The Madness of Our Age

One of the great mysteries of the modern age is why the people in charge of Western countries are so determined to fill up their lands with foreigners. The greed explanation implies a level of coordination that seems implausible. The Machiavellian angle is similarly flawed. Left wing parties gain some benefit from mass immigration, but it comes at a price. That and right wing parties are just as enthusiastic.

There’s also the fact the current voters are wildly opposed to immigration. Polling for years now has made it clear that opposition to immigration is a winner. As long as you avoid sounding like Taki commenters, you can win a lot of votes by opposing mass immigration. This recent poll shows that Trump, with all his faults, is being carried to the top strictly on opposition to immigration.

Immigration: When Donald Trump proposed mandatory deportation of illegal aliens, pundits and politicians on both sides of the political aisle were appalled. But on this issue it looks like Trump has the public on his side.

The fire from the right was almost as fierce as that from the left. “It’s not conservative and it’s not realistic and it does not embrace American values,” said Jeb Bush.

Sen. Lindsey Graham called it “absolute gibberish.”

Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer called the idea “crackpot” and “morally obscene.”

But the prize for overheated rhetoric goes to Hillary Clinton, who said Trump wants to “literally pull people out of their homes and their workplaces, round them up, put them, I don’t know, in buses, boxcars, in order to take them across our border.”

So what do these folks say about the fact that the majority of Americans back Trump on this?

The latest IBD/TIPP Poll asked 913 adults coast to coast if they “support or oppose mandatory deportation of illegal immigrants in the U.S.” Not surprisingly, 87% of Trump supporters back the proposal.

What’s surprising is that 59% of the overall public does as well. Mandatory deportation gets majority support in all age groups except 18-24, every income group, among both women and men, at every level of educational achievement, and in rural, urban and suburban regions.

More interesting still is the fact that 64% of independents and 55% of moderates support deportation.

Even among Hispanics, the poll found 40% backed mandatory deportation — although the sample size is too small to make much of that number.

Trump’s other proposals don’t do as well. Just under half the public favors building a wall along the southern border (48%) or an end to automatic citizenship for children born of illegals (46%). But a majority of independents (55%) back building the wall.

What’s going on here?

The tone and the wording suggest the answer to the puzzle at the top of this post and the question in the article are the same. The people in charge have turned open borders and mass immigration into a sacrament. Instead of looking at it like any other public policy, they view it as the modern equivalent of opposing fascism or slavery. There’s simply no room in the mental space to consider any other option. You are for open borders or you are evil.

This article ostensibly about how immigration is the defining issue of the age illustrates the bizarre lunacy of the managerial class with regards to immigration.

This, incidentally, is why I am convinced that there was no way that the GOP could have precluded the Donald Trump moment in American politics by passing comprehensive immigration reform two years ago. The movement of people from country to the city, from poor nations to richer nations, from the Global South to the Global North, may be the great political problem of the next age in global development. Just as the building of trade routes and the maintenance of empires defined the mercantile age, then the construction of a political economy (capitalist or socialist) became the major problem of the industrial age, the mass movement of people may be the defining issue of whatever we’re calling the information age.

Let that sink in for a minute. The solution to the great revolt over immigration was to pass legislation effectively eliminating the nation’s borders. Put another way, if the people are upset over immigration the solution is more immigration. If it rains too much, the solution is more immigration. If it rains too little, more immigration!

What seems to be happening here is the beautiful people have made open borders the star on their belly. They don’t think about. They don’t even believe in it. It’s all about displaying their piety. The West is experiencing a version of the Lace Curtain Irish versus the Shanty Irish. One group of people, in this case the managerial class, defines itself purely in opposition to the other people, in this case the middle class.

Compounding this is the deeply held belief by the beautiful that they are pulling the wagon and the middle class is freeloading on them. Immigration is a form of spite, revenge upon people our betters see as their burden. It’s how allegedly conservative chattering skulls find it so easy to mock the supporters of Donald Trump. They have never cared for the hoi polloi anyway, so this is a convenient excuse to make that point.

The future is always battled out in the streets. Scenes like this one are becoming more common in Europe and much worse is on tap as the tide of migrants promises to flood European cities. The people in charge face a choice. They can roll the tanks over their citizens in favor of their new charges from abroad. Or, they can yield to the demands of the people. The only question left is just how much blood will be spilled over this suicidal lunacy that has gripped the ruling elites.

16 thoughts on “The Madness of Our Age

  1. Pull people out of their houses and deport them? You mean like Janet Reno did to Elian Gonsalez? I guess that one slipped Hillary’s mind.

    • Yeah, can you imagine if Trump were to be elected and made good on his promise of deportation? Elian Gonsalez x 11 million illegals. The media would lose their minds over that!

