Posted on 08/22/2015 10:22:39 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Donald Trump could transform the Republican Party into a coalition focused on white identity politics. We've seen this in Europe, and it's bad.
Now that we have had time to observe the Donald Trump phenomenon, there is enough evidence to make a clear assessment of what it represents. The rise of Trump is an epic expression of frustration with the American political system, and it is a natural outgrowth of frustrations with America’s changing demographics; the hollowing out of white working class values and culture, as Charles Murray has documented extensively; and what life is like when governed by the administrative state, where the president increasingly acts as a unilateral executive and elected representatives consistently ignore the people’s priorities.
At its best, these frustrations would be articulated by the Republican Party in ways that lead to more freedom and less government. At its worst, these frustrations cast aside Constitutional principles, encourage dictatorial behavior, and become the toxic political equivalent of the two Southie brothers who claimed Trump inspired them to beat up a Hispanic homeless man.
Dismiss Donald Trump if you will, but tonight in Alabama he is expected to draw 35,000 people. Try to do that with any other presidential candidate. The phenomenon is real, and the danger Trump presents for the Republican Party is real. Even without winning the GOP nomination, which is still a remote possibility at best, his statements have tapped into a widespread anger that has the potential to transform the Republican Party in significant ways. Ultimately, Trump presents a choice for the Republican Party about which path to follow: a path toward a coalition that is broad, classically liberal, and consistent with the party’s history, or a path toward a coalition that is reduced to the narrow interests of identity politics for white people.
For decades, Republicans have held to the idea that they are unified by a fusionist ideological coalition with a shared belief in limited government, while the Democratic Party was animated by identity politics for the various member groups of its coalition. This belief has been bolstered in the era of President Obama, which has seen the Democratic Party stress identity politics narratives about the war on this or that group of Americans, even as they adopted a more corporatist attitude toward Wall Street and big business (leading inevitably to their own populist problem in Sen. Bernie Sanders). What Trump represents is the potential for a significant shift in the Republican Party toward white identity politics for the American right, and toward a coalition more in keeping with the European right than with the American.
“Identity politics for white people” is not the same thing as “racism”, nor are the people who advocate for it necessarily racist, though of course the categories overlap. In fact, white identity politics was at one point the underlying trend for the majoritarian American cultural mainstream. But since the late 1960s, it has been transitioning in fits and starts into something more insular and distinct. Now, half a century later, the Trump moment very much illuminates its function as one interest group among many, as opposed to the background context for everything the nation does. The white American with the high-school education who works at the duck-feed factory in northern Indiana has as much right to advance his interest as anyone else. But that interest is now being redefined in very narrow terms, in opposition to the interests of other ethnic groups, and in a marked departure from the expansive view of the freedoms of a common humanity advanced by the Founders and Abraham Lincoln.
Trump’s appeal to these narrow interests is understandable and smart, given the tenor of the times. Among members of the American right and disaffected independents, voices of outrage railing against the collapse of the rule of law have increased steadily throughout Obama’s second term. Their opinion of the Supreme Court has fallen steadily, and they no longer trust the agents of the IRS, EPA, or DOJ to do anything other than serve the wishes of the White House.
Trump’s brand of Jacksonian populism is perfectly tailored for this sentiment. He would throw the Constitution and the rule of law to the winds in pursuit of an aggressive promise of unilateral change – and they are fine with that. What we are hearing now from the Trump-supporting right is akin to the Roman people’s call for the dissolution of the Senate: the demand to install a strong horse, the outsider who will fix all things, the powerful man who promises he will, at long last, get things done for the people. As Alex Castellanos writes at CNN:
Trump is more than a legacy of Republican inaction. He is the inevitable result of decades of progressive failure. He is where frustrated nations turn when top-down, industrial age government fails to deliver what it promised and presents chaos instead. When a government that has pledged to do everything can’t do anything, otherwise sensible people turn to the strongman. This is how the autocrat, the popular dictator, gains power. We are seduced by his success and strength.
For those who believe Barack Obama has ruled like an Emperor, Trump offers them their own replacement who has the appeal of a traitor to his class, dispensing entirely with the politeness of the politically correct elites and telling it always and forever like it is. If the president is to be an autocrat, let him be our kind of autocrat, these supporters say. It’s our turn now, and we want a golden-headed billionaire with the restraint of the bar fly and the tastes of Caligula, gliding his helicopter down to the Iowa cornfields like a boss. He’ll show Putin what for.
