Joe Crowley lost the Democrat primary by double digits to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York's 14th Congressional district, a shocking defeat for the neoliberal Establishment of the party. The 20-year incumbent, head of the local political machine, chair of the House Democratic Caucus in Washington, and supposedly the next Speaker of the House if they took back that chamber in November, got a decisive heave-ho from voters.
Taking his place is a 28 year-old who had never even competed for office before, and who ran her ragtag operation on small donations. She triumphed by offering a populist / socialist platform that, in the Bernie era, is beginning to sweep away the neoliberalism-lite option that had been the opposition party's only path to victory during the Reagan era, already in its twilight phase under Trump.
On a personal level, she comes across as a normal, wholesome, authentic human being, rather than the typical politician who is a manufactured brown-nosing degenerate. She is warm, nurturing, soothing, and feminine -- as though she is only reluctantly wading into cut-throat politics out of last-resort maternal instinct, like a mama bear who sees her cubs being threatened. Totally unlike the over-weening ambition of the typical "woman in politics" during the neoliberal era, who are self-absorbed strivers without a nurturing bone in their sociopathic bodies -- Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley, etc.
Thus, the Bernie movement is not winning elections by running caricatures of their old hardcore base -- who has bluest hair, who has the craziest eyes, who has the most bitter cat-lady voice, the most wine-mommy set of "interests". They're appealing to normal people who don't binge-watch MSNBC, as they have more urgent material concerns than "The Pentagon should nuke North Korea to prevent Trump from normalizing Kim Jong-un," or whatever Rachel Maddow, and her panel packed with spooks and Feds, is psychotically ranting about this week to her freak-faced audience of Clinton cultists.
The upset victory for Ocasio-Cortez marks the further erosion of power held by the Me Generation -- the Silents and the Boomers -- as Gen X-ers and Millennials reject individualism for collectivism, and reject laissez-faire for regulating chaos. The upwards-failing Boomers have seized too much of society's resources for themselves, while the downwardly mobile Millennials have never had anything of their own to begin with.
The Boomers represented the initial stage of the over-production of elites, where a handful of aspiring elites could be the first in their family to get credentialed at college, and through sheer hyper-competitiveness, push out the socially harmonious Greatest Generation above them. By this late stage, aspiring elites are so over-produced that not even a fraction of them will actually attain elite status, no matter how hyper-competitive they have acted for their whole lives.
Unlike Boomer aspiring elites who faced the Greatest Generation incumbents, Millennial aspiring elites are trying to push out an incumbent generation that has always been hostile, defensive, and status-striving. The longer that the Boomers continue to clog the arteries of basic social mobility over the lifespan, the more that the Millennials will figure that it's too late for minor measures like statins, but time for radical open-heart surgery to clear out the plaque directly.
That means Ocasio-Cortez is not like David Brat, the neophyte Republican who primaried a senior-ranking Congressman, Eric Cantor, in 2014. Brat was not a re-aligner, but a standard libertarian of the Reaganite era, just like Cantor, but who promised a harder line on immigration, which is a common promise among GOP Congressmen.
Ocasio-Cortez ran on an anti-Reaganite platform, unlike the vast majority of Democrats who have enjoyed incumbency during the Reagan era. And extending Medicare to cover everybody, along with the other Bernie-style policies, is not a widespread view at the moment among elected Democrats. She is a re-aligner within her party (and in fact she belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America).
If anything, the comparison would be to Trump, who also ran and won on an orthodoxy-shifting platform. But Trump is completely alone among his party, who, as the founders of the Reaganite system, have the most invested in keeping it humming along. There is no broader shift within the GOP toward economic protectionism, anti-interventionism, and leaving the social safety net in place. They do not exist at even the candidate level, let alone primary winner or elected official.
In contrast, tonight's winning Bernie candidate joins many others thus far into the 2018 primaries, and many more in the coming years -- not to mention a handful of currently serving Democrats. As in New York, Pennsylvania saw several Bernie-approved or outright socialist candidates win their primaries in safe Democrat districts. There are scores more who will at least compete in races, whether or not they win.
So unlike Trump, who is utterly isolated in his party regarding his unorthodox policies, the Bernie people all have each other, and their numbers keep growing. Trump will not be a re-aligning figure, lacking anyone else to join his coalition, whereas Bernie or someone like that will have no trouble steering the society in a new direction, as they will have a great big support network of fellow travelers -- including some incumbents who choose to re-align themselves rather than get driven out of office.
"Great Men" do not shape history except to the extent that they are leading a broad and cohesive group. Trump, in his anti-Reaganite stances, is leading absolutely no one else within the GOP, and will not shape history. That role will belong to whoever becomes the leader of the upcoming Bernie revolution.
Sorry for posting this in the other thread before I saw this one. The results don't correlate to race.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/mcimaps/status/1011823783492177920
The whites in the district are old line working and middle class not out of state gentrifiers, mostly the desendents of Ellis Islanders or the 1965-1980 Greek wave.
Here's a full demographic breakdown of district down to the census tract level
ReplyDeletehttps://statisticalatlas.com/congressional-district/New-York/District-14/Ancestry
The results don't correlate to race.
ReplyDeleteThe results are almost all about race.
You had an old ugly male White Irish type running against a Latina who was young and photogenic.
Crowley is representing a district that is only 18% White.
....................................
18.41% White
11.39% Black
16.24% Asian
49.80% Hispanic
0.45% Native American
3.71% other
....................
LOL.
So identity politics wins again in the Democratic party.
Democrats are more about Al Sharpton, La Raza, White feminists and other riff raff.
Socialist Whitey aint gonna cut it.
She is pro-open borders in the extreme. Its a telling sign that the "Bernie candidate" that wins is SJW-lite.
ReplyDeleteI don't like neo-liberalism any more than you, agnostic, but if there really was a Bernie re-alignment of Dems, Bernie candidates would have done better in the 11th, 19th, 21st, & 23rd. The latter three were won by Bernie in 2016.
Read the map, genius. She won white and Asian areas and lost some Hispanic areas.
ReplyDeleteYou're arguing that these NYC Dems only just now discovered identity politics, since they let this old white guy run their district for the past 20 years. Another brilliant insight.
Where was all the official Democrat party support for her, since she's a woman of color and that's what you say is all they stand for? They all supported the white Establishment tool Crowley.
And in the MD Dem primary for Governor, half-black Bernie bro Ben Jealous defeated full-black Establishment tool Rushern Baker.
Just because you keep denying these changes doesn't mean they're not happening.
HBS, all Dems are open borders, especially in urban non-white areas. So are most Republicans, else we'd have that fucking Wall already, plus millions deported, employers and slumlords of illegals getting locked up, etc.
ReplyDeleteImmigration stance is not what separates a neoliberal from a populist or socialist -- or even a Democrat from a Republican.
She didn't run on SJW issues like race, sex, gayness, jihadism, or any other social-cultural issues. It was all class and economics -- Medicare for all, federal jobs guarantee, $15 minimum wage, taxing Wall Street to pay for trade schools, and the rest of the Bernie stuff.
And she wasn't the only one to win tonight -- check Our Revolution's twitter to see who they congratulated. Slowly but surely, re-alignment is happening on their side.
Then show me all the GOP primary winners who support leaving NAFTA and the WTO, 35% tariffs on off-shored production by US companies, leaving NATO, exiting Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.
However unimpressed you are by the Bernie re-alignment, at least it's happening. There are zero GOP candidates even running on Trump's 2016 platform, let alone winning.
Here's her platform flier:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1011786860107059201
Populist, not SJW.
The whole SJW thing was so 2013 -- it's 2018 now, two years after the Bernie / Trump disruptions to the culture wars.
Re-alignment hits the opposition party 1st, not both parties simultaneously. The dominant party has too much invested in maintaining its big-picture system.
ReplyDeleteA lone figure may challenge it from within, may even win among voters -- but he will get cockblocked by the entire system when he takes office, allowing him only a few changes here and there. After that, they go right back to their comfort zone and run old-style candidates.
The opposition gets taken over by re-aligners first because they did not create the reigning orthodoxy, and hence have far less invested in propping it up. If running with a whole new vision is their way of finally climbing their way into long-term dominant status, instead of languishing as the opposition party, then like hell they're going to let that chance go!
