Paradise Losers

California is a paradise.

There may not be a more physically beautiful country on the planet. And yes, California is a country in any meaningful and every old sense of the word. Like Texas or New England or The South it is a thing large enough to hold an identity of country, the sort of place that would possess a culture entirely of its own within a couple generations were it not for the homogenizing forces of modern media.

California is also a hot mess.

There may not be a more dysfunctional country on the planet. Not in the first world, anyway, although southern Europe would certainly give the competition a full morning's effort before retiring for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Come to think of it, there are probably some similarities to be found there. When the weather is practically perfect, the soil is practically perfect, and the Earth seems determined to deliver a practically perfect mix of beaches, woods, mountains, and valleys, it is hard not to feel like a lot of the work is already done.

It's a fascinating mix that has made California a land of contradictions. Its politicians have embraced the most expansive portfolios of socialized services in America, and yet it is among the most unequal states in the union. It is at once one of the hardest states to own and operate a business and the only state where you can really conduct certain types of business. It is responsible for some of America's most powerful cultural export industries and also the center of the world when it comes to the industry of self-flagellation for cultural 'imperialism' and 'appropriation'. There is remarkable wealth in California and remarkable poverty. There are veritable utopias and crime-ridden slums.

California has problems. Some of them are big problems. And if you think that handling a lot of migrants in a short period of time - maybe too many - may have exacerbated some of those problems, it doesn't make you crazy, it doesn't make you a Nazi, and it doesn't make you a racist. America's track record for assimilating migrants is very good, and provably better than most people think. But border regions can slow or change the nature of that assimilation, and assimilation is a process anyway. It's entirely reasonable that too much, too fast can put a strain on various public resources. That's true completely independent of the race, ethnicity, or origin of the people involved. Just ask anyone who lived, taught, or worked in medicine or other social services in Houston in the year or two after Hurricane Katrina.

But hear me: you are not crazy. You are not unreasonable. And unless you wander onto one of the few dozen university campuses where the word still means "anyone who doesn't support the wholesale dismantling of society," you are probably not racist..

Stephen Miller and Brandon Gill, on the other hand, are crazy¹. They are unreasonable. The sentiments embedded in their posts from a few minutes apart on June 9th are absolutely dripping with racism.

President Trump's Chief of Staff and the representative from the 26th Congressional District of Texas would very much like you to think that what they said here is basically the same thing as the reasonable views that you (and I) hold on this issue. It is similar to the motte-and-bailey technique, in which someone makes an extreme argument, retreats to a more reasonable one, then pretends they're the same. Only in this case, they have no intention of retreating from the extreme position; they simply want to use us to bolster the perceived reasonableness of their claim. There is nothing new about this technique, especially among national populists like Miller and Gill.

Every national populist movement MUST and eventually WILL abstract complex, multi-causal frustrations into a single cause.

That single cause MUST and eventually WILL be a group of people that represent an external threat.

The movement MUST and eventually WILL coerce a reasonable population into opposing that threat by conflating reasonable, morally defensible views with extreme, often violent, nearly always racist views.

If it is your aim to engineer support for whatever it takes to enforce an aggressive, often unconstitutional, frequently legally dubious mass deportation program, it is not enough to argue that rapid, large-scale immigration can place strain on communities, public resources, state finances, and cultural cohesion. People don't rubber stamp whatever it takes for a nuanced truth within a complicated story of a state's decades-long mismanagement. That's why the Millers and the Gills of the world don't make those arguments. Instead they tell us that our world would be a paradise of beautiful white surfers in beautiful American-made cars where crime never happens and protests are all peaceful - if only it weren't for those people. It doesn't matter that the era that produced California Girls² also produced at least a dozen protests and riots that would make this past week's rioting look like a sanitized Hollywood whitewashing of an actual uprising.

It doesn't matter because the entire goal of the Millers and Gills of the world is to cause us to abstract from beliefs derived from fact and reason toward symbols that reach us at a much more primal level - a narrative that takes a belief we have about the world and wraps it in a story of much greater meaning and significance that our entire neurological makeup is predisposed to absorb. There's a reason you choose this story if you want to affect human minds: stories about a paradise lost are the oldest stories we have! Yes, of course Eden, but also Gilgamesh's Dilmun, a place lost to all but Utnapishtim and his wife, or the story of Hesiod's Golden Age and man's descent. In each of these stories, paradise serves both as explanation for the chief maladies of the day and a tool for its rediscovery. Men must endure the pains of an unyielding earth and women must endure the pains of birth but paradise can be yours once more if you would but believe.

