In regards to the first paragraph, I agree it's quite inventive to use this against the interlocutor, but practically speaking the difficult leap to make is getting them to understand and accept the notion that the method and result are not the same. The person wants universal healthcare and they agree some competent and powerful organization should carry it out. However, it is my belief based on my experiences with people that most, even otherwise intelligent ones, do not understand the concept of scope and roundabout means of achieving ends. When you suggest the possibility (implictly or explicitly) that the health tzar might instead choose not to provide universal healthcare (perhaps because being at such a height and having the perspective that the seat affords them realizes that some other more roundabout method is actually superior or pragmatic), the magic of your tactic dissipates. It is their inability to understand trade-offs, roundaboutness of means, pragmatic decision-making
Well, first we need to keep our own thinking straight.
I agree with your opening analysis, but the point is not to be pragmatic in that immediate way. It's a question of having a way of being consistent and persistent, over a long period of time, with many interlocutors, at various levels of understanding. A kind of higher level talking point, that can be modified in all kinds of ways as occasion requires. Your own description of the typical leftist shows what other people can come to see over time if this kind of question is kept in the forefront.
I like your argument here, but I’m a little confused on the conclusion. If a sovereign disagrees with your ‘someone should’, isn’t he doing so on the basis of his own ‘someone should’? Since actions have to be motivated somehow, won’t they always be arbitrarily ideological on some level? Why eat instead of starving to death? It’s because I believe ‘I should’ live; if a more logistically aware sovereign disagrees with me on that, is that really reason enough to convince me to stop eating?
If the sovereign has a "someone should," it's functionally identical with "I will." Assuming the sovereign wants to remain sovereign, *that* will motivate his decisions. He will want a coherent chain of command present to him, along with the kind of people capable of taking up their roles in that chain. That's the opposite of ideological and arbitrary. This way, in order to avoid starving, rather than saying "someone should institute full employment with a 15$ an hour minimum wage," there will be someone whose responsibility it is to ensure you and your community have the necessary means of living. And that someone will be in a chain of command leading up to the sovereign.
I agree with this, but the point I was making was that even if people are on board with having a clear sovereign, that doesn’t imply they’re on board with whatever the sovereign is doing, no matter how good of a vantage point they know he has. They’ll still value their own ‘shoulds’ over his in a lot of cases; should we have more immigration or not? That’s a normative question, not one we can answer by simplifying the chain of command to implement immigration reform. I think that while it’s true as you say that it’s not very productive to talk about ideology without practice, it’s equally fallacious to talk about practice without ideology. Why would the sovereign care about anything, including remaining sovereign, if he has no ideology and is agnostic to everything? He has to place relative value on things in this world in order to make decisions, and that makes him ideological.
You're right that there need to be reasons for what the sovereign does. It would be better to talk about "values" than "ideology," because "ideology" assumes a general view of the world opposed to other views--i.e., it is grounded in, and organizes, systematic conflict. But we don't need to add some value system to a power system: there is already an ethics implicit in the practice of ruling. I have to shift to a someone different level here. The "values" or ethics of any system of institution is to be found in its origin. Any community has an origin, just like humanity does. In fact, any "version" of a community has an origin. What we are always trying to is commemorate the origin--all of the institutions of a society are essentially commemorations of its origin. The sovereign wants to preserve the origin of his sovereignty, and that origin must lie in the transcendence of some conflict, the deferral of some violence. Ultimately a community needs unanimity on its origin--the sovereign wants to preserve that. If you ask why the sovereign wants this, the answer is he can't want anything else. Disagreements and conflicts which impair and divide sovereignty are ultimately commitments to different origins.
I understand what you’re saying and sympathize with it at some level, but I don’t understand how to explain something like immigration policy with it in the real world. Surely mass immigration is an obvious route to ‘dividing sovereignty’. I agree that any ‘sane’ sovereign would act in the way you’re describing, but what’s been happening my entire lifetime is the opposite—insane. How do you explain that?
If we lived in a sane society, we wouldn't have to do this much theorizing, would we?
The truth is, immigration is not so hard to explain--it has its roots in imperialism, which in a sense goes back to the 16th century but the kind of "invading the world" that led to "inviting the world" really goes back to the 19th century. (Ancient Rome was pretty "diverse" as well). An empire has clients all throughout the world and many of them will be provided free access. Imperialism leaves open various possibilities for divided sovereignty, without necessarily making it inevitable. But the immigration policies of the last 50 years or so really exploit divided sovereignty and serve much narrower and more partisan interests.
So, you can be anti-imperialist, or in favor of a sane imperialism, and work out the implications of either approach. But none of this is all that hard to explain--in general, having a theory of how things "should" be implies a theory of why they aren't that way.
I strongly disagree here, and in fact I think your view on this issue in particular is empirically unsupportable. The mass immigration wasn’t a product of imperialism—the US had no overseas land claims when it began that project, for one thing, and Europe began its own immigration project a decade or two after the US—and centuries after its own imperial endeavors. Why wasn’t there mass immigration at the height of European imperialism? Why isn’t there mass immigration to China today, as they conduct a successful imperialist endeavor in Africa and South Asia? The fact is, the ability to fulfill imperial ambitions implies a certain amount of power, and having that amount of power implies the ability to shut down immigration. Which is exactly what most all countries did until very recently, for reasons that have got little to do with imperialism.
Yes, these are good observations, but a few things: first,countries like England and France always had a steady flow of colonials into the mother country, even if it wasn't mass immigration, which wouldn't have been so easy from countries like India, Jamaica, Vietnam and Algeria before WWII; second, America's first mass immigration project of the later 19th into the 20th century could be seen more as a continuation of the original settler project, while post-1965 immigration is most certainly taking place within an imperial context, whether the US has formal colonial possessions or not. Third, and most important, we could and I think should see contemporary globalism as a continuation and intensification of earlier imperial projects, in which the EU, the US (or certain imperial factions within the US) extend their power through global economic and political institutions. There was a geopolitical context even to such domestic processes as the civil rights revolution in the US, which involved the US proving its anti-racist bona fides to decolonized countries it wanted to draw away from the USSR. This is even more the case with immigration today, where different factions prove their universalism by abolishing all boundaries--in a way that benefits the most powerful transnational corporations. There could be other ways of advancing an imperial project, of course, and maybe China is discovering one--even if, as seems to me they case, they are much less ambitious and much more cautious than the West has been. Maybe we could be more precise and say that mass immigration is part of an imperial project advanced under the aegis of terms like "democracy" and 'human rights" (which, as Chris B will tell you in considerable detail, have histories deeply rooted in geo-political struggles).