Those who insist on governing us have spent decades shaking and shaking the world's largest can of carbonated Coke, and now they expect it somehow not to explode....
A friend of American Thinker, understandably upset about the unraveling of America around us, reached out with a heartfelt question: how did we as a society come to behave so acrimoniously toward one another?
The two words that stood out to me while turning this question over in my mind were "we" and "society." Who "we" are as Americans has changed radically over the last half-century, and during that time, the political sphere in America has eaten away and destroyed the independence of the civic sphere we traditionally call "society."
Consider these facts:
1. Before Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, nine tenths of all new immigrants to America came from Europe; after the act's passage, nine tenths of new immigrants have come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
2. Since the 1965 Act's passage, over sixty million new immigrants have arrived in the United States, and over a hundred million more are expected over the next half century.
3. In 1970, 4.7% of the American population was born outside of the United States; in 2017, 13.7% of the national population was born in a foreign country.
These are obviously transformative demographic shifts. In an open society unafraid of debate, we would weigh the benefits of these changes against the dangers they present to national cohesion and stability. Instead, and no doubt because Kennedy's immigration law has done more to stave off death for the Democratic Party than any other variable over the last half-century, America's political and business elites have weaponized censorship and political correctness to portray even the mentioning of unchecked immigration's harms as something taboo.
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