Our ancestors told and retold these stories because it is clear that humans were receptive to them. Memes, like genes, can be well-or poorly-adapted. Symbols and stories that can be understood and 'reproduce' quickly are more likely to survive. As we've discovered since, our minds evolved to seek out, understand, and desire to reproduce such stories mostly because they provide psychological equilibrium³. They activate the parts of our brain associated with autobiographical memory; that is, they engage with the stories we tell about ourselves. They engage our emotional regulation systems; that is they help us to prevent counterproductive responses to short-horizon threats⁴. They also activate reward systems, foster interpersonal connection, and allow us to see meaning in life⁵.

The symbolic seduction of this story has been weaponized many times before. It is being weaponized again. That weaponized form is capturing the minds of people who aren't Millers and Gills. It is capturing the minds of people who probably started from entirely reasonable, fact-based beliefs who have been offered a symbol and a story instead.

Anecdotally, among good people I love dearly, what three years ago I used to hear (and share) were concerns about the criminality, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and gang affiliation of some illegal immigration populations. Today, for every one conversation about crime and violence, I hear ten which take the form of complaints about how many Mexicans are in the grocery store parking lots with their whole families, clogging up traffic, sitting underneath the overpass by the Home Depot, and speaking Spanish in public places.

Anecdotally, among state officials, we are sixty years into de facto DACA status for Vietnamese nationals. Vietnam and the United States didn't normalize relations until 1995. Even then, Vietnam wasn't really keen to accept deportees and as a matter of practice really didn't until the two nations signed a repatriation agreement in 2008. That agreement only contemplates the deportation to Vietnam of nationals who arrived after the normalization of relations in 1995. Once again, even then, given the complicated nature of refugees from a country we napalmed the shit out of for the better part of a decade, our deportation policy has been consistently and understandably lenient. Even if a certain menswear blogger's family came after 1995 (which they probably didn't), and even if we decided to abandon six decades of de facto policy for similar fact-based grounds concerning the importance of enforcing immigration laws as written, it wouldn't explain the childish glee that the paradise losers sitting in the senior-most seats of our government feel comfortable expressing about that deportation.

Of course, the lesson from most good retellings of paradise lost stories is that mankind's obsession with recreating that paradise is invariably counterproductive, a futile exercise in striving and vanity. It is a far better thing that we do when we seek to create a new paradise in the world we actually live in. I don't think it goes too far to say that the people who understand this better than anyone on the planet are immigrants - people who leave behind attachments, homes, families, allegiances, and all visions of some paradise in their past to build a new one. I'd like to think that's how my ancestors felt when they fled from the effects of Cromwellian tyranny in Ireland to start lives in the backwoods of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and then Texas.

Yet if there's something good to be plucked from this moment, it's that all of this can be true AND it can be true that you don't have to let anyone call you a racist just because you think borders are good, that laws should be enforced, and yes, that lawful deportations of those who are here illegally should take place at fairly large scale. I believe each of those things. You can, too. For the leftists who think I'm on their side, that goes for you, too. After all, you lot did a hell of a lot of work getting us into this mess. But just as we reject the labels people would place on us for believing very reasonable things about what a country is, we must also reject those who would repurpose our words into stories of a paradise lost that could be reclaimed if we would just do this one thing.

I'm not sure what happens with the military parade and widespread No Kings protests today. Maybe they become a common knowledge moment. Maybe they and their counterprotests in close proximity produce pockets of political violence. Maybe they spawn another summer of counterproductive larping and riots. Maybe it's a nothingburger.

But history is pretty clear about how the stories about this one thing we need to do to reclaim a lost paradise end. We do not want to play a role in those stories. And anyone who would weaponize our reasonable views to suck us into them is not on our side.

1. Miller needs little qualification. Gill is married to Dinesh D’Souza’s daughter, marketed his unintentional farce 2,000 Mules, was a major promoter of the “immigrants eating pets” hoax, and his first bill sponsorships included one to put Trump on the $100 bill and another to impeach D.C. Circuit Court judge James Boasberg, yielding a sharp rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts. ↩︎
2. Interestingly, it also produced the seeds of the long-time rift between Mike Love and the recently departed genius Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys that persists today. Despite writing the lyrics to a song about Kent State in the 1970s, Love became increasingly associated with MAGA events, while Brian Wilson objected aggressively to the use of the Beach Boys brand in support of President Trump’s politics. ↩︎
3. Yang, Z., Izuma, K., & Cai, H. (2023). Nostalgia in the brain. Current Opinion in Psychology, 49, Article 101523. ↩︎
4. Hepper, E. G., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Robertson, S., & Routledge, C. D. (2021). Time capsule: Nostalgia shields psychological wellbeing from limited time horizons. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 21(3), 644–664. ↩︎
5. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To nostalgize: Mixing memory with affect and desire. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 51, 189–273. ↩︎