What makes a person forego his or her regular professional or personal routine in order to stalk federal law enforcement? What makes that person agree to put himself in close proximity to those law enforcement officers, in the freezing cold, even after multiple incidents have resulted in the death of similar activists?
It’s a question worthy of serious consideration, given that more than 34,000 Minnesotans have joined various agitator groups to learn to be U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “observers.”
I think I know what James Burnham, one of the most important (if today largely unknown) American thinkers of the 20th century, would say about anti-ICE activism. Burnham would say it’s a clear example of liberals’ attempts to accelerate the suicide of their own civilization.
The Leftist Turned Champion of Conservatism
By the time Burnham published his book Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, he had already lived an extraordinary life. The son of a poor English immigrant who by his thirties had become a railroad vice president, Burnham grew up in privilege and attended Princeton and Oxford in the 1920s (he had J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor). Burnham got a job teaching philosophy at New York University and in the 1930s embraced Marxism, having rejected his mother’s Catholicism.
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