Lindsay Graham Plays the Lib Card

It seems I have picked up this flu that's going around, so the economics posts will just have to be delayed for a while.

I was reading this article from the Hill, where another lawmaker has refuted that Trump made the shithole comments which has been all the media rage. That's all interesting enough, but what really jumped out was the quote from Lindsay Graham at the very bottom of the page.

"I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals," Graham said.

This is Graham outdoing himself to declare allegiance to The Cult. "I believe America is a proposition nation. Please please please...just don't call me a racist." To some extent, America is a proposition nation. To what extent it is has been debated since the beginning. Benjamin Franklin questioned the number of Germans who were settling in Pennsylvania, as they differed culturally from the predominately Anglo colonists. It was still assumed that America was a white, European-descended nation until 1965, when Congress decided to prefer non-white immigrants.

We can reasonably accommodate the claim that America is a proposition nation. Even though many of us are becoming increasingly convinced that this won't work out in the long-run, we can at least admit America is a proposition nation, to some degree. Graham doesn't grant any sort of that nuance in his statement. America is not defined by its people. These statements are incredible enough when we hear radical lefties spouting them off, but Graham is a tenured Republican senator from South Carolina! According to Graham, it doesn't matter who makes up the populace. As long as they believe in the idea of America, then nothing will change! So we could move all the white people out, replace them with sub-70 IQ immigrants from places like Haiti, Somalia, and Sudan, and everything would be just the same as it was, save for a trivial change in skin tone. This is absolute fantasy, and flies in the face of all observable reality.

To the extent America is a proposition nation, the proposition is something like this: Each American enjoys certain inalienable rights, and great liberty to live as he wishes, so long as he does not infringe on the inalienable rights of others. That certainly is an important description of the American experiment. But is it sufficient that it alone defines the country, to the point the actual people can be ignored? Of course not. If anything, it gives even more reason for the direction of the country to be shaped by its people. The more liberty a government grants, the more its direction and success depends on the nature of its people. If we imagine a very strict government, where people have very little freedom (say, Communism), then the attributes of the people might be less important. The people will just have to do as they're ordered in any case. But in the US, where people are given a lot of license, we are absolutely dependent on the quality and attributes of our fellow countrymen. You cannot have a liberal democracy coupled to a population that is not intelligent, informed, and moral. The left believes that a liberal democratic state can just be assumed as a default condition. This betrays a very insulated worldview.

Graham doesn't consider any of these thoughts before he runs his mouth. He just recites the liberal slogans he knows will help keep the media from calling him mean names. He is a coward, he is not a leader, and he is a liberal. Most liberals are just people who are afraid to be torched for heresy, so they've adopted the right beliefs and convinced themselves they are sincerely held. Graham is one of them.

UPDATE

Not to be outdone, here is a recent Tweet from Mittens, America's favorite virtue-signaling anti-Trumper.

If the race and poverty of an immigrant are irrelevant, then what is relevant? Well, only their willingness to embrace the "American proposition," I guess. The problem here is that no evidence supports any of this. For instance, statistical analysis shows that a person's income is correlated to the average IQ of the country six times higher than his own IQ. National poverty levels are very telling as to the quality of immigrants from a certain country. Race is highly correlated to IQ as well, and to culture. To say that racial and national attributes of a source country are irrelevant means we really don't have any way to judge immigrants from one country over another. To rational people, that would indicate we should not bring immigrants from anywhere, as we have no way of knowing who is good and who is bad. But to liberals like Romney and Graham, it means we should take all the world's people, because nations don't matter, cultures don't matter, IQs don't matter, morality doesn't matter, genetics don't matter...nothing matters. These people are dealers of degeneracy, and they are even more dangerous than the Democratic lefties because a lot of people think they are actually conservatives! What is it, you must ask yourself, that they are actually trying to conserve?