As a reminder of why the GOP will never get tough on immigration, legal or illegal, the biggest ICE raid has rounded up nearly 100 illegals at -- where, exactly? Well, knowing that those durn LIEBRULS are the ones behind our demographic replacement, they must have been getting paid working at a media outlet, or a tech company, or a bank, or a university.
In reality, it was in the agricultural sector of a deep red state -- a meatpacking plant in a rural county outside of Knoxville, TN, which has voted Republican in every election during the 100 years from 1916 to Trump (and in 1912 they voted for Teddy Roosevelt, the rogue Republican running on a third party ticket).
Identity politics has zero to do with mass immigration -- the elites are not trying to erase our identity, our culture, our race, our ethnicity, our whatever. They are class warrior materialists, simply looking to boost profits by cutting labor costs. They do that by hiring cheap foreigners, whether by off-shoring a manufacturing plant to China or by allowing in hordes of Mexicans (the group arrested in this raid).
Because the GOP is the vehicle for sectors of the economy that are labor-intensive, it is they who will fight hardest against keeping America American. Their material interests are most threatened if the cost of labor goes up when only Americans can be hired. The agricultural sector is the worst, but so are the many Republican-aligned "small businesses" that rely on immigrants to clean, cook, and do other menial tasks.
This is no different from the antebellum plantation landowners, who hauled in legions of African slaves to work more cost-effectively than Americans in the agricultural sector. We saw what happened before when an entire sector of the economy put cheap foreign labor over the welfare of society, and we could easily see that again.
You might have also heard Republicans representing the agricultural sector shouting the loudest about Trump's announced but not implemented tariffs against China, and China's potential but not actual retaliation of putting tariffs on American soybeans.
Senator Sasse from Nebraska is the worst, but only the most vocal, of a group that needs to be neutered politically if this country wants to re-industrialize its economy in order to provide its citizens with high-paying jobs that don't require a college degree.
Again, we see the current Reaganite GOP acting like the antebellum Democrats, who not only hauled in zillions of cheap-labor foreigners to toil in the fields, but who sought to lower tariffs so that their agricultural exports would not get retaliated against, even if that meant American industry and manufacturing would suffer.
The antebellum Democrats also did not want to spend money on infrastructure to modernize the economy away from agriculture and toward the Industrial Revolution. At least they paired low spending with low taxes, unlike their Reaganite GOP descendants today who just put everything on a great big government credit card and push us deeply in debt.
They were also the military expansionists of their day, just like the Reaganite GOP, which itself is a form of anti-American globalization. Imperialism means there is no core nation of America, which gets reduced to a central district within a single sprawling empire.
And what good came of their main expansion anyway -- during the Mexican War? As of this century, the Greater Southwest is being rapidly reconquered by Central Americans and increasingly by Asians. Its American residents will have to wage a Second Mexican War to take it back -- and at a time when national cohesion is imploding, and the other regions of the country will not be interested in going to war for them or paying for it either.
Before the ultimate solution, where the regions secede from each other for good, in the meantime the goal must be to remove the GOP from power at all levels and in all places. They have been the main political enablers of mass immigration, which has exploded under their Reaganite paradigm of the past 30-some years, as it benefits the labor-intensive sectors of the economy that control the GOP.
Aside from that political change, there must be an economic change that targets and punishes the employers and landlords of illegal immigrants -- they are the ones who sustain the immigrants on a material level, not the pitiful amounts of welfare that they may be able to scrounge up. Because those employers will mostly be aligned with the GOP, their party will not punish its own controllers, and that opens an opportunity for the Democrats to punish them.
Perhaps the Democrats will use different rhetoric -- about greedy Republican employers who profit from exploiting cheap laborers who have no rights, rather than about the erasure of American culture or the demographic replacement of Americans. Who cares? What matters is the end results.
Toward that end, I've maintained that the best strategy for reducing illegal immigration now and going forward is to demand a high minimum wage for immigrants (say, $25 an hour), and for them to be provided with cheap housing (say, $1000 a month) within 1% zip codes. That will eliminate most immigration, legal and illegal, which is only brought in for the purpose of cutting labor costs to employers or raising housing prices for landlords.
