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Jan. 2, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FORCE OF NATURE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep992
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Thank you.
Thank you.
is a force of nature.
I'm going to look at his highly successful start and argue that there's a lesson here for America.
The never-Trumpers have fallen into dismay, and it's a wonderful thing to behold.
And I'll draw back from the intense debate over H-1B visas to examine two rival concepts that are at issue here, the concept of patriotism and the concept of cosmopolitanism.
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Javier Millet is the president of Argentina, and he is a force of nature.
Sure.
You know about this guy.
He's a weird-looking guy with a strange face, a shock of hair that appears to go in all different directions.
He turns out to be a former soccer player and also a rock and roll singer, which explains a little bit his appearance.
And while in his rock and roll days I guess he would go around with a microphone or with a guitar, these days when he was campaigning for the presidency he would go around with a chainsaw.
And his theme was slashing the state, cutting government, restoring power to the private sector.
He is in many ways not only visually but ideologically a revolutionary.
He came to office in Argentina at the time when the country was in a huge mess.
He's now been in power for exactly one year.
He's just had his first anniversary.
And I want to talk about Malay because there are sort of two reasons to discuss Malay.
The first thing is looking at Malay in his own Country in his own context and looking to see how he has, even in one year, made a huge difference and a huge difference for the better.
In this sense, he has justified his claim that he was going to come in and hit the ground running and make a real change.
I remember an interview that he did with a journalist Who noted that he had the supreme confidence that his ideas and policies would succeed.
And she asked him, like, well, but, you know, in the world of realism, what if it doesn't work?
Like, what's your plan B? And his answer was, I don't have a plan B. There is no plan B. And so this is a man who says and believes that there is a known way to improve government.
We sometimes think of government as a sort of a clash between rival ideas.
If you want more of this, go this way.
If you want more of that, go that way.
Millet's basic claim is no.
The real division is between the competence and the incompetence.
It's between the people who understand that prosperity is only created Or created only under free market conditions.
And the state is necessarily a leech, a parasite, a drain on prosperity.
So all of this is fascinating to examine in the context of what is happening in Argentina.
But there is a bigger lesson here.
There's a lesson in a way for one Donald J. Trump, who is going to take office in about three weeks.
And is going to face some similar conditions to Argentina in a way on a larger scale.
Not the hyperinflation that Argentina had.
Argentina's economy was more of a basket case than America's.
But our economy is not doing well either.
And Trump is going to have to confront some very serious issues.
Now Trump is in many ways different than Millay.
For one, Malay is a vociferous opponent of tariffs.
Malay is free trade all the way.
One of the things he's done in Argentina is restore trade, remove barriers to trade.
But I think this difference can be overstated because I think Trump, like Malay, Trump is a free market guy, and Trump often uses tariffs in a kind of a tactical way or a diplomatic way, kind of like saying to the Prime Minister of Mexico and the President of Canada, Hey, listen, if you don't police your border, we're going to stick 25% tariffs on you.
The point here is not to have the tariffs.
Trump is basically saying if you agree to police your border, I'll take the tariffs down.
So he doesn't really want to impose the tariffs, but the tariffs are a cudgel, a weapon, To achieve a diplomatic result.
By the way, these are things that the Mexican and Canadian heads should be doing in the first place.
But since they're not doing it, we use trade as a kind of lever to make them do these things, and then we, in Trump's case, drop the tariffs.
The other thing about Trump is he's a bit of a big spender.
He's not somebody who...
Trump would not campaign with a chainsaw.
And Trump has, in fact, said things like, no, I'm going to leave basic entitlements, Social Security, Medicare in place, even though these programs are scheduled, their liabilities...
Our population is aging.
The number of people working to support the recipients of these programs is smaller now than it was before in the baby boom years.
You had lots of people working, boomers, and a smaller group of people who were retirees.
So it's almost like saying you have a small roof on a very wide-bodied house.
Now it's going the opposite direction.
Small kind of house and giant roof, which is putting weight, if you will, on a much smaller number of working cohorts.
So, these are some of the differences.
And Trump's style, of course, is very different than Malay now.
Interestingly, Malay adores Trump.
I think Malay recognizes that the global free market revolution requires America to have the lead.
But this all being said, I think that there are important lessons that America can learn from Millay, and the most important lesson is to come in with a bang, or to come in with an axe, or to adopt the spirit that there is no turning back.
