Another series of primary elections, another outcome of zero Republicans running -- let alone winning -- on Trump's 2016 campaign themes of populism and anti-globalism. In case there was still any doubt, the GOP is not realigning one millimeter. At best you'll get a few candidates who promise to crack down on immigration -- same ol', same ol'.
With absolutely no progress on The Wall -- no construction, no plan, no funding, no support, despite total GOP control over government -- immigration has now taken the place of abortion for Republicans. Some candidates will promise to do something about it, single-issue voters will turn out on their behalf, nothing whatsoever gets done in office, if anything it gets even worse, and the voters alleviate their cognitive dissonance by saying "next time" forever. They'll start building the wall right after they overturn Roe v. Wade.
On the opposition side, there are now going to be not one but two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, after Rashida Tlaib won her safe Dem district in Detroit. Like her fellow DSA Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she will be taking the place of a supposedly safe Democrat Establishment icon -- John Conyers, the longest continuously serving member of the House before he got booted by Me Too last December. Younger would-be members of his dynasty were shut out from taking over his seat.
Ilhan Omar, from another safe Dem seat in Minneapolis, will not be a net gain since she's replacing Keith Ellison, one of only 10 Congressmen who endorsed Bernie back in the 2016 primary. But it still shows that the Bernie wing is not losing members from government, and is only adding to them.
She's described as Somali, but is half, and also half-Yemeni -- and not from one of the jihadist factions there, given her opposition to the Saudis' war in Yemen and our military's role in it. Identity-obsessed hacks on both sides will underscore her being Somali, refugee, Muslim, etc., but it's clear that Minnesotans voted for her based on populism and anti-globalism.
See this list of her positions on foreign policy and trade policy, and tell me how different it is from what Trump ran on -- and periodically reiterates, even if no one else in the GOP government will deliver what he wants. Trump nearly won Minnesota by convincing people that he was not a real Republican, and would pursue policies that their Representatives like Keith Ellison or Ilhan Omar could totally get on board with. But after allowing himself to be captured by the GOP Establishment, he's lost most of the unorthodox appeal he used to have.
With Paul Ryan retiring, a realigning GOP would vote for anyone other than Paul Ryan's aide as his replacement. But since realignments are never carried out by the dominant party of a historical period, it falls to the Dems to put someone more populist in Ryan's place. Randy Bryce won the Dem primary on a platform of Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and other Bernie-style policies. This district is not a safe blue one, but is at least up for grabs with the incumbent Ryan retiring, and leaving his butt boy to fill his empty suit.
So far, it looks like the Bernie revolution is going to do best in the Snow Belt and worse in the Sun Belt, as they had little to show in California, Hawaii (Tulsi Gabbard remains, but Kaniela Ing lost big), Missouri (right-to-work rejected by referendum, but Cori Bush lost her primary), and Kansas (James Thompson won his primary, but the district is deep red and he offered no way for Republicans to switch sides).
It's not racial differences, since Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar are all women of color who ran in districts with large minority populations. It looked that way during the 2016 primary, where Bernie won big with whites but got destroyed by blacks and Hispanics at the individual level, and from there to the state level. Now it looks more like a split between the left-behind Snow Belt and the boomtown Sun Belt -- mirroring Trump's appeal to "the forgotten man and forgotten woman".
Even Ocasio-Cortez's district, seemingly in a prosperous metro like New York, is filled with downwardly mobile transplants who thought they were going to get a nice job and live in Manhattan, then revised their expectations down to Williamsburg, then to Astoria, then to wherever else next. Not to mention the victims of gentrification in this district. No one there feels higher and higher expectations over time, whether they're would-be elites or would-be working class kings.
As we head into our Second Civil War, the old battle line between North and South is rearing its ugly head again. Disturbingly, that may apply all the way out West this time, with California resisting both the Bernie realignment and the GOP at the same time, struggling in vain to stay neutral before an obvious civil conflict, while the Pacific Northwest goes along with changing climate. But that's a historical analogy that'll have to wait for another post to explore.
See this list of her positions on foreign policy and trade policy, and tell me how different it is from what Trump ran on
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ilhanomar.com/immigration
hmm, I feel like this is a little different from Trump's platform, but I can't quite put my finger on it...
On trade and foreign policy, Ilhan Omar and Trump are identical, as I said, and as you didn't bother disputing.
