2015-07-30

Political Revolution Comes to America Via Immigration Issue

In 2012, I wrote: Immigration restrictions coming in the United States
Immigration restriction will be one of the key issues that delivers a true outsider politician into power. The only thing surprising about it will be how late it arrives and possibly how sharp a break with current policy it makes. Politicians continue to overwhelmingly hold the extreme "peak social mood" view, a position that was extreme in and of itself at peak social mood, but becomes insanely extreme politically as social mood declines. They are very far away from public opinion, leaving a gaping hole for the first ambitious politician who decides to make immigration restriction an issue.

In 2013: Immigration Amnesty Takes Its Last Breath
One of things I've repeated on immigration is that the U.S. is proceeding as if this is still the year 2000, at the peak of social mood. The tide has been turning politically, but they continue to act as if nothing has changed. Here we see President Obama and NY Senator Schumer assuming they can get more for their side, effectively killing a deal in the House. The House Republicans are the stumbling block on immigration reform and if social mood had crept more into DC, they would refuse any deal and simply wait it out, since their side is gaining support year after year. Instead, a deal was on the table and the pro-amnesty side killed it because it wasn't good enough. Now with Obama weak due to Obamacare and the 2014 election suddenly looking good for the GOP, this may have been the last shot at immigration reform on pro-amnesty terms.

Last year I wrote Immigration Issue Set to Explode in America; Prepare for Political Volatility:
UKIP was a distant warning shot. The defeat of Eric Cantor was a much closer shot. Few if any politicians have stepped up to advocate an immigration restriction policy. They have nearly all taken the easy road of bashing President Obama for inaction. This leaves an opening for an ambitious politician.
That last link goes to a story on Donald Trump.

The mainstream of both political parties is still tut-tutting about Trump. They think immigration restriction of any kind, including the deportation of illegal aliens, is an unacceptable position. They will go to their political graves on this issue. The United States is on the verge of catapulting past Europe and Australia on the immigration issue, squeezing a change that took 15 years in those countries into a single election.

The political mainstream still has no idea about immigration because the media and government suppress information on the topic. Majorities of almost every single group in America want immigration reduced, yet if you asked most people what the polls say, they'd say Americans favor immigration. The polls are a literal fabrication based on leading questions, the data show that restricting immigration is the winning political position.

The national question, 2014
The only two subgroups with positive IEQs are Asians and foreign-born residents living in the US (read immigrants), and there is of course a lot of overlap in these two categories. Perhaps uniquely among major contemporary political issues, there is a pronounced divide between old (black and white) America on the one hand and new (Asian and Hispanic) America on the other.
The IEQ is the "immigration enthusiasm quotient." Every other group is neutral or wants immigration reduced.

This is no surprise to myself or anyone who digs into the data: Internal Poll Shows Donald Trump Generating Strong Support Among Minority Voters – “LANDSLIDE”
“It’s still hush-hush, but enough mouths are moving to make it credible. It apparently started with some Florida numbers by the leading candidate down there. They had been warned their numbers were slipping and the campaign decided to confirm. They received more than confirmation. What they came back with were numbers that elevated Donald Trump’s support among minorities beyond anything they thought was possible. This initiated an order of three more internal polls of other battleground states and the results were very similar – Donald Trump is making significant gains across the board with minority voters. In just two months he has done what Republicans have been crying about doing for the last several years. It’s remarkable. It also means the media, who likely already knows about the polling data, will be throwing everything they can at the Trump campaign to topple it once and for all. They cannot allow a candidate who is overturning all of the established rules of what a Republican is and isn’t. Democrats want him gone. Republicans want him gone. The only ones who appear to want him to stay is a growing number of supporters representing a surprisingly large percentage of the American public.”
Donald Trump isn't a political genius. I believe his line about Mexico not "sending their best people" was basically a gaffe, but like UKIP in the UK, Trump isn't a dummy. He's tapped into the winning issue of the 2016 campaign and this election is now Donald Trump's to lose unless another major candidate pushes further to the right on immigration.

A Democrat is already moving right, socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, who can read a poll:
Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...

Ezra Klein: But it would make ...

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me ...

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.
Bernie Sanders is to the right of Trump on immigration, if he follows up these statements with policy. With Hillary's campaign mired in scandal, it could be that two immigration restrictionists face off in 2016.

Meanwhile, in a development that has no connection to Trump, but is connected to political discontent, the young and Internet savvy right-wing is beginning its assault on the mainstream GOP. The end of Boomer dominance is at hand and the ascendance of the Generation X and Y is beginning. It heralds a shift so far to the right that it cannot be evaluated on the scale of years or decades, but centuries. It's beginning with a bit of humor though:

‘Cuckservative’ — the conservative insult of the month, explained
‘CUCKSERVATIVE’ IS A GLORIOUSLY EFFECTIVE INSULT THAT SHOULD NOT BE SLURRED, DEMONISED, OR RIDICULED
Thus, “cuckservative” can mean many things. It could mean conservatives who are afraid of social exclusion and kowtow to the liberal media establishment. It could mean conservatives who play the left’s game of identity politics, accusing their internal opponents, such as Donald Trump, of being racist or sexist or rapey for spurious or opportunistic reasons.
Cuckservatives are the right-wing politicians who shoot at their own side, implement policies the base hates and engage in self-destructive policies such as mass immigration, which guarantees the destruction of America's right-wing as it exists today.

The entire right-wing is beginning a major rightward shift in a youth driven movement that has been percolating on the Internet for the better part of a decade. I touched on the movement in 2013: Rise of the New American Right Leaking Into Mainstream; What is Neoreaction?
The movement has no central core, and the article correctly notes that there's cross pollination between game blogs that help men meet, date and have successful relationships with women (by throwing out all the feminist ideas); scientists who study taboo subjects such as the biological basis for human traits such as intelligence; technology entrepreneurs and workers who are thinking of and building libertarian systems (Bitcoin being a recent and popular creation); the old paleoconservative right and libertarian right, where Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul both find little love from establishment Republicans; and through the medium of the Internet, where it is now possibly to read books by the losers of history (the critics of democracy). The latter point is important because even if one doesn't agree with neoreaction, it is digging up lot of ideas left for dead that are not even debated anymore. This makes the movement very well read and its opposite mostly unread, relying on power instead. Neoreaction is an elite movement, and it was only yesterday that I linked to Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays.
Neoreactionaries aren't fueling the current push, but their ideas are in the background of the movement. A major political realignment has been underway for more than a decade across the developed world, but it was slow in Europe and "hidden" on the Internet in America, so people ignored it or had no idea it existed. What's about to happen in America will make it clear to all.

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