This is like Patton's old idea of an army that never retreats and is always moving forward.
This is very much the Millet approach and the Millet philosophy.
Now, when Millet took office, November of 2023, it was, by the way, it looked like it was going to be a really close election.
It was Malay against the candidate, the sort of Peronista, going back to the days of Juan Perón and Evita, Eva Perón.
This was a hybrid of socialism and fascism, which is, by the way, those are two very cousin philosophies.
And Peronism has had a terrible impact, long-term impact.
On Argentina.
And so Sergio Massa was the kind of Peronist candidate.
And I remember debates where he would portray Malay as a real extremist and a real clown.
And the basic idea was, you can't take this guy really seriously.
And yet when the election results came in, Millais was triumphant.
He won decisively.
In fact, he got 55% of the vote and the other dude, Massa, got 44%.
So this is a much bigger margin than Trump had because you're talking about an 11-point national difference between Millais and Massa.
So Millais comes in and now Millais does not have a fully cooperative legislature.
But the good news for him is that the president of Argentina does have a lot of unilateral powers.
In other words, there are things that he can do by himself.
And so Millet gets to work.
What does he do?
Well, everything he does is in line with his philosophy.
The slogan that he used in the election, which was Viva la Libertad Carajo, which Debbie translates for me as not just...
I see in an article here that it translates as long live freedom.
No, but the idea here is viva.
Viva, I think, means cheer.
It's like a long-lived.
So long-lived freedom, but Karaho is kind of like, damn it.
It has that emphasis.
It's exclamation point.
And that is the key to Millay.
He's an exclamation point kind of guy.
Now Trump was also an exclamation.
If you look at Trump's posts on social media, they're basically a combination of large type, all caps, bold face, exclamation points.
And so you can see the similarity here between these two guys.
But in comes Millay, and his first job is to reduce the bureaucracy.
So Argentina had 18 government ministries.
Malay eliminated 10. So he brought it down to 8, which is pretty good.
It's not as good as Malay had hoped.
In fact, there was a really wonderful social media video where Malay had on the wall little post-its.
Representing all the agencies of government and one by one he would rip the post-it off the wall and fling it to the ground as if to say get rid of this and this and this and this.
So he wasn't able to do it all but in politics you never can.
Not to say that you cannot achieve your goals but you cannot achieve your goals all at once.
Under normal circumstances, you go from A to D, and then the next round you go from D to K, and then you go from K to M, and then you go from M to Z. So you can get there, but you've got to get there, as Millet has discovered and has shown, you get there in stages.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the one-year adventures of Javier Millet.
The president of Argentina and the lessons of his success because it's hard to see how to describe what he's accomplished in one year other than a resounding success.
He caps the salaries of top bureaucrats.
I'm sure he would have liked to cut them.
Sometimes it turns out he can't do that.
So that's okay.
We cap them.
They don't grow.
He fired 34,000 public employees.
Argentina is a lot smaller than the United States.
That's actually a modest number.
But we'll need to cut a lot more here in this country.
He cut government spending by 30%.
Now that is...
Pretty impressive.
I would be astounded if the Trump administration is able to cut government spending by even 15%.
There is a lot of talk about eliminating a trillion dollars, two trillion dollars.
I'll believe it when I see it.
And I say that only because we have a budget that is in the five trillion dollar range.
We take in by taxes about three and a half trillion.
So there is an overhang of about a trillion and a half dollars.
To be able to cut that kind of number would bring our budget close to being in balance.
Now, this is a long way from paying down the debt.
You still owe $36 trillion.
You still have to pay interest on that.
So even that would leave a task ahead, but it would be a spectacular accomplishment in something the country has not achieved in 50 years, not even in the Reagan days.
But Vivek Ramaswamy has said that we need, quote, Malay-style cuts here in America.
So we'll see if Elon and Vivek can persuade not just Trump, but the entire Trump administration.
Cabinet Administration to pull something like this off.
And not to mention, some of it would require a sign-off from Congress.
Millet does regulatory reforms.
He started off by knocking out 366 regulatory, not just rules, but regulatory regimens or combinations of regulatory rules.
And that number has apparently gone up to 672. Along the free trade lines that I mentioned earlier, he eliminated import licenses.
So again, a license is a form of a tax.
