The Reaganite birth of the "nation of immigrants" propaganda campaign

Part 1 reviewed the New Deal / Great Society period's lack of presidential Independence Day speeches that incorporate immigration into our national creation myth.

Part 2 examined how, as the New Deal was being dismantled, the new "nation of immigrants" myth rationalized and sanctified the shift among the elites from tolerating expensive labor to demanding cheap labor, especially in labor-intensive sectors.

In this third post, we'll look at the record of presidential Independence Day speeches once the New Deal / Great Society framework was being rejected. Suddenly, their speeches go over the top in re-writing the message of "a nation of immigrants, from start to finish" into America's creation myth.

This will cover the disjunctive phase of the New Deal, starting in 1976, and go through the two terms of Reagan, who was the central figure in both spreading the "nation of immigrants" propaganda campaign and calling for boatloads more immigrants. And he got his wish, now that the zeitgeist had gone over to cheap labor, unlike the New Deal's requirement of expensive labor.

A final post will look at the followers of Reagan in the neoliberal era.

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Ford held off on the "nation of immigrants" myth until July of 1976, when he was being challenged by Jimmy Carter, who was running on an anti-New Deal platform. In his main national address at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he only mentioned immigration in passing. He said that in the fight against despotism abroad, FDR and America were "reinforced by millions and millions of immigrants who had joined the American adventure".

But he also spoke aboard a Navy ship in New York Harbor, where he played up Ellis Island. Completing the open borders trifecta, he spoke at Monticello's naturalization ceremony, where he really laid it on thick. The whole long speech is on the "nation of immigrants" myth. Some excerpts:

Just as Jefferson did in designing Monticello, [the founding patriots] wanted to build in this beautiful land a home for equal freedom and opportunity, a haven of safety and happiness, not for themselves alone, but for all who would come to us through centuries...

There was already talk about further immigration, proposing it should be selective and restrictive, but this was swept aside by the greatest mass movement of people in all human history...

Such transfusions of traditions and cultures, as well as of blood, have made America unique among nations and Americans a new kind of people. There is little the world has that is not native to the United States today...

That [American] heritage is rooted now, not in England alone -- as indebted as we are for the Magna Carta and the common law -- not in Europe alone, or in Africa alone, or Asia, or on the islands of the sea. The American adventure draws from the best of all of mankind's long sojourn here on Earth and now reaches out into the solar system.

In 1980 Carter, the anti-New Deal Democrat competing against an even fiercer anti-New Deal Republican, went a step further and lumped everyone who came here after the Indians into the same category of immigrants. There are no longer pioneering founders and later bandwagon jumper-on-ers, only "immigrants" -- some arriving earlier, some arriving later, but all playing the exact same role of assimilating into America. Where did the "America" that we're assimilating into, come from -- who knows? From his July 4th address to a town meeting in California:

And we remember in times of pressure that this is a country of immigrants, it's a country of refugees, who have come here for religious freedom or for personal freedom or for a better chance in life. And unless there are some native Indians here, every family represented came here earlier as immigrants, maybe 2 years ago, maybe 200 years ago. But we've never been weakened because we opened our arms to receive those who have been persecuted and in danger. This is a difficult thing for us to assimilate when we get here and enjoy all the advantages of full American citizenship and wealth and freedom, to say, "Let's keep it the way it is." I'm glad that folks didn't feel that way when my folks got ready to come over here a long time ago.

In California there was naturally an agri-cuck in the Q&A demanding cheap foreign labor for his farm. He had the gall to chastise the president for the INS chasing away some of his illegal laborers. His only concern was that other immigrants, from Vietnam, go on welfare and won't provide his farm with slave labor. Carter agrees to that framing -- bad immigration is welfare, good immigration is endless cheap labor -- and only disagrees about the Vietnamese, saying they belong to the cheap labor group.

Carter made similar remarks at a California fundraiser, since rich people want cheap labor more than societal cohesion, although not in his address to the NAACP. Reminder: black people don't care about immigrants, and feel that the line about immigrants who "bust their ass" is a dog-whistle from the greedy white man about replacing the lazy black man with the ass-busting brown man.

Reagan, the trailblazer of dismantling the New Deal, was also the trailblazer for re-writing our national creation myth into "a nation of immigrants". Even before he became president, on Labor Day of 1980 he held a campaign rally near New York Harbor, where he sang praises to the Ellis Islanders and their provision of cheap labor that made America so rich, all while acting humble instead of uppity.

Reminder: they didn't call them "Paddy wagons" for no reason. Italian anarchists literally blew up Wall Street, killing dozens of innocent pedestrians, in 1920. An anchor baby to Polish parents assassinated President McKinley, and an Italian immigrant nearly assassinated FDR. The Rosenbergs and other children to Jewish immigrants sold our nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. But none of that history of hostile anti-assimilation makes it into Reagan's treacle -- his whole purpose is to glorify foreigners who will work for nothing and just keep their head down and their mouth shut (dog-whistle: unlike the unions and the blacks).

Anyone who apologizes for Reagan's 1986 amnesty of illegal immigrants, suggesting that he didn't really know what he was getting into, or was misled by bad-faith Democrats, is either clueless or lying. He had been re-writing our national creation myth and sanctifying cheap-labor immigration since he was first campaigning for president.

His first "nation of immigrants" speech for July 4th was his radio address in 1982:

Thanks to the faith and fortitude of our ancestors, freedom has flowered on our shores and has brought a legacy of liberty and opportunity to wave after wave of immigrants from every quarter of the globe.

In his national address for July 4th, 1983, he goes even farther out on a limb for immigrants who are recent arrivals, and from non-European countries. Evidently, they are as good or better than us natives -- no moochers, no low-status bums -- probably because they bust their ass more than we do:

We're a melting pot. And our body and spirit have never been stronger or richer, thanks to hundreds of thousands of new heroes -- the brave men, women, and children who risked death to escape their communist prisons in Asia and Cuba. They arrived less than 10 years ago. Most were not able to speak a word of English. But with their courage and faith, they brought unbounded determination to work, produce, succeed, and excel. Now, more and more of them are becoming leaders in their communities -- small businessowners, hard-working taxpayers, even valedictorians in their high school graduating class. We can be proud and thankful that they're joining us today in parades and ball games and backyard barbecues as young members of an old family.

Although his national address on July 4th of 1984 did not rehearse the narrative in such great detail, he still managed to squeeze in the topic of recent immigrants getting their citizenship:

And in a courthouse somewhere, some of the newest Americans, the most recent immigrants to our country, will take the oath of citizenship.

Maybe today, someone will put his hand on the shoulder of one of those new citizens and say, "Welcome," and not just as a courtesy, but to say welcome to a great land, a place of unlimited possibilities. Welcome to the American family.

Reagan's worst year by far was 1986, when he was preparing to sign a massive amnesty for illegal immigrants. To preempt criticism of this flagrantly anti-American policy, he went into overdrive sanctifying mass immigration, including a major push around Independence Day.

On July 2, he issued Presidential Proclamation 5510 -- National Immigrants Day. It is filled with the standard exaltation of the flood of cheap labor from immigrants who bust their ass.

But here's a new line -- that it took courage, rather than greed, for them to abandon their friends, families, cultures, and civilizations back home, in their quest for more money in America. It shows how opposed Reaganism is to social or cultural conservatism: they valorize massive social-cultural disruption, among both the sending and receiving nations of immigration, just because it'll boost corporate profits in the adoptive economy.

For more than three centuries, a human tide of men, women, and children have become new Americans. They have brought to us strength and moral fiber developed in civilizations centuries old, but fired anew by the dream of a better life in America. They have brought to us in this young country the treasure of a hundred ancient cultures. Their dreams gave them the courage to strike out for themselves, to leave behind familiar scenes, to part with friends and relatives, and to start a new life in a new land. The record of their success in every field of human endeavor is one of our proudest boasts. They have helped to make us the great Nation we are today.