But the former dominant party is not convince that the opposition's re-alignment is real, or here to stay. At best, it's a fluke -- so all we have to do is run our familiar candidates from the old orthodoxy that we founded, and we'll be right back in power again.
It's not until after several dismal failures of formerly dominant party candidates, running on the rejected old system, that they finally accept that they are now the opposition party, and must accommodate themselves to the new dominant party that has re-aligned itself. They are now offering their own twist on the re-aligners' themes from the other party.
Last time this happened, it was the end of the New Deal / Great Society period, where Dems were dominant. Jimmy Carter campaigns against the New Deal paradigm, gets elected, then gets cockblocked by his own party for most of the time. He manages some unorthodox things for his era -- deregulation (transportation, some finance), and de-militarization (pardoning Vietnam draft dodgers, pursuing peace accords b/w Egypt and Israel), etc. But mostly he's another Great Society era president, and fails to deliver much on his campaign themes of undoing the status quo.
ReplyDeleteThe opposition party, the GOP, re-aligned itself with Reagan in 1980, won the election, and produced a whole great big team of fellow travelers to immediately deliver on undoing the old status quo. They took a sledgehammer to the New Deal and Great Society in a way that the Dems under Carter were totally unable / unwilling to do.
But the Dems assume Reagan's 1980 win is just a fluke -- our society hasn't really changed that much, people still want a New Deal / Great Society program. So run Mondale in '84 -- a New Deal liberal from Minnesota -- and then Dukakis in '88 -- a New Deal liberal from Massachusetts. Totally in denial that there's been a revolution away from what those candidates represent.
Not until '92 do they win again with Bill Clinton -- a neoliberal moderate-conservative from the South. And now they accept that the GOP has become the dominant party, and they are now the opposition, who must offer a subtle variation on the dominant party's themes -- a more multicultural, socially liberal form of Reaganism, and sanding down some of its harsher edges on militarism and economics.
That's also how Obama won as an opposition Democrat during the Reagan era.
So, when Trump fails to deliver on undo / transform Reaganism like he got elected to do, voters will go with the opposition party who will out-Trump Trump on populism. Say it's Bernie. The Dems are happy to find themselves in dominant status for the first time since the Great Society, and keep on with the populist re-alignment.
But the GOP will be in denial -- Trump / Bernie were just a fluke, we're going to run Pence, then Nikki Haley, then Mitt Romney, etc., convinced that it's still the Reagan era. After so many dismal failures in a row, they'll finally accept that the populist thing is here to stay, that the Dems are now dominant, and that they themselves are now the opposition party. Their only way to win will be offering their own variation on the dominant themes of the Dems -- a more nationalist spin on populism, where the dominant Bernie people are more in favor of "populism in every country to avoid a global race to the bottom".
That person will be what we thought we were getting with Trump, just as Bill Clinton was what people thought they were getting with Carter -- a moderate-conservative Southern Democrat who would blow up the New Deal / Great Society.
But that will be after at least 3 terms of Bernie re-aligners -- in the 2030s, not in the coming years.
Loser Joe Crowley: “I Can’t Help That I Was Born White”
ReplyDeletehttp://www.unz.com/isteve/loser-joe-crowley-i-cant-help-that-i-was-born-white/
She didn't run on SJW issues like race, sex, gayness, jihadism, or any other social-cultural issues. It was all class and economics -- Medicare for all, federal jobs guarantee, $15 minimum wage, taxing Wall Street to pay for trade schools, and the rest of the Bernie stuff.
Its not just about what she ran on its how the Demo base perceives her.
Esp next to some old ugly White baldy.
She doesn't have to run on SJW issues because that's implicit in her being a young latina.
So its more about implicit SJWism and identity politics and stated gimmee dat socialism.
That's her advantage over Sanders. Sanders wasn't even perceived as a minority Jew. Just an old White guy who wanted the government to spread the money around.
So why did Clinton flatten him in the popular vote?
Clinton explicitly attacked Sander's focus on money and class by saying that it wouldn't stop - racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia etc.
The Democrat strategy WILL NOT CHANGE - its about pandering to identity politics and at the same time working to promote Wall street interests.
Sanders failed on both counts. An future Sanders type will fail as well.
https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1010943953837805569
ReplyDeleteWrong, Bernie has already soared to become the most popular Democrat nationally, from zero recognition in 2016.
ReplyDeleteIt's not only from his existing base getting more excited, but from a big chunk of Democrat voters deciding pragmatically that, hey, I guess he *was* the more electable of the two in 2016. He would not have lost Michigan, Wisconsin, the district in Maine, etc. They sense it's the wave of the future.
Non-whites will prefer Sandernistas of their own ethnicity at the local level -- wouldn't you? But at the national level, they're turning toward the populist side rather than the neoliberal side that distracts with ID politics.
The biggest example of that is Corey Booker -- token non-white Wall Street shill, formerly focused on ID politics and neoliberalism. He's had to sign onto Bernie's Medicare for All program, or he'd get fired by his voters. And NJ is not even that progressive of a state. The Bernie movement is not just about claiming scalps, but forcing the incumbents to support the new populist policies if they want to stay in office.
Generational turnover is faster among younger ethnic groups, and blacks and Hispanics start families earlier and tend to have larger families, which tilts their age pyramid in the younger direction. Compounding that is the fact that Millennials are an echo boom from the original Boomers, who are dropping like flies rather than hanging around for so long.
Life expectancy is falling among Boomers for the first time in forever, due to their lifelong degeneracy. They are not bowing out gracefully, but they cannot escape the great harvester, far less so than their own parents who did not pollute their bodies so much throughout their lives.
Every Dem and 99% of the GOP supports open borders, no matter how forcefully the voters demand and vote for the opposite. Trump ran on the most hardline immigration stance, and has been completely cockblocked by his own party.
ReplyDeleteIllegal immigration is deteriorating under his watch -- right back to Obama levels, despite an initial spook during the first several months, as illegals feared the shift might be real.
But they quickly figured out that the same ol' GOP was still in power, and they materially depend on cheap labor more than Democrats, so let's head right back on up over the border.
Conclusion: closed-border folks are going to have to find other strategies for preventing further immigration and driving out the tens of millions of illegals already here. Just voting for the few hardline GOP-ers has never worked.
So they must attack the problem at the root -- the American citizens who employ illegals in the labor market, and who rent to them in the housing market. That is the material source of the demand for immigration -- cheap labor and over-priced housing.
The anti-immigration movement has to shift its vision from punishing the immigrant workers themselves to punishing their employers, and from punishing illegal residents to punishing their slumlords. That's the populist way -- attacking elites who are at the root of the problem, not the peons who are just the superficial effect of the underlying problem.
The tone must allow both sides of the spectrum to sign onto it -- outlawing the exploitation of cheap labor, outlawing the exploitation of vulnerable immigrants by greedy employers and slumlords. If you want them here, you must provide them with better-than-average wages, benefits, and housing prices.
It's also more cost-effective -- one employer per dozens of immigrant laborers, one slumlord per dozens of immigrant tenants.
That requires jacking up the minimum wage, enforcing greater benefits, and extracting more concessions from slumlords. Then they won't benefit from bringing in illegals -- we will have eliminated wage arbitrage for lazy employers.
Finding no benefit to serving immigrants, they won't hire them or house them. And then the immigrants will go home, and won't bother coming here to begin with.
In the southwest section of the U.S. a form of ecological succession is taking place.
DeleteNot only are the racial demographics changing, but the cultural geography is changing.
Since culture is part of the environment for humans a change in cultural geography means a change in social ecology.
Different types of humans will thrive under different ecological conditions.
Most jobs created in the service sector, in an area where a majority of people are Spanish speaking will be filled by Spanish speakers.
In short immigration without assimilation
creates new niches which are more likely to be filled by immigrants or their co-ethnics.
This means fewer opportunities in that area for English only speakers.
So Anglo and Black Americans have suffered a loss of habitat in the southwest while Latin Americans have increased their range
These people aren't likely to give that up and "go home".
Pressure on employers might send the Hispanic immigrant diaspora in the South or Midwest back to the Southwest but among millions of others like them they'll find work.
They're not leaving.