It's a tariff.
It's a way of blocking something.
That's the reason you license something.
It's like, if you want to do this thing, you've got to go through me.
In other words, you've got to go through the state.
He lifted rent controls.
Now, the thing to realize about rent controls is that they are a way of reducing the supply of something.
So if you control the rents in Buenos Aires, there are going to be fewer apartments available for rent or purchase in Buenos Aires.
Why?
Because you'll have lots of people sitting in these rent control apartments.
And frankly, even if they want to leave, they're not going to.
Because they don't want to give up a property that is being offered to them at below the market value.
So it's like, hey, listen, I want to move out of Buenos Aires, but guess what?
I'll find some cousin of mine to come live in this rent-controlled apartment because it's being offered at a lot lower than the market price of rent.
So what does Millay do?
He removes the control, he allows the market to set the price, and guess what?
Now, there are lots of apartments available to rent and buy in Buenos Aires.
It alleviates this housing shortage that people had talked about for years, if not decades, and suddenly, poof, it's gone.
Why?
You have the right policy.
So what Malay is up against in Argentina is an encrusted socialist system that pervades the whole system of government.
And this is not something that can be fixed or tossed aside overnight, particularly because this is sort of like a You know, a one man, admittedly kind of a madman, but a madman in the good sense, a madman with a chainsaw, kind of going through this.
What Millet has to show, and I think this is really why I would count his first year as a big success, Because when you do something, sometimes there is short-term pain.
And the short-term pain can undo you.
I'll give an example from the Reagan years.
Reagan came in in 1980. He slashed He boosted defense spending.
And there was also a tightening of the money supply that was led by Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve.
And the idea was to kind of wring or squeeze inflation out of the economy.
And sure enough, the economy goes into a deep recession, 1982. Now, fortunately for Reagan, that recession did not last very long.
And by the middle of 1983, the economy had turned around and was now coming, booming at a very nice clip.
And this is what enabled Reagan to be re-elected in 1984. But let's say that the recession was very long, protracted.
And 1984 comes along, and you're still in the recession, Reagan might have lost.
And if Reagan lost, then your chance of being able to do more good is completely defeated.
Your opponent comes in, they undo all the things that you did, and so you're back to square one.
You're back to the doldrums of the Carter years.
And so similarly with Malay, if Malay administers this kind of castor oil or bitter medicine to his country, the country goes into a prolonged recession.
The recession might be kind of curative.
It might be long-term a good thing.
A good thing because why?
Because it removes a lot of the bad stuff that has accumulated in the economy over the preceding years.
So it's a kind of...
It's kind of like saying if you ate something horrible, you've got to get rid of that from your system.
That's a good thing.
But nevertheless, the pain of going through all that can be politically traumatic, at least in the national sense.
And so if here we are and Malay is up for re-election and his party is up for re-election, he runs the risk of suffering losses.
But the good news for Malay is that his idea is that the country is in such a mess But if you do good things, you're going to see good results and pretty quickly.
So even though for the first several months there was a lot of attacks on Malay, this guy is going nuts, this guy is threatening the stability of the government, bad results are going to follow, it turns out Malay was right.
Malay is right.
And Millet's statement that there is no plan B turns out to be the correct way to look at these things.
In other words, there is only one known engine of prosperity, and that's entrepreneurship, the free market, technological capitalism.
That is the way to go.
Now, Malay has not been successful in achieving everything he wanted.
One of the things he pledged on the campaign trail is he said the peso, the Argentine form of money, is in such a bad shape that he's like, I'm going to get rid of it.
I'm going to throw out the peso.
I'm going to go basically on a US dollar standard.
Now, this would have been an astounding and spectacular move that would immediately have brought Argentine inflation into check.
It would have solved that problem in one blow.
But it is difficult to get rid of a national currency.
National currencies, first of all, they've been around a long time.
Second of all, pretty much the whole country has them, trusts them, although trusts under conditions of hyperinflation.
I mean, Argentina was looking at inflation rates of 200-300% per month.
And think of what that means.
I mean, you have an apple that costs, let's just say, 10 pesos.
And then at 100% inflation, it costs 20 pesos one month later.
And at 200% inflation, it...
It costs double that.
So these are outrageous rates of inflation that cause a complete breakdown of trust in the currency.
But nevertheless, Millet was not able to swap out the currency.
