So, you think your vote counts. You’ve been one of those guys lecturing us for years about voting for the most rightward leaning viable candidate. Anyone voting for a third party was just voting for the bad guys, by taking a vote away from the viable alternative, always a Republican, of course. Maybe you write checks to the GOP or volunteer to work for a local candidate. You really think it matters. If you just keep trying, things will turn and the pols will pass the right measures.

Well, you’re an idiot.

A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The startling study, titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Politics and was authored by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early draft can be found here.

Noted American University Historian Allan J. Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill, calls Gilens and Page’s research “shattering” and says their scholarship “should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government.”

The statistical research looked at public attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S. laws.

The study’s findings align with recent trends, where corporate elites have aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies despite the fact that, according to the most recent Reuters poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal immigrants “threaten traditional U.S. beliefs and customs,” and 63% believe “immigrants place a burden on the economy.”

The solution, say the scholars, is a reinvigorated and engaged electorate.

“If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened,” conclude Gilens and Page.

The word ‘democracy” does not mean what people think it means. Instead, it is used to mean the people picking between the options the rulers offered them. When Muslims vote for Sharia, no one celebrates democracy in action. When the extremist right wing extremists of the most extreme kind win an election, we hear that democracy is under assault. These days, democracy is about the result and not the process.

But, that’s just another example of the idiocy of our age. Democracy is a process and a shabby one. One reason our government has grown increasingly corrupt over the last century is we have more democracy, not less. In 1914, Senators were still selected by their state’s legislatures. Blacks and women were wisely barred from voting in many states. The poor and the stupid were discouraged from voting. Like or not, you had a better class of voter 100 years ago.

That’s why the average voter counted for much more than it does today. The typical Congressman knew he was being judged by a reasonably intelligent electorate. There were plenty of dopes, but the ratios made it hard to fool the majority most of the time, so they had to be more clever at foolling the people. Today, cobbling together a majority of mental midgets is too easy.

Even if the people were geniuses, democracy is no way to run a country. It works fine in the town and village. It may even work fine in a city or county. Once you get to the state level it starts to fall apart, which is why state’s have legislatures, constitutions and governors. At the national level it becomes a beauty contest. Obama beat Clinton because young and charming beats old and cranky. Obama beat McCain because young and charming beats old and cranky. Plus, it was his team’s turn.

Even a nitwit can figure out if his local school is running properly. He can see if the roads are paved and the sidewalks are in good condition. He can figure this stuff out and place the praise or blame on the person responsible, when there is a person responsible for it, like dictator or prince. At the small scale, the mayor or county executive can be blamed. If the mayor or town council ignores the people, the people can go to their house and beat the hell out of them.

It is not perfect. Nothing is, but the irony of democracy is the government becomes less responsive to the people in the areas most important. Instead, the state becomes obsessed by obscure things like equality or dignity. You keep voting for different people and they keep doing the same things, because that’s just how it works. The people really in charge are beyond the reach of democracy.

Steve Sailer often makes the point that the Democrat coalition is held together by a transcendent hatred of white males. Women, blacks, Hispanics and the six gay guys who bother to vote have one thing in common and that is they think the pale penis people need to be taught a lesson. Specifically:

Another aspect to consider is the inherent fractiousness of the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes: the lesbian-feminists are mad at the suddenly all-important she-males, the Muslims are mad at the Jews over the Middle East, the Asians are mad at the Hispanics over U. of California quotas, the NAMs are mad at the SWPLs for gentrifying them out to the sticks, Hollywood is worried that soon they’ll have to release statistics about their lack of diversity just like Silicon Valley has had too, and so forth and so on.

How can this coalition be kept together? Simple. By getting all the Fringes to unite in hating straight cis-gendered Christian old white uncool men (add as many qualifying adjectives as needed).

The question is whether it can hold together. Charles Murray thinks it will blow apart and the result will be a tribal culture of some sort. What that is, exactly, is debatable. This story from The Hill tells me it is coming at us quickly.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) on Monday accused Democrats of engaging in a “war on whites” in the current immigration debate.

On conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, Brooks dismissed the idea that the more conservative GOP bloc’s position on immigration is hurting his own party.

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during the interview. “It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

A sitting Congressman talking like this is a big deal. It has been decades since anyone in the political class has been willing to say anything about race outside of the old chestnuts approved by our cultural masters.

On “Fox News Sunday,” National Journal’s editorial director, Ron Fournier, suggested the Hispanic community is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Republicans.

