They know there will never be a standalone gun control law because the climate is too polarized, with zealous extremists on each side who either want to ban all guns or deregulate the gun market entirely, and that the deregulatory side is more zealous than the ban-it-all side. So the gun-favoring status quo remains.
We just saw the same failure to pass "commonsense bipartisan" deals on immigration, as the open borders extreme is more well funded and zealous, including most Republican politicians, compared to the side that wants to deport illegals and close the borders. So the immigrant-favoring status quo remains.
Well then, what if the side that wants to up-end the Reaganite status quo on each of these issues cut a deal with each other? It would not be a grand compromise on a single issue -- that's impossible in a hyper-polarized climate -- but a compromise on a pair of issues, with each side of the polarized spectrum gaining something big while giving up something big in exchange.
If it's really the most dear-to-your-heart policy to ban assault weapons, then you ought to be prepared to give up something that is just as dear-to-your-heart that the other side wants dearly.
This process could get hairy if too many issues were included in a single bill, as each side would squabble about how much each component was worth. There is nothing objectively quantitative to argue about -- it's either a subjectively big issue or it isn't, and something big is worth trading for something big.
So if the point were to include as many issues as possible, they should be split up into a series of bills. Too many issues in a single bill gives partisans too many distinct reasons to hate it, and it's all or nothing, so the outcome would probably be nothing.
If gun control advocates aren't prepared to give up anything of real value to the other side, then they reveal themselves to just be full of shit, pretending that it's the most serious and tearjerking cause of our time while being unwilling to pay a red cent to solve it.
Ditto for those who think America is already over-crowded in its labor and housing markets, and wants more or less zero immigration. If it's that important, they should be willing to give up something important too.
You'd think they'd get their way after electing the most hardline immigration candidate to the presidency we've seen in a long while, but evidently that's not how it works, and some kind of compromise ought to be struck -- but on a separate issue, not a watered-down immigration bill, which wouldn't pass even in weak form due to Democrat partisans not getting enough.
The immigration restriction side is more than rational and willing enough to compromise, as shown by this wheel-and-deal proposal from Ann Coulter way back at the early stage of Trump's campaign:
I don't care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper. http://t.co/l7nq8gN7i5— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015
One side is dead serious about getting its way, and holds very little sacred in relationship to it. Abortion on demand? Ban assault weapons? Cover Reagan's official White House portrait in the gay rainbow flag? Conditional on deporting the illegals (maybe excepting the DACA enrollees) and closing the borders -- you've got yourself a deal. If a future government opens the borders and refuses to deport illegals, then abortion becomes illegal, assault weapons become available at CVS, and Obama's official WH portrait gets a giant red MAGA hat painted onto it.
The liberal side had better cut deals while it still has control over the Democrat party, since disillusionment with the GOP among Trumpian populists is about to send a whole shitload of moderates and conservatives over to the Bernie party and begin influencing that party for a change, making it far less beholden to liberal causes.
At that point it'll be the Democrats who start feeling as much heat from their angry new voters that those voters used to direct at gun-squishy Republicans.
I think the Democrats still believe that pursuing a "fifty state strategy" to recover the more than 1,000 offices they've lost since Obama, means they're going to impose their liberal extremist views on their newfound voters -- rather than having to cut deals with immigration restrictionist Alabamians after a Democrat wins a Senate seat there, for example.
But again, I don't see that taking the form of presenting middle-of-the-road positions on every issue, a la the failed neoliberal approach to win over red and purple states. They'll have to do what Trump and Bernie did -- give them a big unequivocal win on X, while asking for an unequivocal concession on Y. The middle-way pragmatic approach leaves everybody unsatisfied across all issues, while the trade-and-barter pragmatic approach leaves everybody satisfied on at least half the issues.
Ending back on the topic of gun control, I only trust Bernie type Democrats to pull this off. See his positions on the issue. He's at least trying to find a compromise with both sides on the issue, rather than doing the neoliberal culture war schtick of inflaming the emotionally retarded cable news junkies with phony heroism in order to distract them from the reality that they're just shilling for Wall Street banks and Silicon Valley digital slave plantations.
Certainly Stephen Miller should be willing to strike a bargain like that. If we got enough conservative media figures like Ann Coulter or Lou Dobbs to sign onto it, it would satisfy both the immigration restriction side as well as the gun-grabbing side. That would be a real sacrifice on their part in order to get something that their side really wants. And likewise for Bernie and others who want to make the Democrats more competitive around the country again.
