I continue to read National Review On-Line, despite having dropped the subscription to the paper version years ago. The reason is it is a canary in the coal mine sort of publication now. Their selection of topics and positions indicates the current thinking within the Republican Party. They have fluff and red meat type stuff too, but it is mostly about how to sell the GOP to the public.
The Weekly Standard, in contrast, is about influencing policy and is more of a trade journal for staffers in DC. They will take a long piece on policy or strategy and package it with a bunch of fluff that managerial class staffers will find interesting. My guess is their circulation is 90% within the DC metropolitan area. It now fills the role the New Republic filled before it was destroyed by the gay Nazi from Facebook.
Anyway, this ridiculously long-winded piece on immigration from one of the fake nerds at National Review is something that got my attention. I mostly skimmed it for two reasons. One is that a 3,500 word piece is too long by default. Second, it’s obvious the author has no grasp of the subject.
For years, elite conservatives have ignored grassroots opposition to mass immigration, and Trump’s rise is their reward. That GOP primary voters are in revolt over immigration, and that so many of them are spurning elected Republicans they no longer trust, should come as no surprise.
Does this mean that all conservatives need to do is call for closing the borders, and then all will be well? Not by a long shot. If Republicans who favor mass immigration have been blind to its downsides, many of those who are opposed to it have themselves been blinded by nostalgia — they have failed to recognize that the more culturally homogeneous America of the 1980s, when many older conservatives came of age, is gone.
The result is that anti-immigration conservatives have alienated potential allies. Many centrist and liberal African Americans share conservatives’ skepticism about immigration, yet they are reluctant to join forces with a movement they see as racially exclusive. Many Hispanics and Asians, whether foreign- or native-born, see the virtue in reducing less-skilled immigration while easing the way for skilled workers. Political scientists Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins have gathered considerable evidence that support for such a policy is widespread among Americans of all backgrounds. Yet immigration advocates have deliberately framed the immigration debate as all-or-nothing, and conservatives have let them get away with it.
I’ll just note that no where in the 3,500 word article do we find numbers in favor of mass immigration of any sort. The alluded to “evidence” in this quote is never mentioned again. Like the “evidence” in support of Big Foot and extraterrestrials, the evidence in support of mass immigration is always discussed, but never presented.
Again, it is an unnecessarily long article. The argument is that the GOP needs to adopt a policy of unlimited immigration that discriminates against low-skilled immigrants. That way, the knuckle-dragging rubes in flyover country will stop bitching about the foreigners and get back on the GOP bus. Again, there’s zero data in support of the claim that immigration is good for Americans. It’s just assumed.
None of this is new, but it indicates two things. One is the GOP is still baffled by the revolt of the peasants. They are convinced the trouble is the poor white dirt people in their trailers and shanties, being displaced by the brown people of the future. If the GOP can buy them off then the American middle class will gladly sign onto what the author concedes is cultural suicide.
The other thing we see here is there’s no real interest in peeping over the walls and seeing the faces of the revolting. They prefer to imagine the Trump vote is a bunch of old white guys on Rascal Scooters, waving around the Confederate Flag. There’s a sneering contempt for the rabble outside the walls. Therefore, it is only proper to assume the worst of them.
The contempt is most obvious when they deploy their favorite phrase, “fear and resentment” to those opposed to mass immigration. The implication is that only paranoid losers oppose mass immigration. They can’t keep up so they manufacture bogeymen they can point to as an enemy. Hilariously, the author finishes by calling his war on Americans “the compassionate case for integration and assimilation.”
This being the start of 2016, I have naturally been reading up on the year 1916. Even though it was clear that Russian society, for example, was buckling under the strain of war, the tsarists were incapable of seeing things through the eyes of the Russian people. To them, the peasants and workers may as well have been foreigners, for all the connection they felt toward them.
You see the same insularity in today’s managerial elite. Reihan Salam is better than most in that he concedes that the GOP should pay some attention to its voters on the issue of immigration. The trouble is the vast majority of the managerial elite look at the American people in the same way the tsarists looked at the starving peasants of St. Petersburg, as a burden and a nuisance.
It’s not fear and resentment; it’s frustration and rage.
Having once been a family member of an old NY/NE elite family and its circle, and having been schooled among them earlier, I can state without hesitation that these folks hold the “common” folk in profound contempt. Be polite to them, appear respectful and once they’re out of sight have a good laugh and forget they ever existed; they’re interchangeable after all.
