You touch on this, but I would go further and say that many people are easily swayed by emotion-driven arguments, regardless of the merits of the argument. And if you're going to just flit from one emotional flashpoint to the next, there's no way you can be ideologically consistent.
It's impossible for me track every bill, every appointment hearing, every budget resolution, or whatever it is that politicians do. At the end of the day, knowing that they are a serious person who broadly shares my values matters a lot more than specific policies do. I shit you not, in 2024 I was evaluating candidates on whether or not they understood what a "deficit" was and whether or not they agreed human shit stinks.
I think a lot of people take a similar minimalist tac. What the few items are vary. For tech heads, in 2024, it was "Feels like they want to do stuff and will get the naggers off my back." A cruddy calculus, but the same shape as "understand basic words and a sense of smell" or "holds these 3 most important moral values" or "wants to give me a job and money."
There's a tendency to always think in terms of progress towards an end state. Evolution: some creatures are more evolved than others. Morality: there is an "arc of history". Politics: the coming revolution. Etc.
This makes sense if you're a religious person who believes in an interventionist god, but if you're a deist, or secular, than this is a truly weird position to take. This often comes up in discussions around things like the Holocaust (I bring it up because today is Yom HaShoah), the idea that "it couldn't happen here" (although that is happening less now that people are looking to point a figure and say it is happening in Israel, a truly vile and historically illiterate claim). There were some truly evil people in Nazi Germany, but the majority of people were ordinarily evil, just your standard, everyday antisemites. It could "happen here", and if you were around then you probably wouldn't have been a righteous among the nations (and anyone who is sure they would have been, I'm more likely to think they would have been one of the Nazis).
Liberal democracy is not a stable point, nor was it thought to be by your founding fathers when they established America. "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". This is an acknowledgement that illiberalism is a constant force that will always threaten to destabilise liberalism. (who is the patriot and who is the tyrant is an exercise left to the reader).
Anyways, my point is, things just happen. There's no "intelligent designer" for anything on a macro scale, not for evolution, not for politics, not for morality.
One side note here is that the coalitions that have defeated right-wing authoritarian populism in Europe have been centered around right-wing political figures and parties who have basically run on "we can get you order and stability without the crazy" and then actually deliver rather than returning to business as usual.
And the thing is, this has worked. Denmark's establishment coalition, for example, got in ahead of the game and has managed to keep its RW populist parties fairly under control (compare to Germany and Sweden, whose RW populist parties have each gotten the second-largest number of votes in their most recent parliamentary elections) while the center of Poland's current governing coalition is a right-wing party.
As you heavily imply, Democrats and establishment Republicans should take note.
I can’t resist a few words from Orwell (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942), which, if you modify some of the 1930s-class-struggle language, still reads very well:
“One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows.”
The theory had more to do with those in the left wanting to believe something other than open borders immigration being extremely unpopular in Europe (which which is what led to both Brext and the increase in support in right wing parties in Europe). US in 2016 was a mix of Hilary being a terrible candidate, the democrats shifting their party base from the lower class to the educated under Obama leaving fertile ground for someone to scoop up the lower class voters the way Trump has done (he was not there yet in 2016, but won anyways because Hilary was such a bad candidate), and then people conflated the 2 things even though they had completely different causes into one theory. That of course led to the Democrats in the US making the exact same mistake that many places on the left in Europe continue to make (although some have fixed) about immigration, which is why Trump won in 2024 more than anything else.
The continual shift to the right in other places in Europe that have not dealt with the immigration issue (cough UK cough) is a strong indication of how the rightward shift in Europe is pretty much about a single issue, and when that issue is no longer relevant, the rightward shift disappears. This is not the same situation as the US, the US has a more general rightward shift, and while the immigration issue is the largest thing behind this, there are several other cultural things that are also moving to the right (the Biden administration reinterpreting Title IX to cover gender instead of only sex right as the backlash against trans overreach was starting was a masterstroke of bad timing as an example). Hollywood and TV media being pretty well dominated by those on the far left, so most TV shows and movies all got infected by groupthink and were pushing positions that most people don't agree with (and frankly, most people rightfully care about their entertainment more than about politics, and since sports is the king of entertainment as a whole, pushing transwomen in sports what the biggest overreach that they did, but mist really politically active people on the left are not into sports, so they never realized how bad of an idea this was to try and push. I still see people who are not all that into sports not understand why it is that big of a deal, which my though is those people don't get why sports is a big deal in the first place, so their attempts to inject things into sports is like the layperson with no education trying to add their own design ideas to a building, then looking in confusion at the engineer who tells them that you can't build a skyscraper using only wood, and instead of accepting that they know nothing about the topic, keep trying to push it and say it is not a big deal.
"most people rightfully care about their entertainment more than about politics."
Depends on what you mean by "rightly." Expectedly, sure. Reasonably, only insofar as we spend more time doing entertainment than having input into politics. But we have to be capable of caring more about politics than entertainment some of the time in the same manner that I have to be capable of caring about my plumbing some of the time despite usually ignoring it.
The social media turn, if not the predicted populist "turn," weaponizes the sometimes-rational care about entertainment to encourage people to act like politics are always a subset of entertainment rather than a superceding if rarer concern.