We'd face a secession movement before that will happen.
Dems aren't the party of gibs -- the era of Big Govt is over. Clinton famously destroyed what was left of the welfare state, with the Gingrich revolution Congress, over 20 years ago. Along with a soaring incarceration rate, primarily affecting blacks -- like it or not, that's the polar opposite of the New Deal / Great Society Democrats.
ReplyDeleteObama's major program blocked universal healthcare -- no single-payer, no buy-in option for Medicare, not even negotiating prescription drug prices for Medicare D. Minor expansion of Medicaid -- BFD.
Democrats of the Reagan era have had to not only deliver welfare for corporations and the rich rather than welfare for the common people, they have had to overtly campaign on that stance -- otherwise they might be suspected of being tax-and-spend Commies, and they needed to reassure Me Gen voters that they were Reaganite Democrats.
Conservative ossification is never on greater display than when they hyperventilate about the Democrats being the "party of gibs" or whatever, like it's still 1965. Once they lost dominant status in 1980, they had to accommodate the new system or go extinct. They did in '92 with Clinton, and the rest is history. Bye-bye New Deal, bye-bye Great Society.
It's only a slightly less retarded view than "Democrats are the pro-slavery party" like it's still 1857.
Ossification among the dominant party can apparently not be broken by reasoning, so the non-retards who supported Trump have given up on it.
Sorry dude, you're taking the wrong lesson from this. The guy finally got flooded off his perch by minorities who vote their skin and for corrupt socialism of the kind they have back home. Bernie's politics are quintessentially SWPL White and model minority, a group that can't carry any meaningful elections outside of some trendy areas in coastal cities.
ReplyDeleteBernie bros got kicked out of the Dem party in 2015 and they still haven't figured it out. Establishment types are just now starting to get shaken off the top of the quarrelsome coalition they've amassed. It's funny to watch Chuck Schumer gesticulate frantically as his pets get out of control and start calling for mobs and riots like they always do when unsupervised.
Bernie bros didn't exist in the party in 2015 -- now they're winning elections. Trumpian populists didn't exist in their party in 2015 -- and they still do not, not even as candidates.
ReplyDeleteThe keystone state, as it were, so far has been Pennsylvania -- several Bernie candidates won there, only one of whom was non-white, and they were concentrated around Pittsburgh -- the crown jewel of Appalachia, not some trendoid transplant enclave on the coasts.
To understand these changes, you'll have to get news from somewhere other than Drudge, Fox, and alt-right twitter. Otherwise you end up sounding just as out-of-touch as Nancy Pelosi and Don Lemon.
If you had been following the usual prog / populist / socialist sources, you would've known who Ocasio-Cortez was, and the stakes of her race, before it freaked out the mainstream media.
You must follow those sources, whether you agree with them or 100% oppose them, if you want to stay clued in with the changes afoot. Otherwise you're going to remain clueless as they continue chipping away at the status quo of the past 40 years.
Mouth-breathers don't even know about Ojeda. West Virginian, veteran (not a gay nurse), Bernie bro who voted Trump over Crooked Hillary, wants to steer the Dems back toward the New Deal.
ReplyDeleteCrushed his primary for WV's 3rd. His opponent, some Boomer-publican real estate parasite, barely won her primary, where four candidates got about 20%. Far more bruising and damaging than his primary, plus she's not the incumbent (Evan Jenkins, the phony who tried for and lost the Senate primary).
WV's 3rd district is 94% white, coal country, and poor. Since the New Deal transition in 1932, the seat has only gone to the GOP in 5 elections out of 43. Only 3 times since the neoliberal transition of 1980.
Ojeda has a high chance of not just taking the seat back for its usual party, but in a re-aligning fashion rather than the corporate BS that Joe Manchin pushes.
White alt-righters who live in 90% minority coastal bubbles should not forget that Appalachia has the strongest tradition of labor radicalism in the nation. When Ojeda wins in the fall, it will only be a hop skip and a jump until the IWW is organizing there again.
Coastal SWPL enclaves, my ass.
Look at the teacher strikes -- those are in red states, not yuppie bubbles on the coasts.
Do the mouth-breathers doubt that all-white neo-Scandinavia will choose Bernie bros and babes over the coming years?
ReplyDeleteThe deniers are trying to hold two contradictory views in mind simultaneously, a classic symptom of cognitive dissonance (the underlying shock being that it's not the Trump party that is re-aligning to deliver populism, as they had been deeply convinced, but the boo-hiss non-GOP party -- either the Dems, if they submit, or a populist party that replaces them).
First, the Bernie movement can only succeed in coastal states with trendy rich whites and model minorities -- so the whole Northeast and West Coast.
Second, the Bernie movement can only succeed in racially homogeneous states that mimic the demographics of the Scandinavian-style socialism that they seek, where diversity cannot divide the electorate -- so, most of Flyover Country, especially in the Midwest, but not the South.
Gee, if the Bernie movement can only win over the Northeast, West Coast, and Midwest, how ever will they manage to become the dominant force in politics?
She won by running ads with more hijabs than hu-whites, more Spanish than English, by rolling her Rs and talking about how it is time for new democrats to replace the geriatric pale ones, and by implicitly promising to have the shrinking percentage of young whites bankroll every aspect of the non-white invaders' existence (public college, medicaid, "criminal justice reform").
ReplyDeleteGuaranteed she will earn a 0% grade from NumbersUSA. Your idea that the non-white Democrat party will say another word about immigration restriction of any kind since Bernie Sanders innocently uttered as much in 2015 is delusional.
I am as excited about this as you probably are, though for starkly different reasons. It's clear that the party of ¡Ocasio! has no place for heritage Americans.
Dude you can admit you didn't even know who she was or what her campaign had been focusing on for months, until last night when Drudge splashed her pic at the top.
ReplyDeleteIt was entirely about populist class and economics issues, not racial grievance or Muh Two X Chromosomes or why don't we have a jihadist Barbie. That's just lazy right-wingers assuming that it's still 2013, so the only way she could've taken down the local machine boss is by waving her uterus and 23andme results around in the air.
Nobody said the Dems will "say another word about immigration restriction" -- rather, that their populist re-aligners will implement what will amount to a reduction, by eliminating the greedy employers' and slumlords' program of wage arbitrage and stacking 10 people into a 2-BR apartment.
Jack up the minimum wage to $20, and zero employers will hire immigrants -- the whole point is to hire them for far LESS than the American workers' wage. When nobody hires immigrants, they return home.
Getting to the real point -- electing Ocasio-Cortez vs. Crowley -- even assuming she gets a 0% from Numbers USA, did you think to check out Crowley's scorecard? IT'S ALREADY ZERO PERCENT. F-
https://www.numbersusa.com/content/my/congress/578/gradescoresheet
So relative to the existing alternative, and the status quo of the past several decades, she will be no worse on that scorecard, but will be light-years better on the major topics for populist re-alignment.
(Which, again, feeds indirectly into a nationalist re-alignment, as rising standards for wages and benefits means collapsing numbers of immigrants hired. Time to realize why they're brought here in such large numbers -- cheap labor, not cultural replacement.)
What do you have to show for all those GOP-ers with good grades from Numbers USA? Jackshit, and you know it. The Republican cheap labor lobby has prevented any reduction in immigration since the beginning of the Reagan era.
ReplyDeleteForeign-born population, as % of all, hit a minimum sometime during the 1970s. Only rose b/w the 1970 and 1980 Census, indicating the neoliberal transition as the culprit -- and confirmed by all the amnesties the Republicans have signed or floated while in control of the WH and/or Congress.
We elected the most hardline immigration president ever, and what did it result in? Illegal immigration right back to Obama-era levels, zero miles of Wall built, maybe a drop in the bucket of illegals deported, and too many near-death experiences with mass amnesty to count.
The past several decades have proven decisively that we will get absolutely nothing done on immigration by electing hardline candidates. They don't do anything, and it's not getting to the root of the problem anyway -- why is there such a big powerful magnet attracting all of them to begin with? That would be the employers addicted to cheap labor, and slumlords addicted to over-paid housing (10 people living where 3 should be). Both of whom are primarily GOP rather than Democrat puppet-masters, so it's no surprise why "voting in more Republicans" has accomplished worse than nothing.
