After 30,000 interviews, Putnam concludes and reports, against his own progressive convictions, that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.
The greater the diversity the greater the distrust, says Putnam. In racially and ethnically mixed communities, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind. They withdraw into themselves, they support community activity less, they vote less.
“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle,” writes Putnam.
They tend to “withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”
Writes columnist John Leo, “Putnam adds a crushing footnote: His findings ‘may underestimate the real effects of diversity on social withdrawal.’”
Putnam is an optimist about the long-term, but his optimism seems rooted less in his findings than in his hopes and America’s experience with the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920.
But that Great Wave was followed by the Great Lull—little or no immigration from Coolidge through JFK to 1965, when LBJ opened the floodgates, though he probably had no idea what he was doing with the Immigration Act of 1965, which goes unmentioned in his memoirs.
Putnam’s implications are ominous. For we are talking here about nothing less than the survival of our country.
America is expected to add something like 100-120 million people in four-to-five decades, almost all people of color who have never before been fully assimilated into any First World nation. Every great city is going to look like Los Angeles, and, as Putnam reported earlier, Los Angeles is a textbook example of a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual city where levels of suspicion and mistrust approach the maximum.
As we know, it is the legal immigrant community that is the sea in which the illegals swim, feed and flourish. And if legal immigration from the Third World increases the levels of suspicion and mistrust, not only among immigrants and native-born but also among all minorities, and even within each ethnic and racial community, what are we doing?
For this is about whether America in thirty or forty years is going to be a giant dystopia, in T.R.’s phrase, “a tangle of squabbling nationalities” and not really a country or nation or people at all.
Between 1924 and 1965, the Melting Pot worked. It converted the children of 15 million European immigrants into American citizens with shared traditions, values and culture.
But today’s immigration is different. And today’s America is different. The numbers coming are huge, and they are coming from countries, cultures and civilizations whose peoples have never before been assimilated by any European nation. And they are arriving in an America whose Melting Pot is broken and whose elites lack the vision to see or the moral courage to confront the imminent peril.
Politically correctness may yet prove fatal to the republic.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
1 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 13 August 2007:
Before we declare another 50 year moratorium on immigration, we better first figure out just where the hell are are going to get our math teachers, pharmacists (gotta know that chemistry), physicians (at least some who majored in organic chemistry and physics rather than biology), and ANY professional who can count further than all his fingers and toes. In my neck of the woods, folk so able to count, and thus the local druggists et al. largely hail from Pakistan and India.
Our kids can’t do math. So if we shut the national gate, we are simultaneously obliged to dynamite the Public Fool System; and in the best tradition of the CarthaginianPeace, let’s leave not one red school house brick on another, let’s sow the campus ground with salt, and let’s poison all the apples. Let’s try private schools, vouchers, uniforms, no sports or dancing lessons, and lunch boxes packed by mom. Yes, yes, you libertarians, I know vouchers have problems, but at least we’d get some home grown pharmacists. Otherwise, you better have a copy of the _Rig Veda_ in hand if you want a discount at CVS. Ommmmmmmmmm.
By the way, law schools are our national brain drain. Let’s close them too. And for you natural scientists out there, we in the arts, would like to remind you that mathematics is a humanity, not a science.
2 Comment by Spiro on 13 August 2007:
Americans will learn math (as well as chemistry and physics) if the market is allowed to set wages, which are now depressed by the influx of immigrants. Shortage of math teachers? No more likely to happen than shortage of proctologists.
3 Comment by Fred Breisch on 13 August 2007:
I agree with Spiro and lets start looking after and protect America First, and for heavens sake stop trying to social engineer the whole world.
Sid’s right about the “Public Fool System”…it really has to be done in, shut down and gotten rid of. American kids are as bright as any and if we’d get rid of the education monopoly and the teachers union that watches over it, then there is hope; however, time does seem to be running out on this grand enterprise.
Cheers,
4 Comment by Johan Dieckmann on 13 August 2007:
(Re. comment #1)
The legendary 1955 Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” wake-up call was followed by another one, “Why Johnny Can’t Add”, in 1973, by Morris Kline, followed in turn by his “Why The Professor Can’t Teach”, in 1977, together comprising serious indictment of the U.S. both elementary and higher education.
Morris Kline, 1908–1992, was Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of N.Y.U., the author of seminal “Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times”, Oxford University Press, 1972. No doubt, Kline’s work contributed immensely to cultural enlightenment of generations.