Obviously it would be pointless to pitch that idea to any Republican, but it would at least get a hearing with the Bernie revolution that is quickly taking over the Democrat party. And if the populists who voted for Trump storm the Democrat party, they will have even more influence over the shape that the re-alignment takes.
Clearly, trying to alter the ossified Reaganite GOP has proven to be a 99% failure, notwithstanding the welcome 1% improvement. The Bernie paradigm is still just beginning to take shape, so get in on the ground floor with that party, and there can be and will be lasting changes made on immigration.
Also, no more debunked myths about Democrats importing foreigners to vote for them, as though there were no hope for reforming that party on immigration either. I keep hearing that from Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, who do have the guts to call out the GOP for its cheap-labor interest in immigration, but who try to suggest the Dems have a strong material interest in immigration as well. Multicultural identity politics is not a material interest, and will be blown away by cold hard material interests like workers wanting higher wages and cheaper housing.
Electorally, amnesty would be suicide for the Dems, not the GOP. Hispanic citizens don't vote, immigrants of any background don't vote, and Hispanic immigrants really don't vote. Only 28% of eligible Hispanic immigrants voted in 2012. African-American citizens are much more reliable voters -- 72% voted in 2012, no different from white Americans who voted at 68% in 2012. Immigrants are also confined to safe red and safe blue states, not purple or swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc., where it is African-Americans who could swing a race that was close among white voters.
Since immigrants disproportionately displace African-American citizens by working for low wages and piling into low-rent housing in urban areas, the Democrats are destroying the non-white part of their electoral base by supporting mass immigration.
Unlike the shut-out Democrats, Republicans have obviously not been hurt electorally for their mass immigration policies -- they have been the dominant party since Reagan, when mass immigration began, and the voters of Texas, Iowa, Tennessee, etc., have never thrown out their GOP politicians despite getting flooded with immigrants.
As the Bernie movement -- an actual movement with meetings, volunteers, activists, and candidates -- shifts their party in a populist direction, it's the Democrats who will put American workers first and cheap (foreign) labor second. If we can get them to pass and enforce a national $25 minimum wage, immigration would dry up overnight, and current illegals would not get hired anymore and have to return to their home countries.
The times they are a-changin'.
Related post: Kate Steinle's illegal immigrant killer was let in by Reagan or Bush, and was sustained by employment in GOP sectors that hire itinerant day-laborers, likely agriculture.
Posted this elsewhere before I read this post, but it's relevant here:
ReplyDelete" Democrats will never lose. The last GOP Senator in a West Coast state was elected 16 years ago. The last GOP Senator in NY, 1992. NJ, 1972."
Yeah, and the shitferbrains GOP was much more enthusiastic about high immigration levels in the 70's and 80's than old school Dems could ever dream of being.
Nixon and Reagan thought that anti-big gubmint sentiment out West was so strong that it could sustain floods of people from the 3rd world. The GOP focused heavily on the South and West after WW2, where the belief was that newly developed areas heavily reliant on the Pentagon, and lacking a history of urban ethnic political machines, could form an electoral redoubt from which to launch an assault on the "Eastern elite".
Fact: The GOP's addiction to growth for growth's sake plays much better in rural areas. In heavily developed and resource scarce areas (such as the Northeast and the West Coast), people hunker down and furrow their brows. What are conservatives so optimistic about, anyway? They think. During the economic recessions of the 1930's and 1970's, the GOP was about as popular as leprosy.
High immigration levels contribute to low wages and higher housing costs. In theory, that ought to make people more "conservative", but in reality, the sting of expensive living steers people towards the party that dominates urban and expensive areas, where people have a highly defensive mentality about getting something that's hard to get and then defending it. The Southern US, the Great Plains, and much of the inland West are still so undeveloped and cheap that the GOP can still do well in these places.
