Paul Gottfried of The American Conservative, writing under the headline “No, Bernie Sanders Is Not an Alt-Right Knucklehead,” argues . . . well, I’m still not quite sure what. I expected the column to be an argument that I’d mischaracterized Senator Sanders’s views or his rhetoric, but Gottfried doesn’t quite get around to that.
He does mischaracterize my views:
What’s convenient about reading Kevin Williamson is that one can always figure out who the good and bad guys are. The goodies are the moderate libertarians who favor lots of immigration, especially from Third World countries, and who happily dump on those whom they consider to be “white racists.” The baddies, predictably, are the “populists,” both Left and Right, who favor more restrictionist immigration policies.
It would be odd for me to characterize as villains those “who favor more restrictionist immigration policies,” since — follow along, now, professor — I favor more restrictionist immigration policies. What I don’t favor is dumb immigration policies, e.g. making risible promises about sorting out immigration issues by building a wall that you’re going to bully Mexico into paying for and then failing to move one inch toward enacting any substantive immigration reform while your party controls both parties of Congress and the White House.
Gottfried argues that I am wrong to connect Sanders’s immigration views to nationalism because in 1924 the unions supported the Immigration Act, as though the political proximity of labor unions to question somehow dissolved nationalism. He writes: “Those who took this position were not promoting nationalist causes. They were appealing to workers who were afraid of being laid off or at the very least having their earnings reduced because of imported competition.”
I’m not so sure about that. President Coolidge argued that the act was necessary because “America must remain American.” Much of the immigration thinking of the time was ethnic and national rather than economic; Senator David Reed, the sponsor of the 1924 act, described his program as “keeping American stock up to the highest standard — that is, the people who were born here.” Hence the incorporation of the Asian Exclusion Act into the 1924 legislation. The AFL did support the bill — so did the Ku Klux Klan, which is not known for putting economics at the center of its thinking. Gottfried, who is a scholar of the period in question, surely knows this.
Gottfried goes on to argue that I am wrong to connect Senator Sanders to populism in general, writing: “American populists, who founded their own party in the 1890s, were decentralists. They were also states-rightists who believed that the federal government had arrogated to itself too much power.” I think I can clear up this misunderstanding: I think that Senator Sanders has a lot in common with gooey and sometimes vague populism of the 21st century, not necessarily with a specific group of self-defined and self-conscious populist party organizers in the 19th century. (I have not had the opportunity to put the free-silver question to Senator Sanders.) I formed this opinion while watching him explain his views on immigration and trade to union-hall audiences on the campaign trail, which is to say, by doing a little journalism. Gottfried ought to think about giving that a try and doing a little work.
My actual views on immigration (more enforcement-oriented than status quo, more liberal than Mark Krikorian, who nonetheless describes my position as “patriotic”) are, helpfully, published, and available for people to read, which is something that you’d think a writer writing for publication would want to do before commenting on them, assuming those writers, their editors, or their publications had any intellectual standards or self-respect. But that is not evident here. Among other things, he quotes me as writing things I never have written, which his editors assure me they are at the moment in the process of correcting.
(Note: The piece has been altered by TAC without acknowledgment of the error.)
Gottfried used to be an academic of some reputation. But the current political climate has not brought out the best in many gentlemen of his particular stripe.
It’s not like I’ve never made an error or been obliged to write a correction, which is what you do when you make a substantive mistake such as attributing to a writer words he has not written; I write a lot, and I make mistakes like anybody else. But this isn’t just a typo: This is willful — or, at best, indefensibly lazy — misrepresentation of substantive questions. It’s the sort of thing I’m used to seeing from Twitter-based nobodies or lame Fox News wannabes like Lauren Chen, a type that has become all too common on the Right, which is suffering from an epidemic of intellectual dishonesty.
Conservatives need honest and intelligent commentary. They aren’t getting it from Paul Gottfried or from The American Conservative, as much as I admire a few of the writers who publish there.