Nevertheless, what he did support was efforts to bring down inflation, and he has.
Argentina finally has a trade surplus.
And it should.
It should because Argentina is a very rich country in many respects.
It is rich in minerals and commodities, lithium, copper.
It has magnificent agriculture, fertile land.
Argentine beef is believed to be among the best in the world.
So Argentina used to be an exporting country before socialism ruined it.
And it looks like Malay is on his way to making Argentina an export king again.
Now, you know, nothing gets solved overnight, particularly when you've been doing bad habits for decades.
So Argentines, many of them, ordinary Argentines, are still poor.
They can't eat a whole lot of the beef that the country makes because they don't have the money to do it.
The poverty rate in Argentina is now Something around 50%.
That's a big number.
This is, in some respects, you're looking at third world poverty rates.
Half the people in the country are poor.
Inflation has come down, but it hasn't been conquered.
And Argentina's growth rate is now slowed to a halt.
But slowing to a halt is better than negative growth rates, which is what Argentina had before.
In other words, the economy, far from growing, was shrinking.
So you go from shrinking to flat or zero, and then you have a growth rate that goes up.
And in fact, the World Bank is projecting that Argentina will grow about 5% next year.
All of this is a way of saying to Trump that if you want to make a real change, you've got to do it right away.
Better to plan for it before you even take office.
This is what Millet was doing even while he was campaigning.
Millet is an economist, so he has a very deep theoretical understanding of how markets work.
In some ways, he's different than Trump.
Millais is more of an intellectual.
If you ask him about the Cantillon effect, he'll know exactly what that is.
If you ask him about Say's Law, he can describe what that is.
Trump, on the other hand, is more of a business guy.
He's not so much of a theoretician.
He's more of a doer, a maker, a builder.
But clearly, what Trump is doing and what Millais are doing are complementary.
And wouldn't it be wonderful if a year from now, one year into the new Trump administration, we can look at these basic indices of America and see the kind of progress that Millet has been able to make.
This would be Trump on a much wider scale and on a much bigger canvas, painting in very much the same colors as Javier Millet.
The Never Trumpers are having a hard time coping.
And this is quite amusing to watch.
You know who the Never Trumpers are.
These are the guys who, some of them had a fairly long history in the Republican Party.
One of them is George Will, who was a A Reaganite, although an inconsistent Reaganite, somebody who would frequently break with Reagan to earn applause from the left.
Probably the leading kind of intellectual never-Trumper is Bill Kristol, who found a lucrative niche as somebody who would Get support, money, accolades from the media, liberal billionaires.
So never Trump became a very profitable phenomenon.
And profitable mainly because Democrats love the idea of having Republicans, or at least so-called Republicans, putative or swadizant, which means self-styled Republicans, attacking other Republicans, and specifically attacking Trump.
So it's kind of like the Democrats are saying, well, listen, if we attack Trump, if Bernie Sanders attacks Trump or AOC or Pelosi, it's kind of expected.
People discount it.
Well, if that's just a normal partisan fight.
But if Bill Kristol goes, as a Republican, we Republicans are supposed to stand for the rule of law, but Trump isn't a criminal, the Democrats go, wow, this is going to get independents and even maybe some Republicans to break with.
And this is why perhaps the leading of all political Never Trumpers, in other words, someone who was in elected office, Liz Cheney, was traipsing around the country with Kamala Harris.
Now, some Democrats, rank-and-file Democrats, a little puzzled to see this lifelong Republican Liz Cheney, in fact, a family that the Democrats have long hated, The family of Dick Cheney, the tribe of the Cheneys.
Nevertheless, here she is alongside Kamala Harris, but again the goal was the same, to get Liz Cheney to sow division in the Republican ranks.
There was also the so-called Lincoln Project.
And notice the name.
The Lincoln Project takes the name of the founder of the Republican Party.
And as if to say, we are the true heirs of the Republican Party.
And these guys, again, would get massive media attention and praise because they were willing to go over the top in their denunciations of Trump.
And as I say, this group was incorporated into, subsidized and funded by the left and by the Democrats.
And yet, it didn't work.
By which I mean that the independents didn't break with Trump.
Trump did better with the independents than he did in 2020. And he did better with independents than Democrats did.
The Republicans who were supposed to break with the party, and there were all these sort of fabled, you know, the Hispanics are going to break with Trump because he's such a racist.