The Political Class’ Betrayal on Immigration
Trump has seized upon the issue of immigration, where the stubborn, arrogant refusal of the political class to implement reforms the people demand – even to the point of enforcing equitably laws already on the books, but willfully ignored by the administrative state – has inflated the balloon on this issue to the point of popping. And Trump is just the man to pop it.
Prior to this election season, the national Republican coalition had come around to the idea that while conservatives are opposed to a comprehensive reform package, they would take an incremental approach to reform: building a wall, increasing enforcement along the border, and generally moving toward a path to legalization, not citizenship, for those here illegally. At the national level, you could generally get to a place where principled border hawk conservatives like Jim DeMint and The Wall Street Journal editorial page can find unity.
Their assumption was that if a future Republican administration finally got control of the border, it would allow them the latitude to move more gradually toward an incremental amnesty or legalization. But this assumption ignored the frustration and rage across the country which has only grown in the wake of Obama’s executive actions.
Essentially, a sizable portion of the country is saying, “We want to stop illegal immigration,” and both parties are telling them, in essence, “You’re not allowed to want that.” Left to fester long enough, this frustration has moved beyond the point of an ordinary, partisan political controversy and is moving toward a crisis of constitutional democracy, where the bipartisan political elite has decided that a basic function of nation-state governance is, in 21st century America, illegitimate.
The two major party establishments are more or less complicit in this political and cultural invalidation of a large swath of the electorate. Couple that with the economic disaffection this same group already bears toward the elites already leaving them behind, and something like the Trump boomlet was probably inevitable. If a large – sorry, yuge – portion of the country wants existing bipartisan immigration laws to be enforced, and one party tells them “Yes,” but means “No,” and the other party tells them, “No” but means “You’re a racist,” then it’s only a matter of time before some disruptor is going to emerge to call them out for their game.
Elite consensus indifference to public opinion has created a vacuum, and Trump’s entry into it has revealed the immigration split within the GOP to be deeper than previously understood. While Trump’s white paper bullets represent fairly mainstream border hawk conservatism, what he has said separate from that plan went far afield from such a proposal. The idea that America is going to endure the blood and moral outrage over the deportation of 11 million people, including young children of illegals born here who are constitutionally American citizens, is absurd. Even one of the most prominent immigration hawks, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, dismissed this mass deportation as impossible on my radio show this week. But Donald Trump has proposed this, and loudly insisted he will do it. And the faction of the country that believes not in freedom but identity politics for white people adores it.
Trump Will Not Win, But His Argument Could
Trump is very unlikely to prevail. His “deport them all now” view, while held by roughly 20 percent of the American people depending on which poll you read, has limited popularity. The normal grievance-based white identity politics platform that promises protectionism, tariffs, infrastructure, subsidies, entitlements, and always blames the presence of immigrants for the creative destruction of the global marketplace, has consistently performed best in the GOP prior to any actual Republicans voting. But should his ideas prevail and win – or if, in the most extreme scenario, Trump were to sustain his path and take the Republican nomination – it would set America’s political path on a direction along the lines of what we have seen in democracies in Europe.
Consider what it would look like for America to follow the path of France, devolving toward a new two-party system which has on the one hand a center-left / technocratic party, full of elites with shared pedigrees of experience and education, and on the other a nativist right/populist party, which represents a constant reactive force to the dominant elite.
In France, the École Nationale d’Administration produces the political elite. In America, we have a more diversified but still as dominating leadership-class production system, with the same phenomenon and same problem of uniformity of elites exists regardless of party. The populists are not being irrational in perceiving that these guys are “all the same.” But their brand of conservatism is frequently xenophobic, anti-capitalist, vaguely militarist, pro-state, and consistently anti-Semitic. If you criticize Donald Trump, it is exactly the sort of hate mail you should expect to receive.