He emphasized this idea again in his national address on July 4th itself:

Last night when we rededicated Miss Liberty and relit her torch, we reflected on all the millions who came here in search of the dream of freedom inaugurated in Independence Hall. We reflected, too, on their courage in coming great distances and settling in a foreign land and then passing on to their children and their children's children the hope symbolized in this statue here just behind us: the hope that is America. It is a hope that someday every people and every nation of the world will know the blessings of liberty.

The ambitious immigrants will not be passing on the social network of friends, neighbors, kin, or most of the key elements of their national or regional culture back home. But hey, at least the immigrants' kids might make a little more money in America than back in the old country.

The re-dedication he refers to was the centennial anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. It had been restored from 1984-'86, as part of the campaign to bring back Ellis Island levels of immigration, and the Gilded Age crushing of the working class broadly. From his July 3rd remarks on lighting the torch:

While we applaud those immigrants who stand out, whose contributions are easily discerned, we know that America's heroes are also those whose names are remembered by only a few. Many of them passed through this harbor, went by this lady, looked up at her torch, which we light tonight in their honor.

They were the men and women who labored all their lives so that their children would be well fed, clothed, and educated, the families that went through great hardship yet kept their honor, their dignity, and their faith in God. They passed on to their children those values, values that define civilization and are the prerequisites of human progress. They worked in our factories, on ships and railroads, in stores, and on road construction crews. They were teachers, lumberjacks, seamstresses, and journalists. They came from every land.

What was it that tied these profoundly different people together? What was it that made them not a gathering of individuals, but a nation? That bond that held them together, as it holds us together tonight, that bond that has stood every test and travail, is found deep in our national consciousness: an abiding love of liberty. For love of liberty, our forebears -- colonists, few in number and with little to defend themselves -- fought a war for independence with what was then the world's most powerful empire. For love of liberty, those who came before us tamed a vast wilderness and braved hardships which, at times, were beyond the limits of human endurance. For love of liberty, a bloody and heart-wrenching civil war was fought. And for love of liberty, Americans championed and still champion, even in times of peril, the cause of human freedom in far-off lands.

He doesn't bother trying to establish that their home countries were gripped by tyranny, or that they were fleeing religious persecution, since everyone knows that never happened with the Ellis Islanders. They abandoned their home countries just to make more money in the more prosperous American economy. That's what Reagan spends all his time underscoring -- they busted their ass, kept their head down, and in return they got paid better than back home. The disruption to the old country, and the new, was worth it.

In separate remarks from that night, he equates the opportunistic Ellis Islanders with the original settlers, like Carter did, while once again praising people for severing all social and cultural ties just so they can join the bigger-paycheck cult in an alien land:

And which of us does not think of other grandfathers and grandmothers, from so many places around the globe, for whom this statue was the first glimpse of America? ...

And that is why tonight we celebrate this mother of exiles who lifts her light beside the golden door...

Well, the truth is, she's everybody's gal. We sometimes forget that even those who came here first to settle the new land were also strangers...

Call it mysticism if you will, I have always believed there was some divine providence that placed this great land here between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world, who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope.

He reiterated these themes in both a message and a radio address around Independence Day.

So, just in case anyone was confused about who did the most to re-write our national creation myth, on the high holy day of civic nationalism, now you know it was Reagan. And you know in what context it was done -- opening up the floodgates of immigration like it's the laissez-faire Dickensian era all over again -- a policy totally unthinkable, and unworkable, back during the New Deal, with its emphasis on pro-social regulations and labor that was expensive rather than cheap.

Intermission: early 2010s medley of 100+ song clips

Here's a helpful aid to get a feel for the zeitgeist of the early 2010s, the most recent manic phase during the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, following a restless warm-up phase during the late 2000s, and preceding the current vulnerable refractory phase of the late 2010s.

Even the folk bands were high-energy, and the singer-songwriters upbeat instead of morose.

You've probably heard most of these since they came out, whether on the radio, over the speakers in retail stores, or other places where you couldn't avoid them. But it's striking to realize how concentrated they were into just a handful of years, just like new wave, psychedelic, girl power, or any other phase that we tend to assume lasted much longer than it really did.

This compilation of 15-second clips is a little heavy on the techno-y dance music, which was fairly big, but skimps on the funky-groovy songs that distinguished it from the late 2000s or late 2010s ("Treasure," "One More Night," etc.). Overall, a good encapsulation of the period's high energy.

The corporate elitist function of the "nation of immigrants" propaganda

In the last post we saw that the New Deal and Great Society presidents never used the occasion of Independence Day to sanctify immigration as a core element of our national creation myth, whether during its birth or its maturation. And they certainly did not use July 4th to call for a return to the Ellis Island period of mass immigration and its resulting Dickensian working and living conditions, as millions upon millions overwhelmed the labor and housing markets.

The major theme of the New Deal period was the pride and dignity of the working class. It would have been blasphemy to praise the Social Darwinism of the last period of mass immigration. Not until the elites began to worship the false idol of cost-cutting -- especially slashing the price of labor -- did our presidents sermonize about America being "a nation of immigrants" back to its origin, shamelessly equivocating between the founding settlers and the hordes of cheap labor brought in over 100 years later.

As far as the New Deal / Great Society leaders were concerned, immigration may have happened sometime in the past -- but that was then, and this is now, so let's not even mention it, let alone dwell on it. Just speaking the wrong words would have been a black magic spell that opened a portal through which the Social Darwinist devil would enter our glorious Midcentury world and corrupt it back into a Gilded Age hell all over again.

The shift in rhetoric during the mid-1970s accompanied the shift in policy toward opening the floodgates of immigration, allowing greedy and lazy employers in labor-intensive sectors to enjoy a higher rate of return on investment without having to "build a better mousetrap". It was not so much the end of the post-WWII expansion and the oil-driven recession of 1973-'75, since the economy would recover from that.

Rather, the lasting change was the increasingly globally interconnected market -- not only for goods and services, but for labor. To remain globally competitive, American employers in labor-intensive sectors wanted access to cheap labor in poor countries, whether that meant dismantling their factories in the US and rebuilding them in China, Mexico, and India -- or if the worksite could not be off-shored, such as a farm or a "small business" (fast food joint, retail outlet, construction, landscaping, domestic help, etc.), then bringing in the cheap labor here as immigrants.

To rationalize this betrayal of the American working class, and indeed to shield it from any criticism by elevating immigration into sacrosanct status, the elites needed a whole new creation myth of the American nation. In the new telling, we've always been a nation of immigrants who bust their ass all day long rather than go on the gubmint dole, humble and grateful to receive whatever table scraps our superiors are generous enough to hand out at the end of a long hard day of work.

This inverts the New Deal July 4th narrative of the lowly citizens uniting as a group in order to put constraints on their rulers, to assert and defend their inalienable rights, including the pursuit of happiness. And the presidents of that era were keen to emphasize material prosperity, not just freedom from monarchical rule.

Now, we're supposed to just let our elites do whatever they want, since they know what's best for us and only have our -- not their -- pursuit of happiness in mind. They are allowed to organize into interest groups, while we are supposed to stay fragmented -- interacting with our families at most, but not with our fellow lowly members in order to put checks and balances on the power of our elites.

The neoliberal creation myth valorizes slavery, in which the common people are humble and deferential, whereas the populist creation myth valorized freedom, in which the commoners were proud and became confrontational if mistreated.

The new myth dovetailed with the policy of open borders and the need to culturally assimilate them into the mainstream, since the coming waves of immigrants were only allowed in as latter-day slaves. See, you and they are not such different groups of people after all -- both of you are slaves who embody spiritual richness despite material poverty. That's the way it always has been, and that's the way it always will be -- various descendants of immigrants toiling away for breadcrumbs, attaining higher moral status through being humble and deferential to their masters.

But the last thing that one group of slaves needs is a whole 'nother group of slaves to have to compete against. In fact, the new national creation myth rationalizes the policy choice of the elites to replace African-Americans with Asian and Hispanic immigrants. The valorization of "immigrants who bust their ass" is always a dog-whistle for, and sometimes overtly contrasted with, the picture of lazy blacks reliant on welfare, and who once upon a time got so uppity that they rebelled against the slave owners.