ReplyDeleteTrump didn't win on immigration but on trade / foreign policy, where he flipped the script on what the GOP vs. Dems stood for.
The Great Lakes has almost zero immigrants (jealous, Sun Belt transplants?). GOP has been the relatively more anti-immigration party, at least in their platform -- the opposite in their actions -- going back decades.
So nobody flipped because Trump said he'd build a wall. The GOP already had those voters locked in for decades -- and still does, even though immigration has deteriorated far worse under the Trump admin, now that the cheap labor party has total control again.
BTW, which GOP-ers are campaigning on ending birthright citizenship, deporting all illegals (in the tens of millions), cutting way back on legal immigration, building a real wall on the Mexican border (maybe even suggesting that Mexico will pay for it), and so on and so forth?
ReplyDeleteWhat's that? Trump was the only one? Looks like single-issue voters on immigration have zero Republicans to choose from in Congressional races, yet again.
So immigration has become a non-issue for voters -- both the Dems and the GOP are campaigning on amnesty, open borders, etc. With no differences there, their races will be determined by other issues where they do campaign on strikingly different positions.
If the Dems fuck up their chances, it will be because they're not stealing back the trade and foreign policy issues from Trump, due to their psychotic anti-Trump hysteria and Russiagate fixation. Or due to not offering a way to steal immigration from the GOP, by giving it an economic rather than ethnic / cultural slant -- keeping out cheap labor that the greedy elites exploit instead of hiring Americans at decent wages.
Even Trump doesn't make that argument -- it's all about crime, drugs, changing cultural make-up, etc., which is a typical Republican slant that attracts no one from the other side. Whereas a Dem who ran on curtailing immigration in order to give struggling American workers a break from downward wage pressure and upward housing cost pressure, could flip the script and win over a bunch of disillusioned conservatives, along with the usual working-class base of the Dems.
There was a real chance to do that with Brent Welder, the Bernie candidate in the primary in the Kansas City suburbs of Kansas. In the general, the Dem will face GOP incumbent Kevin Yoder -- one of the worst open borders Republicans in the entire government.
All Welder had to do was say he's worried about how badly the immigrants are being exploited, and we should curtail their numbers until and unless we can guarantee they will be treated equally with Americans. That would win liberals concerned about fair and humane treatment for non-whites and non-Americans, and it would win over enough conservatives who would cream their jeans to have an immigration restrictionist to vote for, when Yoder is the GOP alternative.
But that's still the one big issue where the Bernie wing refuses to realign, despite the class interests pushing only in the "less immigration" direction. They're still paralyzed enough by identity politics, albeit far less than the neolibs.
Welder lost to some neolib, but even if he'd won the primary, he would've lost the general in a reliably GOP district by not offering those voters a new reason to vote Democrat. "Big business only wants immigrants for cheap labor, and I'm here to put a stop to that process so Americans can finally reverse their downward trend in the standard of living" -- suddenly, a Bernie-crat wins a Republican district in Kansas.
A Dem campaign against cheap foreign labor would be more convincing, since it would harmonize with the rest of their platform, which wants a higher standard of living for the working and middle classes, and more constraints on wealth accumulation by the elites.
ReplyDeleteIf a Republican says they want to stop immigration because of the threat of cheap foreign labor, it comes off as more disingenuous. If he's also in favor of cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations, busting unions, and deregulating business, that all says he's in favor of cheap labor, not against it. So he's just lying when he says he's worried about cheap foreign labor, and is just trying to put an economic populist spin on what is obviously a more cultural / ethnic / racial desire to curtail immigration.
Only a broadly populist candidate, like Trump, can make that argument convincing. But Trump is the sole Republican who wants single-payer healthcare, the end of NATO and elimination of our occupation of the whole world, infrastructure spending, re-industrializing the economy, etc.
For Congressional or other races, it will have to be a Democrat who makes a convincing argument about curtailing immigration / deporting illegals as part of a larger program to boost the standard of living for the working and middle classes.
"If the Dems fuck up their chances, it will be because they're not stealing back the trade and foreign policy issues from Trump, due to their psychotic anti-Trump hysteria and Russiagate fixation."
ReplyDeleteI check tariff and labor news almost daily and the press by an overwhelming margin has adopted an anti-tariff position and it appears your typical #resistance voter has as well. Vociferously. Because Trump is for them.