In the 2002 French presidential election, fascist-style populist Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in the first round of voting, meaning the French electorate had to choose between him and Jacques Chirac, a statist-right bureaucrat who never saw an individual liberty he didn’t want to slightly curtail. Voters recoiled from expressions of racism and fascistic xenophobia, and gave Chirac the largest majority of any French head of state in history. The next French presidential election is in 2017, and there is a very good chance that the 2002 scenario will repeat itself, with Jean-Marie’s daughter Marine Le Pen getting into the runoff (she has sought to increase her chances in part by forcing her father out). Between Francois Hollande and Le Pen, most decent people go for Hollande. For others, when neither major centrist party will prioritize or even acknowledge the problems faced by a people confronted by massive and troublesome issues of immigration and ethnic tension, eventually they feel they have no choice but to protest vote for Le Pen.
France is hardly alone in this experience – across Europe the rise of these populist movements, whether from the left or the right, have spread to Britain, Spain, Italy, and other nations. The European experience suggests that the burgeoning administrative state, whether run by putative leftists or putative rightists, engenders a reaction against itself. That antithesis usually is illiberal and adopts an aesthetic of anger, because it is the sort of citizenry that the administrative state produces, and because it is in the interest of that state to have that sort of enemy. Everyone who believes in the values that the administrative state at least claims to support and defend — societal pluralism, common decency, some sort of liberalism — gravitates toward it on Election Day. This is a story repeated across Europe – and in rare places like Hungary, we see what happens when the populist-right actually wins, and it isn’t pretty.
There is a slim possibility that what’s happening in the GOP primary campaign this summer is actually healthy and salutary, as conservative intellectual Yuval Levin argues here. But it is also possible that it represents one more way America is becoming more European. A classically liberal right is actually fairly uncommon in western democracies, requiring as it does a coalition that synthesizes populist tendencies and directs such frustrations toward the cause of limited government. Only the United States and Canada have successfully maintained one over an extended period. Now the popularity of Donald Trump suggests ours may be going away. In a sense we are reverting to a general mean – but we are also losing a rare and precious inheritance that is our only real living link to the Revolutionary era and its truly revolutionary ideas about self-government.
Since the moment when police officers turned their backs in protest on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, we've seen the type of escalating activity in the city which would be more recognizable as the preview to a messy Latin American coup d'etat. The latest is a form of purposeful sabotage on the part of the NYPD, which is now actively shirking its duty to enforce the law. According to the New York Post, traffic tickets and summonses have plummeted by 94 percent, and overall arrests are down 66 percent for the week compared to the same period...
No, that’s not right. Irving Kristol, Bill’s father, used the term “neo-conservative” to describe himself in the late 70’s. It only became a pejorative term after the disastrous George W Bush presidency.
Think about it: Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were as strong on defense as anyone and no one thought to call them “neo-conservatives”. Why? Because there was nothing neo (new) about their conservativism; they were always conservatives.
Irving Kristol, Scoop Jackson, and the rest of the former liberals in the 70’s embraced the neo-conservative label because they didn’t want to be associated with regular old conservatives, whom they saw as rubes. They were liberals at heart, just liberals with an appreciation for a strong national defense.
“No country has ever undergone this rapid a demographic change without being conquered first.”
I was thinking about the 20 million Latino immigrants, the Muslim immigrants, the Chinese, and India’s immigrants all coming without a leader, without taking over our government. Then it hit me that our government has in fact been conquered. Many other nations have been, too.
Godwin’s law invoked by the title. Did not read further.
I’m guessing Lazy Fair. Or however he spells it in French.
I wonder if Jeb Bush knew this attack was coming before he had his head photoshopped onto a black man’s body?
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I think I’d like Señor Jeb better if they had photoshopped his head onto Marilyn Monroe’s body.
Nah...on second thought, I’d still have to put a bag over the head.
When whites do it, it is the most evil thing that could be imagined.
Where has this author been hiding under a rock these past 10 - 15 years?
Republican party no longer stands for ‘more freedom and less government’. They can't articulate, let alone abide by Constitutional principles.
Blaming some nutjobs on Trump (just like some here on FR blaming Jesse Ventura wanting to be Trump's VP as if it is Trump's fault) is ridiculous.
His logical extension is that Dylan Roof's pictures of Confederate flag are to blame for the Charleston massacre.
/rant off, continue to read the rest of the article
I especially appreciate (NOT !!!) the author saying the previous groveling to be liked and Democrat-lite is 'broad, classically liberal, and consistent with the party’s history'.
And that trying to get back to the Constitutional Republic is 'identity politics for white people'.
Bugger off, you pos, I won't read it any more.