Proud blacks resent being replaced by immigrants, so the new creation myth is never preached in front of black audiences like the NAACP. This proves that the motivation for the policy, and the narrative, is not the cultural replacement of European-Americans, since black people are not so turned off by that idea, yet are viscerally turned off by the immigration idea. In pandering for black votes or donations, you can make fun of how bad white people are, but that must always be in contrast to black people as the superior group -- not Hispanic or Asian immigrants.

Rather, the motivation is purely economic -- to replace expensive American labor with cheap foreign labor. African-Americans understand that just as intuitively as white Americans do, and when they hear politicians or activists talking up immigrants as a group who "bust their ass," they know that their own ethnic group is being slammed as lazy and dependent on welfare. They know the message is really, "Why Hispanics or Asians should replace blacks as the non-white ethnic group in America".

That open-borders message does not make black people think more highly of the white elites who preach it, as though what mattered most to blacks were multiculturalism. Instead it only makes them take a dim view of the white elites, who are not-so-secretly saying they want to throw the blacks overboard and replace them with Hispanics and Asians for reasons of cost efficiency.

Mass immigration has never co-existed with economic populism and civil rights. The Gilded Age had open borders, grinding poverty and inequality, and Jim Crow laws. The New Deal had closed borders, prosperity and equality, and the Civil Rights movement. With the return of the Gilded Age under neoliberalism in the Reagan era, we once more have open borders, a falling standard of living for common people and soaring ill-gotten wealth for the top, and a steady erosion of civil liberties, disproportionately hitting African-Americans.

Any populist on the left who advocates for mass immigration, or who even valorizes immigrants as hard-working folks who bust their ass for little recognition, is only doing the bidding of the exploitative employer class and those who would like to just replace the black population already. Left populists may not want to bash immigrants as people, but they cannot advocate for open borders, cannot elevate immigrants over native citizens (a dog-whistle against "lazy welfare-sponging blacks"), and cannot feed the national creation myth about "a nation of immigrants".

They should follow their New Deal heroes and keep the borders closed on class grounds -- not wanting to swell the supply of labor or the demand for housing, which would lower the standard of living for most people while enriching the elites for free. Narratively, emphasize the birth of our nation with the Founding Fathers, and its maturation with the Lincoln era that ended slavery, industrialized the economy, and built major infrastructure like the Transcontinental Railroad. Simply don't remark on the ethnic and national origins of who built the country, since everyone already knows. And don't remark on the waves of immigration during the later Ellis Island period.

The message should be that after the Civil War, we are all Americans, not we are all immigrants.

In the next and final post, we'll examine the presidential July 4th speeches of the neoliberal period, and see just how intensely they began to re-write our national creation myth, with Reagan by far the charge-leading worst offender.

"A nation of immigrants" is Reaganite / neoliberal propaganda, absent during New Deal / Great Society

I didn't want to spoil the mood on July 4th itself, but now that it's over, it's time to take a cold hard look at the origin and purpose of the propaganda we hear more and more of on Independence Day -- that the founding of our nation was built on immigration, and so more immigration we must have today.

As a side note, nobody falls for the not-at-all subtle equivocation of using "immigrants" to refer both to the settlers who built this nation from the ground up while at war with the Indians and the British, and the much later waves who saw what a prosperous and peaceful society had been created and wanted to enjoy its fruits without having contributed to its cultivation.

Everybody understands that "immigrants" really means the ones who came after a society had been built -- we don't refer to the Iroquois Federation as "a nation of immigrants" just because they originally came from outside the Americas, in Asia, as though to suggest they had no greater claim to eastern America than the European settlers did. They built up a whole society out of nothing before we got here, so they were no longer immigrants. When we built up a whole society that displaced theirs, we were no longer immigrants.

At any rate, you might think that this "nation of immigrants" canard belongs to the liberals, what with their reliance on non-whites and immigrants for electoral success. You'd think the conservatives would emphasize the ethnic Us vs. Them distinction more strongly, as well as the reverence for tradition -- and only some ethnic groups contributed to the traditions of Americana.

That may be true, yet on a partisan level, it has been the Republicans rather than the Democrats who have pushed this propaganda the most forcefully, and mostly during the transition away from the New Deal period and into the Reaganite period. The Democrats who do push this narrative are not driving the trend but jumping on the Republican bandwagon during a period of GOP dominance in the Reagan era.

We might try to resolve this paradox by pointing out that the Reaganites are not conservative on social or cultural issues, only on economic issues, and that they are more libertarian -- socially liberal, economically conservative. But then you'd expect the Democrats of the New Deal and Great Society period to have floated this narrative, since they too were socially and culturally liberal. Yet they did not, because they were economically liberal -- and wide open borders means more competition in the labor market, which drives down wages, screwing over the working class and handing over free money to lazy employers.

It is this unique combination that has unleashed the "nation of immigrants" propaganda, as well as its policy of open borders -- culturally liberal, to admit alien cultures for more than just a visit, and economically conservative, to seek any means possible for driving down wages so that lazy and greedy employers don't have to earn their higher profit margins (e.g., by "building a better mousetrap").

Anyone who supports economic populism must never deploy this propaganda, especially the culturally liberal populists who are more susceptible to its multi-culti feel-goodiness. Their heroes of the New Deal and Great Society never used it -- not that they bashed immigrants, but they avoided playing into the hands of exploitative employers, who would've been only too happy for the populist left to preach the false gospel of wage-crushing open borders.

Strategically, if voters wanted a Democrat who supports open borders, they'd go with the neoliberals who have a wonderful track record. Populist primary challengers on the left must run on a platform that distinguishes them from the neoliberal Establishment, and open borders ain't it.

The rest of this post will look at the New Deal / Great Society period, while a second post will cover the neoliberal / Reaganite period.

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To review the history, I looked at what previous presidents said during the Independence Day period (the first week of July, since they sometimes gave remarks a little before or after July 4th itself). I used UCSB's American Presidency Project.

Beginning with the founder of the New Deal period, FDR gave no July 4th speeches during any of his four terms that mentioned our nation's founding in the context of later waves of immigration, let alone to motivate current policies on immigration. In fact, he spoke at Monticello for his 1936 speech, where naturalization ceremonies take place -- and yet his remarks made no reference to America being a "nation of immigrants," or that "we all used to be immigrants," etc. His messages referred to the Founding Fathers and the Civil War, or WWII for current events, but not immigration.

In 1947, Truman gave a speech a few days after July 4th in which he urged the government to admit European refugees in the wake of WWII. He does refer to the diverse groups of people that America has assimilated, but he is only using this to motivate a policy of letting in handfuls of European refugees, which he explicitly says will be OK because they're so ethnically similar to existing Americans:

In the light of the vast numbers of people of all countries that we have usefully assimilated into our national life, it is clear that we could readily absorb the relatively small number of these displaced persons who would be admitted. We should not forget that our Nation was founded by immigrants many of whom fled oppression and persecution. We have thrived on the energy and diversity of many peoples. It is a source of our strength that we number among our people all the major religions, races and national origins.

Most of the individuals in the displaced persons centers already have strong roots in this country--by kinship, religion or national origin. Their occupational background clearly indicates that they can quickly become useful members of our American communities. Their kinsmen, already in the United States, have been vital factors in farm and workshop for generations. They have made lasting contributions to our arts and sciences and political life. They have been numbered among our honored dead on every battlefield of war.

The conclusion that he's only referring to open borders in the past, not the present, is made clearer in his remarks on July 4th itself, in the context of international cooperation in the post-WWII world (my emphasis):

It is now the duty of all nations to converge their policies toward common goals of peace. Of course, we cannot expect all nations, with different histories, institutions, and economic conditions, to agree at once upon common ideals and policies. But it is not too much to expect that all nations should create, each within its own borders, the requisites for the growth of worldwide harmony.

Eisenhower never referred to immigration in any of his July 4th speeches.

Kennedy did not either, even though his political clan was an Ellis Island Irish family.

Johnson ignored the topic as well, despite hailing from the border state of Texas.