They are all still ultra-pc, of course. I never was, never will be.Having had some skill in the past at being able to make out “Mene Mene…” when I see it on a particular wall, I thus decided to emigrate from the US long ago. I now live in a tiny rural village with wonderful views, a mild climate and a refreshing air of tranquility and small town security. I’m the immigrant, along with my son, both of us bilingual, but he also married a host country national and while I, an older person, will always be seen as “foreign”, we’ve assimilated to a large degree. We are accepted far more and treated far better than folks who move here from the capital city of this country.
The article is spot on. I’ve seen it in various countries in which I’ve lived: the elite will be more open to a foreigner than to a fellow citizen perceived as “not our kind, deary”. It’s mildly understandable, that point of view, but very limiting and in the final account possibly dangerous as well.
In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct.”
It was a sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum, by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites.
“People feel tremendous cultural condescension directed at them,” and that their values are being “smirked at, laughed at” by the political and media elite, said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/why-trump-may-be-winning-the-war-on-political-correctness/2016/01/04/098cf832-afda-11e5-b711-1998289ffcea_story.html
Cultural condescension.
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On the topic of ‘fear and resentment” and the fact that the elite and its hangers-on have no concept of the ordinary world it is always fun when they encounter what the non-elites think.
Some years ago, before mass immigration even appeared on the horizon, there was an attempt by the lefty-loving — though commercially-funded — UK TV channel known as Channel 4 to ensure that ordinary people should be shown to embrace what the lefties love. The plan was a one-off programme (sorry, UK-English spelling) where a group of everyday people — people who might support charitable donations to those in need — would listen to the sob stories of hopeful asylum seekers from warmer countries and declare whether they should or should not be let in to the UK.
The presenters made every effort of pull at the collective heart strings to make their case, and in response the peasant ‘panel’ gave their verdict swiftly.
As far I can recall it was always a “no” to allowing them in to the UK.
I’m looking more to 1860 than 1916, myself. We saw a very similar phenomenon in the run up to the Civil War. One of the reasons most Northerners thought the South wouldn’t secede (or fight if it left, or collapse quickly if it fought) was that there was no real “popular” government in the South — the franchise in places like South Carolina was so restricted that, even if you didn’t technically have to be a slaveholder to qualify, that’s almost what it amounted to. So when Northerners spoke of the “Slave Power Conspiracy,” they really weren’t kidding — the South really did seem to be about 300 families running things for their own direct personal benefit, with the voices of the rabble completely excluded.
The Confederacy, Northerners assumed, would be all chiefs and no Indians, because that’s how Southern politics had worked from colonial times. And Southerners knew it — since they were the ones who set up the system in the first place — and not even they could be so blind to their position as to….
…well, we know how that one worked out. Now, I’m not saying that the current political class can count on Confederate levels of support should they decide to suicidally pursue their own interests to the bitter end once again. I doubt too many folks are willing to enlist for Rich Lowry. The point is that every American revolution has been a revolt of the elites against the masses. It won’t be Tea Party terrorists shooting up federal land in Oregon; it’ll be President Hillary Rubio ordering up drone strikes on peaceful rallies, with NRO out there waving the flag for law and order.
Are you defending the old New Republic? its was journal for the elite done by a gay jew, being ruined is a improvement.
I’m reading that the Cleveland Plain Dealer closed, for the first time, the comment sections on articles “reporting” on the case of the twelve year old tyke shot by cops after spending his morning waving a pellet gun at white people. The editors explained that these articles were “magnets” for haters and made rational discussion impossible. They are unable to conceive that the enormous response in comments are both honest and representative feedback. But they are obviously not interested in gaining paying customers or making a profit. They have principles and they like to sit on them.
I even see this phenomena at the Yahoo homepage. The propaganda is relentless but the comments are hilarious.
Progressives are nothing if not dedicated to propaganda and manipulation. We see their comment trolls, paid and unpaid, all over the net. But if they are getting overwhelmed at Yahoo, that’s encouraging.
BTW, Fangraphs, a good baseball site, has just gone over to registration. Comments were never an issue there in my experience. I do not doubt that they are still stinging from the avalanche that hit them after their most ridiculous posts–why are there not more homosexuals in baseball and the like–but the capper was why are there no Muslims in baseball (and what can we do about it). That thing ran to 200 comments in no time before comments disappeared, the only time this has ever happened. They were absolutely hilarious, a real treasure.
Tocqueville–The evil which one suffers patently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escape from it.