The GOP ultimately will always place the interests of moderately educated professionals and business owners ahead of what's in the best interests of proles. Since the use of cheap immigrant labor is regarded as a patriotic right by cuck inc. and a means to run a better workplace, then poof, there goes drastic measures to halt immigration (such as imprisoning elites who use cheap labor). At best, GOP'ers will limit the most brain dead and dangerous kinds of immigrants from entering; but in their bones they know that a full immigration moratorium such that we had in the 30's-50's would, wait for it........Re-create the FDR era of the proud organized AMERICAN worker....GAAHH!
Moderate Trump voters in the old-school organized labor belt of the Northeast, Eastern Midwest, and Appalachia (the most proleish part of the South) knew that Trump wasn't' a "typical" Republican, so they thought, "maybe this guy doesn't buy into the horseshit about business owners and the Pentagon being the real patriots". Well gee whiz, it turns out that the GOP ain't about to allow its entire image and reason for being get whollly replaced by Trump, who mauled the the cynicism of the Right elite on the campaign trail.
A rising number of Leftists are calling out Dems for being too nice to crooked-ass elites. While the Right cries in it's beer about it's inability to wake it's elites up. Leftists know that eventually, head are gonna roll. First it'll be the gutless GOP, then it'll be the corporate whore Dems who go too easy on corrupt elites. Then when we've got more populist champions in elite quarters we can then get crackin' on nailing corrupt elites, fining them, taking their assets, putting them in jail, maybe even publicly humiliating or beating them. Whatever it takes.
ReplyDeleteWe went from even the GOP giving us presidents who made sure elites didn't get too big for their britches (Eisenhower and Nixon), to Obama not bothering to significantly punish any wall street house or player for their fraud and greed.
Since the Right has it's "principles" of order and decorum, they usually are more difficult to rile up and motivate to action....Collective action esp. The Right always downplays the group and emphasizes the individual...No wonder the Right sucks at getting things done.
Only after voters told the GOP to fuck off in the 20 year long FDR-Truman era, during which prosperity was established, did voters become more willing to give the GOP a chance, and they elected Eisenhower, who invested in infrastructure and cracked down on Mexicans. When a lot of things seemed to sour around 1970, the public began to turn away from the Dems, although frankly neither party was very popular in the 70's. Then the economy picked up under Reagan, and a fair number of people born before the 1970's became convinced that GOP econ. policies were wonderful.....But good luck getting younger people, who aren't marrying or buying houses, to grasp that. And Democrat Boomers know the con that's been played by supply siders for decades, and they aren't buying it any time soon.
Also, one reason the GOP is cooked is that, well, what kind of fool do you have to be to stick up for "business owners" (whoever they may be) who clearly have cried wolf a few too many times? They cheat on taxes (legally or otherwise), bring in immigrant labor, exploit native and immigrant labor, pay people shit wages (and tell people that low wages are to be expected, not challenged), and so forth, while all the while they spend gobs of money on lobbying, lavishly furnish stuff on their elites, and constantly complain about taxes being too high and regulations being too burdensome.
The GOP only targets the supply of immigrants, not the demand for them (employers and landlords), to the extent they do anything at all on the issue. Supply-siders to the bitter end.
ReplyDeleteTrying to control the supply leads to armed force (another sector that controls the GOP), whether it's local police arresting a Mexican drunk driver, ICE raiding a meatpacking plant, a small number of National Guardsmen sent to the border, or in the conservative fantasyland, the US Army carrying out another Operation Wetback.
(Reminder: Operation Wetback was at the behest of the Mexican govt and Mexican business sector, who were trying to industrialize the economy and wanted as many Mexicans back in Mexico to work in the factories, rather than wasting their labor in American farmlands.)
The GOP knows damn well that these armed force actions aren't going to remove more than a drop in the bucket, when we need to totally drain the swamp by going after the employers and landlords who demand immigrants so heavily and sustain their existence here.
But it does provide for temporary symbolic relief, and the GOP voters are so militaristic that they fall for the trick every time.
President Trump is sending the National Guard to the border! -- at half the rate that Bush Jr. did, when the situation is far worse, and without threatening, let alone punishing, the employers and landlords here who are the real source of mass immigration.
