In the New York Review of Books, this essay Real Americans by Joseph O’Neill is noteworthy. O’Neill reviews two books, This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta.
O’Neill delivers a fine essay covering many points of the current state in America, including the point that, now, “We know who the commerce secretary is.”
Later, he also tells us:
The concept of the deep state has gained notoriety in America in the last couple of years. It has been deployed by Republicans to attack Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The investigation, they assert, is part of a plot, conducted by powerful, pro-Democrat national security functionaries, to undo the 2016 election. The people making this allegation most loudly—they include Ted Malloch, author of The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President; the Infowars founder Alex Jones; and Roger Stone—are intellectual frauds. Nonetheless, or perhaps consequently, “deep state” is now a resonant catch-phrase in Republican circles.
The term originates in Turkey. Like the United States, Turkey is a constitutional republic. Its democratic progress has been something of a bumpy ride. There have been three military coups since 1961, each more or less accepted by the Turkish people. They understood (if sometimes disputed) that the armed forces enjoyed an extralegal, almost spiritual authority to safeguard the legacy of Kemal Atatürk and, if necessary, to suspend the constitutional order when that legacy was threatened by civil unrest or dangerous political developments. The military—together with its allies in the state security and legal apparatus—came to be described as constituting, and acting on behalf of, the “deep state.”
A little further on in the essay:
“I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.” The claimant is Suketu Mehta, in This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. The reference to manifest destiny isn’t merely trolling. Mehta’s thesis is that extensive migration from poor parts of the globe to the US is as inevitable and justified as the westward migration that built this country. He goes on:
This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now…. We’re not letting the bastards take it back.
It’s our America now.
You’ll have spotted that Mehta isn’t asking for a benevolent, liberal-American accommodation of the immigrant. He doesn’t even mention the Declaration of Independence (though he does mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Rather, he is asserting a right of migration that can override the right of nation-states to keep people out. His point of view is the migrant’s, not the native’s.
I’ve reserved both books at my local library.