Nixon, like Truman, did refer to our history of immigration, although -- also like Truman -- not to motivate a policy of bringing back mass immigration. As far as he lets on, immigration was a thing of the past. In a speech from 1972:

More than any other nation of any area, America has truly been the home of the free and the haven of the weak and oppressed from other parts of the world. And the catalyst of American values has transformed the weak and the oppressed into part of a strong and a just people.

In a related speech on preparing for the Bicentennial, he goes into greater detail on our history of immigration and assimilation, although again it is not to argue for more immigration. The context is seeking post-WWII cooperation among nations, and wanting international visitors -- not immigrants -- to see what their co-ethnics have done for this society, on the occasion of its Bicentennial (and then they go back):

First, because America is and always has been a nation of nations. Patriots from France and Prussia and Poland helped us win our Revolution. Strong men and women of every color and creed from every continent helped to build our farms, our industry, our cities.

The blood of all peoples runs in our veins, the cultures of all peoples contribute to our culture, and, to a certain extent, the hopes of all peoples are bound up with our own hopes for the continuing success of the American experiment.

Our Bicentennial Era is a time for America to say to the nations of the world: "You helped to make us what we are. Come and see what wonders your countrymen have worked in this new country of ours. Come and let us say thank you. Come and join in our celebration of a proud past. Come and share our dreams of a brighter future."

Generally speaking, the only mention of foreigners or foreign countries during the New Deal and Great Society period was to present the communist and fascist countries as a dictatorial foil to the American nation celebrating its independence and tradition of liberty. Or in a positive tone, to refer to those suffering under not-so-free governments for whom the ideas and actions embodied in the Declaration of Independence could act as a role model -- at a distance.

This was a period of growing prosperity and narrowing inequality, all the way back to the Great Depression, which was more of a decapitation of the undeservedly rich -- who had borrowed massive sums to gamble on the stock market during the Roaring Twenties -- than an evisceration of the working class. Trying to sanctify immigration by incorporating it into our national creation myth, and the story of its evolution, would only have reminded people of the Dickensian working and living conditions that mass immigration leads inexorably towards -- totally opposed to the zeitgeist of The Wonder Years.

It would not be until the New Deal and Great Society came under attack, in the wake of the mid-1970s recession, that presidents would start to use the occasion of Independence Day to sanctify immigration, in order to call for literal boatloads more of it. The elites were going to pursue a program of cheap labor, and that required all the neo-Dickensian immigrants that the bureaucracy could possibly process. Just proclaiming that the days of prosperity are over, would not make a good rationalization. Instead, cheap labor had to be protected by cultural sanctification, against which any argument would be an unforgivable taboo.

Fight SCOTUS pick on populist grounds, ignore abortion; and SCOTUS picks of disjunctive presidents

Liberal commentators are already working themselves into a hysteria at the Supreme Court vacancy that they fear will go to someone who will overturn Roe v. Wade -- as if anyone really gives a shit at this point.

It doesn't animate conservatives that much anymore, since it's been around forever and they assume that even with more conservatives on the Court, abortion will remain legal, albeit with greater or lesser regulations depending on the state. Liberal voters mostly assume the same thing, after so many false panics during the Reagan era, every time a Republican got to nominate a new justice.

By this point, the culture war is tiresome and irrelevant -- we're moving into a new era defined by populism and anti-globalization, not airy-fairy crap in the social-cultural domain.

Therefore, any fighting against the next Heritage Foundation pick should focus on the nominee's position on populist issues. That was Trump's secret recipe for winning as a Republican at the end of the Reaganite era, when too many voters had grown weary of corporate elitism. If he's not going to deliver much on populism through the executive branch, he should at least do something on that score in judiciary appointments.

If he nominates justices who attack populism, that represents a betrayal of his crucial swing voters from 2016. If he is held to account, then we get a populist-friendly justice, and all's well. If he breaks with populism in his nomination, then it will be out there undeniably for all those Rust Belt voters to see -- both when judging him and the whole GOP in the mid-terms and the 2020 presidential election.

Already in Trump's term, the Court has dealt strong blows to labor unions -- not exactly the best way to keep working-class Obama voters happy for switching their vote to you so that you wouldn't go down in flames like McCain and Romney.

These are the issues that should be dissected when the nomination is made -- not because the Court is going to immediately revisit their decisions thus far into Trump's term, but because the next appointment could last for decades down the line.

They are all the more pressing since the already-weak bubble economy for most people is going to go POP even for the 1% before Trump's term is up. In that deep recessionary context, it will be all the more crucial for the bottom 99% to be able to rely on the new justice to have their back.

* * *

The upcoming SCOTUS confirmation battles will be primarily defined by Trump's status as a disjunctive president, serving in the dominant party of his era at the internally dysfunctional end of that era (GOP during the Reagan era).

The disjunctive phase almost always has the dominant party controlling both the White House and Congress, so that any conflict cannot stem from a partisan mismatch between executive and legislative branches.

Conflict will only be due to the fracturing of the dominant coalition at the end of its lifespan, typically due to the president trying to transform the dominant party's vision, which the legislature wants no part of, as they've spent their entire careers building and enhancing that vision. We see that every time Trump threatens to impose tariffs that never get implemented, or threatens to withdraw troops from some pointless occupation that ends up with only more troops.

With both the White House and Congress being held by the same dominant party, shouldn't the appointments go off without a hitch? Not necessarily.

Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter never had a SCOTUS opening, so we'll never know exactly what would've happened. But given what a clusterfuck his term was, we can guess that it wouldn't have gone well. He campaigned against the New Deal and Great Society that his party founded, and as an evangelical conservative. So maybe he appoints a pro-life justice only five years after Roe v. Wade, and it gets scuttled by the liberal wing of his own party in Congress, forcing him to nominate a pro-choice justice instead. The many lapses in government funding ("shutdowns") during his term centered around public funding for abortion (via Medicaid), so it was certainly bound to come up during any SCOTUS confirmation hearings.

In 1930, at the end of the Progressive Republican era, Hoover did get one of his nominees rejected by his own party that controlled Congress, albeit by just one vote. John Parker was protested by labor groups for favoring "yellow dog contracts," whereby a worker had to agree not to join a union as part of his hiring contract. That stance would've cut clearly against the Progressive GOP's promise to favor both labor and business, rather than business over labor -- an especially damning stance during the Great Depression. Hoover had to nominate a more populist justice, and chose an attorney who had worked on the investigation of the Teapot Dome scandal, Owen Roberts, who sailed through -- as did Hoover's other two nominations.

In 1860-'61, at the end of the Jacksonian era and just before the Civil War, Buchanan failed to confirm a nominee for a vacancy that opened up in June of 1860, the year Lincoln would be elected. He nominated Jeremiah Black during the lame duck session of 1861, but the Senate agreed -- by one vote -- to take no action. The spot got filled by Lincoln instead. Buchanan had chosen a wishy-washy northern Democrat like himself, which even his own party controlling the Senate did not feel comfortable accepting. Lincoln's successful appointment was an outright abolitionist. Earlier in his term, Buchanan did successfully appoint a justice, although narrowly.

In 1828, at the end of the Jeffersonian era, John Quincy Adams saw his first (and only successful) appointment die after two years in office -- and only slightly more than a month ahead of the presidential election, where he lost to Jackson. During the lame duck session, he tried to appoint a replacement for his own previous pick, yet his own party who controlled Congress decided to postpone action, and it got filled by Jackson instead. That reflected the fragmentation of the Democratic-Republican party at the end of the era: the Jacksonian faction blocked John Crittenden, who was a proto-Whig and anti-Jacksonian, so that president-elect Jackson could have a pick of his own. That choice, John McLean, began as pro-Jackson but evolved away toward the Whig party anyway.

In 1800, at the end of the early Federalist era, John Adams faced the resignation of the chief justice after having just lost his bid for re-election to Jefferson. During the lame duck session, Adams decided to nominate the first chief justice, John Jay. The Senate, controlled by his party, did agree to that choice -- but Jay declined, choosing to retire from politics altogether. Adams did successfully nominate his Secretary of State John Marshall to that vacancy during the lame duck session, and Marshall did choose to serve, not wanting the president-elect Jefferson to fill it with an anti-Federalist. (Adams had earlier appointed two justices successfully.)

