In the last presidential election, nominated governor Romneycare
In the election before that, nominated Senator McCain-Feingold
The current huge increase in government expenditures and substantial increase in taxes reflects a bipartisan budget that your Tea Party congressman voted for – which means that your tea party congressman voted to fund Obamacare.
And, very shortly after the 2014 election, the Republican party is about bring in thirty million Democrat voters. Â (Each person amnestied gets to bring in relatives, and, in the 1986 amnesty, promptly did so. Â We also had a huge, though short lived, baby boom among immigrants, probably because immigration rights for kin boosted and, for a little while enforced, marriage. Â This caused some people to say that the immigrants were naturally socially conservative, though fertility eventually declined to normal underclass levels as the freshly imported women started normal underclass sexual behavior, responding to welfare incentives, rather than immigration control incentives. Â It eventually became glaringly obvious that Mexican immigrants are not socially conservative, once they become eligible for welfare.)
It is deemed essential that the Democrat party appease its base, hence the ban on the Keystone pipeline, while the Republican party can take its base for granted, and should always do what maximally offends them.  Every Democrat agrees it is essential to pander to the most radical democrats, while most Republicans agree that the Republican wing of the Republican party are ugly hateful racist neanderthals.
And remember the Reagan Revolution. Â Without the 1986 Reagan Amnesty act Obama would not have won the election, and probably would not have been nominated.
At election time, candidates posture about how right wing they are. Â Sometimes they do dramatic things like “shutting down the government” – which invariably and predictably end in the total and complete capitulation of the right. Â When it is time to pass a budget or a law, they are all leftists. Â Just as you don’t get into Harvard except you can do an adequate simulation of leftism, you don’t get into politics unless you can adequately simulate leftism, even though you have simulate rightism for those hateful despicable disgusting voters. Â Democrats are the inner party, Republicans the outer party. Â They are all one party, the party of the state, preaching the religion of the state.
If the Republicans were truly right-wing, they’d immediately defund the 90% of the federal government not required by the Constitution. When a million people who haven’t done an honest day’s work in decades are laid off, what industry will rush in to employ them? Republicans want to keep Washington as it is today, only with themselves in charge, not turn it into Haiti-on-the-Potomac.
I’ve read at least 100 times that the top Republican Party leadership believes they have to do this Amnesty because it is the best of a lot of bad options for the party. Though, there is also a conspiracy theory that the party leadership is ‘pretending’ to be on the fence, in order to help the members of anti-immigration districts juice the grass roots for enthusiasm and cash. I don’t believe this theory.
There are some arguments they make that, if true, would be decent enough justifications. I don’t have the focus group numbers and crystal ball counterfactual-estimator experts they do.
I’ve heard that the big business donors have threatened to abandon the party and switch over to the democrats if the Republicans don’t play ball. For someone in a safe district, that would be terrifying. Better to live large as a member of a minority party, then have no money and just maybe hang on to a majority.
I’ve heard they expect to lose the House again eventually, and that means Amnesty will happen eventually anyway. They think if they have Amnesty forced upon them, then the Amnestied will never forgive the Republicans and they will vote like the blacks forever, and thus the House will be lost forever. But if they remake the Republican party into a Pro-Hispanic party, then they’ll only vote like women instead of blacks, and the loss of the house might only be temporary.
But I don’t believe this stuff. I don’t know if they really believe it either, or whether they are just pretending they believe in these ‘reasons’.
The reason I don’t believe any of this is because, if pushing Amnesty now really was the best long-term option for the Republicans against the Democrats, the Democrats would be trying to keep them from doing it, instead of applauding loudly and salivating at the prospect of the unforced error, which they are clearly doing right now. They would be running articles ridiculing these Republicans for being principle-less flip-floppers, or for being cynical fakers who can’t be trusted. But no, it is all applause and ‘a strange new respect’.
There is just no way this is ‘expected NPV optimal’ for the Republican party.
If google cannot build a bridge over a creek, big business cannot get the immigration policy it wants. And if it could get the immigration policy it wants, what it wants is the power to issue work visas after the fashion of businesses in Dubai.
History tells us this does not work.
The behavior of the inner party shows that amnesty is an act of loyalty to the party, the outer party sacrificing itself to the greater good of the party to the applause of the inner party.
Yes there is. The Republicans hope to compete for the votes of all social conservatives and perhaps nominal Christians in the future, and do not want to offend the Hispanics who the Inner Party makes clear will be a significant force in future elections.
They are rationally jockeying for a position in the future that would be inevitable if the Cathedral truly was as powerful as it thinks.
On a totally unrelated note, today I got a haircut. As the strength of the Cathedral wanes, I think the businesses with the most need for open segregation would be the barber shops, because it is utter lunacy to have people of every race going to the same barber shops even if it’s not quite as insane to have people of every race working in the same barber shops. But for some reason I’m talking about ‘will be’ instead of ‘are’, because only the pleb-tier barber shops are integrated; others don’t even pretend to be integrated the way that high-status schools have a few diversities.
