It’s been hard to read all the opinions about our fair state lately. Most people get some of it or all of it wrong: the groups, the geography, the factions, and the issues. In a post yesterday at The American Mind, Ayaan Hirsi Ali delivered the most insightful piece I’ve read so far. If you are from the West, you might want to read her book Infidel first as it best explains the depth and commitment of tribal society. The article, Minnesota’s Post-Assimilation Realty, details a concoction of groups moving together to create a powerful incentive package for what will probably be the largest theft of Federal dollars in US history.
Let’s pull apart the components of human action. Hirsi Ali introduces the first player.
Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.
Instead of assimilating into the various groups of civic life, their group remains closed. Their action is based on internalizing benefits to themselves and keeping outsiders at bay.
Extract what can be extracted, and when the host weakens, move on. This is adaptation in its purest form. But it is fundamentally incompatible with modern civic life, which depends on social trust rather than blood ties.
Edward Banfield called this phenomenon “amoral familism.” Loyalty inward, indifference outward. Where it dominates, corruption is not a deviation from the system. In truth, it is the system. Public institutions become spoils to be captured, law becomes negotiable, and accountability vanishes.
But no group, in a country as large as the US, can operate solo. There are great over-arching institutions at play where activities will collide in action and deed. So who else is clearing an open path from other conflicting objectives?
Minnesota hosts a dense network of Islamic councils and advocacy groups dominated by Somali leadership. Nationally, the pattern is expanding. Each success is framed as inclusion, which is insulated from scrutiny by the language of civil rights. And each success advances a narrow, disciplined agenda that is deeply anti-modern.
The Democratic Party completes the triangle. Immigration shifted from policy to identity. Enforcement became immoral, and illegality was reframed as victimhood. The result is an unmistakable pattern of activists obstructing federal officers, officials retreating from their duties, and a party increasingly reliant on ethnic blocs it cannot discipline without alienating its base.
The common man (and woman) also has a role to play. In fact, they are now playing a role in the unraveling of this decade-long taking. But for so many years, the workers in Health and Human Services, the neighbors who noted empty daycare centers and so on, were silenced by political pressure. When the choice came between being a whistleblower and maintaining their social or workplace position, they chose to stay the course. Perhaps because they felt it would all be for naught. And perhaps they were right.
Read the whole piece. And all the while think about the structures, both in terms of people and their actions, and think about where liberalism was derailed.
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