Can you share why Hilary was so "horrible" out of curiosity? You said it more than once, I'm wondering what specifically made her horrible in your opinion?
She is almost anti-charismatic. Whenever she tries to be personable, it comes off as "Hello! I am human! Just like you!" and she was really, really bad at concealing her ambition.
Imagine Henry Clay, but female and without the ability to actually build a legislative coalition.
The Democrats believed that the 2012 election was proof of a political realignment instead of Mitt Romney being a terrible candidate who couldn’t win over disaffected Obama 2008 voters.
Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign based on a bunch of flawed assumptions that she never challenged. She bet her entire campaign on Florida, hit all of her turnout targets, and still lost. Her campaign was “data driven” into the ground.
Trump barely outperformed Romney, but that was enough to win.
America is not Europe. We are a young nation populated by waves of immigrants. Americans turned on immigration because of the “jobless recovery” post 2008. Americans actually like immigrants-as long as unemployment is low. Nativist rhetoric in the United States is probably preaching to the converted more than actually changing the political landscape.
Americans only care about Culture War issues when they are feeling good about their pocketbooks.
Trump did not win over working class voters, Democrats’ response to COVID did. White collar workers got to zoom in on their pajamas while blue collar workers had to take their chances and still find childcare while schools were closed. Trump did little to change the situation (he was President) but did an incredible job of shifting the blame. By the time Biden took office and the world was reopening, the framing of the issue had already been set.
Trump spent the next four years campaigning, while Biden did very little to defend his own policies. Biden decided to run again when he was clearly out of gas, then handed Kamala Harris a hole that was too deep to dig out of in only 107 days.
Pretty hard for centrist parties to ‘get with the times’ if ever saying no to any migrant gets you called an authoritarian.
What was illiberal or authoritarian about Brexit? Well, the EU professional class didn’t like it: and that’s their basis for calling anything authoritarian
And the reason Brexit seems to have failed is that the British segment of the professional class that did not like it also did nothing to try to enforce Brexit even though their voters asked for it--just stuck their fingers in their ears and went nah-nah-nah.
I stipulate that immigration may be a more concrete problem for Europe than for the US. That being said, in the US, the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is surely driven by the democratization of info. distribution more than concrete impact. Yes, southern border towns had some wild years, but most people don't live in them. Most places, the most visible impact of immigrants has been their visibility rather than negative economic or cultural impacts.
I agree that anti-immigrant sentiment is more durable than a broader populist turn. But I think, in the US, that's an accident. Immigration dissatisfaction is up mostly because the most prominent man in US politics hates immigrants and because it's an easy explain-everything pitch. It could have been something else.
I think it a delusion on the left that the pushback against immigration is only about Nativist sentiment. Trump might qualify as a nativist and European supremacist.
But the average American is both pro immigration and anti illegal immigration, and much of the wind that fills Trump's sails is that people want respect for rule of law and that the US gets to decide who is allowed in as opposed to the happenstance of whomever slips by the border or uses the asylum end run.
A poll clearly shows that the pushback against Biden's immigration polices, is not Nativism. What this Center Square poll showed ( https://www.eurasiareview.com/04092025-vast-majority-of-americans-think-legal-immigration-is-necessary/ ) that It found that 74% of voters say that legal immigration is good for the United States but that illegal immigration is bad. The minority was split between the all immigration bad (8%) and all immigration good, legal and illegal (16%).
Trump did not invent this even as he exploited it. Americans feel immigrants should obey the law and only come through legal processes. I share that view and am very pro immigrant but also very pro democracy, and the people should get to decide who and how many enter the country. I would argue for a healthy migration stream, but illegality shouldn't define the number.
Now my view of the current situation is that the USA is like a guy who just won the hotdog eating competition and is struggling with a serious temptation to celebrate by having dinner at a buffet. The healthiness of what he ate is questionable and regardless he should *definitely* take some time to let it digest before he eats more. Even if he survives this round, regularly overeating is unhealthy in general and will lead him to an early grave.
The analogy does break down in that a human body needs food of some kind, whereas a country does not necessarily need immigration... at all. If politicians continue to offer a choice between "too much to assimilate" and "less than that" I expect voters to opt for the second one. Increasingly they will opt for the second one even if it turns out to be rounding-error levels of immigration.
I like your analogy and do I have it right that maybe you think we overdid the amount of immigration. This could be. We did see record numbers under Biden and it is problematic when there is not housing or jobs etc. I favor a slow steady stream and one that stresses family unification rather than just who shows at the border. The current wait for a sibling to get in is about 15 years, and I'd like to see that time decreased as we reduce illegal immigration. Migrants do better if they have family support
The US birth rate is below replacement so without immigration we would see population and gdp decline. If you look at a OECD member with the least immigration, Japan, you see a declining economy, aging population (immigrants are younger), and a lack of dynamism,.
But you are correct, it can be overdone, and we need to find the right amount.
Kindly, why do you believe we (as a country) do not need immigration? That is a surprising and seemingly very controversial claim to me. Can you explain how an ever shrinking population would create a growing economy and the funds for retirees, among many other seemingly obvious problems?