It is sad that in his own country, in 2007, one faces the situation in education more dismal than at the time when he wrote, all his and others’ efforts notwithstanding.
(One is here entitled at least to questions. Is this a symptom of a decaying Empire, or the natural entropy of “capitalism”, or “globalization” (or whatever its politically correct name) – or all of the above? Or perhaps (oh, heavens forbid … and despite (or because of) all the indigenous hubris), has the phrase “American culture” been an oxymoron all along?…)
As for
“… And for you natural scientists out there, we in the arts, would like to remind you that mathematics is a humanity, not a science. …”,
Kline’s broad view is in agreement with this (e.g., see his 1972 opus). The truth is that throughout history, mathematics, at its best, has been healthily intertwined with human activity and curiosity; both an outgrowth and a tools of economics, surveying, astronomy, science and engineering – but itself not any one of these; a part of human culture, a humanity.
(At its worst, well… There were “mathematical systems” in Japan that “flourished” some centuries ago, complete with teachers & disciples, who actually prided themselves with “absolute lack of potential usefulness” of their subject matter. This sterile insanity eventually disappeared without a trace, of course, and good riddance. Breaking with our own healthy western tradition that goes back to ancient Greeks, there have also been digressions, notably since the early 1900’s, forming clubs insulated from human activities “‘n proud”. Cases fully deserving of our Congress’ “Golden Fleece Award”, if you recall that one
)
5 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 14 August 2007:
Spiro is half right. Wages aren’t depressed AT ALL in the teaching sector (or any government job), immigrants or no immigrants, because in teaching THERE ISN’T A MARKET AT ALL. Teachers are paid by seniority, not by market supply and demand. Thus the math teacher is paid the same as “social studies” teacher (of whom there is no shortage, if for no other reason than that’s what the coach teaches). The math teacher is paid even less than the coach. Imagine a grocery store where the butcher is paid the same as the bag boy. Result, a shortage of butchers. Administrators (who quickly forget what it’s like to be a teacher), are paid not by the quality of the product but by how many people they boss around. Thus every principal is an empire builder. Teachers also learn quickly that doing their job well is less important than fitting into the boss’s routine. For an excellent discussion of this listen to Tom DiLorenzo, “Economics of the Public and Semi-Public Sector” at the Mises Institute site, the Mises Media page.
Johan Dieckmann’s observation that American Culture is an oxymoron can be fleshed out. Americans simply don’t think being well-educated is important. Ask any Gringo to list his life goals; to be well educated isn’t one of them. Excepted are only immigrant groups with sapiential religions: Confucian, Hindu, Jewish, and (at least in the past) Catholic. Wonder why Jews and Asians do well in school?
From 1945 until the 80s, with everyone else in ruins, Gringoville could coast along with mediocre schools. Now Gringos are being bested. And a high tech economy can’t run without good schools. So, improve the schools (by doing what I suggested in my first post), or let the skilled and hard-working eager-to-please immigrants in. Formerly Gringo Johnny needed only to learn what it took to work in a textile mill. Now the textile mill is in the 3rd world. In short, Gringos are only good as playing sports, and even here, if the sport is international, they’re being bested.
Further observations.
1. Not only is the public fool system to be administered a Carthaginian Peace, but departments of education at our universities simply are to be nuked.
2. When I started teaching, in the 1980s, the suburban high schools were full of Asians and Jews. When I retired in 2002, no Jews or Asians were in the public fool system. They’ve all gone to private, and often have set up their own schools. Way to go! (so to speak). And for years now, when Germans or Japanese built their factories here, they also have brought their own schools for their native employees.
3. Immigrants or no, market or no, not much will change in schools until we make them rigorous. And that means instruction can’t be entertainment, and “required home enrichment activity” (homework) needs to be assigned as prep for every school day. Math and foreign language in particular can’t be turned into amusement. Yet to learn how to be an entertainer is what most education departments and teacher colleges are all about. And frankly, most teachers are not much more than room decorators. Take it from me. I know about which I speak.
4. The comprehensive high school was a mistake from the start. No where else, except in Labour Party Land, does such an institution exist. Long ago, when something beyond the 8th grade became needed, we should have had only special schools for special tracks: one for reflective thinking jobs, one for highly skilled but non-reflective jobs, and one for hewers of wood and drawers of water — the last also honorable work, and if only Montezuma’s men will do this — and do it with discipline, dispatch, and with obliging cheer– then bring ‘um in!