“This party, your party, cannot be the party of the future beyond November if you’re seen as the party of white people,” said Fournier, whom Ingraham described as being part of the “lame-stream media.”

I keep wondering if these experts are crazy, stupid or just pathological. Hispanics are not a big part of the vote. They tend not to vote in general and they have never voted in big numbers for Republicans. As a practical matter, the GOP is wise to limit the influx of Hispanics. That’s good politics and smart politics. Yet, experts keep yapping about the need for Republicans to chase Hispanic votes.

Brooks said recent polls indicate every demographic group agrees that the rule of law should be enforced and border security must be improved.

“It doesn’t make any difference if you’re a white American, a black American, a Hispanic-American, an Asian-American or if you’re a woman or a man. Every single demographic group is hurt by falling wages and lost jobs,” Brooks said.

All of the polling also shows that Hispanics are not fond of illegal immigration and favor cutting back on legal immigration. They suffer from none of the madness that has gripped the political class. They know what mass immigration means for them and they are not enthusiastic about recreating Tijuana in their new homeland.

“Democrats, they have to demagogue on this and try and turn it into a racial issue, which is an emotional issue, rather than a thoughtful issue,” he added. “If it becomes a thoughtful issue, then we win and we win big. And they lose and they lose big. ”

Brooks accused Democrats of playing a “political game” and Ingraham said they’re “playing the race card.”

This is the first time I think I’ve heard a GOP official take this approach. I have never understood why the GOP tries to do battle with the Left on their terms. Immigration should be as exciting as zoning issues. How many do we want and how do we process them? That’s it. But, it strikes me as being way too late in the day for any of it to matter. The future is going to be very unpleasant.

For years, the assertion from the plutocrats that we needed more cheap STEM labor went unchallenged. Both political parties gushed about how wonderful it is to bring in scads of foreigners to work in technology. They would trot out the old canards about how foreigners founded most of the new businesses and so on. The truly strange part of this romantic narrative is how no one ever considered the implications. That is, the natives are too stupid and lazy to do these jobs.

It was always nonsense. There never has been a shortage of STEM workers. Certain segments in certain areas will experience shortages and overages. That’s how labor markets work. People  move around chasing demand and wages eventually reach equilibrium. Importing vast numbers of new labor is the economic equivalent of price fixing, which is what makes libertarians just another type of central planner. They love free markets until those markets result in things they don’t like or want.

Anyway, this being posted on a mainstream news site looks like a big change. The anti-immigration sentiment is growing and the pop culture chattering skulls are trying to get in on it.

Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a “shortage” of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. Even so, the House is considering legislation that, like the Senate immigration bill before it, would increase to unprecedented levels the supply of high-skill guest workers and automatic green cards to foreign STEM students.

As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages.

Stagnant wages

If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies tried to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.

Those supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged — by wages stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects and by repeated rounds of layoffs.

The facts are that, excluding advocacy studies by those with industry funding, there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers (native and immigrant, citizen and permanent resident) who are willing and qualified to fill the high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether supply is two or three times larger than the demand.

Unfortunately, companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and the middle-class security that should come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations.

Redundant reforms

Another major, yet often overlooked, provision in the pending legislation would grant automatic green cards to any foreign student who earns a graduate degree in a STEM field, based on assertions that foreign graduates of U.S. universities are routinely being forced to leave. Such claims are incompatible with the evidence that such graduates have many paths to stay and work, and indeed the “stay rates” for visiting international students are very high and have shown no sign of decline. The most recent study finds that 92% of Chinese Ph.D. students stay in the U.S. to work after graduation.

The tech industry’s promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and green cards is driven by its desire for cheap, young and immobile labor. It is well documented that loopholes enable firms to legally pay H-1Bs below their market value and to continue the widespread age discrimination acknowledged by many in the tech industry.

When considering the credibility of the industry’s repetitive claims of “shortages,” it is worth recalling its history of misbehavior in hiring and employment. The most recent example was the proposed $300 million legal settlement of a class action against companies such as Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe for anti-competitive collusion to suppress the pay of highly skilled employees, including unlawful agreements to not recruit each others’ workers.

IT industry leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage claims among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts their self-interested claims.

What we have today is a modern form of resource extraction. These big tech firms are not inventing anything or creating anything. Mostly, they are harvesting ideas at a discount and commoditizing them. They can do this because they have the backing of the government. Microsoft would have gone bankrupt a decade ago without their monopoly power. In fact, they never would have become a dominant firm without monopolistic tactics. Google is deeply in bed with governments around the world.

