The great divide in the West is now immigration. On which side of the issue you fall, determines where you are on the political spectrum. If you have been paying close attention over the last two decades, this has been increasingly obvious. If you have just started paying attention, it may be a bit of mystery. After all, politicians in both parties dismiss the issue. The press is unwilling to cover it, other than perfunctorily. In polite circles, the “I” word is close to being the “N” word.
Even stranger, particularly in America where the never ending election season is boiling like never before, is that politicians are allergic to the topic. Donald Trump has made immigration his central issue and risen in the polls, yet his competitors refuse to discuss it. When asked, which is rare, they get a frightened look as if they have been asked about their desire for young boys. There’s real fear in their eyes.
What’s going on?
Rich people have always controlled our politics. That was true long before we had politics and no one should be shocked by it. Big business, unions and large issue groups have vast resources to lobby government so they have a big influence on policy. This is not a bad thing. It’s just a reality of life that often gets forgotten as we swim in a sea of Progressive nonsense about the power of democracy.
This was never much of a problem as there were lots of big business types who disagreed with other big business types. Unions opposed business and special interest groups opposed all of them. Plenty of money poured in from all sides so that the money game was just a reflection of public sentiment. A man could buy a legislator or even a few of them, but no one could buy all of them.
That’s changed a lot in the last few decades. The technological revolution and the technocratic revolution has unleashed a new force in politics and that’s the global elite. Mark Zuckerberg’s company makes money all over the world. Apple makes more in China than in the US. Countries are no longer places to global business. They are markets. Consequently, the super-rich are no longer citizens of a country. They are citizens of their class, the global elite.
What’s different about these rich people is they are untethered from their host countries. Their first loyalty is to their class. As a result, they coordinate their efforts across borders, parties and cultures. George Soros is a citizen of where? Who knows. He finances the looting of Ferguson Missouri and he backs pro-immigration parties in Europe. He has no national interests because he has no nationality.
The political and media class are the servants of this global elite. They fly on their jets to Davos and they rely on their largess to finance their think tanks and media companies. The American Enterprise Institute, for example, has no customers and conducts no commerce. Yet it has offices in Washington and 150 people on staff. Who pays for that? Donors, of course, and those donors are not school teachers and shop keepers.
The result of globalization is that a smaller class of people than the former ruling classes has a bigger impact on the national affairs of every country. The old way had rich people trying to buy influence with elected officials. The new way is elected officials trying to curry favor with the rich people, in the hopes they will finance their campaigns.
When the cost of running a campaign for Congress is over $10 million, you have to raise $15,000 every day to keep your office. Hillary Clinton will spend one billion dollars in her presidential run. The only way to raise that sort of money is to have the global elite on your side. Thus we see the Golden Rule: The man with the gold makes the rules. In politics now, it means the donors are the only constituents that matter.
That’s why everyone involved in politics panics whenever the “I” word comes up. Immigration is the one subject where the vision of anointed is revealed. On the one hand, global elites wish to get rid of citizenship and national governments because they are a nuisance. On the other hand, they imagine a world where the masses beneath them live in enforced equality. Their solution to inequality is to make everyone a peasant.
That last part is what no one discusses. The elites imagine a world like the college campus. At the top are the trustees who hire administrators to culture and cultivate the undergraduates who live communal lives. The new definition of socialism is the redistribution of happiness and self-actualization by a cloud people who rule as if they are gods.
This explains the gasps and shrieks from all quarters over the uncouth rantings by the novus homo with regards to immigration policy. Trump is a billionaire. His stance on immigration and his presentation make him a class traitor. That’s what’s triggering the irrational and emotional response to Trump. It’s why Progressives went bonkers over George W. Bush. It’s one thing to be mistaken. It is another to turn your back on your kind and side with the peasants.
There’s something else. The unhinged response to Trump by guys like Kevin Williamson is not really about the “I” word. It’s fear that the old Red Team – Blue Team song and dance is no longer going to play with the crowd. This is not just a Conservative Inc problem. The pearl clutching by Ezra Klein over Bernie Sanders rejection of open borders has the same source. The pajama boys fear they will be dragged into a discussion they can’t have because they can’t win.
