Left-wing agitprop guru Saul Alinsky advised, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” He may not have foreseen that his tactics are usable by all sides.
The governors of Texas and Florida have dipped into the Alinsky playbook by asking soi disant “sanctuary cities” to live up to their declarations of solidarity with “undocumented Americans”. As you may have heard, that too, too solid empathy has melted, thawed and resolved itself into a dew when confronted in fact rather than fancy with even small numbers of the undocumented. Noah Rothman, who passes the very high bar of being one of the best writers at Commentary, has written an excellent summary of the situation, from which I extract the concluding three paragraphs:
Now, in dealing with some small measure of what these border states have been going through, Democratic officials are making all the GOP’s arguments for them. The flood of illegal migrants has overwhelmed emergency and social services. It has destabilized communities, displaced local labor, and undermined public safety. And quite unlike their Republican counterparts, the Democrats’ seething reaction is generating a level of national media attention that the GOP’s immigration hawks could never achieve.
In the Founders’ vision, the states were the laboratories of democracy. They are supposed to experiment with different models of social organization. But experimentation involves risk and, sometimes, failure. If the sanctuary city model fails in response to the modest pressure Republicans have applied to it, the sanctuary city model was never sustainable in the first place.
Republican governors have managed to draft their opponents into their effort to popularize the burdens illegal migration imposes on border states. And they’ve done so evidently without inflicting any hardship on the migrants themselves, beyond those that already accompany illegal residency. Liberals’ discomfort over this is a consequence of their own policy preferences. There are many players in this drama who deserve our sympathy, but the sanctuary cities that now must live up to their rhetoric are not among them.
Now go read the rest.
Further reading: Paul du Quenoy, “Martha’s Vineyard and the fraud of the rich white liberal”
Paul Mirengoff, “One man’s political theater is another man’s poetic justice”
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