Bernie Sanders and his populist Dem Congress could attack the exploiters of illegal immigrant labor, sending the immigrants back without having to use force, as they would find no employers.
And attack the slumlords who exploit these illegals in clapboard housing where they live 10 to a room, where they're threatened with deportation if they complain about the lack of A/C in the summer, etc. Faced with actual punishment, no slumlord wants to house them, and they go back.
But dipshit conservative Republicans would howl about the tyrannical socialist gubmint attacking private businesses. "While we agree that immigrants are a problem, this, Sir, is no way to go about solving it!" Totally utterly suicidal morons.
It would also put something above the profit motive -- American society, culture, etc., or American workers' wages and material welfare. Whatever it is, it would be protected by a taboo and by law from the profit motive. Desanctifying the profit motive would collapse the entire Reaganite edifice, so like hell the GOP would support that approach.
"Our wages don't care about your profits," or "Our culture doesn't care about your profits" -- that's so radical, it'd get shut down as tyrannical socialist collectivism by the GOP and most of its voters, media morons, etc.
That mindset will only come from the Bernie revolutionaries, who not only hold no taboos about the sanctity of business and profits, but who are fired up to do battle against them in order to improve the collective well-being of our society.
You see the same deflection from the GOP on the trade war. They're reconciling themselves to having to vaguely support Trump's position, while trying to keep it as harmonious with Reaganism as possible.
ReplyDeleteSo it's not the American managers and stockholders at manufacturing companies who are to blame for deciding to fire all their American workers, off-shore the plant to China / India / Mexico, and reap the lower costs in the form of higher profits.
Nope, the American executives and stockholders are perfectly neutral or even leaning in the patriotic direction -- but somehow, those inscrutable Orientals and those devious Messicans figured out how to trick our companies into firing their American workers and off-shoring their plants.
Our poor companies are just so taken advantage of by foreigners! We have to attack those foreign advantage-taker-of-ers!
Trump did not begin political life as a dipshit, and constantly railed against the American owners themselves as the problem.
He said how heartless the management at Carrier was for firing everyone so abruptly and with no emotion in their voice as they announced the plant was moving to Mexico. He said the 35% tariff would deter the American owners of a plant from moving it out of the country, by neutralizing their search for lower costs -- not so easy when there's a 35% tariff on the product's way back into the US market!
He's dropped his attacks on the American executives and owners, and made it all about the Chinese taking advantage of us. It lets the GOP resonate somewhat more with the trade war, which now has a more rah-rah Us vs. Them feel to it.
But the Chinese are only the recipients of stolen goods, not the thieves themselves -- that would be the owners of the past 40 years who have taken over companies that they did not create, and sold them off to the highest foreign bidder -- which country can promise the cheapest labor and cheapest regulations, and therefore the highest profits to the American owners?
This approach to the trade war dooms it to failure, if the goal were to re-industrialize the economy. More likely, they're not even making that the goal anymore (bye-bye Rust Belt voters), and are just using the tariffs as a means of compelling better treatment for American white-collar professionals who create and manage intellectual property, or the infamous agricultural sector who will get even greater access and lower tariffs in China, Mexico, or wherever. Maybe cut Wall Street in on the action within the financial services sector in China, Mexico, or wherever.
Ditto for the approach to non-intervention and scaling back our military footprint. Trump has softened his tone on the Pentagon itself as the main actor in ever-lasting occupations around the globe, and shifted more to whining about foreign governments taking advantage of us and not paying.
ReplyDeleteHe blamed both sides during the campaign, but in office, he has stopped going after the American side of the problem, and shifted to blaming the foreign side instead.
But when the main problem is our own elites selling us out for their own growing wealth and power, the approach of blaming foreigners is not just factually wrong, but strategically suicidal.
It removes sight and pressure from the American elites who are the real problem, and only emboldens them more -- as they see that "even a hardliner" like Trump is giving them a pass. That's a far greater license to fuck over society for their own benefit than getting a pass from elite-friendly Obama / Bush. Even the apparent populist opposition like Trump is wussing out against our elites.
