###  "Immigrant Haters" 

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In the wake of Brat's victory, I've seen a number of Facebook posts about "immigrant haters."  
  
No doubt some people hate Mexicans, or Jamaicans, or Laotians, etc.  
  
But _equating_ a desire for controlled immigration with hatred for immigrants is a childish smear tactic.  
  
The fact I do want my neighbors to continue living in their house rather than moving into mine does not mean I hate them.  
  
The fact the Tibetans do not want their culture wiped out by the flood of Chinese moving into Tibet does not mean they hate the Chinese.  
  
OK?

  1. Liberals aren't equating the very *idea* of opposing illegal immigration and amnesty with hatred of immigrants. They're not saying there are no principled and idealistic reasons for this position. They're saying that in actual fact, the vast majority of those.who adopt this position are not doing so for principled reasons, but out of hatred and animus.   
  
It's similar case to your earlier posts on marriage. It may be that there are principled reasons for why marriage ought to be between a man and a woman, such as arguments drawn from Aquinas or arguments that we should wary about changing a definition of marriage that's existed for 5000 years. But liberals argue that in actual fact, the people who take this position are motivated by more sinister reasons than that.. 

  2. I think you yourself are sympathetic to arguments of this form in other contexts. Presumably you don't believe that belief in libertarianism is the same thing a desire to give power to wealthy capitalists, but you've still written posts about how support for libertarian policies is often motivated by a desire to benefit the propertied classes.

  3. "I have seen numerous people posting on FB how Brat is a "hater," "xenophobe," "douchebag," etc.: I guarantee not one of them looked into the situation and asked, "Does he have principled reasons for his stance, or is it just hatred and animus?"" Yes, they definitely conclude that Brat has hatred and animus from the fact that he opposes amnesty But that doesn't mean they're saying the two positions are the same, just that the reasons why people in the real world hold one position is because they hold the other (in the vast majority of cases).

  4. Samson,  
  
I think you are on to something. It also seems, though, that we are just dealing with an especially pervasive ideology. It seems as though liberalism, at its core, is a very fundamentalist religion, one that actually needs a belief in an end time everything is perfected, where everyone is in perfect harmony with each other, all injustice is stamped out, all inequality is gone, etc. In other words, having denied the transcendent Christian heaven and it's possibility, they instead seek to make the world a sort of heaven. The "immaterial doesn't exist", and so the deepest longings of our hearts must be realized in this material, broken, and unfixable world.   
  
Combine an obtuse goal - perfection on earth - with a political philosophy that thinks that it doesn't have to engage in morality in order to mitigate tolerance, and BOOM! You have a dangerous religion that stupefies its followers.  
  
I have yet to read Voegelins' books - they are in the mail, though - so I'll have to hold my conclusions until I can defer to the master historian.