Adams is thus the only disjunctive president whose failed appointment was not due to his own party in Congress blocking him, but to the nominee himself declining, and the only disjunctive president whose successful follow-up nomination after the failure was not bending to the shifting political winds. Quite the opposite, Marshall was a thorn in the side of the Jeffersonians for their entire era of dominance.

I attribute Adams' unusual status in this regard to the fact that there was not a strong party system during his time (the First Party System began with Jefferson), so he's not the best example of a disjunctive president. The founder of his era, George Washington, was a Federalist but ran and served as a non-partisan figure in order to calm tensions during the infancy of the nation.

At any rate, we see that Trump, like other disjunctive presidents, will face some kind of difficulty in nominating at least one of his would-be justices. He could pick someone a little too old-school for this phase of trying to transform the system, and have to go with someone who is more palatable to the evolving populist re-alignment.

It's the job of the Democrats and any not-so-corporate Republicans to make sure the populist principles he campaigned on are respected in his nominations to the Court. With previous disjunctive presidents, it was often only by one vote that the dominant party in the Senate decided not to go with someone so wedded to the old vision. There's no reason that can't happen again, especially comparing Trump to Hoover -- it could be over the same issue of labor unions for a supposedly progressive Republican, as an overly long economic expansion comes crashing down on the working class.

In populist re-alignment of Dems, would-be Speaker & Boomer Reaganite dethroned by Millennial Bernie babe

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.

Dehumanizing obits for school shooting victims read like striver college applications that never got to be sent

Sorry you got mass-murdered at school, but on the plus-side, I'll make sure everybody knows that you would've gotten into to an awesome college and scored a kickass career after graduation.

In a comment on the post below, I addressed the infrequent and narrow range of cases when the elites actually do highlight the problems that American children are facing, as opposed to their non-stop hand-wringing about the 10 billion immigrants they want to overwhelm our country with.

The reason why they rarely feel sympathy for American kids is that they are treated less like real human beings and more like robots to be programmed for maximum status-striving potential in the hyper-competitive globalized labor market. The elites see the outcome of that childrearing practice, and it is not easily recognizably human, hence their difficulty feeling sympathy for such children.

Sympathy anchors on authentic human beings -- or at least sentient creatures, not inanimate devices whose behavioral output has been fine-tuned by clinical engineers and programmers.

So, the elites only want to protect American kids in the school setting -- the main site of feeding them through the striver grinder, with surrogate parent-engineers taking over for the micro-programming while Mom and Dad are busy striving for pay. The elites can only conceive of "harm to children" to the extent that something disrupts the day-in and day-out micro-programming of their robo-kids. They couldn't care less what's affecting them outside of the cram school context.

To truly appreciate how dehumanizing the elites' treatment of American children is, just look at how the victims of mass school shootings are memorialized in the media. Consider this list of Parkland obituaries from CNN as representative of national media coverage. In fairness, local coverage is more humanizing and personal, but I'm talking about the big-picture bullet points from a major outlet like CNN that frames the national impression and conversation. It's not just that longer articles in the local press can go into greater depth -- the national press does not summarize that portrait into a thumbnail sketch, but focuses on a different set of traits.

Very little in CNN's descriptions has to do with who they are as people, whether as individuals or as members of a larger group that exists outside the striver school setting. They are not portraits of human beings. Rather, they are business reports about how far along this particular item was in the striver production process. The intended sense of tragic loss is only conveyed by detailing how much work had gone into its programming so far, and what future assembly lines it was destined for in order to receive the final bells and whistles before being brought to market -- at last -- before potential buyers.

The "senseless act of violence" comes across not so much as snuffing out a real-life human being, or robbing a social group of one of its crucial members -- but as an act of industrial sabotage in the striver factory. All those products that had come so far along in the manufacturing process -- some almost ready to roll right off the end of the assembly line -- damaged beyond the engineers' ability to salvage them and fulfill their clients' orders after all.

Normal obituaries of adults may mention their career accomplishments, although they also include sections on the person's early life and upbringing, as well as their social relationships, in a holistic portrait. The victims of mass school shootings are only teenagers, who do not have a career to speak of -- or do they? Their striver parents and handlers all treat them as though they had training-wheel careers of their own, with status and accomplishments to boast of just as much as any adult.

They don't understand how dehumanizing it strikes a normal person to treat a child as merely a yuppie-in-training, while ignoring anything about their personality, their interests, their hobbies, their social relations, and so on. Or perhaps those humanizing aspects are being prevented from developing in the first place, lest they get in the way of the proto-yuppie production process. Either way, it makes these obituaries awkward to read.

In fact, the only people quoted who do not refer to the slain victims as just promising cogs in a status-striving machine are their fellow age-mates -- other students, siblings or cousins, and neighborhood friends.

This contrast between the profane programmers and the respectful peers is starkest in the entry for Carmen Schentrup:

Carmen was a National Merit Scholar semifinalist.

"Marjory Stoneman Douglas had 10 students qualify as semifinalists for 2018, which is the second year in a row 10 students have qualified," the Eagle Eye student blog said.

Carmen was mourned in the community and on social media.

"Rest In Peace Carmen Schentrup," one tweet said. "You family is forever in my thoughts and prayers. I'm so sorry."

Anticipating fierce competition, this obit opens immediately with a knockout punch -- National Merit semifinalist, think you can compete with that? I'm surprised these obits didn't list "GPA" and "SAT score" along with their name and age in the headers.

In an even more disgusting profanation, it quotes a student blog post that brags about how well the school does in the National Merit competition. In this context, it comes across as crass and tone-deaf; however, it is actually a post from last fall, not one written in response to the mass murder. But the writers here just couldn't help it -- not even something sacred like an obituary could stop them from quoting standard PR bragging from today's hyper-competitive education system.

The connotation is that the victim was only worth something in this world to the extent that she helped rack up a high score for her striver factory in the industry-wide awards for striver production -- without her, there is now one fewer National Merit semifinalist for the school to boast about in its marketing copy. That bastard with the AR-15 ought to be sued into replacing her with another National Merit semifinalist, it's the only way true justice can be served.

Nicholas Dworet's obit ups the ante by declaring that he's already been accepted to college, which it name-drops, and announcing that he was in fact recruited for the swim team, unlike the less competitive applicants who have to beg colleges for admission.

The sole person quoted is from that university -- which he didn't even get to attend, and who therefore knows nothing about him and has no connection to him whatsoever. It's purely to vouch for the student's promising college prospects, to clarify that he wasn't a loser in the striver competition. Oh, and it's the university president, not some low-ranking staffer, who writes this posthumous letter of recommendation to future employers from The Beyond.

For the striver adults commemorating him, nothing else mattered. Not even joking, here it is in its entirety:

Nicholas, a 17-year-old senior, was killed in the shooting, the University of Indianapolis confirmed. He was recruited for the university swim team and would have been an incoming freshman this fall.

"Nick's death is a reminder that we are connected to the larger world, and when tragedy hits in places around the world, it oftentimes affects us at home," said Robert L. Manuel, University of Indianapolis president.

"Today, and in the coming days, I hope you will hold Nick, his family, all of the victims, as well as the Parkland community and first responders in your prayers."

Meadow Pollack's obit also opens with the declaration that she had gotten into a named college, but only a spokeswoman rather than the president vouches for her. (That's why they shouldn't be contacting these institutions to begin with, since it creates needless competition.) As in the first case, this college spokeswoman knows absolutely nothing about the dead teenager who never attended the institution that she works for, but doesn't let that get in the way of vouching for her, using HR boilerplate ("join our community," one rung above "join our team"):

Meadow, 18, had been accepted at Lynn University in Boca Raton, spokeswoman Jamie D'Aria said.

"Meadow was a lovely young woman, who was full of energy. We were very much looking forward to having her join our community in the fall," D'Aria said.

For the adult programmers and engineers, what matters most is maximizing the status of their sabotaged products, and that means getting an endorsement from as high-ranking of a source as possible, not from someone who actually knew the victim as a person. Her friends, and friends of the family, are at least allowed to chime in after the university spokeswoman is done vouching for the deceased's status credentials, and they sound like real people who knew another real person and are struck by grief.