That's reflected in the trade deficits growing far wider under Trump than under Obama (all-time records when you exclude oil). In the fact that we're occupying a whole new Middle East minefield (Syria). And in the fact that illegal border crossings started surging back to Obama-era levels by the second half of last year.
We need a totally different party, leader, and vision to actually turn things around -- not an appeaser who's trying to get both sides within the country to play nice with each other, who are locked in a high-stakes zero-sum contest.
That's the crucial contradiction in "nationalism-populism" as it has actually evolved. At the beginning during the campaign, the "populist" meaning was pretty clear (the welfare of the common people), but what did "nationalist" mean?
ReplyDeleteFor some, it was mostly isolationism -- disentangling ourselves from the global system, mostly relying on our own nation, and maybe a few friendly alliances of convenience (plus the special relationship with our founding country, Britain).
That was perfectly harmonious with the "anti-globalization" theme of the Left circa 2000, something I came out of.
But for others, it was aggressive and invasive -- let's send battleships to China to show them that they can't trick our manufacturing companies into off-shoring their plants any longer!
Or the likes of John Bolton supporting Trump's candidacy, hoping that "America first" would simply translate into "interventionism without the pretext of caring about other nations and peoples".
Sadly, "nationalism" and "America-first" have congealed into the Reaganite-friendly forms, not the Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan forms. Maybe not too surprising, since this was happening within the Reagan party -- but the whole unorthodox appeal of Trump's campaign was that it was going to shake up our relations with other nations.
Don't waste resources trying to conquer them, let alone use them as cheap labor to impoverish American workers -- and rebuild America for the American people instead.
That's just not going to happen for the party and its electorate (especially its base) that is so tribal that it gives a pass to its own sell-out elites who are robbing them blind and raping them to death. But the fact that they're using foreign mercenaries to carry out the ugly job, totally distracts the victims from who was the kingpin who hired the hitmen in the first place.
Conservatives and Republicans are too hopelessly tribal to save themselves from the internal elites, so the populist Bernie revolution must save them instead, by implementing an anti-globalization form of "nationalism" to defuse its alternative of aggression and invasion.
Just because conservatives have the wrong diagnosis, doesn't mean they don't detect some seriously disturbing symptoms of a disease. And it doesn't mean they aren't entitled to being cured by those with the correct diagnosis and the proper treatment.
They will be healed, whether they agree with the treatment or not. (They hate that kind of paternalism, but libs and mods enjoy it, and will gladly play that role.)
Agnostic:
ReplyDeleteHow much of the ignorance of the Right can be put down to shallow Boomers being played so easily? Tell the NFL players to shut the hell up, rattle sabers at China, N. Korea, and Iran, don't aggressively pursue cultural communism, etc. And you'll be adored by much of the base, most of whom are older.
Most Boomers remain so averse to a culture being legit premised on others before oneself, and austerity before opulence, that I think we'll have to get a bigger generational overhaul of the electorate to really see some light.
What's more, if the Silents experienced their greatest leaders being shot before their time in the 60's (and then having to watch capable leaders like Buchanan and Nader effectively sent to the margins by Boomers for favoring substance over style), then the Boomers have lived to see their generation be given chance after chance to steer the ship, yet we can't get around the icebergs. Trump had potential, but as Roger Stone warned after Flynn et al were jettisoned, a de facto coup was happening. And it seems like Trump thought he'd go along to get along, lest his historic achievement (becoming president) be derailed by him and the GOP/Pentagon refusing to align on several important issues (like interventionism or what have you). Trump envisioned himself as CEO of the GOP and White House, but boy was that naive.
Being the standard bearer of a party isn't quite like "running a business", as the GOP often advises WRT government. There are too many entrenched ideological wretches, too many people living in the past, and too little interest in youth driven movements for the GOP to accept self-imposed reform.