These people don't accept being told, "no". They're busy now deplatforming...Alex Jones? And everyone remotely interesting, so, with that mindset, I totally expect them to screw it up with Russiagate and anti-Trump hysteria.
It's Mueller Time!
In a CT Dem primary, a middle aged white woman (Mary Glassman) was beaten by a black woman (Jahana Hayes). Glassman had the endorsement of the Dem establishment, as well as Our Revolution (the Bernie PAC) and.....The Chamber of Commerce! Although ORev claims to have a litmus test involving single payer, evidently they didn't apply it to Glassman whose own website doesn't mention the issue. Nor does her website mention a specific minimum wage increase, which ORev also claims to support.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the the insiders in the Bernie wing are still not quite able to shed the Centrist establishment (the article mentions the Dem Congress. Campaign Committee which encourages Dems to avoid talking up single payer).
There's always the possibility that a Hayes type could be co-opted/bought off, assuming they weren't crooked to begin with. But when even the CoC jumps into a Dem election to try and stop you....Well, that says something. Much like how the deep state creatures have emerged from hiding in a desperate attempt to stop anything that has a whiff of reform and rebellion, it looks like the most crooked elements of cuck inc. might opt to align more and more with "centrist" liberals as way to try and keep the neo-liberal era alive.
Anyway, we could cherry pick certain candidates til the cows come home. But where's the evidence of an elite consensus to:
ReplyDelete1) Alleviate urban overcrowding
2) Reduce disease epidemics
3) Reduce problems associated with immigrants such as dual loyalty, terrorism, general hostility towards the host culture, etc. That's the low-hanging fruit that elites picked in the 1920's and 30's; they didn't make hay by telling people that 40 years down the road America would have the greatest middle class ever.
4) Seriously address the issue of over population and resource decline. The modern Left cynically whines about fossil fuels use, because that's a GOP lobby. But since the late 70's the Left mostly ignores the elephant in the room, because people in a decadent era get creeped out by the idea of people telling them to not do stuff, including having kids. Of course the Religious Right played into this by promoting a sort of pan-global generic Christian identity utterly divorced from ethno-cultural survivalism. Thus, all of God's children are wonderful.
Going back to the roots of this all, the post-WW2 West afforded all living generations the luxury to indulge in happy talk and wishful thinking about an idealized (and never fully attainable) society in which we all could be happy nuclear families "consuming" ever more. Our new identity as consumer units largely superseded traditional tribal concerns, so that whites and blacks alike could in their own way contribute to the bottom line of say, General Electric. The Silents and esp. Boomers raged against this conformity in the late 60's and early 70's, as they tried to develop various subcultures to subvert the soullessness of mid-century life . Then this got corrupted by narcissists saying that their awesomeness, and their past achievements justified being greedy and selfish in the present. And the declining tribalism of the 50's-early 70's became even greater by the late 70's, when pop culture began to go to great lengths to suggest that it was "unhealthy" and "offensive" to merely used certain words and phrases in reference to various ethnic and racial groups. The Me Gen started to place white and black characters as friends in movies and sitcoms, because, well, I suppose if we can make it seem doable in the movies then maybe it'll happen in real life.
Let's be serious: The most basic element of human life, socially speaking, is the family. And one's race is one's extended family. There's no easier way to motivate people than by the idea of defending one's race/tribe/nation. The Left, DUH, knows this. Which is why they are constantly insisting on making generalized condemnations against whites as a whole, referencing Emmit Till dozens of times in the current decade, singling out whites for humiliation after minor offenses (such as calling the police on non-whites), and mysteriously labeling and ID-ing mixed race bad guys as "whites" (like George Zimmerman).
ReplyDeleteThe idea that wholesome reforms are possible in this current era is a joke. Many whites are flat out abandoning wealth re-distribution ideas on the grounds that the Left is explicitly promoting racial spoils systems. The Left has been retarded about affirmative action for decades. How is it fair to whites that employers in 70% white communities sometimes have workforces that are under 70% white? Blacks and immigrants often live in shitholes that can't sustain a decent number of businesses, and they seek employment elsewhere which is then given to them often on the explicit grounds of race. What did white Millennials do to deserve being pushed out of jobs by policies that deliberately discriminate against them?