6 Comment by P. Stewart on 14 August 2007:
I’m a first generation American from an eastern European family. My family were well educated on one side, not at all on the other. They worked hard, bought the American Dream and ran with it as their personal life motto, owned businesses, bought homes and rental properties, helped other countrymen settle here who did the same. They served in all branches of the Armed Forces, they were loyal Americans in every respect who have benefited this country by their presence. They paid taxes, they were not “on the county” during the Great Depression, they made life better for all family members who came after.
I have to say that my public school teachers in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s were tough. We learned a lot. I graduated high school with more knowledge in English, the Humanities and Science than most college graduates in Liberal Arts have today.
The public elementary school of today is a shadow of what it was in my day. It has become nearly part-time, when you factor in all the “institute days” and “teacher in-service days” with the national holidays. The people teaching our children are themselves poorly educated. And why is this? It is because an Education degree has long been the easiest college degree to obtain! 100 years ago, it was difficult to obtain, and one has only to look at the tests for teacher certification in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s day to see that no current teacher could pass them. Teachers also have often gone directly from high school into teacher’s college and then back into a school to work without having any real world exposure. This produces an immature thinker with social skills on the same level as the students they are supposed to teach.
We need not bomb the entire system to rebuild from scratch. We simply need to set the bar higher for teacher achievement, which can be accomplished at the School Board level. You don’t get hired unless you have studied and passed a difficult and demanding curriculum yourself, and have proven work experience in the private sector first.
7 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 14 August 2007:
I’d like to turn back from education to the general question of the stability of a polyethnic and polyreligious social order. (By “ethnic group” I mean a people with a common history and ,sometimes in that history, pitted against other groups.)
1. “Between 1924 and 1965, the Melting Pot worked. It converted the children of 15 million European immigrants into American citizens with shared traditions, values and culture.”
Not really. Any Jew and any Irishman and any Catholic can tell about discrimination in those years against them. That discrimination ended not by their melting into a homogeneous blob with the rest of us. In fact, America was always and from the start polyethnic and polyreligious, as David Hackett Fischer has proven. Discrimination against Jews and Catholic ethnics ended because of the tradition of what Europeans call “Liberalism”, and is best represented by Jeffersonianism. It ended by the attempted privatization of religion and ethnic identity. It also ended because the market doesn’t care who your father was or where you go to church.
Yet it’s worth asking if Liberalism or a business culture in this sense is enough to hold people together. There seems to be reasons to doubt this. Similar doubts ought to be raised about Social Democracy of the Rawls stamp. For Leviathan too quickly becomes the tool of one ethnic group or religion to mistreat another. The libertarians think that with less coercion, folks leave each other alone. I not so sure about that either. Well, what then are the alternatives to Liberalism?
Homoreligiousity? This worked in the Austrian Empire and Belgium in 1830 (together with a prestigious throne) until nationalism fractured them. Still, our memory of the 17th Century prevents this from being an option. The Puritans tried it on our shores. William Penn and Roger Williams had their objections. Or do when wish whole states to be only of one legal religion (as each of the 13 colonies were?)
Homoethnicity? Nationalism tried this, and we know the bloody result. Even where a national state is homoethnic, it seems to be unable to leave its neighbors alone. Chamberlain thought that by letting the German Sudentenland join the Reich, we’d have perpetual peace. We in America tried this with The Indian Removal Bill to Oklahoma and Reservations. And because almost everyone regards this as a shameful moment in our history, the idea that it could be done again isn’t realistic. Secession captures my fancy, however quixotic it may be. Yet the economy is world-wide, we sell in all markets, and if it takes as long to fly to Rome as it takes to walk across my county, then we’re going to have to live in some sort of a polyethnic social order. It’s a moot point anyway: Neither politicial party will do anything to stop the immigration or expel illegals.
So if a homoreligious and homoethnic order just isn’t possible, what do we then do to hold us together? Roger Scruton argues for a common and large embracing culture, culture being “the consolation prize for the loss of religion”. And culture can be shared. I welcome other responses — responses that are not so risible as to suggest that we can and ought to have another St. Bart’s Day Massacre or another Indian Removal Bill.
8 Comment by Johan Dieckmann on 14 August 2007:
Oh yes, here it is:
http://www.taxpayer.net/awards/goldenfleece/about.htm
“Senator Proxmire, where are you when we need you?”