Well there's an assumption buried in your thinking here that no immigration has to mean a shrinking population. Trying to solve that issue with immigration is very much like trying to solve dependence on oil by drilling for more oil: It kicks the can down the road, has many negative side effects in the meantime, and is ultimately not proving sustainable in any case. We should not allow our leaders to duck the issue via immigration.
The fact is that the native population is capable of reproducing. Their gonads work the same way as other people's. They just don't do it because they struggle to attain housing and financial stability. And that is partly due to the overwhelming amount of immigration depressing wages and generally ruining the bargaining power of labor in the labor market, and driving up housing demand. There was not a birth rate problem in the 1960s.
It's really the general case with mass immigration that it lets leaders just duck out of solving problems:
Natives won't breed? Import warm bodies - you can probably get a generation of replacement off them before they fall into the same pattern as the natives.
Housing prices threatening to fall? Suppress building and import more demand.
Natives demanding things like "decent wages" and "benefits" and "job security"? Import lots of foreigners to be scabs.
Natives won't vote for you? Import new voters - even if you can't manage voter fraud, at least their kids will be citizens, and in the meantime they swell your census count.
Well if you have some sure fire method of getting people to have babies let us know. While you are at it, end crime, and eliminate poverty and littering.
Every advanced country in the world, now has below replacement birth rate.
That is not the only reason for immigration. Immigrants work hard, start businesses, excel in the sciences, do jobs that Americans won't do.
I am a grandchild of immigrants. They came with nothing. All their grandchildren are doing well. The hope that my grandparents were given by this country is worth sharing with others. It adds to our strength. It adds to the value people see in America in the world, land of the free.
Yes, it should be legal and limited to our circumstances and needs, but it is good for the country.
It seems like you have a vested interest in believing most of that, and so I won't bother responding to it, except to note that "jobs that Americans won't do" are actually "jobs Americans won't do at the extremely low level of wages that mass immigration has pushed it down to." However:
> Well if you have some sure fire method of getting people to have babies let us know.
I'm going to turn this around on you and say that you *also* have to answer this question without resorting to immigration. The fact that you seem to have missed is that the groups that immigrate *also* have below-replacement birth rates after a generation or two in a Western country. Moreover, as industrialization spreads, every country is having their birth rate drop below replacement, so the well of immigrants will run dry even if you were content to have the West be a population sink indefinitely. It is not sustainable even from a completely pro-immigrant open-borders perspective!
I disagree with this framing of the actual impacts of USA immigration regardless of method, but I can also admit that's a prior that I simply don't want to argue about here.
"Increasingly they will opt for the second one even if it turns out to be rounding-error levels of immigration."
I understand that as a political outcome, but I think it goes with my general thesis that people are voting on this because they're being told it's a problem and that less immigration, directionally, is the solution. It's just not relevant enough to most people's lives for it to be a felt problem, not least because no one has documented-status-vision. Someone doesn't need to be nativist to buy that illegal immigration is a problem. I do think our nativist President played a huge role in otherwise non-nativist people concluding that it is.
So you said before. But if anything, excessive immigration is less visible than it could be. It's disguised as visa overstays, refugee claims, or just straight-up ignoring a removal order, for example. And you don't usually *see* who takes a job you applied for, nor is it written on someone's face that they're an immigrant when they commit crimes, because as you say, no one has documented-status-vision.
I suspect that Americans writ large would be pleased with a heavily revised asylum system (and not in Trump's manner of white people from South Africa only). I don't know if that would poll or campaign well, but the end result would, I think, make a lot of people happy. It'd be much closer to Obama's strategy of a high number of deportations of people who just arrived.
The concept of asylum should be people who are being persecuted in the country they are in immediate danger - opposition journalists, human rights advocates- which is what it was in the past before anybody just saying the magic words "I want asylum" at the border might be allowed in the country to not be adjudicated for many years.. Of course given the choice of swimming rivers and crossing deserts vs saying one sentence, anybody would claim asylum.
Domestic violence and gang recruitment were never previously considered for asylum and are largely not provable, the gangs dont send recruitment letters.
The Biden administration after letting in record numbers of asylum claimants about faced in June 2024 with remain in Mexico. The millions of refugees in Colombia from Venezuela are not being deported, and yes, there is more work in the US, and better pay, but that is not what asylum is about.
One the one hand, this what I'm getting at with a "heavily revised asylum system." On the other hand, "given the choice of swimming rivers and crossing deserts vs saying one sentence, anybody would claim asylum" seems to miss that a lot of people claim asylum after swimming the rivers and crossing the deserts. Matt Yglesias talks about needing to say no to sympathetic cases. This is what he means. It is not easy for people claiming asylum. It might not be viable, and it needs to change, but these people are not lazy.
Sentiment to immigrants is actually warmer than ever.
It’s just that the new paradigms enabled people to vote on it. Trump broke the monopoly of the boys club when he won the primary and gave people a chance to vote on it.
The immigration waves in the 19th and 20th century weren’t grass roots operations and weren’t popular: the elites just did them anyways
That is certainly a viewpoint. I would stipulate that "immigration may be a more concrete problem for Europe than for the US" is a bit like saying "the fire is hotter than the frying pan", and that cities like Chicago, NYC, and even Dallas and San Francisco are not "southern border towns".