One last thing before I end this foam flecked rant. In Europe we’re seeing old Left and old Right locking arms opposing immigration. On the other side are the kept men of the ruling class. A similar thing is brewing in America. Look at the sympathetic, if somewhat bemused, coverage of Bernie Sanders by the Dissident Right. Something similar is happening on the Left with regards to Trump.
In a multi-party proportional system like you see in Europe, this sort of fluidity is easy to accommodate as there are minority parties where voters can migrate to when the main parties are lacking. In America, with our rigid two party system, everything is invested in the status quo.
The media, financial arrangements, lobbying efforts are contingent on the Red Team – Blue Team purse fight. The “I” word threatens the whole thing because it scrambles the loyalties. If all of a sudden blacks are more concerned with the “I” word than the “N” word, Blue Team has a problem. If suburban white people stop listening to promises about shuffling commas around the tax code because they care more about immigration, Red Team is screwed.
The “I” word put everything at risk so the people in charge are putting everything they have into make the “I” word more taboo that the “N” word.
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What with the F word, the N word, and the C word,
we’re well on our way to spelling “France.”
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I left the USA 17 years ago and Europe 11 years ago to end up in South America, where northwestern Europeans are not exactly popular, given that our work ethic is antithetical to that which prevails down here. Immigration into S.A. requires money and don’t think for a moment that if you don’t speak the local language you will be assisted or cut any slack whatsoever. The English-speaking US should act just as these folks do, and cut the interlopers (i.e. illegals) no slack whatsoever; in fact, best would be to expel them forthwith. ANY other policy is tantamount to demographic suicide.
I have a Latina daughter-in-law and by default Latino grandsons, but if they don’t learn English, I will disinherit them. Happily, my son (their father) agrees. My grandsons are dual nationals and in spite of the fact that the US is more and more a suicidal state, I’ll be guddamned if those boys are going to be raised as Latino populists wihout a clue as to what makes a society work without the alien concept of fiat currency and the redistribution of wealth!
You can walk 5 miles over the Arizona border into Nogales Mexico and be shunned if you’re a gringo. But we’re the xenophobes and racists. Don’t get me started on the hordes of unskilled, illiterate, unassimilated Somali and Sudanese Muslim refugees cruising through the supermarkets with bulging shopping carts bought on our nickel.
While the media pretends that it’s all just about racism and xenophobia, so they can sweep it under the rug, I think people are just fed up. I think this issue maybe simmering under the radar in a lot of places. In the USA, the case of Kathryn Steinle is emblematic of our elites demanding we roll over and whizz in the air, while they, the pols, spread their legs for every special interest group,…….except…… the everyday working American.
BTW, where are the environmentalists and zero population growth chicken littles? Remember the handwringing over increasing population stressing fragile environments to the tipping point of no return. Was that a bunch of contrived fabricated hooey, or is it that just normal workaday people pollute and stress the environment and illegals do not? Why do these people always talk out of both sides of their mouth?
Also, do these people not realize that BIG AG, factory farming, is becoming more automated?
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America has, at least for the moment, lucked out with Trump entering the race.
Without Trump immigration and lopsided ‘free’ trade pacts wouldn’t even be
on the agenda.
Instead, the RINOs would be giving us focus-grouped platitudes about
what’s good for us.
Anyone considering anyone else other than the Donald, should check their so-called conservative candidate’s positions, prior to Trump, not post Trump.
Sure, Walker is now an immigration tough guy – but he was a “pathway to citizenship – immigration reform” guy just two year ago.
And Kerryesque Cruz: He supported the TPP before he didn’t
and expanded H1-Bs of course.
I won’t even bother to mention the rest of the RINO surrender monkeys.
The Republican establishment is awful.
The Democrats let you know they’re leftists.
Bill DiBlasio doesn’t hide his fellow traveler past and gets 73% of NY City’s vote.
The Dems reward their minions with Bama-phones, Section 8 vouchers,
ever-filled EBT cards and lots of big government jobs.
But the Republicans betray their own middle-class voters at every opportunity.
Dumb-ass trade pacts, H1-B expansion, open borders & endless ME ‘refugees’,
and then even facilitating O’s bogus Iran nuclear treaty –
The Republican’s are traitors to their supporters, except of course to their big donors.
Trump says that ¡Yeb! will be “the puppet of his donors.”
Excepting Trump, how will the others be any different???