Time to attack the problem at the root, and drain the swamp of cheap labor and over-stuffed / over-paid housing. But that requires populism, not stale trickle-down Reaganism. You can only pick one -- populism and low immigration, like the New Deal / Great Society, or elitism and high immigration, like the Reagan era and Gilded Age.
The party of Ocasio-Cortez includes heritage Americans like Ojeda in WV, northern Appalachia in general, the old-timey New Englanders (not just the Ellis Islanders), and the Rust Belt, including states like Michigan who voted Bernie over Hillary -- and those are all heritage Americans, not the Germanic or Slavic Ellis Islanders who are found to the west of Lake Michigan.
ReplyDeletePlus those legions of schoolteachers on strike in West Virginia, Oklahoma, etc. -- or maybe that's not considered heritage America anymore. From now on, we'll define it to achieve the desired grouping -- basically, only the Deep South will count as heritage America. Where, BTW, whites are among the lowest as a share of the population. But they're whites who would never vote for Bernie, so that's the ticket.
But then they were a central faction of the New Deal coalition -- the Northeast and the Deep South -- as they developed their economy into the industrial age, and out of poverty-breeding agriculture like it's still 10,000 years ago.
I'd rather not have the South in Bernie's coalition, though -- too much of a drain on government spending and national debt caused by their militarist bubbles, at a time when we're no longer an imperial power like during the New Deal.
Did Trumpsters forget how they won? Dropping the culture war in favor of economic populism?
ReplyDeleteImagine trying to run on a platform of "protecting heritage Americans" in 2016 -- it would have been worse than a Ted Cruz campaign.
But since the GOP cucked the would-be populist goals of Trump while in office, his supporters have mainly come to re-imagine what got him there in the first place. In their minds, the Rust Belt woke up one election day, and decided that corporate tax cuts and ever-inflating militarist bubbles were the secret to widespread prosperity after all. (Gee, they'd never heard that option before from the GOP of the Reagan era...)
So now that the whole economy thingie has been taken care of -- just look at what the melt-up in the NASDAQ has done for your 401k! -- we can move on to the really important business, like cuckball players standing for the national anthem.
Almost everyone who voted for Trump has totally forgotten that people vote based on material concerns, unless they're rich, in which case they vote on airy-fairy cultural concerns like heritage Americana or free speech on college campuses (pro or con).
Nobody in Michigan who swung the election to Trump gives a shit about cuckball or college professors, if Trump doesn't get the hell out of NAFTA, slam 35% tariffs on Ford when they move production to Mexico, etc.
And they definitely will not take seriously someone lecturing them about heritage America, when they're more Anglo-Saxon than the Dutch and Germanic cucks of the Great Plains, and were admitted to the Union in 1837 instead of after 1860, having been settled long before them.
The deal was supposed to be economic populism in exchange for cultural nationalism. Some people wanted both, but mostly those goals were in opposition -- Democrat vs. Republican themes. Without populism, those who swung the election to Trump won't care about the culture war.
Trumpsters are following their personality cult guru over the cliff, as they worship the ugliest central bank bubble ever inflated to give a lifeline to the decadent 1%, rather than push him to deliver on populism. And having decided that the economy has been made great again, only offering a pretty stale version of the culture war (attacking the pornography industry would have gone against the deregulatory spirit).
Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a young female Bernie Sanders or a young female Congressman Luis Gutierrez?
ReplyDeleteI think the latter.
Trumpsters are following their personality cult guru over the cliff,
Over the cliff or into the White House?
Gorsich is on the court and Mike Lee or some other similar nominee will be on the court next. Followed by 2 more replacements for Jewish liberal dinosaurs Ginsberg and Breyer.
Those are huge victories for Trump in the culture wars.
as they worship the ugliest central bank bubble ever inflated to give a lifeline to the decadent 1%, rather than push him to deliver on populism.
So Trump is doing nothing "populist" on trade, on global capitalism exploiting the US for corporate benefits? Nothing?
I don't agree. Trump won and got in and now he is fighting a two front war against both US parties.
Sanders is a dead loser. No young Sanders type is on the horizon. Wouldn't matter anyway because he would just another SWPL, volvo driving, vegan poser. That wins you a job in Portland and Vermont and a few other "negro-free" areas. But so what.
Instead we now have a latina leftist, south of the border socialist rising up.
Trade deficits are exploding under Trump, worse than Obama, so no, he's not getting shit done on that front. Worse, he cucks for China even more than the GOP Congress.
ReplyDeleteAnd he's abandoned manufacturing and industry, in favor of agriculture, in trade matters -- something he repeatedly mocked our leaders for doing, when he was just a candidate. Japan sends us cars by the shipload, and all we send them is wheat.
You're too blind to see the next deep recession hitting before November 2020. The Trumpsters have staked out an extreme position -- that the current expansion is going to be the longest in world history, to avoid it popping before the next presidential election. Not happening, and it's pretty clear the top has already been reached this year.
All the Sandernistas are young, not old -- as evidenced by the person you're trying to ignore, Ocasio-Cortez, who will be the youngest woman to get into Congress. All the Bernie people are Gen X-ers or Millennials -- stereotypically so.
That wins in the Northeast, West Coast, and Midwest, including northern Appalachia where Ojeda (Gen X) is going to win (West Virginia, not some faggot colony near wherever you live). Does not win in the Deep South -- good. Don't want their militarist welfare draining the treasury and exploding the debt anymore, not to mention staining our reputation with their endless decades of military failures.
We had "socialist" candidates aplenty in the early 20th century, whose self-identification as such only really declined after elites got their act together in the late 1920's and 1930's. Robber Barons allowed our leaders to sign onto socialism-lite, which proved to be the right call as the West was spared from hard core communism as well as the prolonged excesses of laizze faire Darwinist norms.
ReplyDeleteThe neo-liberal faction wants public opinion to remain entombed in the mid-1980's forever. There's no sense into buying into that when with every passing year the anti-big gubmint crowd is shrinking and the rising ranks of robin hood types are increasingly aware that the economic booms of post-1980 have gone to a narrower and narrower range of people who are increasingly old (people born in the 1970's are moderately more poor these days then forty something people were in the 1960's-1990's, while Millennials are far more poor than twenty and thirty something people were in the 1950's-1980's.
How arrogant and out of touch must middle aged and elderly people be to insist that Millennials own up to the prevailing conditions of their lives so far? Do these morons realize how much easier it was for young people to make a living and stockpile a decent financial back stop in the 1950's-1980's? Millennials are desperate to eject the Reaganite and Clintonite zombies who've fed enough on the resources and goodwill of the public. Get lost, and good riddance.
And he's abandoned manufacturing and industry, in favor of agriculture, in trade matters
ReplyDeleteHe killed the TPP and wants to tariff manufactured goods from countries that wont remove tariffs of US manufactured goods.
Doesn't sound like abandoning manufacturing to me.
All the Sandernistas are young, not old -- as evidenced by the person you're trying to ignore, Ocasio-Cortez, who will be the youngest woman to get into Congress.
I'm not ignoring her I'm simply saying she is an identity politics, south of the border socialist. Great but I don't want to live in her district or a Latin American socialist loser state.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/fox-business-american-money-flowing-back-america/
"Over $300 billion was repatriated to the U.S. in the first quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) — the most on record."
Trump is committed to re-industrializing America by making it more competitive with the rest of the world.
It's pretty obvious that's his agenda. The latina who won in some crummy district in the Bronx couldn't care less about that.
She's all about LaRaza, Hispanization of the US, open borders, socialist government.
"......While a student at Boston University, Ocasio-Cortez was an intern in the immigration office of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.........
.....She was also employed as an educator in the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute............."
including northern Appalachia where Ojeda (Gen X) is going to win (West Virginia, not some faggot colony near wherever you live).
Or he will simply lose to the Republican incumbent.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is from the "faggot-colony" known as New York and is completely pro gay, LGGBTTYZJFK.!!!
She would have ZERO chance in a nation wide contest.
He's begging to get back into TPP, in exchange for dropping the tariff on steel for Japan -- a double-cucking. It is good that he left the negotiations, but TPP was not even signed at that time. We're still in the ones that we were in already -- NAFTA, KORUS, CAFTA, WTO, etc.