I won't delve too much into the analogy, but I don't have any argument with the fire being hot. I don't know much about Europe. I contend that the pan isn't; people are told that it is, and in a few places in America it has been, but largely, again, the main thing that changed is visibility, not a rise in negative impact on people's lives. This is why I don't factor Chicago or San Francisco into the calculus except as data points on visibility. I contend that their problems aren't caused by immigrants.
I said it could have been "something else." The poor. The unemployed. Druggies. Heck, pick an ethnic community that is and already has been here. People could have blamed one of these or anything else for what they see as the problems of the US, but instead we got "they're emptying their prisons and insane asylums to rape our girls." Maybe something else wouldn't have been as effective rhetorically, but it's not because something else would've been more or less true.
The thing with most predictions that take a wave election and extrapolate growth forward is that political trends are very hard to discern and normally the big wave election is the result of a missed trend (or an obvious one that gets ignored for partisan wishful thinking) hitting its crest and not a new one just starting to surge.
Completely irrelevant rant, but maybe someone here has an answer: Why is it "ouster" and not "ousting"? I know we got it from French and that's how they conjugate it or whatever. But English is like 65% French and we don't do that for any other word. Seems odd
The state/health of liberal democracy and any fundamental change in the psyche of voters seem to me very separate things (though I think fallacy of that psychic shift is very noteworthy and well treated in the post). Authoritarians either need keep the popular will on their side by some combination of getting things right (mostly economically) or some rallying cry (usually toward a mostly fabricated enemy) or, when the hearts of popular will can't be won, then fear/intimidation/force/corruption. Europe seems to be scoring some great points in response to poor economic effects, but it ain't over until it's over, and on this side of the pond team authoritarian is still swinging. I think the economics will continue to be a liability for them but if there's some fluke and they find a way to change that or are somehow able make that a secondary issue (doubtful but possible), then they'll have a chance to maintain control and continue to remove democratic guardrails ... and to support the enemies of democracy around the globe (it's just so wild to write that about a US government, but I don't know how to see it any other way). Just because they haven't always executed well doesn't mean they don't learn from their mistakes. The story of authoritarians is to win enough popular will to get power and then do their best to set things up so that they don't necessarily need the popular will to stay in power. I don't give them very strong odds at this point, which is encouraging, but this game seems far from over. And politics is so much like college basketball ... however big the leads get, it seems like the 90% of games have a 2 point margin with 2 minutes to go. They're gonna tighten this up.
Good to see you optimistic for a change. I think it’s also worth mentioning that old-school liberalism is just boring, and gets resistance not just from the right (Orban, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, that Czech guy) but also the left (Chavez, Morales, Danny Ortega, Correa) because it’s more fun to pitch black-and-white solutions. For me the turning point is more like 2000, when people complained Gore and Bush were basically the same. I wish we had that problem now.
You have a very reasonable analysis of how political change often sweeps through populations. It's a shame you just cancelled yourself by pinning Trump's comeback on the trans community. It's too bad really, but I don't make the rules 🤷🏼♂️. Sorry
I didn't pin anything on the trans community (if anything, the ACLU is to blame!). That ad appears to have cost Kamala two points in an election she lost by 1.5.
"Groups" begin with gr. Grrrr. I don't have numbers, but it also seemed quite devastating to her prospects when Kamala was asked if she would have done anything different than Biden, and she said, "No. I love inflation and a lawless border." I paraphrase but her answer was a firm no.
> the common man, whom they considered smelly, ignorant, and more than ready to burn witches or murder Jews if they thought it would increase crop yields by even a miniscule amount.
It's *much* worse than that. Look up the story about the Russian peasant, the angel, and the neighbor's cow. That's what people are really like ... and small communities are notorious for being hotbeds of envy. What people passionately struggle for is to raise there status *relative to* the people around them, and over much of history, pushing down some other group has been a more practical way to achieve that than working hard to raise one's self up.
Indeed, I think I could cook up a theory that "modernity" is an enormous social trick that puts everyone into a large enough social context that working harder to increase one's income is a more effective way to improve one's status than is burning down a neighbor's house. But once that genie gets out of the bottle, it comes to dominate the world.
Has anyone listened to the Substack podcast "Letters from an American" today? It's dated April 13 but it's release a day later). Heather Cox Richardson lays out the "rich white dudes take control, crash economy" we've been going through since the 1850's.
But listen to the computer voice that comes with her written version (she does a printed and audio version simultaneously).
She makes Jeff look really lazy lol. That way you can avoid her Elizabeth Warren like scolding history teacher voice.
She's well worth a free listen.
She's also a terrible businessman person like Jeff.
As much as I have little but contempt for HCR, she's referring to the twenty-year(ish) economic boom-and-bust that basically started in the 1820s and went until the Great Depression.
You touch on this, but I would go further and say that many people are easily swayed by emotion-driven arguments, regardless of the merits of the argument. And if you're going to just flit from one emotional flashpoint to the next, there's no way you can be ideologically consistent.
Good point. And social media probably makes this a bigger factor than it used to be.
Jeff: there is also a "hat" above the a in my last name.
I was always told it was called an "accent." Thanks for straightening me out.....
You need to leave Murica' and go somewhere where they like hats on the first letter of their weirdo alphabets.
