Can't support secession or separation because it's -ist, -ist, -ist! Just as Nativism is bad because it's bigotry and -ist!
Immigration: A Troubled History by Mark Malvasi
Immigration: A Troubled History (essay by Mark Malvasi) https://t.co/S5EAqPcZCH— Winston Elliott III (@WinstonElliott3) May 19, 2020
Malvasi:
Writing in 2010, I anticipated one of two possibilities likely to emerge from the controversy that immigration had provoked. Americans would either witness “the resurgence of a truculent bigotry or the decline of national cohesion. Neither prospect,” I added “bodes well for the fate of the United States. The first reaffirms the opinion that some peoples are unworthy of inclusion in American life; the second endorses the primacy of racial, ethnic, religious, local, or cosmopolitan allegiances at the expense of national identity.”[29] I was right and wrong. Americans have experienced both “the resurgence of a truculent bigotry” and “the decline of national cohesion.” I can propose no solution to the longstanding problems that immigration has caused. Nor am I competent even to dispense a remedy that will alleviate the worst symptoms of this recurrent crisis. I can only suggest another way of thinking about difficulties, past and present, in the hope that doing so may yet lead to a humane resolution.What does he offer?
More than a century ago, Josiah Royce articulated the philosophy of loyalty.[30] Although not specifically addressed to immigration, Royce’s analysis encourages a distinctive approach to understanding and, perhaps, to ending the predicament to which its long history has led: how to safeguard family, home, community, and nation without also denigrating or injuring other human beings. Unlike Lodge and Boas, both of whom sought variously to eliminate social conflict, Royce extolled loyalty to kith and kin even at the risk of bringing diverse peoples into collision with one another. Attachment to a particular family, community, history, and tradition was, in his judgment, a healthy alternative to the deadening uniformity of modern life.So Malvasi, following Royce, thinks that loyalty to the principle of loyalty as the start of a resolution, in so far as this can somehow bring out mutual respect. But even if it could, mutual respect does not entail integration into one community. If anything, it makes more sense for a peaceful separation of two different peoples. Shouldn't this be applied to the author's judgements of people from the past, e.g. American Nativists? Why shouldn't they be respected for their loyalty? Because they were bigots! Etc.
Intellectual consistency is too much to expect from a liberal.
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