Lastly, there's also the possibility that moderates and conservatives were so repulsed by by the goodfernuthin' Bush-Obama-McCain-Romney corporate whore era, that just about anyone (Trump included) is a breath of fresh air. You see this frequently with people claiming that Hillary's election would've been the end of the world, so let's be grateful we got Trump. But that's setting the bar awfully low, isn't it? Hillary would've had similar foreign policy as Trump, would possibly have been amenable to econ. populist reforms like expanded and cheaper gov. health care (after all, she herself once pushed universal HC in the 90's), and probably have continued cultural Marxism until it played itself out. Being in the Dems, she would've probably "triangulated" for maximum political effectiveness; Obama started pushing CultMarxism around 2010 because it was in the zeitgeist, but by the 2020's we can probably look to trends changing, which the Dems would've adapted to. Hilary would've been a suspect president, no doubt, but then again, her party is less rigidly commited to dated and politically suicidal ideas, so who knows how things would've played out? After all, Bill Clinton himself was trying to prime her on how to appeal to the Rust Belt and South, and maybe at some point she would've started listening to him?
Florida is a swing state with plenty of immigrants. Immigration policy works differently for Cubans & Puerto Ricans. Nevada is another one of the states with the highest percent of immigrants in its population, and is considered a swing state. Despite being a relatively rural midwestern state, Iowa is also a swing state and famously had its Postville meatpacking done by immigrants.
ReplyDeleteFlorida is a swing state, and has been so long before it was overwhelmed with immigrants, which cannot explain its swing status. Back through the New Deal and Reaganite eras. Before that, part of the Solid South for the Democrats.
ReplyDeleteNevada is basically blue now, not really a swing state. But if you look back further, it has been swing-y -- long before overwhelmed by immigrants. Although 28% of the pop is Hispanic, they were only 18% of the electorate in 2016. HISPANICS DON'T VOTE.
To the extent it is a light blue state, changing from the libertarian-red state it used to be, that's due to the Republican-supporting owners of the tourism and leisure industry hauling in zillions of cheap-labor immigrants to work at the casinos, restaurants, etc. They get represented by a service workers union, which nudges them to vote Democrat, but again, mostly unsuccessfully since they tend to stay home.
And even when they turn out, the Hispanic vote in NV in 2016 was only 60% Democrat anyway, unlike blacks voting 80-90% and above Democrat.
Hispanic immigrants are not American, and do not consider themselves American -- hence they do not take part in any aspect of American civic society.
Iowa is like Wisconsin, defecting from the Reagan coalition in 1988, aside from a single return for Bush Jr in '04. Not really a swing state, but a blue state that flipped for Trump.
At any rate, those meatpacking immigrants were not what made Iowa blue for most of the past 30 years -- that would be the same people who made the rest of the Lutheran Triangle blue.
"Trump commutes sentence of kosher meatpacking executive" of Iowa plant.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/20/trump-commutes-sentence-kosher-meatpacking-business-executive-rubashkin-311389
Iowa meatpacking plant gets raided in 2008, nearly 400 illegals are arrested, executive Sholom Rubashkin is charged with that on top of money laundering. Convicted, sentenced to 27 years, serves 8, gets sentence commuted by Trump, who he didn't vote for, dances for joy as a free white collar crook.
Way to send the signal that the Trump admin is going to crack down on employers of illegals. Take the most high-profile example of such an employer, from the most notorious sector that employs only illegals and saddles the local community with the costs of immigration, and spring him loose from the jailhouse!
Trump did not have to take any action -- the guy had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced. He could've simply done nothing, and let him stay in jail as punishment for ruining Iowa (Rubashkin himself is an absentee landlord, as a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who was born in Russia).
Just doing nothing would have sent a strong enough signal ("these crimes against America and our workers will not be forgiven"), but he cucked and commuted the shithead's sentence to time served.
Either he didn't ask about who this guy was and what he was convicted for (lazy), or he got the gist and became his usual softie self, especially toward business executives.
His persona as a ruthless killer is so phony. He's the biggest marshmallow ever. The Bernie revolutionaries would have let that guy rot in jail.