Agnostic, do you seriously think that whites would've bought into the New Deal if anti-white policies were codified at that time? And if they knew that judges and politicians would strip the police of their ability to easily roust and intimidate hoodlums (prior to the 60's, the police were generally given latitude in their physical handling of reprobates)? Americans soured on socialism at the precise moment when black criminals and welfare queens were let loose by the 1960's. It just took some time; Minnesota was 95% white in 1960, but by the 80's all over the Upper Midwest it was understood that we'd imported a black underclass precisely because we gave out more goodies than other regions.
Reminders to people still stuck in 2013 white identity politics:
ReplyDelete1) Race is not an extended family -- how often do you cement social bonds with your "fellow race members"? Never. Only autists think that "blood is thicker than water" because of what is literally in the blood, rather than the social bonds that are made more likely by closer genetic relatedness.
That does happen with the nuclear and extended family, maybe a clan, and at most a regional ethnic group (Appalachians, Cajuns, etc.). Not a race. Not even a nationality, which everyone understands is not a family, but a team that's cooperating across a wide swath of family-like groups.
2) Whites are not a cohesive social group in America, in any domain.
3) Thus, there is no attack on "whites" -- only certain sub-groups of whites. The whites who attack other whites are not sobbing over their own "white guilt", or practicing racial treason, or whatever. They are gleefully piling onto their enemy, not sobbing while guiltily handing over one of their own as a sacrifice.
4) Affirmative action didn't take your job -- a cheap labor immigrant did, or it was off-shored, or it was destroyed altogether in a mega-corporate merger.
5) Welfare queens do not exist, and never did. You would've seen some by now. Welfare recipients are not concentrated in Cadillac dealerships, but in thrift stores -- and not because they're looking for a discount on a high-quality vintage item.
6) "Americans" did not sour on the New Deal -- the Me Generation did. The emphasis on societal harmony came at the expense of pursuing individual ambition, and the Me Gen never knew how destructive a war of all against all could get -- they were born after the Great Compression began, after the Gilded Age, after the explosion of political violence circa 1920, and so on and so forth.
It had nothing to do with resenting non-white recipients of New Deal programs -- as evidenced by the entire West making that change at the exact same time, for the same generational reasons. There were no masses of non-whites in Western Europe, thus no racial angle to their transition away from social democracy and toward neoliberalism.
The racial angle in the US is second-order, exacerbating the first-order factors.
7) No matter how loud you scream into the internet, white identity politics have never taken root anywhere, and will never, because whites are not a cohesive group with a unified system of material patronage.
It's time to give up on the always-failing Reaganite system, which has caused all of today's problems, and join the Bernie realignment, giving it a culturally moderate / conservative constituency. The alternative is to go down with the Boomerpublican ship -- and after never having enjoyed the goodies it provided either!
I understand the Boomers going down on their own ship, but not Millennials who never got anything from it. That's why they're turning so hard against the whole neolib order and the GOP which has foisted it on our society for 40 years.
Adapt or go extinct.
If you're hung up on the populists being non-white, then your gripe is really with your "fellow white people". Badger them into running culturally moderate / conservative whites who will also support the economic and foreign policy goals of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar, and problem solved.
ReplyDeleteInstead, the white ID politics crowd is cucking for the worst of cucks like Kevin Yoder in that Kansas district that should be going to Brent Welder, the white Bernie bro who doesn't indulge in anti-white ID politics.
Part of that failure lies with Welder and the broader Bernie movement for not trying to court populist voters who are also for restricting immigration.
But the other part lies with the failed Trump "movement," which has devolved back into the Tea Party. Why didn't that Trump "movement" organize Kansas voters -- GOP, Dem, or who rarely vote at all -- into defeating one of the worst open-borders business cuck Republicans in the entire government, by going all-in for Welder?
It can't be because Welder is worse on immigration -- Yoder is rivaling John McCain for being open borders, and a labor-oriented Dem is not going to hand out cheap labor visas as indulgently as a Chamber of Commerce Republican, nor look the other way when entire farms hire only illegals.
If anything, Welder would've been at least marginally better on immigration than Yoder -- maybe far more so, depending on how much leverage the Trump "movement" brought to the negotiations behind flipping a red district in Kansas.
But then, realignment never happens within the dominant party of a historical period -- Republicans, during the Reaganite period. They just cannot accept that their own party and coalition are at fault for how badly things have gotten fucked up, and continue to pretend that the New Deal saw skyrocketing immigration, rather than zero immigration, while back on planet Earth it was the Reaganites who tore open the borders and keep them torn open.