They tried that.
The Democrats tried to hold on to their 90% of the black vote.
Trump is, again, you know, doesn't like blacks.
And then they thought that they would peel off the soccer mom Republicans, the suburban women, partly on the abortion issue, but also on the idea that Trump is just kind of a meanie, sort of like a domestic abuser.
You're not going to want to vote for this guy.
He's so unpleasant.
And that didn't work.
So really, none of it worked.
All of it failed.
And now is the time when Never Trumpers, well, some of them, of course, are going to try to continue the grift.
They're going to have meetings saying things like, we've got to double down.
Right after the election, Bill Kristol was putting up, yes, we now need to have organized bunker resistance.
These are pointy-headed intellectuals who fancy themselves as some sort of Charles de Gaulle, French resistance to the Nazis.
Even though these guys are, most of them, they're hardly French resistance fighters.
Most of these people are overweight.
They have fat cheeks.
They sit in fancy DC restaurants.
They overeat at lunch and have three drinks.
So these are people not exactly suffering.
They're essentially the jaded debris of the Washington bureaucracy.
They've lived there all their life.
I remember thinking back, this is when I first came to Washington.
Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmeltarbe had moved from New York to Washington, but they had lived a productive life Both of them were professors.
I think one at NYU, or maybe both at NYU. Gertrude Himmelfarb was a historian.
Her husband was a political scientist.
And then their son, Bill Kristol, moved with them.
He was at the time, I believe, a fellow at Harvard.
So he was actually making something of his life.
But he came to be part of the swamp, and this dude has just never left.
Now he's moved left.
He's now a kind of strategist for the Democrats.
Although I'm guessing that a lot of the billionaires who poured money into this Never Trump enterprise are recognizing that it's a racket.
and are recognizing that it was a money-making operation from the start and are recognizing that its usefulness is now at an end.
One of the Never Trumpers is this guy named Damon Linker.
Not a very well-known guy.
You've probably never heard his name.
In fact, he's a weird guy.
Currently a lecturer in political science at Penn.
He's also apparently a senior fellow at something called the Niskanen Center.
I used to know Bill Niskanen, a distinguished economist, but the Niskanen Center sounds like a disgrace, particularly if it has this guy.
Affiliated with it.
And he puts out a comment today saying he's been struggling since the election.
And he says, I'm not struggling emotionally, although I suspect he probably is.
He goes, but I'm struggling intellectually.
And then he goes, he was on the never Trump side, he says.
He was against Trump.
He supported the left against Trump.
And then he quotes a passage from an article.
And I want to read the passage because it kind of sums up the dismay of the never Trumpers.
The liberal left resistance will have to stagger into a future.
They failed over and over again to head off.
No movement perhaps has accomplished less.
In other words, you got this movement with a lot of money and they have failed by their own terms or in their own measure.
No movement has done so little to reach what was supposed to be an existential goal.
So in other words, not just that you failed.
If I try, for example, to achieve something and I don't succeed, I'm like, well, okay, I'll try something else.
But this was supposed to be an existential goal.
This is a make or break.
This is a save democracy or not.
This is save the country or we go down the tubes.
And the point is, they failed at that.
Trump eight years into the resistance is at his apogee.
The apogee is the high point.
Trump is, in other words, stronger than ever.
The editorial boards and bosses and magazine writers and braying congressmen and MSNBC panelists must contend with this bare, inarguable fact.
The electoral map ran blood red.
How?
Why?
Why?
And then he goes on to say, it was the racism of an Arab majority city voting for Trump, the white supremacy of the Bronx, New York's poorest borough deciding Trump needed more of its vote than ever before.
Pundits prattle about misinformation as if all the voters are toddlers who need to be bolted down.
And it was not merely the Trump that was chosen.
It was the not Democrats.
The option that wasn't in power.
A vote is a middle finger aimed at the sky.
In the heat of all this, the liberal left will have to recalibrate or dissolve.
The Hitler analogies are played out, so are the speech wars.
They will have to somehow consider material conditions.
So this is one of those articles where someone is just telling plain facts.
And these never-Trumpers, these never-Trumpers delude themselves.
They know a few big words.
Most of them are not as smart as they think.
They're well-educated, but they're sort of educated beyond their intelligence.