ReplyDeleteNo one cares if he "wants to" impose tariffs -- the fact is that he hasn't, due to getting cockblocked by the free trade worshiping GOP. Zerohedge had a good chart the other day of "threatened" or "announced" tariffs, vs. actually implemented tariffs -- only his bluster has risen, while implementation is still basically zero.
That repatriated money has gone completely into stock buybacks (which only boost shareholders' wealth), dividends paid out to shareholders, executive compensation, and some mergers & acquisitions (cartel-ization).
None of it has gone into capital expenditures -- building more factories, expanding existing factories, hiring more workers, paying workers higher wages, etc.
It's just a great big GOP bailout for already lazy and greedy corporations, not industrial or manufacturing workers.
As for Ocasio-Cortez, she won in all the racial sub-groups of her district, and did slightly worse in the more Hispanic areas. Now you're going to change your tune -- "Well, that only goes to show that a Bernie candidate can only win with wealthy white SWPLs and Asians!" She won with everyone there.
No one cares if you don't want to live there -- who would? The Bernie candidate won, whether outsiders like it or not.
And no one cares if she wouldn't do well in a nation-wide contest -- that's why Bernie will run for pres, rather than her, who is tailored to her district as all politicians should be.
Ojeda, also tailored to his district but running on mostly the same issues as Ocasio-Cortez, is not running against the incumbent, dumbass -- as I already pointed out. The incumbent was Evan Jenkins, the total phony who used to be a Democrat until he wanted the GOP Senate nomination, and lost to Morrisey. The GOP candidate is some no-namer who has never held federal office. She's in the House of Delegates, he's in the state Senate.
And that seat is almost always held by a Democrat -- only going GOP in 5 out of 43 elections since the New Deal, and only 3 times since neoliberalism began in 1980.
Ojeda is by far the favorite, and it will be great to see a Gen X Bernie bro knock out some dinosaur Boomer-publican in the whitest state outside of Bernie's own stomping grounds of rural New England.
The larger point is that Trump is worthless if the GOP keeps blocking the good changes he's proposing. No one will care if he personally is not to blame -- what good is it to elect someone whose good policies will be totally blocked by the politicians who are supposed to be implementing his overall vision?
ReplyDeleteIt's the exact opposite for the Bernie people -- there are a whole bunch of them, they're growing more every year, and when one of them becomes president, there will be an entire army of them in Congress, the think tanks, the media, and activist groups.
Steering society in a whole new direction requires team cohesion, and right now it could not be more obvious that the Reagan coalition is in utter disarray any time that Trump tries to do something new and better. They only sign on when he bends to their old and failed system, like corporate tax cuts, obsessing over cuckball, etc.
The Bernie people are building up social capital, which will soon become political capital. They won't recognize the old currency, but will recognize the currency of one another. And just like that, the old politicians won't be able to get anything done.
Just like the Reaganites taking over during the 1980s, as the fragmented New Deal / Great Society coalition was cast aside. Only now it will be Sandernistas moving society in a very different direction, back toward the good ol' 1950s golden age.
Agnostic,
ReplyDeleteCrowley got a few points from Numbers here and there in the early 2010s, back when Democrats occasionally could. Post 2015, in line with the PoC ascendancy, that's no longer possible. No one on the Dem side ever gets any points for anything anymore. On every measure, Dem voters are more in favor of open borders now than they were a decade or two ago (and probably as long as it's been tracked, but I'm not sure).
What do you have to show for all those GOP-ers with good grades from Numbers USA? Jackshit, and you know it.
The retiring, dying off, and fading away of the most open-borders congressional elements of the GOP.
Immigration jettisoned to the #1 or #2 issue among GOP voters, especially among younger ones. A decade ago, it NEVER cracked the top half.
There is no longer an electoral path to the GOP nomination that is anything other than Trump populism.
Who was the last president to call illegal aliens invaders? We have to go pre-1965 for that, back to Eisenhower.
It's easy to dismiss this--it obviously hasn't stopped the great replacement. But politics is downstream from culture and on the American political right, the culture is changing. If we split immigration restrictionism across the political landscape, the momentum is gone and the country's demographic future is sealed.
She ran on Latin American-style socialism. The PoC ascendancy is the only viable path to Sanders-style socialism in the US.
We'll both be around for awhile. We have a strong indicator coming up in 2020. I'm betting we get a member of the PoC ascendancy in 2020 at the top of the Dem ticket--Harris or Booker. You say it's Sanders or an acolyte.
Here's why that won't be. Sanders cannot win the Dem nomination because he can't win black voters. If he runs in 2020, he'll square off against Kamala Harris. She's dumb and uninspired, but blacks will vote for her 85%-15%, maybe more.
Sanders will have to grovel even lower than he did with Hillary--think the two land whales who shut down his Seattle rally--and will simply lose whenever he tries to brandish his Diversity! bona fides against hers. When SWPLs see blacks backing Harris by such huge margins, they're not going to negate that by backing Sanders by similarly large margins because that would be waaaycist.
Seems to me you have to acknowledge that Sanders only became a national sensation when he renounced his immigration sanity entirely. If he dared say open borders is a Koch brothers proposal today, he'd fall off the 2020 radar. There's no thinking--let alone talking!--like that allowed anywhere on the left, and most especially among the DSA.
Let's wager publicly on it here, the payout being a post by the loser acknowledging the other's powers of prognostication.
Over the longer term, I'll bet you political dissolution of some sort precedes any indication of the Dem/socialist side of the electoral equation turning against immigration of any (non-Afrikaner) kind. Political dissolution is unthinkable, right, so this should be a question of when rather than if I get embarrassed, right?
This blog should be named "Anything for Free Stuff."
ReplyDeleteFor the record, a big market correction is coming. The volatility index makes it hard to see it otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the Southwest is the least (non-Hispanic) white area of the country, not the South. After Hawaii (duh), it's California, New Mexico, Texas, and Nevada. Those four states have a greater population than the entire South does.
“Only now it will be Sandernistas moving society in a very different direction, back toward the good ol' 1950s golden age.”
ReplyDeleteThat’s lining up to take place in the 2030’s-2040’s; right around when Whites in the US will become minorities. So when the black and brown masses have political power with their “populist people power” ideology and wealth redistribution from Whites to non-Whites it’ll be a golden age? Your generational ideas would hold up more if the racial demographics were stagnant, but they’re not. Theoretically a White voter dominant nationalist populist party couldn’t win federal elections because of ethnic block voting. The 1980’s were racially homogeneous, economically prosperous, and had a youth bulge. Basically for Whites it’s a lose/lose scenario: GOP Neoliberalism sells you out and the future brown/black populist party will rule over you while a future white backed nationalist populist party will never gain political power.
West Virginia aint gonna be taken over by any Bernie bros who hate Trump -
ReplyDelete"West Virginia Senate President Credits GOP And Trump Policies For State’s Recovery"
http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/29/west-virginia-senate-recovery-trump/
And there will be NO Sanders Revolution. Sanders is a dead man walking and his type have no future. The future is now and now is identity politics -
http://www.breitbart.com/2018-elections/2018/06/27/washpo-democrats-primaries-are-picking-tribal-identities/
A.E., who are the post-Boomer GOP-ers who are calling for closed borders, including legal immigration, ending birthright citizenship, deporting millions of illegals, etc.? Tom Cotton, and.... that's it. He's also a neo-con on the military, rather than re-aligning in the anti-interventionist direction, so there goes his chances of winning a national election.
ReplyDelete"But the voters want it" -- great, just like always! We know how well the GOP follows its voters on immigration, rather than the cheap labor lobby. That's what you get when you support an economic platform that says "boost profits at all costs" and is bitterly anti-working class. Just fire the workers, then, if they expect too much in wages, and hire workers who will out-compete them -- like the Chinese, Mexicans, or Indians.
To reiterate for the millionth time, the Bernie people do not have to explicitly call for reducing immigration in order to achieve that effect. They just have to force higher wages and benefits on employers, and call for an end to the heartless exploitation of vulnerable immigrants -- e.g., if employers and slumlords want to hire / house immigrants, they should be giving them better-than-US-average wages, benefits, and rent prices.
