Opinion | This Is the Democrats’ Biggest Problem

There’s a fight right now within the Democratic Party about ICE enforcement. “For weeks, we’ve been pushing common-sense reforms.” “Real accountability starts with abolishing ICE.” “American citizens — American citizens — being arrested, being detained, being held for days.” That is a kind of proxy fight for a larger fight, which I think isn’t actually being had right now in earnest but will in the primaries. Meaning: What should our immigration policy be? Which is: What should our immigration policy be? I do think there’s a sense that the old consensus is dead. What was the old consensus? The consensus was: increased enforcement, path to citizenship. “You’ve got to pass background checks, you’ve got to learn English, you’ve got to pay taxes and a penalty, and then you’ve got to go to the back of the line, behind everybody who’s done things the right way and have tried to come here legally.” To me, the bigger thing is: There’s a fundamental fight over what kind of country we are happening right now. I mean, the emergence of a genuine blood-and-soil strain of conservatism — “This country is for us and by us”; the people who can go and visit their ancestors’ graves, where they will bury their children — that’s what this country is; it’s not a country of ideas; it’s not a creedal nation. All that pluralist claptrap that you got taught — people come from all over, and they can all be Americans. The famous Reagan speech, where he says you can go to Germany and can’t be a German, you can go to Italy and can’t be Italian, but anyone can come here and be an American. This was his last speech. His last speech. Yes, which is a perfect articulation of what used to be a fairly kind of consensus vision that underlay the debates happening above it, that consensus is torn apart. When that fight is happening at this elemental level, I think it’s very hard to come back in with the old policy question without actually making an affirmative case for what kind of country you want.