Lord knows Trump would eat up the opportunity to sign a grand bargain that solved two of the major issues of our time, in the eyes of otherwise polarized camps of people.
The Democrats have never faced a Republican electorate and a Republican president who held so few things sacred from the Reaganite orthodoxy. They'd better strike while the iron is hot, or they'll get nothing once we storm their party's primaries in the wake of disillusionment with the GOP, and become a dug-in zealous voting bloc of closed-border Democrats.
The Russians recently referred to the US as "Not Agreement Capable" which in that nation is a significant insult.
ReplyDeleteIts quite true if you remember the 86 amnesty which was supposed to revisit immigration and never did and the many government who always "give us a little gun control, that's all we want to be safe." and than end up a few years later with confiscation (c.f UK, Australia, etc)
Its always a lie, confiscation and tyranny is all the Left wants ever
Even in the 1930's Roosevelt tried to outlaw handguns , well make them cost an extra $3700 US to license under the NFA!
Comes to those issues the only goal the Democrats have is the domination or elimination of the rural Right by any means necessary
Some Conservative, Blue Dog and other Democrats weren't like this but they were to the Right of todays Republicans anyway
Long and short, because of the Left and the culture gap you can't negotiate anything with the Democrats in good faith other than the budget and only that because you have to
Let me make a single caveat, if they were serious and were willing to amend the Constitution to ban abortion and and seriously limit immigration , it would be worth trading say a ban on the future manufacture of Assault Weapons and magazines over ten rounds say . If they were willing to ban birth control the same way , it would be worth a ban on detachable magazine firearms
This would hurt them badly enough they'd have to make a real choice. They won't do it though. The cost if far too high
A totally level-headed response to what someone like Bernie's position is (read the link, play the video).
ReplyDeleteYou're stuck in the 1990s culture war mindset.
Once the plurality of the electorate is people born after the 1970s, where Independents and non-partisanship is the norm, we're not going to bother with that kind of psychotic under-siege thinking.
The Bernie Dems may still turn down a reasonable offer on gun control for closed borders, but they won't be making an argument like you just made -- that the closed-border group wants to wage genocide on everyone outside of America by letting them languish in the poverty, sickness, and war of their homelands.
Fortunately the 2020 election will be the first where the post-'70s births will be a plurality. The Boomers have already just peaked in '16, and Gen X is a baby bust cohort, while the children of Boomers are an echo boom -- for better or worse. But in the case of electing new leaders, for the better.
No more Hillary Clintons or Ted Cruzes.
A compromise, my gun rights for less dereliction of duty on immigration matters is a loss for me. I don't want to be part of the loser right thanks.
ReplyDeleteIn oder for a compromise to work it has to be something the Left can't renege on the next time they get enough political power which they will (they always have) and it has to hurt them as much as it will me
I have to win or at least have a push.
Otherwise its better to not compromise and force the other side to take by force and risk its legitimacy.
You see I'm not interested in trying to create the fake consensus of the post war era. That nation died with its demography and with technology.
50 million immigrants and possibly a majority minority country can't be run like the old nation.
If the system implodes, that sucks but so be it. A system where someone a continent away is deciding my fate is stupid. Local local local
I suspect the Bernie Bros aren't going to easily wrest the party away from the Neo Libs or the Cultural Marxists they may not be able to do it all. They have passion and are decent enough they lack resources and numbers
The Democrats decided they were the Urban non White , Anti Christian party and a I am White, Culturally Rural, Culturally Christian therefore they aren't my party till they prove otherwise .
As Singapore's first prime minister noted
In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.
So I do.
And yes the BB's aren't like that. I Know . They are good guys in general just unrealistic and assume they can somehow make the US into France or Sweden which they can't. We can't do a robust social democracy for reason that would take up an entire post
we can barely half-ass what we have and once the Boomer are gone, its going probably going too.
Its not that I'm stuck in the 90's its that the Left has an army of violent Communist goons being built and its looking Weimar/1858 out there in my mind only with a delightful taste of Yugoslavia added in.
A few years after Trump and it will get ugly for me and mine, I see no reason to compromise
This isn't a new problem from the Havamal (advice of Odin) the Viking bible if you like
125
Bandy no speech with a bad man:
Often the better is beaten
In a word fight by the worse.
and 127
If aware that another is wicked, say so:
Make no truce or treaty with foes.
And it seems to me the people in the Democratic party are so different in what they want , the above two apply.
If I'm wrong and the Bernie Bros take over and show they are honorable, I'm open minded
To your last point No more Hillary Clintons or Ted Cruzes. That would be nice buy I'll take either of them over Kamela Harris, or any of the really old Democrats or the radicals
After President Trump need a younger Paul Welstone (RIP) who is impeccably honest and decent and I haven't a clue where to find one.