Some of the GOP-ers' weakness is due to Boomer-ism, but even Gen X conservatives have adopted a lot of the "Dems r real racists" and "keep the gubmint out of the private sector" worldview.
ReplyDeleteMillennial Trump supporters are not quite so retarded on those issues, but they're still confused at a basic level about who the enemy is. For them, it's still the foreigners who are taking advantage of poor defenseless America -- rather than our own elites selling us out to those foreigners.
Millennial GOP-ers may be less mindful of racial taboos or political correctness, but that doesn't mean they're training their sights on our own sell-out elites. They want a showdown with China, rather than a neutering of American manufacturing executives who have eagerly sent their factories to China for lower labor costs (= higher profits).
And they get way more energetic about sending troops to the border to repel the immigrants themselves, rather than sending our troops to the headquarters of an agribusiness corporation to arrest the executives who hire only illegals. Or sending our troops to arrest the slumlords who house these immigrants.
Their focus is still on external enemies rather than the rot within.
The one area where they seem truly resistant to the GOP's sham nationalist deflection is on foreign policy and military occupation. They don't buy the idea that we have to indefinitely occupy Syria (Iraq, Afghanistan) or else we'll get blown up here.
They aren't Russia-haters either.
We'll see how much they get influenced, or not, into supporting our endless military presence in South Korea and Japan.
Seems like the main source of their resistance to adventurism is the outcome of recent wars, which have been in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Maybe they'll be less resistant to the prospect of a land war in East Asia -- they don't remember Vietnam or the original Korean War, and those wars have not been part of the pop culture they were raised on (which after the '80s, has focused entirely on WWII).
Who's going to pay for that Wall? "Mega-farm landowners!"
ReplyDeleteWho? "7-11 executives!"
I can't hear you! "Casino moguls!"
That's right. Make the enablers of mass immigration pay the price of sealing the border. Getting Mexico to pay would've been a good troll, but seizing the assets of the immigrant-demanding employers here will do a better job of correcting the karmic imbalance.
Targeting employers and landlords is also more cost-effective to disperse the immigrants back home.
ReplyDeleteThere must be only 1 employer per 10s or per 100s or even per 1000s of immigrants. Ditto the ratio of slumlords to the immigrant population they house.
Orders of magnitude fewer targets to attack, already known who they are (no one "in the shadows"), higher profile, upstream of the problem, less sympathetic in the eyes of the general public, and more terrifying to other enablers of immigration.
Also, less qualitative need to use teams of armed forces to physically round up and transport the targets. Immigrants might run, hide, resist, fight back, etc. Our elites are soft and wimpy -- easily taken into custody.
The only downside is employers and landlords have more political capital than illegal immigrants -- but we're already assuming there is political will to solve the problem, and that we're already in a populist / nationalist rebellion.
But that does mean that it won't be the Republicans, even Trump, who will solve this problem. They will accept the political capital of the targets, and get them off the hook before they're even arrested. Trump already intervened to commute the sentence of one of their worst offenders.
Bernie revolutionaries, on the other hand, can't wait to get their hands on white-collar exploiters of immigrants -- they'll throw those suckers in the slammer so fast it'll make ya head spin!
"Iowa is like Wisconsin, defecting from the Reagan coalition in 1988, aside from a single return for Bush Jr in '04. Not really a swing state, but a blue state that flipped for Trump.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, those meatpacking immigrants were not what made Iowa blue for most of the past 30 years -- that would be the same people who made the rest of the Lutheran Triangle blue."
Yeah, the NW Midwest is the most Teutonic part of America; we don't have the WASP culture that allowed the GOP to do well in much of New England before the 2000's, nor are we as Celtic as the Eastern Midwest or South. Furthermore, the most Nordic Germans and Scandinavians naturally clustered together in the NW Midwest, while the less Nordic Germans were more comfortable being closer to Appalachia and being in Texas.