  2. I think you are on to something. Historically, not only in Europe but throughout the world, the ruling classes cared little about the happiness of the common people, looking upon them as little more domestic animals. We think these aristocratic feelings — or, rather, lack of feelings — are things of the past. But they are not. These kinds of people still exist. It is a phenomenon of class psychology, of which political correctness — caring more for the good opinion of ones friends and colleagues than the happiness of one countrymen and compatriots — is a part.

  3. As you point out, the promotion of mass immigration is an article of faith, an unquestioned dogma of the managerial elite, possibly even THE fundamental tenet of their new-fangled civic religion. But the question remains of how they came to hold such an unpromising, indeed ultimately suicidal, public policy prescription with such unwavering certitude, for it is a construct of fairly recent coinage, yet is held evermore blindly and devoutly even as the real world implications become more dire and the forces of opposition gather with increasing hostility.

    One might write a great deal on this, even though I will decline to do so. Yet my sense – and it is no more than that – is that our betters have somehow internalized the notion that western civilization is in some very real and explicit sense a crime against humanity, and that this thought has replaced the central idea of individual sin as the new civic faith has undermined and replaced Protestant Christianity, especially in its Puritan manifestations. Nonetheless, the dynamics of the new faith echo that of the old so that the expiation of sin remains an overwhelming and oppressive obligation, both within the confines of one’s individual conscience and as an exercise in the rituals of very public worship.

    So what better way to expiate the sins of western civilization than to obliterate it by inundation as wave after wave of victimized brown peoples who have suffered for its crimes come to infest its shores until nothing but a trace remains? This is, of course, also is a self-annihilation, but a deserved one, because as the inheritors of western civilization they bare the burden of its inherited sins, its “privileges,” if you will, and willingly offer up themselves, and more importantly, their progeny, to this necessary act of sacrifice and appeasement.

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  5. Your phrasing of the managerial class versus the middle class is the clue. We have a worldly cosmopolitan elite, don’t believe they are really part of a nation, a media that apes the beliefs of their rich betters, etc. thus a cultural outlook that believes it has a duty to ameliorate the conditions of third worlders and is happy to do so at the expense of middle class Americans whom they despise. Obamas hatred of tea party types, the medias chastisement of Sarah palin, etc googles contempt for ordinary American holidays, all part of the same thing. Tim

    • You just described MSNBC. Look how quickly both they and their viewers gleefully point out that, while their birth certificates may say “Ohio” or “Maryland”, (how DULL!) they are deep-down, in their heart-of-hearts “Citizens of the World”. Or so they claim.

      There once was a time being a “citizen of the world” was a cause for regret and perhaps even a little shame. Consider the case of Mr Rick Blaine, forever consigned to make a living in the dusty and dangerous suqs of Casablanca.

      Now it’s embraced by every hipster doofus in Williamsburg with a PBR t-shirt and a pair of Warby-Parker retro eyeglasses. In theory, at any rate………I am sure some time in a Turkish prison will get one’s mind right, and real quick-like.

  6. I dunno, Zman. I think it happens for the same reasons we have crazy people living on the streets here in the US of A.

    Whenwazit? Early 60s? Anyway, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest got published and all of the the weak sisters got palpitations and wanted the state and county mental hospitals shut down and replaced with something more “humane.” So the party of government, seeing more opportunities for graft (Much easier to launder money through dozens of half-way houses [I think that’s what they were originally called. Probably something with a lot longer name now since “half-way house” was no doubt declared dehumanizing by some advocacy group a couple of decades ago.] than one big, immovable hospital.) jumped on the bandwagon immediately The party of plutocracy liked shutting down mental institutions since now they could give tax breaks to big defense contractors, conglomerates, and holding companies since I gather we had lots of those before the packet-switched panopticon came to be. In my home state it was Ronald Reagan leading the charge to de-fund the state institutions, for example.

    Illegal immigration is pretty similar. The tend to vote for the government party and they present many, many opportunities for “programs” which can be directed to government agencies, preserving government jobs — or in our more sophisticated system of corruption here in the U.S. — to some foundation or 501c scam who will kickback some of the graft back to the politicos. The Plutocratic Party gets cheap labor and a couple of sweet second order effects:

    1. The immigrants drag down wages for natives, too.

    2. Small businesses get crushed as neighborhoods get destroyed and businesses with enough pull hire H1Bs to undermine them. Big businesses benefit since potential entrants and rivals are destroyed at a faster rate than in a non-immigrant economy.

    You may be right… In Europe, prole majorities are for the death penalty in almost every country, but the enlightened inner party members in their parliaments won’t let them have it. My analysis doesn’t explain that political outcome, but your does.

