“At the core of Miller’s worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction”
“When I asked Steve Bannon, a longtime Miller ally, which writers most influenced Miller’s view that migration threatens American or Western “civilization,” he texted me some names. The top three were Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington, and Oswald Spengler”
“I was unable to confirm from Miller himself whether he’s read these three authors. However, Miller plainly draws sustenance from a strain of right-wing thought that loosely includes those writers, as well as David Horowitz, who mentored Miller as he came of age politically in a diversifying high school in Santa Monica”
“This strain holds roughly that “Western civilization” is something like a static cultural inheritance forever teetering on the edge of plunging into terminal decline”
“Buchananism more directly draws inspiration from figures like former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and white nationalist Sam Francis, and in this sense is a precursor to Trump—and, by extension, Miller”
“Buchanan wrote a 2011 book called Suicide of a Superpower. In a companion column, Buchanan declared that “Western civilization” probably won’t “survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants.””
“For Miller, it all started to go wrong with the 1965 immigration act. Miller has long lamented what this law and its impacts supposedly “did” to the U.S. In 2022, Miller declared that the act’s legacy has been to destroy “social cohesion” in the country. “There cannot be social trust,” Miller continued. “There cannot be civic bonding. There cannot be a shared culture, a shared language, a shared education, a shared experience.””
“those immigrants defied such predictions because the U.S. turned out to have very powerful mechanisms of assimilation. In countless ways, that great migration positively redefined our “civilization,” which turns out not to be a static thing”
“Miller has in essence shifted the civilizational goalposts: If Southern and Eastern Europeans didn’t end up threatening U.S. civilization, well, the actual threat lies further afield, in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere”
“studies have shown that recent waves of immigrants have assimilated just as successfully as previous ones did, and that immigrants embrace American political institutions”
“Other empirical work has undermined claims that they’re dissolving our social bonds. If you’re worried about declining “social cohesion,” let’s talk about soaring economic inequality, weakening civic virtue, declining worker power, and social tensions cynically stoked and manipulated by right-wing elites—all of which Trump is exacerbating”
“As time passes and outsiders contribute to—and associate with—local communities, their original illegal entry loses significance, and they develop a claim to belonging. We recognize this because we see them as human, and human life is messy and complicated. Most people understand this intuitively: Communities are dynamic things; their boundaries are not fixed and rigid and unchanging”
“Miller has long harbored particular venom for “cosmopolitanism.””
“our understanding of cosmopolitanism is itself partly an inheritance from Miller’s beloved “Western civilization.” It originated with the Stoic philosophers of the ancient world and was developed by the Roman statesman Cicero”
“It passed via him and others to European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who elaborated on it further. Its conception of common humanity informed the human rights ideals that emerged after World War II, which the U.S. signed on to”
“demographers like William H. Frey have gamed out what a scenario of net-negative migration will look like over time, and it’s not pretty. It results in population decline, a dangerously aging workforce, and depleted tax revenues to pay for social insurance for our aging population”
“Miller’s alternative is a horror. He has set in motion a vicious math problem: His deportation machinery is arresting people faster than they are being removed. To hold them, he’s now looking to build out a network of vast warehouses. We’re going to end up with a massively expanded immigrant carceral state at an enormous cost to all of us, both in taxpayer dollars and in the searing social conflict that Miller’s masked storm troopers have unleashed on the streets of U.S. cities.”
“On this point, we’re giving the last word to Miller’s cousin on his father’s side, Alisa Kasmer. Over the summer, Kasmer posted a scalding Facebook takedown of Miller that made big news.”
““We’re Jewish—we grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing,” Kasmer told me. “Now he’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses—to live a rewarding life.” This—not “saving” our “dying” country, as Miller absurdly claims Trump is doing—will be Miller’s ugly legacy.”