Then poof! There goes all the demand for immigration, now that it no longer feeds cheap labor and over-priced housing.
The GOP grassroots' call for reducing immigration overtly has never worked, and it's only getting worse over time as they give it explicit racial / ethnic connotations -- rather than making it a big tent movement like in the older days, allowing Democrats who were against cheap labor or environmental destruction.
It was the conservatives who drove out the liberals on that issue, making it politically toxic by giving it such a racial / ethnic slant. They should have practiced taqiya, and only dog-whistled on race / ethnicity, while saying they too don't want cheap labor undercutting wages, or invasive species disrupting our ecosystems.
Ha, just five seconds ago, the haters were saying Bernie's movement could only take root in all-white areas that mimicked the Scandinavian demographics of his "Scandinavian-style socialism".
ReplyDeleteNow that the biggest upset of the year took place in a diverse area, the haters have switched to calling it "Latin American socialism" instead of "Scandinavian," and dismissing it as a demographic fluke. "Of course such a movement could only take root where there's a Latin American demography."
Which is it?
The smarter haters would at least make the more abstract argument, that it requires ethnic homogeneity, regardless of whichever ethnic group was the by far dominant group. Latin American socialism where everyone's Latin American, Scandinavian socialism where everyone's Scandinavian, etc.
But that district in NY was diverse, not homogeneous -- about equal parts white, black, Hispanic, and Asian (itself diverse among East and South Asians).
Certainly it's more likely to succeed where people are homogeneous -- Appalachian socialism where everybody's Appalachian. Again, red staters had better check West Virginia and northern Appalachia's history of being the most violent hotbed of labor radicalism, if they think those folks are like the mild-mannered agribusiness cucks of Nebraska.
That made Ocasio-Cortez' win even more noteworthy -- it succeeded in a very diverse area, which tends to prevent people from uniting behind a common grassroots cause. That will be the exception, and it'll have far greater success in more homogeneous areas like Vermont, WV, Minnesota, Michigan, or for that matter the all-Hispanic parts of the Southwest.
Blacks are already taking a big liking to the Bern-man. They figured out Hillary was so bad that she lost safe states like MI, WI, and PA. They don't care as much about racial and cultural issues per se -- it's more about criminal justice reform, de-militarizing the police, debt forgiveness, raising wages, and other things that are economic in nature, but which hit blacks harder than whites.
These aren't the well-fed Boomer blacks who only worried about how represented they were in the dominant culture. Since the black population is younger than whites, they're even more influenced by Millennial trends -- jobless recovery, crushing debt, plummeting wages, and the like.
I'm making no bets about 2020, just like 2016. I do know that the future re-aligners will be Bernie-style populists, but I've already detailed why that may not be in 2020 and may not even be through the Democrat party.
ReplyDeleteNormally that's what would happen after a single disjunctive term from the moribund dominant party. But there was one case where there were two disjunctive terms in a row, with separate presidents even, and where the re-aligners were not the old opposition party, but an off-shoot or re-grouping of that old oppo party.
Namely, the lead-up to the Civil War. Disjunctive presidents Pierce and Buchanan, Whigs BTFO when they should've won after Pierce, and Republicans taking their place to re-align as the dominant party of the Lincoln era (it was mostly the same individuals, but without the slavery sympathizers, the Know-Nothings, who ran their own spoiler campaign in the Buchanan election).
Since polarization of parties has heated up now to the hottest it's been since before the Civil War, that is a non-trivial possibility for 2020 -- another disjunctive Reaganite (probably not Trump), Dems in utter disarray, Bernie people forming their own populist party without the neoliberal Dems, neolibs running a spoiler campaign, and re-alignment under newly dominant Bernie-ites delayed until 2024.
That's not guaranteed, though. It's still possible for the Dems to save their party by surrendering to the populist re-alignment.
TL;DR Trump cultists jealous cuz no GOP-ers running on his 2016 platform, while more and more Dems are running on Bernie's 2016 platform and are not only winning -- but taking out senior-ranking figures.
ReplyDeleteImagine if some 28 year-old populist-nationalist guy who had never run for office before, and one year ago was just a computer janitor, launched a small-donation grassroots campaign, and took down Kevin McCarthy on a platform of getting the hell out of NAFTA, pulling out of Afghanistan and Syria for good, and ending birthright citizenship.
If you want to know why the Bernie people are still on a high about the Ocasio-Cortez victory -- now you understand.
To reiterate for the millionth time, the Bernie people do not have to explicitly call for reducing immigration in order to achieve that effect. They just have to force higher wages and benefits on employers, and call for an end to the heartless exploitation of vulnerable immigrants -- e.g., if employers and slumlords want to hire / house immigrants, they should be giving them better-than-US-average wages, benefits, and rent prices.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds nice in theory, but if the Bernie people ever assume power they're going to offer amnesty to every illegal in the country and open the floodgates to even more. The left has put immigration over worker welfare for decades and nothing you say convinces me this 'new wave' will be any different.
To reiterate for the millionth time, the Bernie people do not have to explicitly call for reducing immigration in order to achieve that effect. They just have to force higher wages and benefits on employers, and call for an end to the heartless exploitation of vulnerable immigrants -- e.g., if employers and slumlords want to hire / house immigrants, they should be giving them better-than-US-average wages, benefits, and rent prices.
ReplyDeleteSo abolishing ICE, supporting completely unfettered open immigration to the US from anywhere, making college free, making health care free, giving a government-guaranteed job to anyone who shows up, and keeping people out of prison--all while vociferously calling for more immigration and more refugees--is supposed to reduce the flow of foreigners into the country?
I'm not being hyperbolic, either--she campaigned on all of those things.
ReplyDeleteLast time around immigration wasn't reduced until 20-30 years after the rise of populism, there's no reason to believe it will happen right away this time.
ReplyDeletehere's a paper about the 30 year battle for immigration control 100 years ago http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6577.pdf
This is one of the five most foreign districts anyone who represents it is going to be open borders. She a Puerto Rican meaning other Hispanic won't trust her unless she's really loud about it(see also Luis Gutierrez).
Actually the Ron Unz approach to immigration reform (he wrote about this exact strategy back in 2011 ((http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/immigration-republicans-and-the-end-of-white-america/)) is pretty simple to understand. Absent a belief in Jewish-Masonic-Transdimensional Lizard People pushing for people to come to the U.S. illegally to further their nefarious schemes, why do illegals come here in the first place? Because there are labor intensive industries that want to be able to, at the least, both pay their employees less than the prevailing wage in their industry (and lower than minimum wage if possible) and to have their employees work in conditions that'll cut costs and make them more money (i.e. never having to hear the word 'union'). Meanwhile, you've got a bunch of people in Latin America that want to get jobs, and jobs that pay more than whatever they're likely to find in their country. Therefore, so long as employers want low wage labor and are willing to hire illegals to do it, you have illegal immigration.
ReplyDeleteMost of the proposed measures that get bandied about by the right to address the issue of illegal immigration simply don't work. At best, they focus on the wrong part of the equation (E-verify: you mean to rely on a system where both the employer and the employee have every reason to evade it?) to actively making things worse. After all, one of the most attractive features of illegal immigrant labor is that you don't have to deal with all those pesky employment laws since an illegal sure as hell won't report you for fear of deportation. If you make the environment for illegal immigrants more hostile, you succeed in making them even more cowed and thus even more attractive to low wage employers. And given the amount of uproar that's occurred over the whole border separation thing, don't think for a second that you can realistically deport all 10-20 million of them.
However, the key reason that an employer will hire an illegal, even though they are likely to be more poorly educated than a similar American citizen and are likely to kind of struggle with things like understanding English, is because they can pay them really low wages. If an employer simply couldn't hire someone, anyone, for less than minimum wage without a really good chance of legal penalty, and said minimum wage is bumped up to $15 an hour, do you really think an employer is going to hire a guy who just got across the border or overstayed their visa who probably can't even speak, read, or write English or are they going to hire an American citizen?
Simply put, the whole reason we have an illegal immigration problem is because we have a cheap labor problem. So long as an employer can hire an illegal for poverty wages and get away with it, they will. Make it so that they can't without substantial penalty, and employers will stop hiring illegals of their own accord. At which point, said illegals, not being able to get work to do things like make rent or pay for food, head on back to their home countries, maybe with an additional inducement of a one time payment of a few thousand bucks and a plane ticket, and we don't have new illegals coming to the U.S.