  7. You’re right about the blood being spilled — There Will Be Blood — the only question is whose blood. Things are slowly coming to a head in Europe, with huge populations from the ME and Africa “migrating” (read: invading) into Europe to take advantage of the European welfare states. Of course, the majority are Moslem, which makes them a wholly inappropriate transplant to Western nations. Push back has started. The rise of Pegida in Germany, painted by the Merkel gov’t as right-wing racists, was just the beginning last year. Hungary wants to stop migrants from using trains to transport themselves, and the Chech Republic wants the army to guard its borders. Germany (the gov’t, not the people) has committed itself to accepting 800,000 immigrants this year. That’s an astounding figure in a country with a population of 83 or so million.

    The People have had it and these examples are just the beginning of a long train of PushBack. As I’ve said before, the main reason the Elites are in favor of “migrants” is because they do not have to live with the consequences of accepting these people into our country, or into Europe. If the Elites had to live next door to Mohammed, have their kids go to school with him, hear the sound of the Moslem call to prayer in their very neighborhoods, they’d be singing a very different tune. Diversity sounds great on paper, in Other Peoples Backyards, but rarely works out well in real life.

    • Kathleen, you come across as extremely well informed about Germany: As a German, I fully support the picture you’re painting. Do you happen to be an expatriate American living in my little beleaguered and elite-abandoned country?

      Just a few minor points to add. When you say that Germany has “committed itself” to accepting 800,000 this year, that sounds as if planning and an upper threshold were in place. But no, 800,000 is just the current estimate of the number of arrivals. If more cross our abandoned, unguarded borders in 2015, well then there will be more in the country. The law, international (EU) treaties, everything be damned: The Holy Migrant must not be opposed, his every wish must be our command.

      When Macedonia lately blocked migrants for a day or two, I saw an outraged and, as it appeared, truly puzzled Syrian complaining into one of the doubtlessly many cameras present: “But why are the Macedonians doing this? It makes no sense. I mean, it’s not like we plan to stay in their country and take their jobs. No, we all want to go to Germany!”

      Also, thousands of migrants chanting a slogan before the Budapest train station yesterday: “Where do we want to go? Germany!”, essentially making the same “argument” toward the Hungarian authorities.

      • The flood of immigrant mobs toward Germany, Herzog, brings with it a subject you probably are not permitted to speak of in Germany (btw, we in the US have caught and passed you in prohibited speech.)

        John Keynes, before he lost his mind to narcissism, wrote convincingly after the Treaty of Versailles that Eastern Europe was entirely dependent upon Germany for economic direction and that the treaty’s economic destruction of Germany would have a calamitous effect upon Eastern Europe as well, which it did. In the same vein those evil colonial powers which ran the middle east and Africa toward shouting distance of the nineteenth century get all the blame and none of the credit for that accomplishment while their citizens presently are left to flee for the homelands of the colonialists.

        What can I conclude other than the failure of Europeans to take a firm hand with the management of those wretched parts of the earth is simply not working for you–and even less for them?

        Tocqueville’s rules for managing the affairs of others: “A race, inferior by nature or by education, can tolerate the government of a superior race. The only sensible effects of this superiority are good : if the government manages well, it may be preferred even to that of the native princes; but a private individual, more civilized, more rich, more clever, and more influential than his native neighbours, is always an object of hatred and of envy.”

      • No, Herzog, I’m an American, born and raised. But I am always interested in what’s happening in other parts of the world, especially in relation to the invasion of Western countries by the Moslem hordes. I have made it my business to know as much as possible about Islam, and to share that information with others. It is shocking how little the average person knows about Islam. How can one fight an enemy you know nothing about? If you know nothing, do you even realize you have an enemy? The barbarian, totalitarian, culture-annihilating political system known as Islam is conducting the Third Jihad, and the West better wake up before it’s too late. I frequent a number of counterjihad websites and/or blogs that monitor the goings-on. While I like them all, my favorite is Gates of Vienna. Perhaps you are also a fan? If not, I recommend it highly.

    • You are right, Kathleen. The elite do not have to live next door to the immigrants, and in the UK they all –despite their professed socialist “principles” — send their kids to schools where there are no poor immigrants.

      The principle of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) has always been strong at the top of the tree but the desire of the elected and the unelected elite to put the burden on the unimportant rabble who provide for them has never been stronger.

      Recently, a Liebore front runner proposed that every town and city in the UK take ten refugee families. Well, one would never notice in a place like Rotherham but the telling thing is the migrants trying to get into Britain are mostly single males. If every town here took ten families they would have to take an awful lot more single muslim or African males, which is (as always) not what was planned or expected but how it will work out.

  8. Well, of COURSE the solution is always more immigration! Since the ultimate objective is to swamp and wash away in a sea of poverty, illiteracy, polyglotism, and dependency the historic American character and people in order to increase the Democrat/Socialist vote, it’s hard to see how any other solution could possibly be permitted.

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