It's impossible for me track every bill, every appointment hearing, every budget resolution, or whatever it is that politicians do. At the end of the day, knowing that they are a serious person who broadly shares my values matters a lot more than specific policies do. I shit you not, in 2024 I was evaluating candidates on whether or not they understood what a "deficit" was and whether or not they agreed human shit stinks.
I think a lot of people take a similar minimalist tac. What the few items are vary. For tech heads, in 2024, it was "Feels like they want to do stuff and will get the naggers off my back." A cruddy calculus, but the same shape as "understand basic words and a sense of smell" or "holds these 3 most important moral values" or "wants to give me a job and money."
There's a tendency to always think in terms of progress towards an end state. Evolution: some creatures are more evolved than others. Morality: there is an "arc of history". Politics: the coming revolution. Etc.
This makes sense if you're a religious person who believes in an interventionist god, but if you're a deist, or secular, than this is a truly weird position to take. This often comes up in discussions around things like the Holocaust (I bring it up because today is Yom HaShoah), the idea that "it couldn't happen here" (although that is happening less now that people are looking to point a figure and say it is happening in Israel, a truly vile and historically illiterate claim). There were some truly evil people in Nazi Germany, but the majority of people were ordinarily evil, just your standard, everyday antisemites. It could "happen here", and if you were around then you probably wouldn't have been a righteous among the nations (and anyone who is sure they would have been, I'm more likely to think they would have been one of the Nazis).
Liberal democracy is not a stable point, nor was it thought to be by your founding fathers when they established America. "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". This is an acknowledgement that illiberalism is a constant force that will always threaten to destabilise liberalism. (who is the patriot and who is the tyrant is an exercise left to the reader).
Anyways, my point is, things just happen. There's no "intelligent designer" for anything on a macro scale, not for evolution, not for politics, not for morality.
Yeah, "muddling along" is probably a pretty good descriptor for most of humanity most of the time.
One side note here is that the coalitions that have defeated right-wing authoritarian populism in Europe have been centered around right-wing political figures and parties who have basically run on "we can get you order and stability without the crazy" and then actually deliver rather than returning to business as usual.
And the thing is, this has worked. Denmark's establishment coalition, for example, got in ahead of the game and has managed to keep its RW populist parties fairly under control (compare to Germany and Sweden, whose RW populist parties have each gotten the second-largest number of votes in their most recent parliamentary elections) while the center of Poland's current governing coalition is a right-wing party.
As you heavily imply, Democrats and establishment Republicans should take note.
Yep, "We can get you order and stability without the crazy" sounds like a probable winner in any language.
Love that for them. Wish it were on offer in the USA.
I can’t resist a few words from Orwell (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942), which, if you modify some of the 1930s-class-struggle language, still reads very well:
“One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows.”
The theory had more to do with those in the left wanting to believe something other than open borders immigration being extremely unpopular in Europe (which which is what led to both Brext and the increase in support in right wing parties in Europe). US in 2016 was a mix of Hilary being a terrible candidate, the democrats shifting their party base from the lower class to the educated under Obama leaving fertile ground for someone to scoop up the lower class voters the way Trump has done (he was not there yet in 2016, but won anyways because Hilary was such a bad candidate), and then people conflated the 2 things even though they had completely different causes into one theory. That of course led to the Democrats in the US making the exact same mistake that many places on the left in Europe continue to make (although some have fixed) about immigration, which is why Trump won in 2024 more than anything else.
The continual shift to the right in other places in Europe that have not dealt with the immigration issue (cough UK cough) is a strong indication of how the rightward shift in Europe is pretty much about a single issue, and when that issue is no longer relevant, the rightward shift disappears. This is not the same situation as the US, the US has a more general rightward shift, and while the immigration issue is the largest thing behind this, there are several other cultural things that are also moving to the right (the Biden administration reinterpreting Title IX to cover gender instead of only sex right as the backlash against trans overreach was starting was a masterstroke of bad timing as an example). Hollywood and TV media being pretty well dominated by those on the far left, so most TV shows and movies all got infected by groupthink and were pushing positions that most people don't agree with (and frankly, most people rightfully care about their entertainment more than about politics, and since sports is the king of entertainment as a whole, pushing transwomen in sports what the biggest overreach that they did, but mist really politically active people on the left are not into sports, so they never realized how bad of an idea this was to try and push. I still see people who are not all that into sports not understand why it is that big of a deal, which my though is those people don't get why sports is a big deal in the first place, so their attempts to inject things into sports is like the layperson with no education trying to add their own design ideas to a building, then looking in confusion at the engineer who tells them that you can't build a skyscraper using only wood, and instead of accepting that they know nothing about the topic, keep trying to push it and say it is not a big deal.
"most people rightfully care about their entertainment more than about politics."
Depends on what you mean by "rightly." Expectedly, sure. Reasonably, only insofar as we spend more time doing entertainment than having input into politics. But we have to be capable of caring more about politics than entertainment some of the time in the same manner that I have to be capable of caring about my plumbing some of the time despite usually ignoring it.
The social media turn, if not the predicted populist "turn," weaponizes the sometimes-rational care about entertainment to encourage people to act like politics are always a subset of entertainment rather than a superceding if rarer concern.