"5) Welfare queens do not exist, and never did. You would've seen some by now. Welfare recipients are not concentrated in Cadillac dealerships, but in thrift stores -- and not because they're looking for a discount on a high-quality vintage item."
ReplyDeleteDoes D. P. Moynihan ring any bells? The black family and community imploded in the 1960's after the welfare spigot got blown open, and de-segregation and AA enabled higher caliber blacks to began escaping the crappier blacks instead of keeping them in line.
The ruthless assault on the gov. dole that young-middle aged white Americans cheerled in the 1970's and 80's was greater in it's ferocity and sense of outrage than what you saw in say, England. Every problem we associate with Boomers hit blacks first and hardest. And Uncle Sam deserves a lot of the blame. Reagan and the Boomers weren't wrong to be ticked off at how generous welfare was in the 60's-80's, a time in which good jobs were easy to come by. Where they erred was totally gutting welfare right at the moment that neo-liberalism was starting to ravage the middle class (the mid-90's, post-NAFTA, H1Bs and so forth becoming abused, etc.), to say nothing of the fortunes of lower class people.
"I understand the Boomers going down on their own ship, but not Millennials who never got anything from it. That's why they're turning so hard against the whole neolib order and the GOP which has foisted it on our society for 40 years."
90% of Millennials are not as over zealous and breathlessly partisan than older generations. We just want a fairer shake, we want competition to wind down after late Boomer and early Gen X-er parents told their kids that they'd be losers if they didn't bust their ass in school, collect accolades on the side to polish their college app., and go vastly into debt to attend college.
But what are many white X-ers and Millennials suppose to do, when they don't have the econ. clout/status to glide above the hostility directed at whites since the late 1980's? What are we to make of the "Newspaper of record" openly paying white genocide advocates? It's still 2012? Really? The damage wrought by cultural Marxism in the 90's and 2000's was blunted by most Americans still being white. But erstwhile "respectable" institutions are pushing more intense versions of anti-white hysteria at a time when legions of foreign Gen X-ers reside in America, and their Millennial and Gen Z off-spring have been conditioned to make hay by repeating pablum about "white privilege" (such privilege has not stopped many Western countries from being rendered demographically unrecognizable).
Also, you still didn't respond to what I said about what made the original New Deal possible: do you really think the New Deal would've been possible if whites had been asked to to fully embrace housing, schooling, and employment policies that actually or theoretically benefited blacks at the great expense of whites? I think the South in particular would have really balked at the New Deal if they knew what was coming down the pike in the 50's and 60's. Again, the impact of CultMarx government imposed de-segration, AA, and "fair housing" is only going to get greater as America becomes less white.
"Instead, the white ID politics crowd is cucking for the worst of cucks like Kevin Yoder in that Kansas district that should be going to Brent Welder, the white Bernie bro who doesn't indulge in anti-white ID politics."
ReplyDeleteThese CoC/Ned Flanders dipsticks are going to be harder to push out because local GOP elections tend to be dominated by older voters, who don't get that it's not the 80's anymore. Oh, and late Boomers/early Gen X-ers to the extent that they bother voting at all are often very Republican....And they're the "values" and anti-gubmint types. They often hate the 60's and 70's, and think that Reagan saved everything. Late X-ers and Millennials generally are better at calling out "voodoo economics" and bashing the Religious Right for being pain in the ass.
It's 1960's births who are quite responsible for the GOP making huge gains in the 2000's and 2010's.
"Adapt or go extinct."
ReplyDeleteAdapt to what? Join people who've been taught ( and rarely question) the notion that Western Civ. is gravely responsible for robbing many nations and ethnic groups of their natural dignity and potential? I certainly am all for cracking down on corrupt elites, reducing mergers, etc. But the "progressive" wet dream ain't gonna happen when the modern Left excuses the destruction of white cultures as payback for past sins, while the Right is too hapless and gutless to stop the pandering to corrupt business owners.
You can claim that anti-white animus is "fleeting" or "isolated", or "over-exaggerated". It's the same old same old happy talk. All indicators are that diversity is horrible for social trust and happiness. That's why segregation "naturally" evolves, and why national borders exist; it's why actively "forcing" integration since 1946 has on the whole been terrible for whites, and benefited some blacks but been terrible for other blacks. James Howard Kunstler says that the Left's increasingly belligerent rhetoric towards whites is the result of frustration that blackaren't happy and can't achieve parity with whites, and have if anything drifted further and further away from whites on a cultural level. A "paradox" of integration is that blacks feel compelled to to cultivate a super-black identity lest anyone accuse them of selling out to whites. Mexicans are superficially along for the ride, but the reality is that Mexicans are too taciturn and boring to be worth really fighting for on the Left, who instead fawn over blacks.