Jaime Guttenberg was only 14, so her obit couldn't reassure us that she had gotten into a good school just yet. But not to worry -- the writer makes sure to include remarks from her father's alma mater, only half-hinting that she could have gotten her degree there, if it weren't for that bastard with the AR:

Skidmore College, where Fred Guttenberg attended, released a statement saying their hearts go out to Jaime's parents and others affected by the tragedy.

"There really are no words to lessen the suffering that the families of victims are feeling at this moment, but perhaps knowing that we stand with them can provide some small measure of solace," the college said.

This quote comes abruptly after several sentences of the father's grieving. It's not clear whether he put his alma mater up to this, or whether the writers investigated where the dead teenager might have enjoyed legacy status in the admissions competition later on. At any rate, in juxtaposition, the father's grieving reads more as a set-up for the college's remarks -- he is the connection, so if the writers had not introduced the grieving father first, the remarks from his alma mater would have sounded a little too out-of-the-blue.

Only in a pathologically striver-stricken culture would obituary writers subordinate paternal grief to the reassurance that the mass-murdered daughter was likely bound for a college with a median SAT of 1320.

Alyssa Alhadeff's obit emphasizes her extracurriculars -- Parkland Travel Soccer, Camp Coleman ("Section 5: Please describe how you've spent your last three summers"). Not what role she played in these groups -- was she the jokester or the straight-faced one, a leader or a helper ("Hmmm, if she wasn't the leader, that won't look good on the application"), who else she connected with, how they shaped her, or anything human about belonging to a group. It's simply a list of extracurriculars to pad her file for ultimate judgment by that great big admissions panel up in the sky.

Sadly, even her own mother offers little description of who her daughter was, beyond what any mother would say while pleading her case in front of the admissions board: "Alyssa was a beautiful, smart, talented, successful, awesome, amazing soccer player." Look, I made sure she's going to crush it in her career choices, what else do you expect me to know about my daughter?

Cara Loughran's obit begins with her extracurricular: she "danced at the Drake School of Irish Dance in South Florida." It doesn't describe what she was like at the studio, what her favorite kinds of dances were, or any other portrait-like details. It just lists her membership in an institution whose WASP-y name, "the Drake School," is designed to sound like an exclusive private school.

Even when her adult neighbor is quoted, the remarks are abstract rather than concrete, and generic rather than personal -- "fly with the angels," "celebrate your beautiful life". It sounds more like someone who signed your yearbook without knowing you -- "Have a fun trip 2 Heaven, C U next lifetime."

Gina Montalto's obit starts off with her extracurricular -- winter guard on the marching band -- and follows with a condolence from the Winter Guard International, who did not know her, but whose high-ranking status will hopefully make their letter of rec more status-boosting to the dead teenager. She does get a more personal portrayal from her middle school coach, though. Her aunt tries to tell us that she was into art and design, but cannot help turning it into a grievance about the striver career that the young girl never got to kick ass at: "I know somewhere in the heavens she's designing the latest and greatest trends," she says awkwardly, falling back on PR buzzwords toward the end.

Alaina Petty's obit focuses more on the "service" section of the college application -- volunteering after Hurricane Irma, Helping Hands program with the Mormon church, member of junior ROTC, which the writers emphasize is "a leadership program" taught by retired Army personnel. Her family seem to have her career prospects mainly in mind: "Alaina loved to serve," and the family "will not have the opportunity to watch her grow up and become the amazing woman we know she would become". In context, "amazing" means kicking ass in the status competition.

Alex Schachter's obit is entirely about his extracurriculars of marching band and orchestra. The band director's letter of recommendation -- "I felt he really had a bright future on the trombone" -- emphasizes the student's appeal to college admissions boards, or perhaps as a career choice if he were really good at it. In either case, it is about status prospects that will not be realized. There is no description of his personality or social relations, other than noting that he had a family when mentioning who it is that has set up a music scholarship in his memory.

Luke Hoyer's obit is one of the few that does not dryly run through a checklist of academics, extracurriculars, and service activities. In addition to some personality traits, it is about the state of shock that his grandparents are in. They are described as a "close-knit family," although the grandparents live 10 hours drive away from Fort Lauderdale, in Appalachian South Carolina. Recall that these mass school shootings only happen in rootless striver colonies, such as anywhere in Florida. If the parents had remained close to the grandparents, it would have been an even more close-knit family, and not exposed to the risk of mass school shootings.

At any rate, his obit goes to show that, unlike the overall pattern in America, people from Appalachian background are unlikely to treat their kids solely as robots to be programmed into status-strivers, and view them more as holistic human beings, especially by being plugged into extended kinship networks.

Other than his, the only obits that present a more personal sketch instead of a college application belong to the students who are of recent immigrant background. That reinforces the point that our elites feel sympathy for immigrant children because they do not perceive them to be robotic proto-yuppies whose humanity has been crushed out of them after getting cranked through the striver grinder by programmer-engineer parents.

Helena Ramsay's obit centers around her personality and kin relations, with both people quoted being family members. The fact that she would've started college next year is mentioned in passing, not drawn out (no name of the college). In her personality description, there is one reference to the cram school context -- "she had a relentless motivation towards her academic studies" -- but again is mentioned more in passing. She was of recent Afro-Caribbean background.

Peter Wang's obit does mention that he was in junior ROTC, but it's not so much of an item in an extracurricular checklist, as it is a set-up for the description of the brave way in which he died -- holding open the door so other kids could escape. Most of the description is personal, from a close friend and classmate who describes how he made her smile and laugh, and how excited he was to celebrate the upcoming Chinese New Year. He was of recent Chinese background.

The obit for Martin Duque Anguiano, born in Mexico, focuses on his personality and his place in the family structure. They specify that he's the baby brother, with the roles that implies, rather than just being a fungible member of Team Duque. And it's written by his older brother instead of a programmer parent.

Finally the obit for Joaquin Oliver, also an immigrant:

Joaquin was born in Venezuela, moved to the United States when he was 3 and became a naturalized citizen in January 2017, the Sun-Sentinel reported.

"Among friends at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, he was known as 'Guac,' a moniker that appeared on his Instagram account. His interests: football, basketball, the Venezuelan national soccer team, urban graffiti and hip-hop," the paper said.

An Instagram post dated December 31 was his final social media post -- a message to his girlfriend, the paper said.

"Thank you lord for putting a greater blessing than I could ever imagine into my life this past year," he said. "I love you with all my heart."

Nothing about academics, extracurriculars, or service activities. It lists football and basketball under interests rather than participation on school teams. He actually has interests of his own, not only activities that he is fed into by programmer parents. He actually has friends. They've even given him a nickname -- a unique personal detail, whose informal and familiar tone brings the reader into their social circle.

And unlike the apparently sexless American robo-kids, the writers emphasize that this guy actually has a girlfriend -- might actually get married, might actually raise a family. It's that never-realized marriage and family that is the tragic loss in his entry. The robo-kids are presumed to advance to the procreation stage once their amazing careers have reached the kickass level -- before then, it would only get in the way of foundational striver development.

What are the range of interests of the other students? Who are their friends? What are their nicknames? Who are their girlfriends or boyfriends? What are their plans for marriage, for raising families one day? According to their adult programmers and the national media -- who cares? Don't you really want to know instead what would make them an amazing candidate for a "fast, early acceptance into an Ivy League school (and please let it be Harvard)"?

With this conception of American children, it's no surprise that the elites have such difficulty feeling sympathy for them, and turn to immigrant children instead, who they see as more authentically human than robotic.

Elites feel for 3rd world children, who seem more authentically human than their own robotic striver spawn

The absolute hysteria that the elites have shown over the past week about the Central American immigrant "kids in cages" is not the response they would show if those kids were from the first world. The profound disconnect between their response toward the children of their own nation and those of less developed nations is a sign of a broken moral compass, and none of the usual explanations for the outta-whack state of affairs seem to be correct.