Those diversities, like Barack Obama, believe that the Cathedral is invincible and its triumph is inevitable, as a matter of God’s Truth marching on. Glory, glory alleluia. Meanwhile, Joe Biden sees how his personal position is strengthened by his contacts with completely harmless Cathedralite diversities. Anderson Cooper even had the independence to call the ousting of Brendan Eich disgusting – from his position of privilege, he has no idea how precarious the ideology that keeps an avowed sodomite on the air really is.
Why do you believe the Cathedral is waning in power?
Easy. The old electorate has abandoned the Democrats, and they are going to ensure they have a new one.
Are you implying there ever was an American right?
The most paleo of paleoconservatives, Ron Paul, is an advocate of liberal democracy, with egalitarian voting. The person who keeps appealing to the Founding Fathers, completely rejects the right-wing components of their political design. He could reject judicial review, support direct democracy, oppose the incorporation doctrine, or many similar things.
Even Pat Buchanan only wants to take us back to the 1950s. That’s all the American Right ever is, looking a few decades back. And it’s usually not even that.
By 1790, there were no Monarchist politicians in America. By 1840, there were no pre-Jacksonian politicians. By 1910, there were no politicians who wanted to abolish the civil service. By 1960, there were virtually no politicians who opposed the New Deal. By 1980, there were no politicians who supported segregation. By 1990, no politicians opposed the Great Society (Medicare, et cetera).
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Why are there no ambitious Machiavellian politicians? It’s really disappointing. Open any history book (since most people will not believe psychology or mood studies) and you can clearly see that there are periods when nationalism, anti-foreigner (trade), anti-business politicians win big. They wipe out their enemies completely for a time.
We are in such a period. If the Tea Party marched into a “suicidal” confrontation with big business and told them to fuck off on the issue of immigration, it would open the door to a Jacksonian anti-bank, anti-immigration candidate. Big business would balk, or it would be naked exposed as fully Democrat. Then the full scale “war” can begin. Conservatives must be ripped whole out of their leftist cocoons and the only way to do that is to make enemies. The way history is going, these are exactly the enemies you want.
You need money to get elected, and money to get media exposure. Even if you pulled it off without money, you need money to bribe other congressmen to agree with you. Even if you got to president with a populist anti-plutocrat platform, you’ll get full media and plutocrat enmity for 4 years. You wouldn’t last long.
The system has been refined, there’s no subverting it.
Because the real power is held by the civil service. Jacksonian politics was only possible with a spoils system.
Return to democracy would necessitate returning control over power and money to elected politicians – who will use it to reward their supporters. Thus, return to democracy has to return to spoils system. No very likely.
Except for local democracy, where social pressure can overcome some of the flaws of electoral politics. Or direct democracy, where politicians are factored out altogether.
Not to mention, the spoils system can be kept quite minimal. If the government functions in a more unitary way, as it did before Andrew Jackson’s presidency, then there are fewer feuds between different branches and different bureaucracies.
But that requires a dominant elite holding the government together. Not compatible with egalitarian voting, political parties (plural), or competitive elections. I’m suddenly thinking of modern Singapore and pre-1990 Taiwan.
[…] The American right is deader than God « Jim’s Blog […]
They aren’t dead. Far from it! They are divided. We had the same problem up here in Canada. The political right divided between the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives – and as a result, liberal scum ate our lunch for damn near two decades and nearly broke up the country in the process.
Conservative America has two choices – they can go after the leftish-centrists and try and woo them for their votes – as they have been doing…or they can mend fences with the disenfranchised libertarians – which is, in my opinion, the only possible way forward. That will require some compromises that will suck for everyone. The religious social conservatives will have to stay out of everyone’s bedrooms and keep their faith to themselves. The libertarians are going to have to pay their taxes and understand that their freedoms also entail some responsibility, and that their taxes are going up regardless of who is in power, and that some socialist structures and losses of some freedoms are unavoidable. My impression is that many libertarians are still convinced they can cut their noses off to spite their faces…and that Hillary will be your next POTUS. Maybe 4 years of her will convince us guys on the right that we have to get along.
divided because dead, not dead because divided.
Explicit advocacy for the interests of the White nation became heresy. At that point, it’s over.
Some who wanted to advocate for the interests of the White nation claimed to only want less taxes, tax money being used to deconstruct their shared identity. Others claimed to only want to preserve their Christian culture. Others want to impose the values that the nation had come to on everyone, including the invaders, and that by not pursuing those values nearly as assiduously, they could be pursued more effectively.
And all of them waste time and effort in effect propping up a system that hates them. Meanwhile, they are correctly called crypto-racists, except for the bleeding-heart libertarians and interracial-interfaith Quakers and UUs; the accusation really is unfair for the neocons because they are actually liberals.
This is silly. Today’s religious social conservatives don’t want to get in everyone’s bedrooms. They just don’t want to be forced to celebrate other people’s gay marriages and forced to accept their marriages as legitimate – if that. Hard to find any remaining social conservatives even by that loose standard.
Today’s religious social conservatives support frivolous divorce and having children out of wedlock and have done so for the last fifty years – see Dalrock for a list of horror stories.