The easiest way to help the Bernie people wrest control of the Democrat party is to vote for them -- at the least, in their primaries.
ReplyDeleteWe've seen how phony the choices are on the GOP primary -- aside from sui generis Trump, the choices are between Chamber of Commerce cucks who want to replace you, and Cultural Rightists who want to replace you. They just pander to evangelical identity politics instead of suburban country club identity politics.
Both want literal boatloads of cheap labor, meaning foreigners from alien cultures. Both want endless military occupation of the entire world, meaning we have to let those people immigrate here in order to placate the Pentagon's leadership partners in the nations it wants to occupy. Both want friendly terms with the oil-rich nations, meaning the jihadists of the Gulf.
Democrats are not reliant on cheap labor foreigners, military occupation of the whole world, or being besties with jihadists from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Emirates.
That still leaves work to do -- dislodging ID politics from their pursuits, but it's a superior starting point. With the GOP, there is no starting point because of the cold hard material interests that align them with open borders.
Imperialism means the core nation is just a central district within the broader integrated empire. And we know damn well which party is the relatively more imperialist one.
Plus the Cultural Rightists have never delivered the goods on evangelical issues anyway. They fail to produce positive results of their own (no repeal of the Johnson Amendment), and they fail to prevent the negative results of the other party (no block of gay marriage).
Voting Republican for a nationalist is committing demographic suicide in exchange for affiliation with the evangelical movement -- while failing to enjoy any concrete victories on those issues.
Same goes for compromising -- the best way to make it the Bernie people you're negotiating with, instead of the Crooked Hillary types, is to not sound like a ranting absolutist psycho calling into a talk radio show from 1995.
ReplyDeleteIf that's what the Democrats hear, it emboldens their own stale culture warriors who belong back in the Clinton era. Their Corey Bookers and Kamala Harrises are the natural adversary to people who sound like they still re-play their taped-from-radio Rush Limbaugh shows from the Gingrich Revolution.
So the initial move is to say we won't negotiate with the Crooked Hillary types, but only with the Bernie types. Who's going to refuse that on their side? They know their own voters like Bernie more than Hillary, and that he has the most cross-over appeal, making a better ambassador for their party.
They will insist on the same thing -- we'll only negotiate with someone who doesn't rant and who sympathetically lets Old Leftists on his show like Tucker Carlson, rather than Hannity. Hell, he's already had Tulsi Gabbard on, why not also Bernie, provided there were no "gotcha" questions, which Tucker doesn't do anyway?
As for difficulty of reneging, unfortunately that includes all closed borders proposals. We closed the borders in the 1920s, but opened them back up decades later (a creak at first in 1965, but then a tsunami under Reagan).
ReplyDeleteThat means you would never take any deal that closed the borders, as they could always be re-opened. Well then, you've left yourself with the open-borders status quo indefinitely -- and helped to import tens of millions more immigrants over the next several decades, vs. a deal that closed the borders at least for the next several decades, even if they were later re-opened.
They could say the same about gun control -- sure, we managed to wring a concession out of the GOP now, but who knows how psychotic they may get on this issue in the future and not only end the program but reverse it, making AR-15s available in every CVS.
That's why I said make them part of a paired deal, with snap-back clauses if one side reneges, and make it more painful for the defaulting side. If the borders are re-opened, then gun laws get restored to what they were before the Brady Bill or whenever.
The only area regarding immigration where we have to worry about front-loading the benefits for the other side is amnesty. It's unlikely that the DACA people will never get legal status, with or without citizenship. But we have to make that conditional on deporting as many non-DACA illegals first, who have no sob story about "no fault of their own".
Say, for every 10 deportations of non-DACA people, we give 1 DACA person citizenship. That continues until all the DACA people get citizenship, and the remaining illegals are still subject to deportation.
These issues will most definitely be resolved by some kind of negotiation, even if we go to civil war over it and it's part of the terms of surrender for the losing side. Better to get it done peacefully and sooner, which means thinking rationally about it instead of saying I won't take any deal because any deal could be reneged on.
"That means you would never take any deal that closed the borders, as they could always be re-opened. Well then, you've left yourself with the open-borders status quo indefinitely -- and helped to import tens of millions more immigrants over the next several decades, vs. a deal that closed the borders at least for the next several decades, even if they were later re-opened."
