Always Next Time

 There is a recurrent irony in history whereby politicians and their parties often seem to end up fulfilling the exact opposite of what they came into office purporting to stand for: it was the hawkish Nixon who famously went to China, for instance; it was largely a series of center-right conservative governments in postwar Western Europe that created the modern welfare state; and so on. 

And if the effect can work in this beneficent direction—whereby right-wingers sometimes surprise us by gaining the credibility to enact policies that would be distrusted and resented in the hands of the left—it can also go the opposite way as well. It was a Democratic president who famously signed into law acts gutting welfare and expanding the death penalty, for instance (albeit ones first passed by a hard-right Congress).

We seem now to be trapped in a similar political cycle with respect to immigration. Democrats run on a pledge each election year to end the cruel policies of their Republican predecessors; but they end up consummating them. 

Barack Obama was a pro-immigrant candidate who emptied the Bush-era family detention centers once he took office; yet a few years later, he had deported more people than any president in modern history and restored and expanded the use of family detention far beyond anything the Bush administration had contemplated. 

So too, Joe Biden ran promising relief from the cruelty of the Trump presidency; pledging to "restore the country's values as a nation of immigrants." A few years later, he has expanded Trump's anti-asylum Title 42 program, promulgated a regulation dismantling many current asylum protections—and is now reportedly considering restoring the family detention policy yet again.

"I come not to abolish far-right policies and their pundits, but to fulfill them!" should be the motto emblazoned over the head of every Democratic administration. 

If all of this is dismaying to watch, time and again, at least we know it is not unprecedented. In a footnote in his justly-beloved novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles calls our attention to the fact that the last great Reform of the 19th century franchise in Britain—the one that made universal male suffrage a reality—was accomplished by the Conservatives and opposed by the Liberals. 

Fowles's book is written in virtuoso imitation of the Victorian novelistic voice, complete with omniscient narrator and a sense for dramatic irony. Yet it is also a self-consciously modern novel that looks back on its Victorian characters from the perspective of 1969, commenting on both their follies and our own (though we are of course now almost as far from that date as Fowles was from the Victorians). 

Because of its intentional pose of looking backward, Fowles will periodically surprise us, in the midst of his pitch-perfect Victorian narration, with a stray reference to the Gestapo, say, that catches us up short, and reminds us of the gulf that separates us from his characters. These modern references also, however, allow us to see ourselves distantly reflected—if distorted—in the past. 

The way in which politicians betray themselves and their supposed principles is only one of these instances, where a Victorian example suddenly seems all-too reminiscent of the present day. To expound the irony of the fact that the conservative Disraeli achieved universal suffrage, while the liberal Gladstone opposed it, Fowles introduces an apt quotation from Karl Marx, who was then writing his series of journalistic articles for the New York Daily Tribune: 

The English Liberals, wrote Marx—as quoted in Fowles—"represent something quite different from their professed liberal and enlightened principles. Thus they are in the same position as the drunkard brought up before the Lord Mayor, who declared that he represented the Temperance principle, but from some accident or other always got drunk on Sundays."

"The type"—Fowles goes on to editorialize—"is not extinct."

And indeed, the type is no more extinct now in 2023 than it was in 1969. Our politicians are still like the penitent who keeps promising to reform, yet always seems somehow to avoid doing so. "This time," the Democrats tell us before each presidential election, "we're really going to make good on our promises. I know we ended up detaining families last time, but it won't happen again!"

But then—circumstances intervene. "[S]ome accident or other" prevents them. "Yes, we do still eventually plan to be more humane than Trump. But first we just need to get this crisis at the border under control!" And so it amounts in the end to saying that they do still intend to restore asylum, but only so long as there is no one arriving at the border to make use of it. They want pro-immigration policies, but only so long as they don't involve actual immigrants. 

They are very much, then, the English Liberals Marx described—next time, we will live up to our principles! Always next time. And next time never seems to arrive. 

What does it all tell us? What does it amount to? Perhaps that an enlightened conservatism, which reforms in order to preserve, is as good or better than an explicit liberalism that quails before actually consummating any of its goals. That what we should ultimately value in politics is results over rhetoric. This certainly at least is one lesson of the 19th century Disraeli-Gladstone divide. 

But if glean this lesson we must, let the accent in the last paragraph be placed on the word "enlightened." For history is even more full of people who promised to do evil things and then actually did them (viz. Trump or Newt Gingrich). The irony we have been describing above—the "Nixon in China" effect—plainly does not operate as a sort of magic mirror that transforms people into their opposites, once they assume office. 

Sometimes, to the contrary, people (alas!) prove to be exactly what they promise to be.