Son of Son of Proposition Nation

Over at VFR Auster has a nice post up rebuking the neocons for reducing the United States to a nation operating under the "rule of law."

LA writes:

The examples should make it clear that the rule of law, by itself, does not define what we are substantively as a people, a country, a way of life. Anyone who reduces America, or any Western country, to "the rule of law" and other such abstract phrases, is a liberal who has shown him incapable of defending our actual civilization from the mortal threats that encompass it.

Jake Jacobson comments to the article:

Points all very well made!

A further thought. Our focus is on illegal immigration and we have dealt extensively with the Minutemen. They are infamous for all but chanting this phrase at demos, so I have challenged some of them asking them "but what if they changed the law and passed amnesty?" Would you then respect the law?

"The Law" such as it is is by nature a malleable and political thing and it can change, which is why it is dangerous to invoke it in this way. Also, I genuinely believe this is a big part of why our elite class were so puzzled by the freak-out average Americans threw during the last several amnesty debacles. I really think they were sitting around sipping their soy lattes and saying "Right, right, so we'll change the law, what's the problem?"

The problem is that what we and they call "the rule of law" is a shared understanding, an unspoken covenant that appears to be breaking down like most everything else as industrial strength liberal solvent is applied, well, liberally!

Mr. Jacobson's comments got me thinking. Specifically, there is a tendency of right-liberals to oppose illegal immigration because, well, it's illegal ... duh! Right-liberals are admittedly all for legal immigration. In fact, they seem to be pretty proud of it. So using Mr. Jacobson's line of reasoning, one might ask whether right-liberals would care about immigration at all if the terms and conditions were changed to reduce and finally eliminate illegal immigration, in accordance with the liberal "gospel" of non-discriminationism?

If America is a nation which operates under the rule of law as the neocons say, and every law, and thus every nation operating under the rule of law, must have a "higher principle" as its basis, and if non-discriminationism is the "higher principle" which determines America's laws, then doesn't it stand to reason that it is the illegality of illegal immigration which is the chief cause of all the trouble? What's the solution then? Is it not, in conformity to the rule of law and the higher liberal principle governing it, to de-illegalize illegal immigration?

It seems to me that the grandson of the Proposition Nation may well be opposition to, and only to, illegal immigration.