Chaos created by President Joe Biden’s utter refusal to stop illegal migration across the Mexican border is crucial in understanding how he boosts former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primary, and how Trump will in turn probably help Biden get reelected.
Border Patrol intercepted a record 3.2 million aliens at the frontier in 2023, half a million more than in 2022 and double 2019’s influx.
Biden’s response is to dicker around trying to finesse the issue by suckering Mexico and Republicans into helping him so he can deflect blame from the Left, which doesn’t want the inflow cut, and from the Right, which knows the maneuvers are cosmetic, give rein to a capricious, law-flouting president, and will do nothing to mend the practical and philosophical catastrophe he has created.
It is philosophical because it delineates an abysmal split in our society, which is replicated across the developed West. On one side are those who regard the nation-state as a racist, colonialist anachronism, evil in theory and retrograde in practice. They want multilateral government to override the supposedly parochial and bigoted priorities of citizens, to dismantle borders, and to upend the success of the developed nations, at least insofar as it benefits their creators. On the other side are people who see the nation-state, a piece of land governed by laws and customs decided by its citizens, as the only hope for democracy and peaceful coexistence in a common culture.
Biden, Democrats, the international Left, and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and European Union are in the first camp. They are working to expunge the nation-state, disapproving of the origins and customs of successful, historically white nations. They want these superseded fast by radically egalitarian dispensations in which no hierarchy is allowed.
Trump, even with the manifest faults that make him unsuitable to be president, taps into the alarm and hostility ordinary people feel toward this post-national nightmare. They want their own country, not a multicultural morass, and they seize on him as the doughtiest fighter against the dissolution of the nation. That is why his slogan, “Make America Great Again,” resonates so powerfully.
Too many of them don’t realize they don’t need him. The rise of the Tea Party and then of Trump changed the Republican Party permanently. Every Republican candidate now is firmly on the side of the nation-state against multicultural collapse. Republicans don’t need Trump’s nationalism, and would be foolhardy to choose him, because all the other nationalist choices come without his appalling baggage. They would beat Biden more handily than Trump would.
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That’s why Biden and the Democrats want to run against him. They know he is probably the only candidate so unappealing that he alienates enough voters to return the hapless incumbent to the White House. Thus, Biden has much to gain by stoking illegal immigration, which scares angry nation-staters almost atavistically into Trump’s arms.
It is breathtakingly cynical, it displays a damnable indifference toward the idea of America and its future, and it appears to be working. The New Hampshire primary may be the last chance for Republicans to avoid making a choice that makes another four years of Biden’s misgovernance more likely.
