Chris Bertram

One of the things that’s becoming clear is the determination of the Trump administration to divide humans living in the United States into two groups (to whom Wilhoit’s Law applies), citizens and immigrants. Actually it is a bit more complicated than that, because some of the legal citizens are, in reality, at best some sort of semi-citizen,¹ but let’s keep things simple for now. What I want to focus on is how incompatible this is with the notion of a free society, indeed with a free society even as those on the political right have historically seen it.

The Trumpists think they have a discretionary right to deport immigrants for wrongthink and wrongspeech, for taking part in a pro-Palestine demonstration, but also for writing a newspaper article, making a social media post, sharing a social media post, even liking one. They think that such people have no right not to be snatched off the street by goon squads. And they think that when immigrants face deportation for wrongthink they should have no right to contest the decisions made about them. The US courts may yet disagree with the Trumpists about these matters, but we’ll see.

Immigrants are people. Sorry for insisting on a truism, but I say it not just to argue that they have rights as humans, but also to make a point about their behaviour. US citizens are people too. And as people do, individuals in these two groups will barter and truck, fuck, form romantic ties, break bread, get drunk together, study together, worship together, share and dispute ideals, like and dislike books, operas, tv shows. Et cetera. You can’t monitor and control the activities of the individuals in one of these groups without monitoring and controlling the activities of the people in the other group who are in millions of cases the counterparties to their transactions and attachments.²

One of the marks of a free society, at least as many liberals and conservatives have insisted, is that it is composed of smaller societies through which much of its life is conducted.³ Associations, clubs, universities, schools, families, and so forth. Those societies have a life of their own and the wider society of which they form a part loses its own freedom and vitality when the state subordinates their inner life to its own purposes. Not that all such regulation is bad: some is necessary for justice and equality and even child protection (cf Brighouse and Swift)⁴. But overdo it and you create not a free society but a totalitarian one. Though immigrants may not be full legal and political members of the big society, they are often full and equal participants in the smaller ones and, as such, they need to be able to argue, express, consent, dissent, voice and exit just as the other members do. The smaller societies can’t function properly if they are composed of some people with rights and some people without them. Every member needs to hear what other members say and when some people can’t express themselves for fear of the consequences that not only destroys the inner life of society but also leaves individuals open to blackmail and exploitation.

As the United States slides into totalitarianism, there’s not much that anyone can say in a blog post that will prevent the worst. But if it is, at least, to stand as a warning to other societies that want to retain such freedom as they have, then we had better notice that the casual assumption that a neat quasi-natural divide can be drawn between citizens and immigrants isn’t limited to the US, it is the routine unthinking blather of politicians in Europe and elswhere, and not just on the extreme right. And if and when the bad times come and the immigrants get targeted, that will harm not just the direct objects of xenophobic policies but also all of the individuals who live lives entwined with theirs, some of whom will doubtless find their own status reclassified.

At the cutting edge of world history and industrial progress back when it was built in 1799, but now Ironbridge and nearby Coalbrookdale are bucolic backwaters where you struggle to get a decent phone signal.

I’ve not been out taking pictures, so here’s another cormorant from the sequence I shot a few days ago.

The UK has recently introduced (via “guidance” rather than legislation) a permanent ban on naturalisation for people who arrive in the UK via “dangerous journeys”. The power used to block their applications is the Home Secretary’s discretion to refuse citizenship to someone of “bad character”. This new policy seemingly conflicts with the UK’s commitments under the Refugee Convention. I’ve a short piece on this at the London Review of Books blog.

One of my Sunday routines is usually to post a photo here. Sometimes that’s easy, since I’ve taken something in the past few days, and sometimes that involves trawling through my archive to select something, sometimes from years ago. One problem with that is that there are just so many photos, and it is hard to keep track of everything I’ve posted here in order to avoid duplicates. It would be easier if I had enough discipline to put each photo selected in my Sunday Photoblogging album at Flickr, but I can neglect doing that for weeks, months, and even years at a time. So I’ve spent much of today going through Crooked Timber and making sure that all those photos are in that album. Well, it turns out there are 467 of them, which is an awful lot of Sundays. Quite an instructive exercise for me: there are some I like a lot, and others where I wonder why I selected it at all. There are influences I can detect such as Kertesz, Leiter, Gruyaert (not that I’m fit to be mentioned in the same sentence) but also E. Chambré Hardman, who use of natural frames I’ve often copied. Anyway: here’s the complete set, assuming I haven’t missed any out, which I probably have.

At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, lots of leisure time and paid holidays, universal healthcare generous maternity provision, inclusion for people with disabilities, free education and universal childcare, freedom to form a relationship and maybe a family with the person of your choice (straight or gay), a woman’s right to choose, tolerance of everyone regardless of faith or race, political freedom and democratic elections under fair conditions, concern for the natural environment and so on. A vision of prosperity for all, even if some degree of inequality might be tolerated to provide incentives and so forth. This wasn’t particularly an ideal limited to the left (in fact parts of the left would have rejected it for something more robustly socialist) but could have been embraced, in its rough outlines, by everyone from the centre-left to people on the centre right such as, for example, Simone Veil.

Some parts of this radiant future even got built, to varying degrees, across parts of Europe other than Scandinavia, in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand. A realistic utopia, in fact.

But

Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.¹

Nobody currently thinks our future looks like Universal Scandinavia – and even in places where social democratic parties are in power, such as the UK – nobody thinks that they will advance even the tiniest step towards it. Rather, the likelihood is that even they will retreat. "Nice idea, but unaffordable."

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