9 Comment by Lee on 14 August 2007:
I am not an expert on culture, but, using Pieper’s definition in Leisure the Basis of Culture, America does not have a culture. The minimum requirement to have a culture is to have a cultus. That is there must be formal, regularly scheduled acts of public worship/celebration of a more or less fixed form, plus special, occasional worship events, also of fixed form but different from the regular events and that all take part in. (Public sports are merely an extension of the theatre and therefore entertainment, and do not count as cultus.) According to this definition, parts of America have some remnants of culture, but the country as a whole has none. And it shows, and it shows, and it shows!
10 Comment by John Q. Public on 14 August 2007:
I expect Hillary will defeat Mitt… and the first ‘attempt’ to hold us together will be via prudent socialization of medicine etc. Or a line will be crossed making life untenable to the 99% who have to share only 20% of the bounty of what (they) americans produce. Since in Fact there no longer is any “us” really to hold together. Then like the first amoeba whose size made it no longer a tenable organism unless it divided, the country will begin to spilit apart. It won’t seem like secession but like scratching one’s head. From our very inception as a nation american culture has been a veiled attempt at replacing christianity with itself. Frankly speaking it did not work. Rather it created in Fact a collection of “I’s” or number 1’s (me, myself, & I) who believe everything else is a part of them. Rather than what emanates from mother Nature and the Christian Religion that God or the godhead or the group or common weal is first/holy and we individually are a part of it. And that reality itself emanates out of the land we *belong* to… The – if you will ‘touchy-feely-ness’ of which we have been removed from by technology. And so that too is neither a back-up influence. Maybe the old Texas will be an example-?-every State a Republic~! But the point I’m making is it won’t change itself…given its current size and ways…reality only will change it to survive like at the most fundamental levels of life reality changed the amoeba. We’re conceptual creatures; but really we’re creatures who are conceptual … meaning it’s the horse that pulls the cart. cheers! Yes mother Nature is cruel, but she’s also kind. Once we’re sitting in the cart (as consciousness, aware of being aware) behind the horse, for the most part sadly, we’re driving her stone blind.
11 Comment by Avery Bullard on 14 August 2007:
Sid – “Any Jew and any Irishman and any Catholic can tell about discrimination in those years against them”
Every ethnic group on earth can say they were discriminated against. The Jews and the Irish are just bigger whiners than most. How have those two groups shown their appreciation toward Anglo-Saxon America for allowing them the opportunities they have had in the U.S.A? I believe they thanked them by first complaining about discrimination. Then by using their votes and media influence to flood America with Third World, making the descendants of those Americans who built the country a minority. And finally they used their influence to drag Americans further into Middle Eastern and Irish/British politics. Anglo-Saxon America owes them nothing.
12 Comment by John Q. Public on 14 August 2007:
I happen to ditto avery bullard (above) with a big time DITTO. ‘There’s enormous power in the victim Role; no power in being the Actual victim.’ -myself in conversation with a sweet tree. – Anglo-Saxon America has been hammered almost to extinction with its own Values. However where-?-was/(yet still is their sin in this scenario?)…Their secnario or schematic as I’ve written above was sadly to replace with their ‘enlightened’ culture [via John Locke] Xianity i.e. Christianity. Let me pander to the secular…and if they don’t believe in sin suggest that “Sin” was a mistake (I would venture to say you know it’s a sin if it’s a mistake on more levels than you can count.) The real question for them given this reality which they simply don’t wish since Henry VIII >>> to abide or to metabolize is a question within themselves. And subsequently what therefore they create or if you prefer they ‘manifest’ outside themselves? That question being-as put succinctly by Their bard- (and what a windfall he was for them…even if he’s yet to get thru To-them, much like Genesis for the jews, though it’s not gotten thru yet to them either): “to be or Not to be?” … Hey, I hear it – i’m on the side these days of to be…although i used to feel rather it was six of one half-dozen of another.
13 Comment by Thomas on 16 August 2007:
If Ron Paul is in the race to win why doesn’t he speak up?
14 Comment by William on 18 August 2007:
hi i enjoyed the read
15 Pingback by Conservative Heritage Times » Diversity = Distrust on 21 August 2007:
[...] Posted under Political Correctness & Globalism “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle,” writes Putnam. They tend to “withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” ~ Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (via Pat Buchanan) [...]
16 Pingback by “The Downside of Diversity?” (Salon on August 25th, 2007) « The Club of Rome on 23 August 2007:
[...] Appropriation of Putnam’s work by those advocating a dramatic curb in immigration [...]