ONLY IN AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

I used to love the Dilbert comic strip.  At his best, Scott Adams perfectly captured the absurdities of late 20th century office culture, the bafflegab and the eternal quest for new planning techniques that were abandoned one after the other.  I stopped paying attention to Dilbert around the turn of the century, and didn’t think much about Adams at all until 2016, when the presidential election surfaced his political views.  At some point, while I wasn’t looking, Adams had turned into a men’s rights cheerleader and a Trump supporter. 

When my disappointment subsided, I went back to ignoring him.  Until last week, when someone reposted an Adams tweet.  It was boilerplate Republican agitprop, framed with Adams’ characteristic tone of smug certainty.  But the thing is, the talking points are really dumb – nothing more than Fox & Friends level bluster.  And since I haven’t seen anyone on the Left respond to this particular piece of propaganda, I thought I’d give it a go. 

Here is the full text of the tweet.  Adams wrote, “Three things to know: 1. If you can't control your borders, you don't have a country. 2. If there is no transparency on social media algorithms, you don't have a democracy. 3. If half of congress is focused on impeachment for political reasons, you don't have a government.”

What you have to understand about Scott Adams is that he’s always the smartest guy in the room.  He knows things.  He presents his opinions as simple facts.  We’re supposed to believe him because he’s smarter than we are.  Our job is to listen and learn. 

The first thing he wants us to take on faith is that “If you can’t control your borders, you don’t have a country.”  This has become the go-to mantra for Donald Trump’s Wall fetishists.  But it’s absurd on its face. 

The United States has been a country for over 200 years, and for most of the first half of our existence, our borders were constantly in flux.  After all, we had a manifest destiny to fulfill, and it required us to expand our borders at the expense of everyone else’s – Mexico’s border as well as indigenous territorial boundaries. 

In the process, we made some choices that continue to reverberate through contemporary politics.  For instance, in 1854, we did the Gadsden Purchase thing.  We said, in effect, “Oh, hi there, former citizens of northern Mexico.  Your new benevolent overlords welcome you to America.  We bought you, or at least the land you live on, for $10 million.  Keep calm and carry on.”  And so they did.  But in the mid-19th century, our western and southern borders were mostly lines on a map.  Anyone could go back and forth as they pleased, and no one cared, or even noticed. 

In the east, the Atlantic Ocean might have been a genuine impediment to immigration, but our Founding Fathers decided that cheap labor was more important than secure borders.  Our first wave of non-European immigration came from Africa – as many as the slave ships could hold. 

Later, in the 19th century, when the railroad barons needed cheap labor to build out their infrastructure in the West, we crossed the Pacific Ocean to import workers from China.  And when famine and political strife in Europe sparked successive waves of migration from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, the good old USA was where many of them wanted to be.  Land of opportunity, and all that.  In the 20th century, when refrigeration technology made it possible for California and other western states to become agricultural dynamos, we recruited workers from Mexico to pick the crops.

We made efforts at keeping track of some of these immigrants – especially those from Europe, passing through Ellis Island – but anyone who thinks we were in control of the flow is kidding themselves.    

For most of our history, our borders weren’t “controlled” in any meaningful sense of that word.  And that used to be a source of pride.  As a kid, I was taught that our Canadian and Mexican borders were the longest stretches of unguarded border in the world.  Americans prided themselves on getting along with our neighbors.  If the wretched refuse of some teeming shore came here looking for a better life, we welcomed them.  When I was in school, the metaphor of choice was “melting pot.”  It was a boast, an assertion that America could assimilate all comers, and be better for having done so. 

Of course, the melting pot theory also assumed that new immigrants would voluntarily assimilate.  And overwhelmingly, that’s exactly what they did.  It took a couple of generations, and while the process was underway, some people grumbled about the slow pace.  The Irish, the Italians, and the Jews were the new kids on the block at one time or another, and the WASP establishment that was quite willing to hire them for menial work was much less enthusiastic about accepting them as peers.  But the children and grandchildren of those immigrants learned English, entered the workforce, and became thoroughly Americanized. 

Scott Adams ignores this complex demographic history.  If you accept his first point, you’d be forced to argue that the USA didn’t become a country until sometime in the 20th century, and then ceased to be a country at the dawn of the new millennium, when – from a Republican point of view – we suddenly found ourselves swimming in terrorists and welfare fraudsters from south of the border.  The truth is, as a nation, immigration issues were a very low priority for most Americans until the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 

But – it says here – we were a country the whole time.  So much for Adams’ first point.

As for his second assertion, there may be good reasons to advocate for social media transparency, and even for arguing that the current lack of transparency is a threat to democracy.  But claiming it’s necessary for democracy is an overreach.  Democracies – including ours – existed long before social media came along.  But the cream of the jest is that the lack of transparency in social media is what helped elect Donald Trump, and what helps keep his followers deluded.  Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Adams.

And then there’s the cherry on top, in the form of Adams’ final assertion: “If half of congress is focused on impeachment for political reasons, you don't have a government.”  That’s really stupid. 

First off, I’d say that 100% of Congress is focused on impeachment for political reasons.  Some are for it and some are against it.  But the point is that impeachment is inevitably political.  That’s why we elect the people whose job description includes carrying out the impeachment process, if appropriate.

Beyond that, in the United States, the “government” consists of three branches – the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative.  They all depend on each other to some extent, but the “government” keeps on functioning even when Congress is divided, on impeachment or any other issue.

What Scott Adams chooses to ignore is that government divided over impeachment, if not exactly the norm in American politics, is at least not all that uncommon.  Leaving the 19th century case of Andrew Johnson aside, there have been two impeachment cases in my lifetime.  One was real – a bipartisan Congress concluded that Richard Nixon committed high crimes and misdemeanors in the Watergate scandal.  The other was bogus – a Republican congressional majority decided to bring down Bill Clinton by hook or by crook, and when their Whitewater investigation turned up nothing illegal, they decided to make it about blowjobs.  It turns out that adultery is not an impeachable offense. 

As time has passed, it turns out that Republicans like extra-marital sex as much as Democrats do.  It’s Donald Trump’s favorite hobby.  Not that I care about Trump’s sex life.  I figure Melania knew what she was getting into.  But I do care about honest elections, and constitutional government. 

Scott Adams was blowing smoke.  This morning, Robert Mueller held a press conference which blew that smoke away.  My preliminary takeaways from Mueller’s statements today are these.  Mueller didn’t charge Donald Trump with a crime because he was forbidden to by Department of Justice policy against indicting a sitting president.  But, as Mueller said, if he thought Trump was innocent, he’d have said so, and he didn’t say so.  The best he could do, given the constraints he was under – a hostile boss, and the ever-present threat of getting fired – was to find the facts and turn those facts over to Congress, which does have the authority to bring charges of high crimes and misdemeanors against a sitting president. 

That process is called impeachment.  If House Democrats were waiting for some sort of signal, I’d say Mueller gave them one.  Come on, Democrats.  The ball is now in your court.  Do your duty.