And the Pentagon is almost meaningless in the Upper Midwest, where there are very few military installations and Nordic dovishness makes military service and loyalty much less common than it is the South, Lower Midwest, and inland West. Not having to hear sentimental hogwash about the military as you grow up makes you much less inclined to care about the Pentagon and thus the GOP in general. Micheal Barone often points out that the Upper Midwest and the Pacific region beginning with SF and ending with BC are invariably the regions of America most associated with isolationism, being the most Nordic regions of the country and having the greatest discomfort at bossing other countries and ethnic groups around. And unlike the Northeast, the Nordic belt is less concerned about impressing Europeans or whatever with displays of muscle flexing.
Most of the Pentagon elite is largely drawn from the South, Northeast, and even to some extent the West.
It's funny how many TrueCons give the Nordic belt shit, as though they don't understand the history that the Dems have with "ethnic" white populism (pre-1960, the Dems were the party of Nordics, Scots-Irish, and urban Ellis Island people e.g. Italians, Jews, Irish-Catholics, and Poles). Nowadays it's assumed that all white people are morally obligated, or something, to vote for the GOP, as though anything has happened in the Upper Midwest that's equivalent to the political changes of the 60's which gave the South to the GOP (LBJ's Dems went all in Civil Rights, and Dems during the late 60's and early 70's began to shed Pentagon baggage which alienated the South).
"they don't remember Vietnam or the original Korean War, and those wars have not been part of the pop culture they were raised on (which after the '80s, has focused entirely on WWII)."
ReplyDeleteThe primary audience for that stuff is Boomers who still can't over the lingering bitterness that they never got as worthy an opponent as the Nazis, no matter how hysterically they demonize whatever country is the enemy of the free world du jour (neo-cons talking about "ending evil" or Leftists claiming that Putin et al are a scourge against secular free-thinking values).
We seldom get movies about Vietnam or Korea, and movies about post-1990 Middle East conflicts are either not very popular (even the Oscar winning Hurt Locker), or if they are popular (American Sniper, Lone Survivor), it's because they romanticize The Fighting Man so much that we forget how stupid the Pentagon has been for 70 years.
The doddering Academy is still fond of war pictures, even when the public necessarily isn't (Zero Dark Thirty). The general public since the 90's still seems much more fond of WW2 pictures (Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge, and that Chris Nolan war movie whose name escapes me) than it is other types of war movies.
It should be noted that war movies these days almost invariably do not discuss atrocities committed by Americans, whereas in the 80's Platoon and Casualties of war had scenes of poor behavior by GIs. Most war movies these days are heavily overseen by the Pentagon, whereas back in the 80's film production was much less corporate and artists had more free reign to explore different aspects of what war entailed. This of course is profoundly out of step with they stereotypical notion that the 80's were cowardly, conformist, and morally simplistic. In reality, certain taboos became heavily enforced in the 80's but this was before everything became so corporate and PC; the values and nature of expression of the 80's came mostly from people wanted and felt in their guts, whereas since the mid-90's so much of what we do is governed by a fear of being out of line with whatever moral, cultural, and social dictates are being handed down from above.
Robocop (1987) doesn't just satirize the (exaggerated) greed of the mid-80's, it's also a humanistic expression of how many people were horrified about the possible road we may have been heading down ("we practically are the military", says the CEO who effectively owns the police force). The movie was a hit because it was about a decent man who overcomes street and corporate thugs.
After cocooning and high striving set in, narratives about people fighting to maintain their integrity in the face of institutional corruption have become much less successful. We habitually watch movies and TV shows filled with well-meaning and essentially benevolent leaders and authority figures. Whereas in the 70's, 80's, and very early 90's, corrupt or stupid authority figures were constantly getting in the way of the hero (in First Blood, the villain of the movie is a sheriff, which becomes a metaphor for the often stated belief among American GIs that incompetent leaders didn't let us "win" Vietnam). Aliens tapped into this brilliantly, too, as we see how a "civilian" (Ripley) proves to have much more courage under fire than the "Captain" who's never faced and overcome a challenging situation in his life. Credentialism and nominal authority just didn't matter as much back then. Even if people were becoming bigger strivers, it didn't mean we were becoming more willing to accept their wisdom or moral authority.