Can you share why Hilary was so "horrible" out of curiosity? You said it more than once, I'm wondering what specifically made her horrible in your opinion?
She is almost anti-charismatic. Whenever she tries to be personable, it comes off as "Hello! I am human! Just like you!" and she was really, really bad at concealing her ambition.
Imagine Henry Clay, but female and without the ability to actually build a legislative coalition.
So like Vance?
The Democrats believed that the 2012 election was proof of a political realignment instead of Mitt Romney being a terrible candidate who couldn’t win over disaffected Obama 2008 voters.
Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign based on a bunch of flawed assumptions that she never challenged. She bet her entire campaign on Florida, hit all of her turnout targets, and still lost. Her campaign was “data driven” into the ground.
Trump barely outperformed Romney, but that was enough to win.
America is not Europe. We are a young nation populated by waves of immigrants. Americans turned on immigration because of the “jobless recovery” post 2008. Americans actually like immigrants-as long as unemployment is low. Nativist rhetoric in the United States is probably preaching to the converted more than actually changing the political landscape.
Americans only care about Culture War issues when they are feeling good about their pocketbooks.
Trump did not win over working class voters, Democrats’ response to COVID did. White collar workers got to zoom in on their pajamas while blue collar workers had to take their chances and still find childcare while schools were closed. Trump did little to change the situation (he was President) but did an incredible job of shifting the blame. By the time Biden took office and the world was reopening, the framing of the issue had already been set.
Trump spent the next four years campaigning, while Biden did very little to defend his own policies. Biden decided to run again when he was clearly out of gas, then handed Kamala Harris a hole that was too deep to dig out of in only 107 days.
Pretty hard for centrist parties to ‘get with the times’ if ever saying no to any migrant gets you called an authoritarian.
What was illiberal or authoritarian about Brexit? Well, the EU professional class didn’t like it: and that’s their basis for calling anything authoritarian
And the reason Brexit seems to have failed is that the British segment of the professional class that did not like it also did nothing to try to enforce Brexit even though their voters asked for it--just stuck their fingers in their ears and went nah-nah-nah.
Sorry where does saying no to any migrant get you called an authoritarian? Is that on Facebook or by someone who matters?
Idk buddy, he compiled a list of authoritarian populists and he was the one who included every anti immigration thing he could think of.
I stipulate that immigration may be a more concrete problem for Europe than for the US. That being said, in the US, the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is surely driven by the democratization of info. distribution more than concrete impact. Yes, southern border towns had some wild years, but most people don't live in them. Most places, the most visible impact of immigrants has been their visibility rather than negative economic or cultural impacts.
I agree that anti-immigrant sentiment is more durable than a broader populist turn. But I think, in the US, that's an accident. Immigration dissatisfaction is up mostly because the most prominent man in US politics hates immigrants and because it's an easy explain-everything pitch. It could have been something else.
I think it a delusion on the left that the pushback against immigration is only about Nativist sentiment. Trump might qualify as a nativist and European supremacist.
But the average American is both pro immigration and anti illegal immigration, and much of the wind that fills Trump's sails is that people want respect for rule of law and that the US gets to decide who is allowed in as opposed to the happenstance of whomever slips by the border or uses the asylum end run.
A poll clearly shows that the pushback against Biden's immigration polices, is not Nativism. What this Center Square poll showed ( https://www.eurasiareview.com/04092025-vast-majority-of-americans-think-legal-immigration-is-necessary/ ) that It found that 74% of voters say that legal immigration is good for the United States but that illegal immigration is bad. The minority was split between the all immigration bad (8%) and all immigration good, legal and illegal (16%).
Trump did not invent this even as he exploited it. Americans feel immigrants should obey the law and only come through legal processes. I share that view and am very pro immigrant but also very pro democracy, and the people should get to decide who and how many enter the country. I would argue for a healthy migration stream, but illegality shouldn't define the number.
I used to be in that camp.
Now my view of the current situation is that the USA is like a guy who just won the hotdog eating competition and is struggling with a serious temptation to celebrate by having dinner at a buffet. The healthiness of what he ate is questionable and regardless he should *definitely* take some time to let it digest before he eats more. Even if he survives this round, regularly overeating is unhealthy in general and will lead him to an early grave.
The analogy does break down in that a human body needs food of some kind, whereas a country does not necessarily need immigration... at all. If politicians continue to offer a choice between "too much to assimilate" and "less than that" I expect voters to opt for the second one. Increasingly they will opt for the second one even if it turns out to be rounding-error levels of immigration.
I like your analogy and do I have it right that maybe you think we overdid the amount of immigration. This could be. We did see record numbers under Biden and it is problematic when there is not housing or jobs etc. I favor a slow steady stream and one that stresses family unification rather than just who shows at the border. The current wait for a sibling to get in is about 15 years, and I'd like to see that time decreased as we reduce illegal immigration. Migrants do better if they have family support
The US birth rate is below replacement so without immigration we would see population and gdp decline. If you look at a OECD member with the least immigration, Japan, you see a declining economy, aging population (immigrants are younger), and a lack of dynamism,.
But you are correct, it can be overdone, and we need to find the right amount.