There was no implosion of the black family in the '60s -- not until the mid-'70s, for whites and blacks alike. Meaning, kids growing up w/o both parents. It's a neoliberal phenomenon, not a New Deal / Great Society phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteChildren outside of wedlock is a bad measure, since the kids could grow up in an intact family, only where the parents didn't get married. Broken homes is the real measure.
The Deep South was not necessary for the New Deal to win, since it was not heavily populated relative to the Northeast. And the Deep Southern Dems *did* balk very early in reaction to the Civil Rights movements -- the Dixiecrats, Byrd, Wallace, etc. Didn't matter.
New Deal voters didn't want to continue the Jim Crow era, which lasted into the race riot explosion circa 1920 when blacks left the South. They wanted racial peace, and if that meant Civil Rights programs, so be it. No different from wanting class harmony, and favoring labor programs to achieve it.
There is no anti-white movement, only anti-certain-whites, mostly orchestrated, funded, and executed by whites outside the target group. Non-whites have minimal power, wealth, or influence in America.
Even if you are fixated only on purging liberal ID politics from the scene, then throwing in with conservatives or Republicans won't work -- because it never has. That requires an internal realignment among Democrats, and has been chugging along since the Bernie primary and Hillary fucking up so badly in the general.
All the lib ID politics in the world amounted to jackshit when it counted.
And it's not just white libs or leftists who are purging ID politics from their movement. Any black, Hispanic, etc. person who's a Bernie sympathizer is working to end the obsession over race -- up to the point of saying they don't care if white voters are racist, as long as they vote for the right person.
Briahna Joy Gray makes this point regularly.
' I don't even care to argue about whether or not they [Obama '12 voters] are racist. Many on both sides folks are. The issue is that racism didn't preclude them from voting for Obama. Thus, the idea that we can't coalition build with the white working class because they're "too racist" is absurd. '
https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/959508426413002752
No more racial ideology purity tests for black Millennials who are more concerned with class, or class plus race, instead of race uber alles. As long as you're on board with the Bernie realignment, they couldn't care less if you're racist. Political coalitions form to take over government to re-shape society -- not to hang out together.
Stop reading so many damn Boomers, it's infecting your brain with dead ideas and bad takes.
Peter Zeihan has an interesting analysis of how the Democrat and Republican parties have reconfigured. Essentially, both parties have lost substantial voters, who don't associate with either party(yet), or are willing to vote for either depending on positions.
ReplyDeleteHis factions are ill-defined - for instance, what is a "populist", and certainly categories like the "greens" and "catholics" must be more all-encompassing than he says.
Democrat Base(Post-Trump):
Blacks
Gays
Greens
Single Women
Republican Base(Post-Trump):
Populists
Evangelicals
Swing Vote(Post-Trump):
Unions(formerly Democrat)
Catholics
Hispanics
Business (formerly Republican)
National Security (formerly Republican)
Pro-Choice (formerly Democrat)
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/26/accidental_superpower_author_peter_zeihan_president_trumps_foregin_policy_in_geopolitical_context.html
Zeihan's configuration raises some good points - for instance, that the 2016 campaign has made lifestyle issues more negotiable for the Republican party(populist base cares less about those issues than immigration), therefore pro-choice voters becoming swing voters.
ReplyDeleteHis factions, though ill-defined, also raise some points - for instance, Union voters who have traditionally voted Democrat are a separate faction from the non-Union, populist voters who have traditionally voted Republican - and whom Zeihan believes are diehard Republican voters who won't vote for Bernie.
And how does one throw "Catholics" in the mix, since I'm sure quite a fair number of Union voters are Catholic - in this analysis, I guess that Catholic voters are supposed to be the more middle-class, socially conservative, economically liberal voters who are more influenced by lifestyle issues.
On the other hand, its simplistic to categorize "business" as one category, and incorrect to say that they are all Republican loyalists - as Agnostic pointed out, businessmen tend to vote based on the industry in which they work - with those in the informational and financial industries voting Democrat - and those in the production industries(agriculture, energy/oil) vote Republican.