A healthy moral sense devotes more attention to domains where the person or some group they belong to can make a difference. That's how we recognize the shameful deflection when the liberal elites ask why Trump is meeting with a human rights abuser like Kim Jong-un, when they do not ask why Trump met with an even worse offender like Mohammad bin Salman. Kim is not our ally, and won't change his behavior just because we pressure him to. Bin Salman is our #1 ally, and would respond to our pressure, lest he lose the material and intangible goodies we provide him with. Worrying about Trump legitimizing Kim is morally pointless, worrying about Trump legitimizing bin Salman is morally worthwhile.

Maybe you could worry about both of Trump's meetings with those leaders, but you could not worry more about the Kim meeting than about the bin Salman meeting.

Now, if the elites are so concerned over children who are in a pitiful state, why not start right here at home? It's not as though everyone's kids in this country are doing A-OK. The elites might respond that they worry more about the immigrant children because they're poor, whereas their own kids are rich, and even those of the middle-class are wealthier than the immigrant kids. But then they ignore the large swaths of American children who are not wealthier than the immigrant kids. There are plenty of places right here where rural whites and urban blacks are not exactly living in what you would call first-world comfort.

Oh sure, there's the once-a-year feature story on the lead-polluted water of Flint, Michigan, or the heat system getting shut off during winter in Baltimore public schools. Then it's right back to obsessing over immigrants for the rest of the year, which is a far more recurring topic of theirs, and one they report on with much greater emotional investment. The chronic plight of urban blacks has been totally sidelined in favor of attention to immigrants.

When they do mention Flint or Baltimore, it's more of an empty ritual -- something they know they're supposed to do, and they go through the motions, but their heart is not in it, and it's not part of a larger and longer-term vision of theirs for a better society. Their moral vision for improving the lot of the non-white people of the world is to open our borders to 10 billion foreigners, and hope that there's still enough wealth to go around for all of them. They can't have an impact at that level, so why bother? Whereas focusing on blacks in America is something they can have a huge impact on -- and yet, just half-hearted ritualistic expressions of concern.

Of course, the elites care even less about white American children who are in a pitiful state, but it is not about race. They scarcely care more about African-American children than about Euro-American children, since almost all of their effort goes to immigrant and foreign children. And some major cases are not even very non-white -- look at how apoplectic the elites go after seeing dead children in Syria, during each chemical hoax du jour. Syrians are pretty white, especially compared to African-Americans -- and yet, we don't see the elites foaming at the mouth to start another war on behalf of dead black children in America, like they do about children in Syria.

So what's going on with the outta-whack moral sense of today's elites, whether liberal or conservative?

A cynical response is that the elites are just crying crocodile tears in order to advance their globalist agenda -- whether the goal is to import hordes of cheap labor to boost corporate profits, to culturally replace what they feel is an embarrassing American culture, or whatever else.

We can reject that, as with most lazy cynical answers, since it only captures a tiny slice of the elites. A big chunk truly feel morally invested in the fate of poor Guatemalan children, while feeling almost nothing similar for poor African-American children, or poor white-American children.

And the phenomenon is broader than just trying to incorporate the Guatemalans into the American nation -- the elites feel more deeply for Guatemalan children even when they're understood to be living in Guatemala itself for the rest of their lives. And again, that's true for elites on both the left and the right, albeit with different rationalizations for their similar behavior of ignoring poor Americans in favor of poor foreigners -- alleviating global poverty for the left, saving all of God's children for the right.

Another cynical response is "virtue signaling," meaning the elites don't bother sympathizing with American children because that's easy or cheap to do, whereas sympathizing with third-world children is somehow harder or more costly to do, so that their moral posing is really a kind of status contest amongst themselves. Who can out-do the others in obsessing over the children of unfamiliar and alien cultures?

But if that were true, we would see the "most obscure band / film / author" phenomenon -- the elites would resort to ever more exotic cultures to sympathize with the plight of pitiful children, just as they do in fact for the cuisine of other cultures. It's amateur to signal your knowledge and appreciation of Mexican food -- but make it Salvadorean food, and you've upped the ante.

In this framework, only a beginning poser would try to score points by sympathizing with Central American immigrants -- too geographically close to us, too familiar from their immense numbers in our country, and therefore too over-exposed in our public mind as stereotypical immigrants. But make it those Rohingya people who the media have been trying to turn into a storyline, and you'd rack up a higher score. ("Oh... you've never heard of the Rohingya...?")

And yet the elites continue to pay little attention to the Rohingya, the Tibetans, and other truly more exotic cultures than the Guatemalans or the Syrians. The "costly signaling" model does not work here.

These and other lazy cynical answers all presume that this elite behavior is part of a well-functioning machine -- that their moral obsession over third-world immigrants is somehow serving a more fundamental goal of theirs, whatever we may think about that goal. This is the fallacy of thinking that all traits are optimal for the individuals possessing them, presumably because they would otherwise be weeded out by some form of competition. On such a brief time scale as we are observing our elites, how do we know that these traits are not in fact mal-adaptive to their own goals?

Consider their slowly and hazily dawning awareness that by pushing so forcefully for open borders, they have triggered a backlash that will end up not only closing the borders, but deporting a large chunk of illegals who thought they were already in the clear. Too much immigration leads to zero immigration.

And before too long, they'll start to understand how 10 billion people living in America would wreck our welfare state worse than any Tea Party scheme. Liberals go to pains to preserve the welfare state in political contexts that do not touch on immigration.

As I said at the outset, this elite behavior is clearly a sign of their being broken, outta-whack, misaligned. It is not 3-D chess for globalists. But what precisely is the nature of this broken moral compass?

Quite simply, I think our elites don't view American children as authentic human beings, as a result of our children being micro-programmed, as though they were cutting-edge robots, in our hyper-competitive and status-striving climate. Program them to eat the right kind of organic breakfast foods, program them to play the right sports in pre-school, program them to ace the pre-pre-pre-school admissions exam, program them to play the right instruments when they get home from pre-pre-pre-school, and on and on and on.

Striver parents are terrified that their kids won't grow up to be strivers like them, so they leave nothing to chance or free will. Just program the hell out of the kids, and that's their best shot at making it in adulthood. The children's eventual social status depends entirely on the parents properly nano-tuning their programming during childhood.

If that's your conception of the parent-child relationship, then of course you won't conceive of the child as a real human being. They're not even sentient, like a pet. Sidenote: people train their children as though they were pets, and resort to owning pets to fill the void left by raising robo-kids. Their pets are treated as though they were the real children -- left alone from programming, and behaving all natural.

When these elites think of third-world cultures, they sense that there are no elites there like there are here -- sure, there are elites, but attaining that status does not come from a war of all against all, a Darwinian survival of the fittest, AKA meritocracy. They sense the elites inherit large tracts of productive land, or political office, or whatever it is. In our elites' mind, the third-world parents don't turn childrearing into micro-programming, since there is no hyper-competitive admissions process for pre-schools, colleges, internships, and professional firms.

The children from such a culture will appear to be more authentic as human beings, making them suitable targets for sympathy -- unlike the robo-kids of our society, who don't even register as sentient.

Our elites view all children from the third world this way -- naturally the children of poor foreigners, who don't go to college, but even those from relatively better-off families, who don't have to go through the dehumanizing process of striver programming. That shows that our elite's sympathy is not just about being materially poor -- you can be relatively well-off, as long as your parents didn't turn you into a robot in order to attain that comfortable status.

And our elites project their own kids' robo-traits onto those of American children writ large. After all, such a large share of kids in America go to college, and an even larger share are put through regimens to prepare them for college, even if they decide not to. The elites may assume that our education system treats every child as college material, so they must all get cranked through the striver grinder, just like the elite kids.

Whether that's true or not, doesn't matter. It's the elite's perception that matters. And they talk in such broadbrush terms about "our society" and "our children" that they wouldn't see exceptions even if they were there among urban blacks or rural whites, who may not robotize their children like the strivers in the elite zip codes do. Out of sight, out of mind for the elites.