Kindly, why do you believe we (as a country) do not need immigration? That is a surprising and seemingly very controversial claim to me. Can you explain how an ever shrinking population would create a growing economy and the funds for retirees, among many other seemingly obvious problems?
Well there's an assumption buried in your thinking here that no immigration has to mean a shrinking population. Trying to solve that issue with immigration is very much like trying to solve dependence on oil by drilling for more oil: It kicks the can down the road, has many negative side effects in the meantime, and is ultimately not proving sustainable in any case. We should not allow our leaders to duck the issue via immigration.
The fact is that the native population is capable of reproducing. Their gonads work the same way as other people's. They just don't do it because they struggle to attain housing and financial stability. And that is partly due to the overwhelming amount of immigration depressing wages and generally ruining the bargaining power of labor in the labor market, and driving up housing demand. There was not a birth rate problem in the 1960s.
It's really the general case with mass immigration that it lets leaders just duck out of solving problems:
Natives won't breed? Import warm bodies - you can probably get a generation of replacement off them before they fall into the same pattern as the natives.
Housing prices threatening to fall? Suppress building and import more demand.
Natives demanding things like "decent wages" and "benefits" and "job security"? Import lots of foreigners to be scabs.
Natives won't vote for you? Import new voters - even if you can't manage voter fraud, at least their kids will be citizens, and in the meantime they swell your census count.
Well if you have some sure fire method of getting people to have babies let us know. While you are at it, end crime, and eliminate poverty and littering.
Every advanced country in the world, now has below replacement birth rate.
That is not the only reason for immigration. Immigrants work hard, start businesses, excel in the sciences, do jobs that Americans won't do.
I am a grandchild of immigrants. They came with nothing. All their grandchildren are doing well. The hope that my grandparents were given by this country is worth sharing with others. It adds to our strength. It adds to the value people see in America in the world, land of the free.
Yes, it should be legal and limited to our circumstances and needs, but it is good for the country.
It seems like you have a vested interest in believing most of that, and so I won't bother responding to it, except to note that "jobs that Americans won't do" are actually "jobs Americans won't do at the extremely low level of wages that mass immigration has pushed it down to." However:
> Well if you have some sure fire method of getting people to have babies let us know.
I'm going to turn this around on you and say that you *also* have to answer this question without resorting to immigration. The fact that you seem to have missed is that the groups that immigrate *also* have below-replacement birth rates after a generation or two in a Western country. Moreover, as industrialization spreads, every country is having their birth rate drop below replacement, so the well of immigrants will run dry even if you were content to have the West be a population sink indefinitely. It is not sustainable even from a completely pro-immigrant open-borders perspective!
I disagree with this framing of the actual impacts of USA immigration regardless of method, but I can also admit that's a prior that I simply don't want to argue about here.
"Increasingly they will opt for the second one even if it turns out to be rounding-error levels of immigration."
I understand that as a political outcome, but I think it goes with my general thesis that people are voting on this because they're being told it's a problem and that less immigration, directionally, is the solution. It's just not relevant enough to most people's lives for it to be a felt problem, not least because no one has documented-status-vision. Someone doesn't need to be nativist to buy that illegal immigration is a problem. I do think our nativist President played a huge role in otherwise non-nativist people concluding that it is.
So you said before. But if anything, excessive immigration is less visible than it could be. It's disguised as visa overstays, refugee claims, or just straight-up ignoring a removal order, for example. And you don't usually *see* who takes a job you applied for, nor is it written on someone's face that they're an immigrant when they commit crimes, because as you say, no one has documented-status-vision.
I suspect that Americans writ large would be pleased with a heavily revised asylum system (and not in Trump's manner of white people from South Africa only). I don't know if that would poll or campaign well, but the end result would, I think, make a lot of people happy. It'd be much closer to Obama's strategy of a high number of deportations of people who just arrived.
The concept of asylum should be people who are being persecuted in the country they are in immediate danger - opposition journalists, human rights advocates- which is what it was in the past before anybody just saying the magic words "I want asylum" at the border might be allowed in the country to not be adjudicated for many years.. Of course given the choice of swimming rivers and crossing deserts vs saying one sentence, anybody would claim asylum.
Domestic violence and gang recruitment were never previously considered for asylum and are largely not provable, the gangs dont send recruitment letters.
The Biden administration after letting in record numbers of asylum claimants about faced in June 2024 with remain in Mexico. The millions of refugees in Colombia from Venezuela are not being deported, and yes, there is more work in the US, and better pay, but that is not what asylum is about.
One the one hand, this what I'm getting at with a "heavily revised asylum system." On the other hand, "given the choice of swimming rivers and crossing deserts vs saying one sentence, anybody would claim asylum" seems to miss that a lot of people claim asylum after swimming the rivers and crossing the deserts. Matt Yglesias talks about needing to say no to sympathetic cases. This is what he means. It is not easy for people claiming asylum. It might not be viable, and it needs to change, but these people are not lazy.
Sentiment to immigrants is actually warmer than ever.
It’s just that the new paradigms enabled people to vote on it. Trump broke the monopoly of the boys club when he won the primary and gave people a chance to vote on it.
The immigration waves in the 19th and 20th century weren’t grass roots operations and weren’t popular: the elites just did them anyways
That is certainly a viewpoint. I would stipulate that "immigration may be a more concrete problem for Europe than for the US" is a bit like saying "the fire is hotter than the frying pan", and that cities like Chicago, NYC, and even Dallas and San Francisco are not "southern border towns".