ReplyDeleteThe popular desire to fling open the gates will decline (eventually....) with greater development. Austria, in response to absurdly inappropriate refugee dumping, already elected a nativist PM. Austria has not been a "young" and lightly settled county in many generations.
In America, Bos-Wash and coastal California are so expensive and over-stuffed (with foreigners and butthole strivers) that a decent number of people are moving to (sometimes moving back to) the Mountain states, and the Midwest and the South. If we don't drastically halt immigration, then immigrants and their descendants will swell the population and development of the US. And eventually we'll be closer to what they have in Europe and Asia, where high population density and difficulty of development creates antipathy towards immigration.
One of the things that fueled GOP enthusiasm for immigration in the 80's and subsequent decades was the roaring neo-liberal economy, the post-1980 oil glut, and so forth. Nobody believes in the "glory" of the market and resource abundance quite like Anglo conservatives, esp. in the New World. The only thing that's really motivated some conservatives to get real on immigration is cultural/religious issues (Pat Buchanan) and/or concerns about Leftist statism growing under non-whites (Ann Coulter, Stefan Molyneux). Of course, a 100% white Millennial cohort would've still brought these changes anyway since they belong to the generation type most enthusiastic about collectivism, and are not interested in being fundie warriors. But if white conservatives erroneously blame every cultural change of the 60's/70's on blacks and Jews instead of gentile whites (itself the Right equivalent of brain dead ID politics), then hey I guess we might as well mischaracterize Millennial era culture as well.
Re: leftist statism if non-white immigrants become a majority, that is a real contingency to plan for in some parts of the country.
ReplyDeleteAnd our job is to encourage the peasants to rise up against their lords. If mega-farm owners and ranchers in the Plains and Rockies want to turn America into Nicaragua, then they'd better get used to being treated like Latin American elites -- becoming the targets of periodic slave revolts that collectivize agriculture and kill the old large landowners if they get in the way.
Of course the first goal is to prevent the elites from importing Latin America. Then, to deport what they have brought here. Then failing that, to make sure that it's the elites who pay the full costs of their demographic experiment, rather than push those costs onto the common American people.
If they want cheap foreign labor, *they* will be the ones who take the risk of being on the wrong end of a Sandinista revolution.
Populists and nationalists of either party will be guiding the immigrant peasants toward the homes of the employers who brought them here. The immigrants won't be bothering the commoners at that point -- they'll be taking over their lord's home because, to paraphrase the bank robbers, that's where the farmland is.
"And our job is to encourage the peasants to rise up against their lords. If mega-farm owners and ranchers in the Plains and Rockies want to turn "America into Nicaragua, then they'd better get used to being treated like Latin American elites -- becoming the targets of periodic slave revolts that collectivize agriculture and kill the old large landowners if they get in the way."
ReplyDeleteIt's not necessarily that we're importing Latin culture, it's more that unceasing immigration from anywhere strains carrying capacity and becomes a racket for elites, who after several decades of being abusive will eventually be called onto the carpet.
The GI generation was heavily immigrant and hostile to the GOP. They voted for the party that gave them (and thus, in their eyes, society as a whole) a shot at re-engineering society away from cut-throat competition and aging braggarts. And due to the lower striving climate of the time, pre-GI's (in the West) agreed to cut the crap.
Millennials also are heavily immigrant in background (either immigrants themselves or the off-spring of immigrants). They too are heavily Democrat. Boomers and early X-ers who shame Millennials for not having the willingness to commit themselves to no-holds barred combat in the arena of life need to get a clue. It's impossible for Millennials to benefit from an "opened up" society like middle aged and elderly people did. GIs and Millennials understood that 30-40 years of intense competition and a "hands-off" approach to adjudicating it ultimately shred through far too many people and eventually such excess collapses under it's own weight.
Pre-heroic generations are comfortable with making a deal that enables them to choose their own way, which carries the strong risk that they'll fall behind, be broke, get arrested, get sick, get beaten up, etc. But to them it's a deal worth making, since after all, nobody's gonna tell me what to do. But after 40-50 years of that mindset, older generations are supposed to wise up and knock it off.
In a troublesome sign, it look like pre-1970 cohorts are basically digging their heels in. The right leaning whites often cling to the GOP as though the ill-conceived booms, the deregulation, and the union busting of the 80's and 90's never should end, and nearly all of the GOP elite agree. Meanwhile, the Left leaning whites and POC won't shut up about cultural Marxism, instead of trying to revive economic populism, while the DLC elite continues to pull strings. If the Dems went full Bernie, it would cause white Millennials to support the Dems to a similar degree that the GIs did.