This quote from Grant is key:

These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.[Emphasis added.]

I suspect that Grant was lying in his reference to ideals, that he was viscerally and biologically more concerned with racial purity. Certainly, America had produced many Jewish citizens and thinkers who supported American ideals. But then why pretend that ideals were at stake? With whom would that phrase resonate? What does that intellectual fig leaf cover?

From a purely “Americanist” point of view, hoards of immigrants have always seemed to threaten our cultural norms, norms that have, even if only superstitiously, kept the elephants away so to speak. America does stand for things, including welcoming the world’s tired and poor, but only into the melting pot, and only if the assimilation Americanizes the exotic and not vice versa. One can certainly understand how sheer numbers would raise the possibility and thus the fear that those who arrive not sharing our values will be able to survive without adopting them.

Suppose Grant had written only this:

These immigrants adopt the language of the native American and they wear his clothes, but they seldom adopt his ideals.

Even if we disagree with the argument, one does not have to be a racist to make it. So, for example, does feminist America really want “too many” anti-feminist Muslims? But the secular left will not stand up for American values, even the “new” ones that the secular left espouses. Why can’t the left distinguish ethnic diversity from multiculturalism? And if the left espouses multiculturalism, where does that leave the non-racist lover of “American” culture? (Or are we to believe that “American” implies “white and racist” just because white racists are the ones defending it?)

Any lawyer can tell you that bad people can make good arguments, especially when good people on the other side fail to acknowledge them because they hurt their case. (I have never understood why lawyers make bad arguments — such arguments by their bogosity virtually scream that the client has no case — but, then, I was never a litigator; I may have a higher opinion of judges than practicing trial lawyers do.) In our political system, then, it has, for whatever reason, fallen to the worst among us to defend the best of our ideas.

Since 1964, the Republican Party has been a coalition of racists, plutocrats, and philosophical conservatives. To philosophical conservatives, the others were just strange bedfellows, people to be tolerated because they voted with conservatives and because their other nastiness was kept in check by cooler heads in the party and the country. Now, the conservatives have been purged by the plutocrats and racists, and the plutocrats are too busy making money to care about the racists. So the racists are in ascendance.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and the argument for American ideal still needs to be made, and no one else is making it. America needs immigrants, but we need new Americans. We do not need multiculturalism, nor do we need bi-lingualism — which is why those idiotic forays into Spanish by the Dems in the first debate were so off-putting. To the American ear, those bits of Spanish said “You don’t have to learn English.” If one party is going to take that view, you can damn sure bet that the other, however otherwise deplorable its members, will, rightly, oppose it. If good Americans won’t stand up for Americanism, who does that leave to do it?