I won't delve too much into the analogy, but I don't have any argument with the fire being hot. I don't know much about Europe. I contend that the pan isn't; people are told that it is, and in a few places in America it has been, but largely, again, the main thing that changed is visibility, not a rise in negative impact on people's lives. This is why I don't factor Chicago or San Francisco into the calculus except as data points on visibility. I contend that their problems aren't caused by immigrants.
I said it could have been "something else." The poor. The unemployed. Druggies. Heck, pick an ethnic community that is and already has been here. People could have blamed one of these or anything else for what they see as the problems of the US, but instead we got "they're emptying their prisons and insane asylums to rape our girls." Maybe something else wouldn't have been as effective rhetorically, but it's not because something else would've been more or less true.
The thing with most predictions that take a wave election and extrapolate growth forward is that political trends are very hard to discern and normally the big wave election is the result of a missed trend (or an obvious one that gets ignored for partisan wishful thinking) hitting its crest and not a new one just starting to surge.
I dunno, is getting dumber a big ideological shift?
Completely irrelevant rant, but maybe someone here has an answer: Why is it "ouster" and not "ousting"? I know we got it from French and that's how they conjugate it or whatever. But English is like 65% French and we don't do that for any other word. Seems odd
The state/health of liberal democracy and any fundamental change in the psyche of voters seem to me very separate things (though I think fallacy of that psychic shift is very noteworthy and well treated in the post). Authoritarians either need keep the popular will on their side by some combination of getting things right (mostly economically) or some rallying cry (usually toward a mostly fabricated enemy) or, when the hearts of popular will can't be won, then fear/intimidation/force/corruption. Europe seems to be scoring some great points in response to poor economic effects, but it ain't over until it's over, and on this side of the pond team authoritarian is still swinging. I think the economics will continue to be a liability for them but if there's some fluke and they find a way to change that or are somehow able make that a secondary issue (doubtful but possible), then they'll have a chance to maintain control and continue to remove democratic guardrails ... and to support the enemies of democracy around the globe (it's just so wild to write that about a US government, but I don't know how to see it any other way). Just because they haven't always executed well doesn't mean they don't learn from their mistakes. The story of authoritarians is to win enough popular will to get power and then do their best to set things up so that they don't necessarily need the popular will to stay in power. I don't give them very strong odds at this point, which is encouraging, but this game seems far from over. And politics is so much like college basketball ... however big the leads get, it seems like the 90% of games have a 2 point margin with 2 minutes to go. They're gonna tighten this up.
Good to see you optimistic for a change. I think it’s also worth mentioning that old-school liberalism is just boring, and gets resistance not just from the right (Orban, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, that Czech guy) but also the left (Chavez, Morales, Danny Ortega, Correa) because it’s more fun to pitch black-and-white solutions. For me the turning point is more like 2000, when people complained Gore and Bush were basically the same. I wish we had that problem now.
You have a very reasonable analysis of how political change often sweeps through populations. It's a shame you just cancelled yourself by pinning Trump's comeback on the trans community. It's too bad really, but I don't make the rules 🤷🏼♂️. Sorry
I didn't pin anything on the trans community (if anything, the ACLU is to blame!). That ad appears to have cost Kamala two points in an election she lost by 1.5.
"Groups" begin with gr. Grrrr. I don't have numbers, but it also seemed quite devastating to her prospects when Kamala was asked if she would have done anything different than Biden, and she said, "No. I love inflation and a lawless border." I paraphrase but her answer was a firm no.
The one thing I miss about a Mac is that accents are so much easier to put on letters.
Option-E, then type the letter.
> the common man, whom they considered smelly, ignorant, and more than ready to burn witches or murder Jews if they thought it would increase crop yields by even a miniscule amount.
It's *much* worse than that. Look up the story about the Russian peasant, the angel, and the neighbor's cow. That's what people are really like ... and small communities are notorious for being hotbeds of envy. What people passionately struggle for is to raise there status *relative to* the people around them, and over much of history, pushing down some other group has been a more practical way to achieve that than working hard to raise one's self up.
Indeed, I think I could cook up a theory that "modernity" is an enormous social trick that puts everyone into a large enough social context that working harder to increase one's income is a more effective way to improve one's status than is burning down a neighbor's house. But once that genie gets out of the bottle, it comes to dominate the world.
Has anyone listened to the Substack podcast "Letters from an American" today? It's dated April 13 but it's release a day later). Heather Cox Richardson lays out the "rich white dudes take control, crash economy" we've been going through since the 1850's.
But listen to the computer voice that comes with her written version (she does a printed and audio version simultaneously).
She makes Jeff look really lazy lol. That way you can avoid her Elizabeth Warren like scolding history teacher voice.
She's well worth a free listen.
She's also a terrible businessman person like Jeff.
Enjoy!
It's an odd assertion that the economy has somehow "crashed" since 1850.
As much as I have little but contempt for HCR, she's referring to the twenty-year(ish) economic boom-and-bust that basically started in the 1820s and went until the Great Depression.
Worley: there has been ups and downs.....