In the areas of America with high minimum wages, there are still plenty of illegals working for poor, often sub-minimum wages. They're just 1099/contract/pieceworkers or being exploited by their fellow co-ethnics, or the law is flatout being broken, still. The idea that people who are obsessed with cheap labor will follow to the letter some law about high wages is currently, provably being shown to be wishful thinking.
ReplyDeleteI support penalizing/jailing the employers, btw. But the DSA and such aren't talking about sending Jeff Bezos' vice presidents to jail, or even the 250k/yr R-voting businessmen who use illegal labor. They're arguing for high national wages, open borders and 2-3x the welfare we have right now. And all by taxing the people who aren't doing this while mostly excluding the people who are in their taxation programs.
ReplyDeleteOT what are your thoughts on the Mexican election. On the surface it looks like Nieto is the disjunctive president and Obrador might be the reconstructive president.
ReplyDeleteThe PRI survived at least one realignment but around 1980 they switch form nationalist managerial capitalism to globalist neo-liberalism around 1980, then PAN took over in 2000 and followed the same policies.
The immigration protests today seem really white for example
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/DMillsGregg/status/1013099761103265792
This was from Chicago a 1/3 hispanic city. It like there haven't been mostly Mexican immigration protests in past.
"So [a new New Deal] is supposed to reduce the flow of foreigners into the country?"
ReplyDeleteYes, just like it did the last time in our history.
A stingy elite class whose sole source of wealth growth is rent-seeking, and giving little back to the people they're profiting from, defines the mass-immigration period of our history -- the long Gilded Age.
Progressive Era policies slowed down immigration, so that the foreign-born population maxed out in the 1910s, before they even shut the borders in the 1920s (although that sealed the deal). All throughout the New Deal and Great Society era, there was basically no immigration -- despite all those goodies being handed out directly, and the indirect boost the average person got from the govt protecting labor unions.
Foreign-born pop does not begin rising again until sometime in the 1970s, in tandem with the shift away from New Deal / Great Society programs -- first with Jimmy Carter, who openly campaigned on that shift, and then really taking off with the Reagan revolution, the period we are still in.
Working for a higher standard of living protects against immigration because everyone knows that on the relevant time-scale, wealth is zero-sum. The more that the elites have, the less that the middle and bottom have. But also, the more that we in America have, the less that other places will have -- because they won't be immigrating here to under-cut our wage & benefit conditions, or live 10 to an apartment and drive up housing prices for everyone else.
Nobody is going to give up that comfortable standard of living just to boost the 10 billion global population's wealth by only a couple bucks per capita. They're going to want to keep a hold on it, and they know that opening the floodgates means it gets immediately diluted.
Conversely, signaling that our main priority is profit maximization for the elites is a great big magnet for immigrants -- "Hey, I heard the cheap labor employers are hiring again!"
You're getting too caught up in the rhetoric and theatrics of things, as though the DSA is going to be the major power group, rather than a minor partner in a large coalition, and as though everything they claim right now will be implemented and defended even if it proves counter-productive to their main goal, which is boosting our standard of living rather than multiculturalism.
The real piles of "free stuff" go to the rent-seeking elites, although that's really a separate post.
ReplyDeleteFree stuff is our farm bills that provide a generous price floor for the crops of plantation owners, who do no work themselves and only hire immigrants (legal or illegal) to do the hard work.
Christ, even Mr. Anti-immigrant Populist himself has changed his tune on that issue -- constantly touting the benefits of opening the floodgates of immigration for stockholders of agribusiness cartels ("the farmers").
Free stuff is a trillion dollars a year going to the black hole of the Pentagon so they can lose a couple more wars, dispose of a couple thousand more cannon fodder Americans, create another refugee crisis and source of immigrant overload back here, and continue living comfortably on the public's dime in still-occupied 1st-world countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, which have not been under any danger for 70 years, but where we still have tens of thousands of troops in each country.
Free stuff is the energy sector hijacking the government's foreign policy to squeeze Iranian oil out of the global market -- Iran having the 2nd largest reserves in the Middle East -- in order to artificially jack up the price for our oil cartels (up 20% already in 2018).
That's who the lazy, greedy, and socially destructive groups are in our society in our time -- parasitic elites who want an ever-soaring standard of living without having to earn it through invention or industriousness. Just take over the government and use state power to extract more from the bottom 99% on behalf of the top 1%.
The more that dead-end right-wingers keep referring to that as the Protestant work ethic, or capitalism, the more they will fatally damage those brands, and the more the Millennials and Gen Z-ers will just shrug when some Boomer tries to fear-monger them about democratic socialism.
It looked like the Trump vanguard was going to try to salvage those brands by quarantining the neoliberal Reagan system from the generic term "capitalism," and resurrect the brand of 19th-C "American System" of tariffs etc. to protect American industry and its workers.
Instead, when they look back at the 19th C, they're glorifying the American System's bitter enemies, the dominant Jacksonians, rather than the opposition Whigs, or the later dominant Lincolnians.
And they've abandoned working-class populism in order to clap like seals for the latest and greatest GOP corporate tax cut. Jesus, they're about to go with "Tax cuts, round 2" as their big midterm topic. And here come the seals clapping again already, just cuz it'll troll the libs.
"Help the parasitic elites keep more of their ill-gotten rent-seeking wealth, to buy their own stock and artificially juice its price even higher for the other parasitic elites who own the stock" -- talk about a platform of Free Stuff that rewards greed and laziness.
Not exactly what is going to win back the white working class, though. At this point, the Trump vanguard has collapsed, and suffer from Stockholm Syndrome after getting captured by the GOP Establishment. Sad!
The 1924 Immigration Act wasn't about restricting the total movement of people. To the extent it was based on class, it was only by proxy.
ReplyDeleteIt was based on racial, ethnic, and religious grounds and it was pushed by heritage Americans (including their elites). Yes, Samuel Gompers also supported it but socialists like Ocasio are primarily concerned with paying more to people with government jobs (teachers, or providing government job guarantees!).
Comparing the American cultural and political landscapes of 2010 and 1910 isn't as futile as comparing the American cultural and political landscapes 1491 and 1591, I guess, so there's that!
The act certainly wasn't pushed by the Ocasios of the day. To the contrary, she has the potential to be this century's Celler--congressional representative of the invader demo who failingly tried to stop heritage America's turn towards restrictionism--but who four centuries later exacted his revenge on heritage America.
ReplyDeleteThat's probably optimistic, though. This time I think Cellar wins in 2024--(s)he doesn't have to wait until 2065.
Agnostic's take on the WaPo article above would be much appreciated. The thesis is that Dems need to embrace, rather than run from, Identity Politics; ideology, like populism, doesn't explain the winners and losers of these contests, but identity does, they say.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the virtues of this woman as touted by Ag, but her father is an architect and not quite the working class stiffette as portrayed. Nothing wrong with that, seriously, but there is no way she would have been embraced by the media and these fake socialists if she were genuinely working class with working class concerns. Spinning a nice, bourgeoisie girl as Jenny-from-the-Block is them wanting their cake and eating it, too.
What happens with a genuine working class girl? Because she's likely to be less actualized and thus shy, she's less likely to speak up in the first place. On the slimmer chance she does get up courage, her politics as a whole are grating because she's just not into the identity politics that are so emotionally important to those above her, so she's put down and shutted up. And because she has far less power, she stands a very good chance of being sexually abused and exploited.
The non-economic dimensions of the 1924 immigration act I think to some degree were motivated by people who didn't or couldn't admit to the importance of economic concerns/resource scarcity. This tendency only increased as time went on; in 1955 conservatives still coveted cheap labor but didn't push too hard for it, since they had capitulated to the economic populist trends of the late 20's-early 60's. But conservatives assuaged their dashed hopes for cheap labor by telling themselves that we needed to keep immigration down for the sake of cultural continuity.
