The Websterians

 Look, I'm obviously enough of a Democratic Establishment type that I'm voting for Kamala Harris in this election. I've donated to her campaign as well. My mind never required making up on any of that. I was on team "unite the left in a popular front to defeat Trump" as far back as 2016. And certainly nothing that has happened since then would convince me I was wrong about that. 

But I'm not such a Democratic Party hack that I would withhold all criticism of Harris's policy positions until after the election. I recognize this is somewhat in tension with what I said just yesterday. In that post, I argued that the shameless Harris stans on social media should keep the brat summer magic going for at least a few weeks more. So maybe I'm contradicting myself here...

But no part of my conscience can allow me to remain silent when I hear Bill Clinton get up before an audience and use Trump-style arguments to defend a border bill that would slash asylum access. It's bad enough that Harris has made a point of boosting this mean-spirited legislation at every opportunity. At least, one could generally say, her rhetoric on the issue was better. 

But Bill Clinton last week, in an appearance as a Harris surrogate, did not stop even at that limited moral boundary. Rather, he drew from the well of Trump-style racist talking points—falsely linking asylum to crime. Referring to the horrific murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, Clinton argued that the murder never would have taken place, if the Harris-backed anti-asylum bill had been law. 

It's easy to see why politicians would be tempted to use this rhetoric. It underlines Trump's hypocrisy on one of his signature issues; and it deploys one of his own chief weapons—incendiary racist arguments about crime and immigration—against him. Plus, it's Bill Clinton. It wouldn't be the first time he had stooped to morally dubious tactics to present himself as "tough on crime." 

But the obvious expediency of invoking the arguments doesn't make them morally defensible. In the real world, after all, murder is a crime regardless of a person's immigration status. People deserve to be judged on their actions, not "guilt by association" due to nationality. And besides, no statistical evidence has ever linked asylum-seekers to higher crime rates: quite the opposite, in fact. 

There are a lot of people (I've encountered them in comment threats on my social media posts) who say: yes, we know all this is shameless. We know it's opportunistic. But look at the alternative! You can't deny that asylum and immigration have become politically toxic in this country. If we don't do something to curb both, the backlash will lead to actual outright fascism. 

A particularly annoying article in this vein came from Nick Kristof this summer. He argued Biden was right to restrict asylum, because immigration is actually bad for low-wage workers (many economists would disagree). He also suggested it is best to have Biden and the Democrats roll back asylum in a gradual and "reasonable" way—if the alternative is to have Trump do it violently. 

But, is it really not possible to say—I pick neither option, please? If anyone should be out there defending asylum on moral grounds, after all, it's Kristof. Hasn't he written endless pieces about refugee crises in the developing world? I guess, like so many, he can sympathize with refugees at other people's border, but when it's at our own borders, he says: "eh, they're faking it. They're not really in need." 

I can't see this kind of thing as anything other than cheap hypocrisy. And I have to condemn it as such, even if I see full well the strength of the electoral arguments—even as I understand the incredibly high stakes of this election. Maybe politicians need to compromise in order to avoid the worst. But let the politicians make those choices. I, for one, have never pretended to be a politician. 

There is of course an argument for pragmatism, and the need for compromise. Those who plead for it sometimes invoke the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, which they contrast with the more radical Republicanism of politicians like Thaddeus Stevens. But, there is a pre–Civil War analogy that comes to mind too—and which is far less favorable to the "pragmatic" side of the debate. 

In Henry Adams's classic memoir, he talks at length about the two sects that divided New England politics in the years before the Civil War (when he was a child and young man). On one side, were the Charles Sumner types. They were convinced and thoroughgoing abolitionists, who would brook no compromise or half-measures when it came to the Slave Power.

Adams and his storied family were clearly in this camp. And even though Adams writes about their inveterate earnestness on this issue with a certain amount of irony and distance—it is nonetheless an irony clearly tinged with affection. Despite his gently mockery of the Adamses (including himself), he nonetheless still finds something admirable in their moral puritanism. 

Contrasting with them were the party of Daniel Webster, the great Senator from Massachusetts. The Websterians were all ostensibly still anti-slavery at heart—in their long-term goals (just as Kristof claims to still have "pro-refugee instincts," despite endorsing Biden's asylum ban). But they saw the Compromise of 1850 as necessary to forestall still worse outcomes. 

For this reason, the Websterians backed the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the forced return of people escaping captivity in the South to the hands of their enslavers. This measure, they thought, may have been morally abhorrent; but it was a necessary sop to the South to prevent war (just as many Democrats plead today for banning asylum as a necessary sop to the Trumpian Right). 

In hindsight, of course, the Compromise didn't ultimately prevent war; all it did was return a lot of people to inhuman conditions. And obviously, there's no moral equivalency between the Fugitive Slave Act and the asylum ban of today. To say there was would be obscene. But the comparison between the two is also not entirely irrelevant, for all that. 

After all, the asylum ban—just like the Fugitive Slave Act—forcibly returns people who have escaped persecution to the hands of their tormentors. Indeed, some of the people seeking asylum today are literally fleeing slavery. Black people in Mauritania, for instance, still face a system of hereditary racial enslavement. Eritreans are often fleeing forced military conscription. And so on. 

Henry Adams, describing the Massachusetts political controversy of his youth, describes the moment when he confronted the full horror of the Fugitive Slave Act. What made it so appalling was the betrayal involved in seeing his own Massachusetts—that great free state and hotbed of abolitionist sentiment—become a party to the enforcement of an evil institution. 

"Worst of all," he writes in one passage, in The Education of Henry Adams, "[...] the sight of Court Square packed with bayonets, and his own friends obliged to line the streets under arms as State militia, in order to return a negro to slavery." The sight "wrought frenzy in the brain," he recalls, "of a fifteen-year-old eighteenth-century boy from Quincy." So it is with me. 

I can't bring myself to be a Webesterian any more than the fifteen-year-old Henry Adams could. I may vote for the Democrats. I may wish desperately, with every fiber of me that hopes for a livable future in this country, for them to prevail against Trump. But I can't join the Kristof brigade in therefore acquiescing to policies that would deport people to death or slavery. 

I would rather side with Sumner. I would rather side with the Adamses. I would rather side with John Greenleaf Whittier, who wrote of Daniel Webster, after he made his notorious Compromise, and betrayed his own free soil—"so fallen, so lost!" That is the only way I can regard Democrats who came to office promising humanity—and ended their term by deporting people to death. "So fallen!"

I'll still vote for someone fallen. In an election where Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun were both running for president, I would have cast my ballot for the former without a second thought. And that's plainly the position we are in as a nation today. But I will not hold back my condemnation of the compromises they make along the way, or the injustices they commit. 

You will never enroll me in the ranks of the Websterians! No Ichabod I. As Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote in a poem—"I will not tell [Death] where/ the black boy hides in the swamp. [...] Am I a spy in the land of the living,/ that I should deliver men to Death?/ Brother, the password and the plans of our city/ are safe with me; never through me/ Shall you be overcome."