Steve King ingests the poison of nationalist ideology

Members of Congress — King included — frequently say kooky things that make us laugh. This isn’t a case of that. Nor is it the typical case of leftists absurdly arguing that all conservative positions (low taxes, limited government, pro-life, right-to-work) are inherently racist. This is something more troubling that deserves to be taken seriously.

As if to underscore that point, David Duke followed up with praise for what King said. This morning, King followed up with interview in which he doubled down on his position.

King was once a standard-issue pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax conservative who happened to be (as many of them are) hawkish on enforcing U.S. immigration law. He was talking about a border wall more than a decade ago. In 2006, he built a somewhat elaborate model of one on the House floor. His unfortunate comment about running a non-lethal electrical current through the wire on top (“we do this with livestock all the time”) got the most attention. But what’s more important here is that his argument at that time on immigration was a practical one, fundamentally different from the one he is now borrowing from European nationalists.

At that time, after building his model modular wall on the House floor, he remarked of it, “If somehow they got their economy working and got their laws working in Mexico, we could pull this out just as easy as we could put it in.” Whatever other controversy arose from what he said, he spoke then of immigration as something that is inherently good, but only if lawful and measured.

What he is saying now — that “somebody else’s babies” cannot “restore our civilization” — is subtly but completely different. It is an argument against outsiders, full stop, on the grounds that they are culturally different. This line of argument doesn’t depend on whether they enter the U.S. under color of law. It makes his often-stated preoccupation with legality in immigration seem insincere. Is the problem illegality, or is it immigrants?

King has changed subtly in the last several years, and this tweet is not the first demonstration of that. In late 2015, he said that Muslim immigrants and refugees were inherently incapable, on aggregate, of assimilating as Americans. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, he gave an interview on MSNBC, offering the following as a defense of the fact that the attendees were predominantly white:

“I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

Over time, King seems to have moved away from the Reagan view of legal immigration as a positive good, and toward a blood-and-soil nationalism that views the admission of outsiders as an inherent threat. This comment about “other people’s babies” is just the latest example of this. If Republicans let themselves be carried in this European direction, they will not only be punished politically, they will also be untrue to the nation’s founding.

In The Federalist No. 2, John Jay did make an argument about race, religion and culture, but not the one that King appears to be making. He argued that, given that all 13 colonies shared the same the common English heritage, language, and religion at that time, it would be absurd for them to form 13 separate neighboring nations, as though they were strangers to one another:

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

But nowhere here is any argument for the exclusion of outsiders from the nation he was helping found. And in practice, newcomers were welcomed in an early America that suffered from chronic labor shortages. The Founding Fathers, for all their unfortunate willingness to overlook slavery for the sake of union at that time, were specifically cognizant of religious freedom, to the point that they put it first in the Bill of Rights, swearing off the idea of any official American religion or denomination.

George Washington himself famously expressed these sentiments to the Jews of Newport. Roman Catholics, who before the Revolution had been barred from voting or holding public office under English law since 1689, participated in the founding and were newly emancipated afterward.

At least one Republican Congressman — the son of Cuban exiles — has taken umbrage at King’s remarks.

I certainly hope he doesn’t end up being alone. This whole line of thinking is itself alien to our (small-r) republican ideas and our Constitution, not just to conservatism. At the very least, it flatly contradicts the ideas of religious freedom that King elsewhere claims to espouse.

Even if Europe is in the throes of a revitalization of nationalist ideology (I suspect the coming Dutch and French elections will prove otherwise), Republicans must not allow this sort of thinking to taint their commitment to a Constitution to which such ideologies are truly alien.