“To the victor belong the spoils” is a proverbial phrase coined in 1828 by the American politician William L. Marcy.
What he forgot to add was that the victors are guaranteed to squabble over the spoils, especially those dealing with ideology.
If you wish to disagree with this observation, I suggest you remind yourself of what happened to the men who perpetrated both the French and Russian revolutions.
Most of them were eventually slaughtered by their erstwhile comrades who disagreed with them on fine doctrinal points. None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, as I always say.
The conflict brewing within the MAGA ranks is just as heated, although I expect it to be less sanguinary. The bone of contention is the H-1B programme that allows US companies to hire foreign workers who possess high skills not easily found in the native population.
The programme is championed by Vivek Ramaswamy who strikes me as the most level-headed member of the MAGA brass. Because Ramaswamy saw the rational benefits of the programme, he came out in its favour even though he knew he’d be touching a sensitive nerve.
Touching? Jangling, is more like it.
All ideologies demand purity above rationality, and they are extremely sensitive to the slightest hints at heresy, never mind apostasy. MAGA is no different in this respect.
At issue here is mass immigration, curbing of which happens to be one of the central planks of MAGA ideology. Generally speaking, that’s a good idea. Alas, many a good idea turns into its opposite when pushed to a ridiculous extreme (reductio ad absurdum is the egghead term for that process).
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation),” wrote Ramaswamy.
“A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”
Unfortunately, Ramaswamy then reduced cultural differences to the preference of some TV shows over others, thereby unwittingly illustrating the problem. He also added that America should return to the culture of “unbridled exceptionalism”. Surely he meant ‘excellence’? American exceptionalism is the jingoistic ideology of deifying the country, which is bad political philosophy and even worse theology.
Such quibbles apart, the point Ramaswamy made was serious, and it demanded a serious response. That, however, wasn’t the response he got. What he got was an outburst of spittle-sputtering ideological fervour, which always comes packaged with ignorant and often idiotic rejoinders.
One such came from the blogger Mike Cernovich, who can sputter spittle at a faster rate than most people. Ramaswamy, he wrote, sells short America’s talent for innovation: “The Woodstock generation managed to build our aerospace, the one before went to the moon.”
Quite. But those two true-blue generations received a mighty hand from Werner von Braun and his team, transported in its entirety from Peenemünden to the Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama.
When I worked at NASA, I visited the Centre in 1974 and marvelled at the continuing preponderance of German accents there, 29 years after the war ended. Photographs on the wall showing Braun in his Nazi uniform splendour also left little doubt about the provenance of the American space programme.
Thankfully, German nuclear scientists narrowly missed out on creating the atom bomb. But those great physicists the Nazis ran out of Europe were largely responsible for the Manhattan Project.
Off the top, one recalls such key figures as Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Behe, John von Neumann – not to mention Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, who shouldn’t be mentioned because they turned out to be Soviet spies.
Nor was it just physics. Emigré chemists, such as Otto Meyerhof (Nobel Prize 1922), Otto Stern (Nobel Prize 1943), Otto Loewi (Nobel Prize 1936), Max Bergmann, Carl Neuberg, Kasimir Fajans “soon effected hardly less than a revolution,” writes the conservative think tank CATO Institute. “Their work … almost immediately propelled the United States to world leadership in the chemistry of life.”
Although the H-1B programme didn’t exist at the time, its precursive spirit was wafting through America, blowing into those shores such immigrants as Igor Sikorsky, Nikola Tesla, Vladimir Zworykin – and more recently even Elon Musk. By and large, they’ve all done America proud, although I’m not yet convinced about Musk.
Nikki Haley, who had previously steered clear of MAGA affiliation, took exception to Ramaswamy too. In doing so, she showed a keen nose for the direction in which the wind is blowing and also a talent for the requisite demagoguery.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” fumed Haley. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
This reminds me of a Chekhov story in which two officers argue whether or not Pushkin was a great psychologist. “If he wasn’t,” went the clinching argument, “they wouldn’t have erected his statue in the centre of Moscow.”
Nikki should look up non sequitur and see how it applies to her statement. Unless all those huddled masses yearning to get American social benefits are mostly made up of potential Nobel laureates, her argument missed the point by a light year, not just a mile.
MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec saw an oxymoron where none existed. America, he wrote, should nurture domestic talent rather than admitting those brainy foreigners. He seems to think that the presence of a few thousand émigré scientists would preclude the development of native talents, rather than having the opposite effect, as it always has done.
“Imagine how many more J.D. Vances are out there,” Posobiec argued, leaving his readers to wonder whether that argument was pro or con.
Other arguments referred to the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which to me isn’t so much a theory as a mathematical fact. If immigrants arrive and multiply faster than the native population can keep up with, they’ll eventually replace this population.
This is worth talking about, and I for one don’t see that simple calculation as a conspiracy theory. Not being an expert in demographics, however, I’m not sure of my footing when the calculations become less simple, as eventually they must.
What I am sure about is that, again, this has nothing to do with the problem at hand. Those Manhattan Project scientists initiated no great replacement, and these are the kind of numbers Ramaswamy was talking about. Perhaps a few thousand, not a few dozen, but even that wouldn’t create an objectionable demographic shift.
A rational curb on immigration isn’t only desirable but essential. Yet the moment ideology comes in, rational walks out. Any country can only protect its sovereignty by controlling the influx of immigration and deciding who should and who shouldn’t be admitted. That’s basic.
But throwing out the baby of top foreign talent with the bathwater of those millions of people fording the Rio Grande isn’t rational. It’s ideological and therefore stupid.
It’s experts who should decide who can qualify for the H-1B programme, not loudmouthed political ideologues. If such experts conclude that this or that top scientist or engineer can make America more competitive, then turning him away at the door is foolish.
But the adjective ‘top’ is naturally restrictive. People who qualify for it can’t be too numerous by definition, meaning that ideally they shouldn’t even be part of this conversation.
Alas, since we don’t live in an ideal world, the H-1B programme has a potential for corruption, and that must be rooted out. But that’s a different story, one that has nothing to do with the programme’s intrinsic merits.
Trump hasn’t joined the battle yet, although in his first term he made cuts to the programme. However, the president-elect has been known to change his views, as I hope he will in this case.