ReplyDeleteThe link between low immigration levels and the dominant economic populism of the late 20's-early 60's can't and shouldn't be denied. As we neared the 1970's, people began to feel a bit too comfy, and we began to lose sight of the goals which are motivated by a prolonged period of growing resource scarcity (the 1920's-early 1940's). The resources abundance of the late 40's-1960's is exactly what opened the door to the cultural revolutions of the late 60's and 70's, which ultimately came at the expense of economic populism (wages began to stagnate around 1973, the initial tax cut for the wealthy was passed in 1964, to be followed by even greater tax "relief" in the decades to come).
It really is not about ideology, or culture, or morals, or whatever. What really drives trends is resources or lack thereof.
AE's repeated wrong reading of what people are saying is typical of the brain rot caused by identity politics -- for whites as well as non-whites.
ReplyDeleteI've said multiple times that Ocasio-Cortez will definitely not call for slamming the border shut -- so what are you disagreeing with?
What I did say was that pushing economic populism will result INDIRECTLY in reducing immigration, since the whole point of the elites allowing such large numbers of immigrants is to exploit them as cheap labor -- not to culturally replace heritage Americans or whatever other retarded ideas you have about that.
By forcing the price of labor higher, through populism, there will be no cheap labor for these greedy and lazy employers to exploit. Faced with an American citizen who must be paid $20 an hour vs. a Honduran immigrant who must be paid $20 an hour -- take a wild guess who that employer will spend their $20 an hour on?
The Trump cultists are unreachable at this point, in case anyone out there is thinking of reaching out to them. Trump voters are reachable, especially if they weren't already dyed-in-the-wool GOP-ers like AE. If they were the voters who flipped in 2016 despite voting Democrat for years or decades, that's who's reachable.
Heritage Americans are the ones replacing heritage Americans with foreigners -- odd culture war, sounds more like a class war.
ReplyDeleteLook at the entire GOP -- it's all heritage Americans, with Rubio, Haley, Tim Scott, etc. understood by all to be token ethnics. Look at the sectors of society that control the GOP as their political vehicle -- military, agriculture, and energy, with evangelical Christians as junior partners. Those sectors' elites are as heritage American as you can get.
They are the ones responsible for opening the floodgates of immigration, during the neoliberal transition.
The white culture warriors have become so mentally crippled by cognitive dissonance after realizing they can't blame the Jewish media and entertainment sector, the Jewish tech sector, or the Jewish finance sector for what's gone on throughout the entire Reagan revolution -- since they have been the feeble opposition party, not the dominant party. They've barely held the White House, rarely the Congress, and never the Supreme Court.
That leaves the broken-brained white identitarians with two possible solutions to their cognitive dissonance:
1) Invert reality by claiming that politics and economics are downstream from culture. Since the culture creators and shapers and distributors are disproportionately Ellis Islanders, non-whites, and/or immigrants, it's not whitey's fault after all!
Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers are simply helpless to do anything other than implement the dictates from Hollywood, the New York Times, Facebook, and the Wall Street banks who all donate to Democrats instead of Republicans.
2) Dislocate the source of these problems back before the heritage American coalition became dominant during the Reagan era -- it ackshually traces back to the Sixties! When those New Deal / Great Society Democrats relied on Ellis Islanders, blacks, and the New York banks as their base.
Only slightly less retarded of a solution. FDR, JFK, and LBJ have no power from beyond the grave, and neither do their programs. When the Reaganites wanted to blow up a program from the previous historical period, they did it -- with gusto. Gutting labor unions, deregulating all of society (including the movement of people across national borders), slashing taxes, paying for govt by ever-rising debt instead, and so on and so forth.
But somehow they're unable to challenge and defeat Teddy Kennedy's views on immigration from the '60s. Total bullshit. They simply have no interest in challenging that view, since their whole vision has been maximizing the standard of living for the elites without them having to earn it -- permanent military bubbles, farm subsidies, military-backed oil embargoes to drive up oil prices, and in general lowering the price of labor for the labor-intensive sectors of society. That means off-shoring our factories to cheap labor colonies, and hauling in the cheap labor if the work must be done on our soil.
Blame Reagan, not LBJ, for today's wide open borders, soaring foreign-born population, and dilution of heritage American culture.
Yes, high wages will reduce the immigration draw. Especially if paired with a government guaranteed jobs program that does not discriminate by residency status.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, that's why California--which has the highest minimum wage of any state in the country (tied with Massachusetts, which also has a higher than average foreign-born population)--has so few aliens. California and Texas make good comparisons since they're both border states with comparable unemployment rates. California's minimum wage is 50% higher than Texas'--and its foreign-born population is 50% higher than Texas', too!
It's also why in Europe the migrants all go to low-wage countries in southern and central Europe instead of going to high-wage countries like Germany or Great Britain.
And why Canada has such a small foreign-born population (over 20%) compared to the US (13%).
All things equal, a higher minimum wage will reduce the immigration draw--but those things are never equal. If the higher minimum wage is paired with everything else that goes along with welfare states entirely lacking in interior enforcement, the results will be... exactly what we see.
Your theories are always interesting.
AE,
ReplyDeleteGermany's business class supported the recent migrant influx as a way to counter the country's strong unions and high wages for labor:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/refugees-are-an-opportunity-for-the-german-economy-a-1050102.html
"German Companies See Refugees as Opportunity
The German business community views the recent influx of refugees as an opportunity to help companies grow and ensure long-term prosperity. Many are calling for bureaucratic red tape to be lifted so that new arrivals can enter the labor market faster."
I think agnostic's argument is that the political and social infrastructure supporting high wages would result in inhibiting immigration indirectly, not that high wages don't draw immigrants.
If the country had strong, militant unions that engaged in major strikes and activity that threatened the business class and the wealthy, then the business class and the wealthy would no longer regard immigrants as cheap labor. The immigrants would become much more expensive labor if populist economics dominated and they became radicalized and voters for the Left and populist economics.
European immigrants were brought in as cheap labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they became much less appealing to the elites when many of them were engaging in radical activity like bombing the police while striking for an 8 hour workday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Square_Affair
If Hispanic gardeners and busboys were organizing and striking and killing their employers to protest for higher wages and better conditions, the Koch brothers and their ilk would no longer regard them as cheap labor. The business class would realize that they no longer can have their cake and eat it too, and to preserve their cake, that is their wealth and privileges generally accorded to the wealthy and to business in the US, they would move against immigration which would supply votes and power for populist economics.
According to Pew (http://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/unauthorized-immigrants/), California had about 2,350,000 illegal immigrants circa 2014 and Texas 1,650,000. However, since Texas has a smaller population than California (as of last year by about 10 million people), as a percentage of their populations, and again in 2014, illegal immigrants made up 6% of the population in California and 6.1% in Texas. As to why high wages haven't deterred immigration to California, keep in mind that according to Pew in illegal immigrants in Texas are about 35% of the immigrant population but in California only 22%. Is it really any shock that a state right on the Pacific coast, that for over a century has been the place where anyone immigrating from Asia/the Pacific would step onto U.S. soil for the first time, with a variety of industries that are dependent on both illegal (agribusiness, construction) and legal (Silicon Valley) and which on it's own would be the sixth largest economy in the world would be a hub for immigrants?
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, let's not forget that, as left wingers are fond of pointing out, wage theft is the largest form of theft by dollar amount. As it comes to illegal immigration, of course it's not enough to just raise the minimum wage to $15/hr if employers feel that that wage is a mere suggestion. If, on the other hand, the penalties for wage theft are increased and actually enforced (my suggestion, defund ERO at ICE and use the funds to go after wage theft), do you honestly think any business would hire someone who just got across the border for $15/hr?
Illegals come here because there are business owners who want to skimp on payroll and hire people who they can exploit to the hilt because they aren't Americans. If you get of any 'advantage' that hiring an illegal could provide to a business, how exactly do illegals get jobs? And if they can't get jobs, how do they stay in the country, rather than going back home of their own accord? And, while for some of the people here this won't be considered an advantage, an illegal who's actually been here for a while and established a good work history will be probably still be able to get work, meaning this only effects new immigrants, rather than hitting those who actually have built a life here.
But, that does make such a strategy even more palatable to Democrats and Independents than, what exactly? Giving ICE a couple hundred billion a year to go round up every illegal in the country? Because how else do you propose to deal with over 10 million people in the country that you believe should be removed?