And so they live in a world where they think of themselves as extremely insightful, seeing below the surface.
They understand voters better than voters understand themselves.
And then you have the election and it's like slap, slap, slap, slap, slap.
And so you now have this phenomenon of people who think of themselves as smart.
I mean, these people have egos the size of planets.
And yet, they have to look in the mirror and essentially say to themselves, there stands before me a complete idiot.
There stands before me someone who didn't, has to admit, I did not understand the world.
I did not understand the people I sought to understand.
I wasn't able to convince anybody, literally anybody, Anybody, that all the dark warnings and prophecies and threats that I was issuing, nobody paid any attention to me.
And so my project has been a failure from top to bottom, from start to finish, from left to right.
The whole thing is in tatters.
This is why Damon Linker, the little dude I mentioned earlier, is not having a very good day.
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I've been talking for much of the week about the clash between the tech CEOs represented by Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Patrick Beddavid, and several others in the same camp on the one side.
And a certain wing of the MAGA movement A powerful and important wing represented by people like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon and Elijah Schaefer and Laura Loomer and many others.
And this has been over, over what?
Well, At the front end, it's been a debate over H-1B visas, but I think the debate is about something much bigger than that.
It's a debate about immigration.
And it is an attempt to go beyond the earlier kind of simple distinction between legal and illegal.
Because there is a virtual unanimity right of center that illegal immigration should be stopped.
And not only that, but that illegals should be sent back.
How many can be practically sent back can be debated, but there should be an attempt to send them all back and to create a way to restore the status quo ante, which is to say the situation before all these illegals came.
There is a, as I say, a kind of consensus.
Not in the country, because the left vehemently disagrees.
They would keep the border open if they could.
But on the Trump side, on the right of center side, there's an agreement about illegals.
But there's not an agreement about legals.
And so part of the clash here, this is sort of like a Christmas holiday fracas.
Has been over what to do about H-1B visas, which are legal.
You're allowing people to come legally into the country under a program that is supposedly for skilled labor for positions in which there is a shortage of Americans who are able and willing to fill those positions.
And again, there's a lot of factual debates here about to what degree is the H-1B program being abused?
Is it being abused at the margins?
Is it being systematically abused?
And I think that these debates can be reconciled.
I mean, I have never doubted that our legal immigration program also needs a lot of reform.
In fact, if you had asked me prior to this H1B debate, I would have said that the biggest abuse of the legal immigration process is not the H1B. I think the H-1B has gotten a lot of attention because it is a direct issue of jobs, right?
You come in on an H-1B visa to take up a job.
You are occupying a position.
And the idea is that, wait a minute, some other American already living here could have filled that job.
And so the job issue is what gives the sort of sensitivity and fire to this H-1B debate.
But The biggest abuse of the legal immigration process is not that.
It is the family unification clause, which allows people to bring, through a kind of chain reaction, innumerable of their relatives to the country.
And this is not what this family unification was for.
In fact, the idea of it was, American soldier goes and fights in World War II, Or Vietnam marries French women or Vietnamese women should be able to bring your wife to the country.
And that's it.
That was the point.
That was the purpose.
But the way that the program is abused is you bring the wife, and then the wife brings her parents, and the parents sponsor the other four siblings, and the four siblings bring their wives, and then we sponsor the wives' parents, and then they bring their other children, and the process continues ad infinitum.
If I had abused this process, I haven't.
My family is all in India, and I came to the country by myself.
But if I had abused this process, I could easily, over the course of the last, let's say, 35 or 40 years, brought something like 100 people to America, maybe more, under this chain policy.
So there's a lot of work to be done in fixing the system.
But there is also, beyond all this, a kind of broad...
Conflict of principle here.
And the conflict of principle is not identified by the tech side, which stays out of this kind of debate.
But it is identified by the Bannon-MAGA side.
And it's a conflict between sort of nationalism and globalism.
Or to put it differently, a conflict between patriotism on the one side and cosmopolitanism on the other.
Now, these are terms that need to be given a little bit of attention.
Nationalism is not quite the same thing as patriotism.
The two are sometimes used interchangeably.
Patriotism, by and large, is a conservative or right-wing phenomenon.
Love of your country You're going to find it far more right of center than left of center.
It is taken for granted among Republicans.
It is often depreciated among Democrats.
