I was struck by something in Scott McConnell’s review of my book in The American Conservative. In the first half he was very complimentary about it — really, you can’t complain when a reviewer says your arguments are “presented with measured rhetoric and unimpeachable logic.” But in the second half he addressed the issue more broadly, and said that courting the pro-war Right was too high a price to pay for control of our borders, and suggested that mass immigration might be worth it if it could stop the Forever War:
To the extent that the existing American political class is now given to grandiose and probably self-destructive visions of America’s role in the world, modifying its composition through immigration seems much less of a bad idea than it might have ten years ago.
And if Mexico has indeed begun an extraterritorial campaign to retain the political allegiance of Mexicans in El Norte, where does this rank on the outrage scale relative to igniting a “preventive war,” or to some of the ideas circulating the Beltway about promoting America’s “global hegemony”?
Wow — talk about “dissolve the people and elect another.” This is essentially a mirror image of McCain’s hyperventilating about the “existential threat” of militant Islam, only in this instance identifying our sometimes-bumbling efforts to combat militant Islam as the existential threat.