Today’s religious social conservatives, when a woman divorces the father of her children, and wants to marry someone else, say “You go girl”. I regularly beat up on Bruce Charlton for being too far left on sex, so that he has banned me and will not talk to me any more.
The actual socially conservative position is that women are not allowed to divorce even with cause, except in extraordinary circumstances, men are not allowed to divorce except for adultery, and a divorced woman may not remarry while her husband lives regardless of whose fault the divorce was, that the father of a child should be forced to marry the mother of a child, that the father should be forced to support and protect the mother and the child, and the mother should be forced to submit to and obey the father. Nothing to do with other people’s bedrooms, everything to do with the principle that children should have fathers.
Today’s “libertarians” oppose the free market economy. When have you heard them complaining about Sarbannes Oxley, or Jon Corzine, the man of many hats? What they support is forcing everyone to enthusiastically endorse transvestism, gay sex, and the mass migration of low IQ third worlders to the US to live on crime, welfare, and voting democrat. The overton window, moving ever leftwards, has now moved so far leftwards that no libertarian positions remain. Nor do any socially conservative positions remain. The religious social conservatives endorse gay sex,fatherless children, and mass third world migration, the libertarians support gay sex, fatherless children, and mass third world migration.
As actually libertarian positions dropped out of the overton window, and actually socially conservative positions dropped out of the overton window, libertarians and religious social conservatives became indistinguishable from each other.
Hmpffffff. Yes to all that Jim. I really, really want to disagree with you but I’ll be damned if I can. I have always maintained that the left has gone nuts but I am looking at my fellow ‘conservatives’…and I see that you are right.
I withdraw my comment.
That’s where your wrong. They are often distinguishable.
Religious social conservatives can be aggressively anti-libertarian on economics. For example, Mike Huckabee’s anti-poverty programs in Arkansas.
And libertarians can be aggressively anti-religious. For example, during his 2012 presidential campaign, Gary Johnson promoted Same-sex marriage as a Constitutional right.
Quite so: But, as you imply, the difference is in what part of the left program they promote, not what part of the libertarian or social conservative program they promote.
What do conservatives do when a database server goes up in flames? That’s easy, we replace it and restore the database from last Saturday’s off-site backup tape. Conservatives always keep backups.
What if instead, the database crashed because, owing to various software flaws accidental and deliberate, the data was gradually corrupted over a period of many years? In that case, conservatives stand around arguing which backup tape ought to be restored.
I personally favor the gold-standard free-market economy of the late 19th century. With no living memory of such a system, we’d have to reconstruct it from the writings of Thomas Sumner et al, and we’d probably get a few key points wrong.
That was a good economic order, but the nineteenth century is when patriarchy came under legal and social attack by the state.
Hi Jim, you seem to have a vast knowledge of history. Could you point me to some good resources on patriarchy begin attacked by the state in the 19th century? Thanks.
Jim may be referring to the “Tender years doctrine”. Parliament passed a law in 1839 that divorced women should have custody of children under seven, and raised the age to sixteen in 1873. In effect, this made children property of the mother, i.e. matriarchy, though social disapproval of divorce allowed the patriarchy to linger on for another 100 years.
King George’s attempt to divorce queen Caroline.
If King George could not divorce queen Caroline for breaking the marital contract, what woman could be divorced for breaking the marital contract? Thus though the laws enforcing marriage on women remained on the books, it was dead law. The marital contract was only enforced on males.
The Matrimonial Causes act.
Hey, I’m not able to comment on the fertility thread-get a 404 error. What’s up with that?
Try again. My site has been under hacker attack. Think I have regained control.
Nope, still no joy. I could throw it up here, but do not want to hijack another thread with Joo talk.
Well I will make a thread where it is on topic, by promoting my comment to the post.
And for some reason I can’t put up long comments there.
So Jim, do you think there is any positive effect Reactionaries can have through the framework of democratic politics?
In particular, I’m thinking of things like Reagan’s attempt to run up the debt, in order to prevent further government spending. The “Starve the Beast” strategy.
It would seem to have had some effect on our budget policies. Without the financial pressure from our debt, many more progressive projects become financially practical.
No. Whenever democratic politics works, the left fix things so it no longer works.
That’s usually true, but certain areas seem to be exceptions. One, criminal justice. The very lenient progressive system created social chaos in the 60’s and 70’s, and roughly from the late 70’s there was a popular counterrevolution that made the system harsher than it had been even in the 50’s, at least in more conservative states.
I think the left permitted this because there is a certain level of anger and discontent they can’t tolerate. The horror and fear generated by the crime explosion of those days was totally undermining their program, and I think they though it best to throw black murderers under the bus.
Murders of convenience store and gas station clerks were a daily occurrence then, and things like a couple of armed robbers herding the entire crew of a fast food place into the freezer and killing them all execution-style- a phrase invented by reporters back then- happened pretty regularly.
Another is concealed carry and gun rights. They don’t like this, but giving the rednecks this calms them down a little.
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For some time my theory has been that the Republican leadership are no longer interested in winning the White House, nor a majority in the Senate. Other commenters have alluded to it as well. My thought is that they are content to be forever the minority party. They still get most of the personal perks, but have no responsibility to actually govern.