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Immigration ticks number of boxes, all of which are considered doubleplus good.
First, a government that invites immigrants (or in Britain’s case under the 13 years of vile NuLabour, actively begs immigrants to come to the UK) then you are seen as ‘caring.’ Caring wins votes.
Second, you get the chance to buy in votes. Democracy may be an illusion but if you can get the immigrants to vote for you (again as NuLab did to ‘organise’ community leaders to gather up blank postal voting forms and fill them in on behalf of the elite) then you have a good chance of winning.
Third, not only does it bring cheap labour and socially useful people into the country (I know people who purr at how much immigrants contribute to British society, though they rarely mention the fact that while Polish workers are far less likely to cause problems, the Pakistani-origin kiddy-fiddlers and Bulgarian criminals are the real issues) but it gives a government a morally superior position at international meetings. “See how much we do, so why aren’t you doing your share?”
Fourth, it distracts the population from the fact that the government is probably in all sorts of deep and smelly doo-doo and stops those media ‘experts’ who aren’t in the ruling elite’s pockets from looking at how wretched society actually is.
Admittedly, the population does get stirred up over immigration, but as it will be never be openly discussed in the halls of power, or even in parliament, then so what?
Meanwhile, what is MSNBC promoting at the top and bottom of every hour?
Global Citizenry! Yea! “The news is in: Beyoncé, Pearl Jam, Ed Sheeran, and Coldplay will all be headlining the 2015 Global Citizen Festival on Sept. 26 in New York City’s Central Park – and msnbc will be there to film the festivities live.”
If you happen to catch any of it, you’ll note that it will have the vibe – and pretty much the hue – of a Bernie Sanders campaign event.
At least the angry mob on the Right mostly recognizes it’s being led to the abattoir. The hipster doofus sheeple of the Left don’t even see it.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/what-you-need-know-about-the-2015-global-citizen-festival.
Somewhat related: I live in Irvine, California. It’s VERY diverse, but not in the usual sense. Everyone is computer science or bio-this-and-that. Every nation in an arc stretching from Cairo to Hokkaido is well-represented. These are the “model immigrants” everyone keeps yakking about……..highly educated, high incomes, minuscule crime rates, blah blah.
And they could honestly give three flucks about being American. I’ve been saying for years that for these people, America is nothing but a goddamned job fair.
Anecdotal, but……….This past July 4 I rode my bike thru the neighborhood. 150 houses (all of which are priced in the high 6 figures, btw)
I saw a total of 2 American flags out. My place and that of another troglodyte white guy down the block.
What you end up with is a new visualization, beyond the old left/right linear graph. You add a vertical axis, and turn it into an X-Y graph, like classic graph paper. The vertical axis is rich/poor, and position evaluation becomes a degree more complex. Basically all the announced candidates are in the cloud above the left/right axis, and want to make sure everyone possible stays on the other end of the rich/poor axis. If they have to bring in a horde of extremely poor to bring the average down, well, that’s just the price you’ll pay to make sure that they have a secure spot at the opposite end of the axis.
Immigration is The Issue now because the hoi polloi are fed up big time. No, fed up doesn’t even begin to cover it, really. We know that if this isn’t stopped, and soon, we are done as a distinct and singular nation. Who feels our anguish? Or hears our pleas to stop this madness? No one but Donald Trump, it seems. And maybe he’s faking it, maybe not. This is no longer Red Team/Blue Team because really it’s the Purple Team vs. The People. I don’t see anyone standing up for the People except for Trump, and maybe Cruz. Possibly Carson, still watching and listening to him.
Cruz was literally called a class traitor by Rich Lowry, but he was being descriptive, not accusatory. I think if Trump fades, Cruz picks up his vote. I would not be shocked if Cruz decides to go in with a immigration plan that is better than Trump in an effort to gain back the issue.
I have to admit I’m concerned about Cruz’s past support for H-1B visas for foreign workers. My oldest will graduate from college next year with a degree in computer engineering. Will he be able to compete with the “slave wage” foreigners when the Dollar is the deciding factor for these traitorous companies? That’s what it is, IMO, when U.S. companies import foreigners to do the jobs that many Americans are more than capable, and willing to do; traitorous. Cruz needs to answer to this before he gets my support.