This is the problem right here. The laws of G-d--the One True G-d Who created everything and everyone--are the only basis of morality . . . not anyone's "values" or "culture." But ironically, a society that marginalizes G-d and His Laws leads people to appeal to "the ways of our people" instead.
The answer is neither "white working class values and culture" nor eighteenth century liberalism; the answer is the Laws of G-d.
Do people actually believe that heterosexuality is a creation of "white working class values and culture?" If all these immigrants acknowledged the objective Laws of G-d we wouldn't be having these problems.
BTW--Somehow I don't see Donald Trump as some kind of charismatic European right wing messianic figure. But his candidacy is revealing the henotheism of much of the electorate and telling us that they think being Mexican is a greater sin than being homosexual.
But it's okay for the Democrats to be a coalition focused on marginal identity politics (blacks, illegals, sexual deviants, man-haters ...).
White identity politics? As opposed to what? Black identity politics? i.e. the Black Caucus or Hispanic identity politics? i.e. the Hispanic Caucus? Or any other form, of which there are many, of ‘identity’ politics?
Just who exactly stand ups for whites? Just who exactly gets outraged or speaks for whites at the constant barrage of crap thrown at them or the unending anti-white laws and policies - ‘white privledge’, ‘racist’, affirmative action, the immigration invasion and a list a mile long?
I certainly hope whites get some form of identity.
If the political elite do not want the reaction that they think Trump represents then they need to dial back their own leftist identity politics that is producing that reaction.
It looks like its BioShock art style...
Seriously there is nothing ‘white’ about asking people to wait their turn in line. Mexico does it as does pretty much every other country on earth. I is the lawless country’s that reward line cutting criminals over those who dutifully wait their turn.
This is not a documentation issue this is an invitation and assimilation issue. The difference between an immigrant and an invader is quite simple, an invader brings his culture and language with him expecting the natives to adapt. An immigrant genuinely wants to join the native culture and language.
An interesting academic point. The trouble is at this point is is simply academic Trump’s politics have nothing to do with skin color. Their almost entirely about economics.
Trump simply wants to practice the same immigration policy Mexico and most other countries of the world practices, and the United States too uses to practice. Its called respect our laws and wait your turn or get kicked out.
Put American Workers First
Decades of disastrous trade deals and immigration policies have destroyed our middle class. Today, nearly 40% of black teenagers are unemployed. Nearly 30% of Hispanic teenagers are unemployed. For black Americans without high school diplomas, the bottom has fallen out: more than 70% were employed in 1960, compared to less than 40% in 2000. Across the economy, the percentage of adults in the labor force has collapsed to a level not experienced in generations. As CBS news wrote in a piece entitled “America’s incredible shrinking middle class”: “If the middle-class is the economic backbone of America, then the country is developing osteoporosis.”
The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans – including immigrants themselves and their children – to earn a middle class wage. Nearly half of all immigrants and their US-born children currently live in or near poverty, including more than 60 percent of Hispanic immigrants. Every year, we voluntarily admit another 2 million new immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and dependents, growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 million immigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers in order to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities’ rise into the middle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure our immigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream.
Additionally, we need to stop giving legal immigrant visas to people bent on causing us harm. From the 9/11 hijackers, to the Boston Bombers, and many others, our immigration system is being used to attack us. The President of the immigration caseworkers union declared in a statement on ISIS: “We've become the visa clearinghouse for the world.”
Here are some additional specific policy proposals for long-term reform:
Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program's lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need to companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to the unemployment office, not USCIS.
End welfare abuse. Applicants for entry to the United States should be required to certify that they can pay for their own housing, healthcare and other needs before coming to the U.S.
Jobs program for inner city youth. The J-1 visa jobs program for foreign youth will be terminated and replaced with a resume bank for inner city youth provided to all corporate subscribers to the J-1 visa program.
Refugee program for American children. Increase standards for the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers to crack down on abuses. Use the monies saved on expensive refugee programs to help place American children without parents in safer homes and communities, and to improve community safety in high crime neighborhoods in the United States.
Immigration moderation. Before any new green cards are issued to foreign workers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers. This will help reverse women's plummeting workplace participation rate, grow wages, and allow record immigration levels to subside to more moderate historical averages.
Ok, that’s just weird. I’m going to assume you stayed up all night before posting that.
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