Go to the Democratic National Convention, you won't see a whole lot of waving of American flags.
Nationalism, though, is somewhat different because nationalism is this sort of idea of attachment to the nation Any nation.
And nationalism comes with certain types of baggage that patriotism doesn't.
You have left-wing nationalism.
Castro was a nationalist.
Stalin was a nationalist.
And yet it would be hard to call them patriots, at least in the normal meaning of the term.
And let's look at the other side of the seesaw, which is the term globalism, which is by and large a term that is surrounded by a kind of very bad aroma.
When we think of globalism, we think of world government, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, people who are sort of trying to reduce or take away our sovereignty.
And I agree with all of this, and I think globalism, for this reason, has come into deserved disrepute.
But globalism is not the same thing as cosmopolitanism.
Cosmopolitanism simply means a kind of worldliness.
And an interest in the world, a recognition that there are interconnections in the world, a curiosity about other cultures, a desire to learn, if you can, other languages, A recognition that there are capable and smart people all over the world.
And in some cases, hey, some of those people could be a big asset to us over here.
Almost like saying, hey, listen, we have a baseball team.
We're going to bring in a baseball player from Cuba because he's a terrific baseball player and he's going to make the Houston Astros win the World Series again.
So this is a way of combining An appreciation for the world with a recognition that ultimately it is about our team.
Notice that if you're bringing in some guy from Cuba to play baseball on the Astros, your main goal is not to help Cuba.
You're not sort of selling out America or selling out Houston because you think Cuba is better.
On the contrary, your goal is to create a winning Astros team.
And to create a winning Astros team, you bring in the outside guy because he's going to be an asset to your team and your team is what you care about.
I say all this because as I think about my kind of guiding star in American politics is Abraham Lincoln.
And as Lincoln understood it, America should be not nationalist and globalist, but rather patriotic and cosmopolitan at the same time.
And, by the way, this kind of weird combination of being sort of attached to your own and yet in some ways attached to universal values, this is right there in the Declaration of Independence.
Notice, by the way, that the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal.
Now, it didn't have to say that.
It could have said all Americans are created equal, in which case it would be basically saying that the laws of nature, the laws of human nature, the idea of natural right, which is key in the Declaration, applies to America and doesn't apply to anyone else.
Other countries can have different ways of understanding the world.
We're equating the moral worth of every American to every other American and to no one else.
But the Declaration doesn't say that.
It in fact suggests that this idea that no person is sort of intrinsically better than anyone else, this is sort of like a universal maxim.
So notice that it is applied to America, but it's stated in universal terms.
And Abraham Lincoln as well is talking about the, he's interpreting the Declaration of Independence.
And he makes a very interesting observation.
He says, well, you know, there were people who wrote that document.
And there are other people who are their descendants, who have a direct lineage to the people who wrote that document.
And he goes, and then you have what Lincoln calls the New Americans.
And these are people who came after the Declaration of Independence.
They often came from places that were unconnected to the Declaration of Independence.
And he says, this is Lincoln, I'm not quoting him.
If these people, meaning these New Americans, quote, look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, meaning to the founders, they find that they have none.
They cannot carry themselves back to that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us.
And then Lincoln's speech goes in a surprising direction, but Lincoln basically says, but they don't have to.
In other words, they don't have to find a thread of DNA that takes them back to the founders because the principle of the Declaration applies to the new Americans no less than to the old.
So here's Lincoln.
He says that when they read the declaration,"...then they feel that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and," this is the key point,"...that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are." What is Lincoln saying here?
He's basically saying that all of us here in America, American citizens, Whether we are the original Americans or whether we are descended from the original Americans, by taking the oath and embracing the country and its way of life and its laws and embracing its anthems and songs and hymns.
In other words, by...
We are connected to the Declaration no less than the people who are descended from those who wrote the Declaration.
So what is Lincoln doing here?
He's sort of extending membership in the American family through the Declaration of Independence to all Americans.
And his way of doing this, I think, is to unite the principle of patriotism on the one hand, With the idea of universalism or cosmopolitanism, people can come to America from other places, and they come conditionally.
The country doesn't have to let them in.
There's no obligation to have generous immigration policies.
But nevertheless, when people come by the rules, play by the rules, become Americans by the rules, assimilate to America, Follow its laws, revere its constitution.
They become full members of American society, no less than anyone else.
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