Most likely, this is one of those brief mentions that allows the media to pretend they are open to all sides of the debate. They do this with conservatives. They have on one right-winger and ten left-wingers and call it balance. In this case, one story critical of immigration in a sea of cheerleading for open borders. It’s all part of the propaganda effort to keep the public asleep as what is happening.

The gun grabbers lost another one over the weekend. A Federal court overturned DC’s current ban on carrying a firearm outside the home. This was the city’s attempt to get around the Heller decision, which overturned their ban on gun ownership. The ban on carry outside the home was intended to make gun ownership pointless. You could own a gun, but you could not carry it outside the home for any reason.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Saturday overturned the city’s total ban on residents being allowing to carry firearms outside their home in a landmark decision for gun-rights activists.

Judge Frederick Scullin Jr. wrote in his ruling in Palmer v. District of Columbia that the right to bear arms extends outside the home, therefore gun-control laws in the nation’s capital are “unconstitutional.”

“We won,” Alan Gura, the lead attorney for the Second Amendment Foundation, told Fox News in a phone interview. “I’m very pleased with the decision that the city can’t forbid the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right.”

Gura said he expects the District to appeal this decision but added, “We’ll be happy to keep the fight going.”

The decision leaves no gray area in gun-carrying rights.

Judge Scullin extensively referenced the Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) to concluding “there is no longer any basis on which this court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny.”

The court ordered the city to now allow residents from the District and other states to carry weapon within its boundaries.

Judge Scullin wrote that the court “enjoins Defendants from enforcing the home limitations of [D.C. firearms laws] unless and until such time as the District of Columbia adopts a licensing mechanism consistent with constitutional standards enabling people to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms.”

The defendants are the city government and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier.

This case has dragged in the courts for five years. Gura has twice asked the federal appeals court to force Judge Scullin to issue a decision. The five plaintiffs filed in 2009, and the case was argued twice, most recently in Oct. 2012.

The city will appeal, but they have no chance to win on a total carry ban. They also opened up the door for the court to rule that the right to carry is a protected right and subject to strict scrutiny by the court. There is a school of thought that if such a case were to make it to the Supreme Court, they would effectively overturn all bans on concealed carry in the country. The result would be shall issue everywhere.

I’m not sure about that as this court is timid and frightened to do anything that may upset the ruling liberals. The more likely result would be the court simply invalidating these bans as they arise. That leaves liberal states to keep their web of gun laws designed to harass middle class suburbanites, while pretending to care about the blacks who commit all of the murders.

That’s what makes the Left’s lust for gun grabbing puzzling at first. It is a loser politically and legally. The Left is far more pragmatic about the acquisition of political power than the Right. They take the long view and they are willing to accept one click on the ratchet and then fall back in defense. It is why America has steadily moved left over the last century. One side plays the long game while the other plays with itself.

There’s nothing to be gained and everything to lose with gun control. Liberals like Bill Clinton avoided the gun issue, knowing it was a loser with no upside. I think what’s going on here is it is part signaling, part culture war and part self-deception. The first part is easy. The people rushing around vowing to keep fighting for gun control are engaging in public acts of piety. The good Progressive shows he is a good Progressive by flagellating himself in public over guns.

Then there is the culture war angle. Guns are southern, white and working class, three things the Left loathes more than anything. Guns are sold at Walmart. Guns are owned by men with beards who wear camo and watch Duck Dynasty. That would be beards that are not intended to be ironic. Guns are owned by people who attend Christian services and listen to country music.

What keeps the Left going to this well is the last bit. It is the self-deception. No matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise, the Left has been in charge for at least three generations now. They have held complete control of our major cities. Yet, the lives of black people are worse today than under segregation. West Baltimore makes the Gaza strip look nice.

For the same reason the left never mentions Marx or socialism anymore, they obsess over suburbanites owning guns. The failure is too painful and discomforting. By pretending the problem is not the grotesque and reckless management of our cities by the Left and is instead the fault of the bubbas in the burbs, the Left can avoid answering for their crimes. It is a classic case of shifting the focus.

Somewhere in the Bush years, I threw in the towel on the Republicans. It was not the endless and largely pointless wars that did it for me. Iraq and Afghanistan were understandable blunders. Maybe not excusable, but certainly understandable. When you have a big powerful military, you want to use it, so when the neocons cooked up these schemes, they found willing buyers.

