Reminder: Bernie Sanders Called Open Borders "A Koch Brothers Proposal"

Andrew Sullivan's latest article in The New Yorker was so extensive, I wanted to do two posts commenting on it. 

In the second part of his article, he republished an interesting interview between then-Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and reporter Ezra Klein, who was writing for the left-wing magazine Vox.

The Left’s Border Conflict

I loved this little nugget from an interview Vox’s Ezra Klein had with Bernie Sanders in 2015, which has been recirculating recently on Twitter. Money quote:

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

How about that? Sanders refused to go along with an open borders agenda. No one should be surprised. The most ardent socialists, whether they call themselves democratic or add some other adjective, remain committed to their nations.

National identity, ethnic status does not simply get whisked away in the fight between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as Marx had wrongly predicted in the mid 1800s.

The rising strength and continued attachment of the working and middle-income classes to their nations would upend the entire socialism design. During the European interregnum of the 1920s and 1930s, nationalism took on a prominent turn and waged war against the Soviet agenda for international communism, based in Moscow.

Mussolini's Black Shirts and Hitler's Brown Shirts were violent enforces imposing the same ideological push for national socialism, and they therefore hated communism, which one could also call globalist socialism.

Notice surprised Klein after Sanders shot down the open borders proposal:

Ezra Klein: Really?

  

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …

I am not sure that one could call the elimination of national borders "right-wing." Center right politics is committed to national as well as individual liberty. The question of economic controls, the role of t the state versus the individual on domestic matters better defines the right-left dynamic.

There are national socialists, and there are national free enterprise advocates ... like Donald Trump and to another extent Patrick Buchanan.

Let's remember that Hillary Clinton shared her private position with well-established bankers and financiers that she wanted a hemisphere wide global market in which goods, services, and laborers would move freely throughout North and South America. She was promising open borders once she became President, and never once did she quality or explain her stance as a "progressive who gets things done" ... for Wall Street.

Ezra Klein: But it would make …

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me …

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.

Exactly! The answer to the world's problems is not an open border. Numbers USA provides a compelling visual aid/lecture using gumballs to show that one nation taking in 1 million or even 5 million immigrants a year cannot alleviate the world poverty which has overwhelmed the Third World. In fact, free market reforms and the implementation of a stable legal culture allows for growth, opportunity, prosperity, and enterprise bring men and women out of abject dearth into ample wealth.

Good for Bernie! But you can almost hear Ezra’s sudden realization that he’s talking to a reactionary old fool! 

The Revolution is devouring itself.

What's worse is that Sanders sold out the working class by endorsing Crooked Hillary and embracing all the "DREAM Act" talk, along with bringing in lots of refugees.

What a shame. He could have been a contender. He could have been somebody. Many of the younger Berniecrats whom I spoke to told me that they ended up supporting Donald Trump because of the immigration issue. They wanted an end to the open-borders agenda of the Democratic Party which made a total mockery of their parents' or their grandparents' efforts to enter the United States legally.

What you have here, I think, is a perfect encapsulation of the old and the new left. Sanders has never had a problem with the nation-state; it is, after all, the foundation for any functioning democracy, and a democratic politician will always put the citizens of his country first. His ideal left-liberal countries — the Nordic ones — are strong nation-states with, until very recently, homogeneous populations. 

White lives matter, just as all other lives matter, including black ones. All nations matter, including nations that happen to be majority white. There is nothing wrong with any of this. The white guilt crap has got to stop. 

But Ezra really does seem to have an issue — philosophically and morally — with the nation-state. Social justice doesn’t end at the border, after all. And if the goal of the left is universal equality, on what grounds does it not extend to everyone on the planet? Which is to say: why do we have borders at all? Why do we draw any distinction between the citizen and the non-citizen?

Communism doesn't end at the border, and cultural Marxism has been all about pushing open borders and a classless society in which everyone is "equal" -- of course, that term "equal" doesn't have equal meanings among different factions of humanity.

Cue "Animal Farm", and some animals end up being more equal than others.

This, it seems to me, is what impedes the Democrats from taking a strong line on illegal immigration. Many of them don’t have the slightest problem with it, and some even believe it is a moral necessity. A wealthy country cannot ethically keep its wealth to itself, they believe. And this is even truer when such a country is largely white and those outside it overwhelmingly nonwhite. Borders, in this worldview, are inherently racist. So how exactly does a good liberal favor enforcing them? He doesn’t. He just pretends to.

The Democrats have no problem with illegal immigration because it's a political necessity, not (just) a moral one. They need the votes. The more that people of every color and background see what the Democratic Party has become, they are walking away in droves.

Final Reflection

Immigration is the hottest issue across the country. It has united interesting coalition of left-leaning and right-lining voters back to a national vision which rejects the secular, leftist globalist hatred of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Interestingly enough, this is a movement which is bringing more young people right of center. Borders are necessary, public safety is a reality, and with it comes a growing recognition of scarcity, limitations, and the frustrating vagaries of arbitrary power.

Suddenly, big government does not seem like such a great idea anymore. Socialism is OK when it doesn't cost the individual adherent. When my property, my rights, my identity suffers infringement, then socialism turns into a big, fat turnoff.

And that is why Bernie Sanders is having a harder time coalescing support for a 2020 bid, and why the left is easing itself from the inside out. The fantasy and the reality are too far apart to be justified to the minds of prospective voters.