American children as synthetic, third-world children as natural -- that's what's behind this whole warped morality phenomenon. And it's a sign of something wrong, namely the degree to which today's parents treat childrearing as though it were engineering a machine to optimally compete in Battle Bots, as all of society tunes in to watch their performance -- the machine's performance, and by extension the engineer's.

This likely applies more broadly than just children, too. Even adults in America are perceived by our elites to not really be human, given the dehumanizing system they are all a part of in our hyper-competitive climate. But adults from poor third-world cultures? Our elites doubt that their way of life is as dehumanizing as ours, so they must be more wholly human than American adults, and hence more suitable as targets for sympathy.

It's not really a Noble Savage worldview, since the poor immigrants are not hunter-gatherers. They come from cultures with a government, sedentary residence, agricultural economies perhaps with some of our off-shored manufacturing plants, permanent elites, religious hierarchies, and other elements of complex societies.

It's more about our hyper-competitive, credentialist, groping for a post-industrial utopia whose outcome feels increasingly uncertain. The third-world cultures certainly don't have that going on.

What is the solution? It is to channel our awareness of the broken moral compass into changing the underlying problem. First, by drawing the elite's attention to their outta-whack priorities -- they should be more concerned with struggling Americans than struggling Guatemalans, since we control America but do not control Guatemala. Then, by pointing out the root cause of the elite's misaligned priorities -- seeing their fellow Americans as not really human, due to being cogs in a dehumanizing machine, which they assume does not apply in Guatemala.

Finally, to make that the central task -- to dial down the psychotic levels of competitiveness in our society. If it keeps going any further, it will blow up the society in a civil war. And even if that were to be avoided, it is still producing more dehumanized people on the other side of the striver grinder, and that in turn makes it easier for our elites to treat them callously rather than charitably.

We have to unseat the reigning ethos of anti-social ambition, and replace it with pro-social restraint. And we must replace the warped focus on fixing the whole world with fixing America -- where we can actually succeed.

DC blacks pass higher min wage: Employers of immigrants hardest hit

Voters in DC have approved Initiative 77, which will gradually raise the minimum wage for tipped workers to be the same as it is for non-tipped workers. It's currently only $3.33, compared to $12.50 for non-tipped workers. If the workers' tips plus the barebones wage falls short of the general minimum wage, the employer is supposed to make up the difference. But in practice, greedy employers stiff their workers for that difference, and the Labor Department has little power to investigate, charge, and collect the unpaid wages from the employers. That leaves the workers making well below the general minimum wage.

You can read more about the issues in this explainer from Vox, but what really matters is that this will move the DC economy one step closer toward abolishing cheap labor, and thereby drying up the demand for immigration. Whether they realize it or not -- mostly they do not -- the progressive Democrats are helping to send immigrants back to their home countries, once they can no longer get jobs here. And they will not be getting hired as commonly if the minimum wage shoots up.

The whole purpose of immigrants being here is to serve as a vast pool of cheap labor for greedy and lazy employers who want to enjoy higher profit margins without actually having to improve their business model or product -- just by firing their well-paid American employees and replacing them with cheap foreigners instead. Wow, what a brilliant insight, what a singular innovation! The employers' greed, laziness, sociopathy, and treason ought to be punished, not rewarded.

All the Democrats need to do now is to play up the fact that those workers who will get fired when the minimum wage goes up will be illegal immigrants, and that primarily African-American citizens will be taking those jobs instead. By framing immigration in class terms, and by attacking employers rather than the immigrant workers themselves, the Democrats can steal the immigration issue from the GOP. And, solve the problem more efficiently -- punishing one small business owner vs. tracking down the dozen immigrants he employs.

And since the Democrats are not controlled by the material sectors, like those relating to food, they can credibly threaten to keep raising the minimum wage, which will not affect the sectors that do control their party -- informational sectors like finance, tech, and the media, which are not dependent on armies of cheap foreigners, either here or abroad.

With Initiative 77 passed, some businesses will stay open, only with fewer immigrants and more (African-)Americans on their payroll. Other businesses will have to close down, because their business model is so pathetically defective that it fails just from having to pay their workers the minimum wage. That is all for the better -- we want good businesses to stay open, not shitty ones that can only be propped up by the government looking the other way while the employers pay their workers $4 an hour and stiff them for the rest that they owe to meet the full minimum wage.

As that happens more broadly, it will affect entire sectors, driving out the bad and replacing them with the good. When a crappy restaurant or hair salon closes down because they can't turn a profit if forced to pay their workers the minimum wage, the source of their financing will have to find another destination.

Remember, nobody puts up their own money to operate any business -- they're all getting loans from banks, selling equity through a stock market, issuing bonds, or whatever else. Once those funds can no longer go to the crappy businesses, they will necessarily be routed to those that are profitable under the higher minimum wage -- such as a manufacturing plant instead of a third-tier restaurant. Food-related jobs will dwindle, while manufacturing jobs will rise, shifting workers from low-paid jobs into high-paid jobs, not just improving their lives but narrowing inequality between them and the rich.

A higher minimum wage will be a crucial component of the new Bernie-era industrial policy to revolutionize our economy out of the dead-end shitty service model that our elites have driven us into during the Reagan era, and back to one with robust manufacturing and industry.

Which group of voters deserves credit for this big first step? The blacks of DC, not the yuppie whites (he means high-end neighborhoods in the NW):

Washington DC passed a referendum mandating that tipped employees receive the full minimum wage (rather than relying on tips). The measure passed easily in African-American precincts while failed in the more high-end suburbs in the east.  #DCision18 #DCprimary #Initiative77 pic.twitter.com/bk8XemEfND

— Matthew Isbell (@mcimaps) June 20, 2018

Black people in DC are not looking ahead to the effects of a higher minimum wage on the employment prospects for immigrants -- but even if you pointed it out to them, they would not give an utter shit about a bunch of poor weepy Mexicans who won't get hired at all if they can no longer serve as dirt-cheap replacements for (African-)American workers. "I got mine, BITCH -- now go on and get yours, BACK IN MEXICO."

Obviously none of those blacks will ever vote for Trump or the GOP, and that's perfectly fine. We aren't trying to drive them to the GOP -- who would instantly lower the minimum wage and bring back the cheap-labor foreigners anyway. The goal is to have both major parties acting to restrict immigration -- by fomenting a loud and angry pro-American worker movement within the re-aligning Democrat base itself, albeit on class terms and attacking greedy employers rather than the immigrant workers. But if blacks use the occasion to air some of their grievances against immigrants, so much the better.

Immigrants don't vote, especially if they're illegal, and they lower the material standard of living for everyone, except their corporate bosses who enjoy higher profits from cheaper labor, which widens inequality at both ends of the spectrum. They are the last thing the Democrats need to win elections. The path toward recovery for the Dems is to amp up their African-American base -- and they don't care about pointless identity politics anymore, except for a few dead-end Boomers. They want more cash in their pocket, simple as that. Jack up the minimum wage to $20 an hour, and there go all the illegal immigrants back to wherever they came from, with black people giving zero fucks when that happens.

That will also help to drive a wedge between the black base and the neoliberal elites within the party, who not only want to keep the minimum wage down (see the NW section of the map), but who want to transform their base to include all non-whites -- even if most of those other non-whites don't vote, and lower the standard of living for blacks. African-Americans are the only reliable non-white bloc of voters for the Democrats, they can't stand the other unreliable non-white groups, and unlike the other non-white groups who live in either deep red or deep blue states, blacks live in swingy states where they could actually make a difference, especially in the Rust Belt.

Neoliberal yuppie whites will never understand that, but they don't need to -- they just need to be shouted down by their angry black base who demand a $20 minimum wage, regardless if that means Mexicans returning to Mexico when they can no longer work for pennies on the American dollar. Hopefully that winds up purging the neoliberals from the party leadership, and leading to their replacement by blacks and whites who are just looking out for the American worker, and not the cheap labor legions of literally the entire world.

Let this be a lesson to any remaining populists and nationalists on the GOP side -- there's nothing worth voting for on the Republican side's primaries. It's more effective to channel your votes, donations, and efforts into making the Democrat party an alternative to corporate-globalist Republicanism.