No, what did it for me was the domestic side. They did not do a damn thing to roll back the welfare state, despite having control of both houses and the executive. Not only did they not cut a single penny, they went on a spending spree. Worse yet, they expanded the portfolio of every domestic agency. They left no doubt that Pat Buchanan was right along about so-called conservatives and the Republican Party.

Given the state of the other party a sober minded person was left with no choices on election day. The election of 2010 did not offer much hope. One look at Boehner made it clear he was a timid, unimaginative man with no spine. The nomination of Romney for the 2012 election was comical, in many respects. Romney is everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. You cannot be a credible alternative to the Left if you’re just offering more of the same.

The upcoming midterms promised to be uneventful. A president’s second midterm is always rough as his own base has run out of steam while the other party’s base is motivated to send a message. Given the state of the GOP, but adjusting for the endless list of scandals and buffoonery from Obama, it was looking like the GOP adds to their margin in the House and maybe wins the Senate by a seat or two at most.

John Derbyshire points out that Americans are talking about immigration. That’s something no one thought possible a year ago. Not only are they talking about it, they consider it the top issue. There’s also a big majority now in favor of decreasing legal immigration. Given the way we romanticize immigration, that’s mind boggling. What’s even more stunning is our rulers are now clutching their skirts over it. That’s when you know things have turned. Even usual suspects are running for cover now.

Potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidates are showing divisions over how to handle the surge of illegal immigrant children, underscoring how quickly the immigration issue has gone from what they thought was a guaranteed political winner to an electoral headache.

Some Democratic governors considering presidential bids also are having to grapple personally with the surge as they decide whether to fight or accept the Obama administration’s requests to house the children in facilities within their borders.

Those within Congress, meanwhile, will have to take tough votes on boosting spending and changing the law to allow for faster deportations — all under the close scrutiny of Hispanic groups that are prepared to punish those they deem to be working against immigrant rights.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley sparked a feud with the Obama administration in recent days when he publicly called on President Obama not to send children back to their countries of origin but privately urged a White House official not to house them at a site in Maryland, either.

“What I said was that would not be the most inviting site in Maryland,” Mr. O’Malley told CNN on Wednesday. “There are already hundreds of kids already located throughout Maryland.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken a more enforcement-centered approach. She told a CNN-sponsored town hall last month that the children “should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are.”

She said some children might have valid humanitarian reasons to stay but the key was to send a signal of tough enforcement.

“We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay,” she said. “So we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”

The thing to keep in mind is Obama is the leader of the radical wing of the Liberal Democrats. The Clintons are the leaders of the establishment wing. The two wings despise one another with the intensity of a thousand suns. People like Martin O’Malley are in the Clinton wing. Warren has the support of the Obama’s. If Clinton chooses not to run, she will throw her weight behind O’Malley in the primary. Immigration therefore becomes the dividing issue in the Democrat primary battle.

The disaster on the border is what’s driving the the news cycle. The administration has decided to take the Tony Blair approach to immigration. That is, they want to flood the nation with immigrants thus changing the debate from whether we should let them all in to how we should treat them now that they are here. That means the issue could very well be with us for a lot longer than the current news cycle.

Faced with a tailor made issue to use against the other party, the GOP will be tempted to screw it up by preemptively surrendering on the issue. The defeat of Eric Cantor, however, seems to have removed that knife from their hands. Now they have to fear being their Right in this election. That means groveling to the Left on immigration is not the obvious choice for them.

It’s way too soon to get hopeful, but the immigration bomb has gone off. Unlike most issues, this one is lethal for the Democrats. Blacks are strongly against any sort of immigration, but especially Hispanic immigration. Latinos are strongly against illegal immigration. On the other hand, the plutocrats at the top of the party want open borders and upscale whites are divided on the issue. Those in STEM fields are fine with low skill immigration, but against the H1B1 rackets.

The GOP is not shielded from this explosion. Boehner and Ryan and Cantor were ready to do the bidding of the Chamber of Commerce and pass amnesty this fall. That’s suddenly out the window. The people who vote for them and provide the boots on the ground are against amnesty. The shearing effect on the party will not tear it apart, but it does give the good guys a shot to force changes. Even Conservative Inc. is jumping on the bandwagon.

More important, 2016 may open the door for an outsider candidate to run on the issue.