I wrote this in 2007. If you want to know what happened with Trump, skim through.
I don’t have much passion one way or the other. Having to speak Spanish to get a decent wet burrito doesn’t bother me, I like cinco de Mayo and it strikes me as vaguely fair that our policy should help families stay together. America survived the Irish invasion, the Italian invasion, the Nordic/Germanic invasion, the slavic invasion, the (involuntary) African invasion and the Chinese invasion so it seems ludicrously insecure to think that one more will kill us. Whichever way they went on the issue the worst heat most Democrats are likely to face will come from David Broder.
But lord, what a tough spot for Republicans. At its heart the GOP has two basic camps* – business conservatives who bankroll the party and the social conservatives/theocons who staff it. In that light one could say the towering achievement of Bush’s term as POTUS was that he defied the centrifugal forces of majority power and held the GOP’s unlikely coalition together as firmly and as long as he did. If so, his towering failure will undoubtedly be his adamant support of this immigration bill.
I have tried for days to think of something that could wedge the social cons apart from the business cons [better] than immigration but I just can’t do it. The Chamber of Commerce loves our current system because one can pay illegals practically nothing and they will thank you for it. In their view any fix to the current system has to keep bringing in large numbers of people with poor language skills (can’t have them reading those OSHA flyers on the wall) and a weak bargaining position, e.g. guest workers. Otherwise Americans had better get ready to start paying more for hotel beds, restaurant meals and packed meats.
The key problem is that the thing that the business cons need more than anything is exactly what the social cons desperately want to end. This issue has no conceivable middle ground because the social cons want less of precisely the same thing that business cons need more of. The historical calm between these two camps lasted and could only last as long as party leaders had the good sense to keep the issue off the front burner altogether. Any move to change the status quo would necessarily set off contrary demands that could easily spiral into open warfare.
Pushing immigration now was a dumb move by Bush, but it was far dumber than I think most people realize. Hilzoy has argued that the immigration is really a convenient outlet for Republicans to vent their deeper disappointment over issues J through Z, and I’m sure that there is plenty of that, but I think that the president’s screwup is more profound than Hilzoy lets on. The president’s party is reeling from Iraq, rudderless and lacking in leadership at any level, facing political losses as bad or worse than 2006, and now his own mulish push on immigration has lit the fuse on a wedge-shaped charge** that could split the party in two.
Running hard on immigration is a brilliant way to win the primary. Nativist bigots make up the bigger half of the Republican party. The problem is that the same strategy becomes catastrophically stupid if you want to do anything other than win a GOP Presidential primary. It alienates everyone who is not a nativist bigot. It makes life especially hard for the Chamber of Commerce wing who need unregulated immigrants just as badly as the nativist bigots hate them. The funny thing is that the party exists and has always existed to serve the Chamber, more specifically the very wealthy people who own the businesses that keep the CoC funded. Since Lincoln died the one through line of GOP policy has and one expects always will be eliminating the inheritance tax, and then lower taxes for the very top, and then weaker regulations on financial transactions. After that comes less regulations on monopolies, polluting, whatever. Plutocrats only grabbed on to the bigot vote after Lyndon Johnson freed it up by embracing civil rights.
Maybe the bigots would some day figure out the scam, but right now we got to beat that Jimmy Carter guy. The tea party had all the pieces in place, but then the tea party turned out to be just another grift to squeeze money and votes from poor, desperate chumps terrified by bugbears on FOX. But the exploit was always there. You just needed someone desperate, stupid or crazy enough to use it. You needed someone who maybe stumbled on the exploit by accident, and had enough independent money to survive the Chamber folks desperately trying to shut him down.
***Update***
With thanks to Jeffro in the comments, this think piece at NBC strikes me as too optimistic by half.
“The party of Reagan was the party that had coalitions that worked seamlessly together,” GOP strategist John Feehery said. “What Donald Trump has identified is a party that is literally splitting apart between the donor class and the working class parts of the party.”
Whether or not Trump prevails in November, the GOP is set for a rebuilding process like none in recent memory.
The GOP is set for debuilding in 2017. The bigots figured out the exploit. Pandora is not going to un-open that box.
Corner Stone
I think it’s beautiful that even longtime hard core grifters like Ann Coulter are getting caught in the shrapnel as Trump’s “The Softening” now enters our lexicon.
Jeffro
NBC News has up a very good article entitled “beyond Trump”, which notes that immigration is the number one issue dividing the party, and that after November there will be a rebuilding process “like none in recent memory”.
I think the latter comment assumes facts – ie, the word “rebuilding” – not in evidence.
Corner Stone
I always considered the push for some type of immigration reform to be about the only thing the W administration got right*. But it turned on him so fast and so hard he probably felt like he’d been beaned by a Nolan Ryan fastball.
*By “right” I mean it could have helped the country and immigrants if addressed at the time. They got a few political calculations correct during his two terms but they were usually at the expense of the country.
MFA
A prescient piece, Tim. F.
Felonius Monk
Per Josh Marshall at TPM:
(emphasis added)
ploeg
As it happened, the someone didn’t need that much money, and the Chamber folks didn’t try that hard to shut him down. In the end, the Chamber folks bought into the nativist salesmanship, if not the entire nativist program, and hoped that the general election voters would forget what happened in the primary.
Applejinx
@Jeffro: Might be like Spinal Tap’s ‘none more black’.
None rebuilding. The rebuilding of none. Memory of the building of the none.
Corner Stone
@Jeffro:
Absolutely no chance. This is more media fantasy like Trump’s Pivot, Both Sides, Fair and Balanced, etc.
Ambitious politicians in the South will see the destruction being a smush on immigration causes to political careers and will double and triple down on racism and bigotry.
jeffreyw
“The Softening” – what an appropriate moniker! It describes what is happening to Trump fans’ tumescence.
schrodinger's cat
I wouldn’t pop the champagne cork just yet.Republican party has always had an anti-immigrant streak, even from the days of the sainted Lincoln. In today’s GOP immigrant bashers like Mark Krikorian and Chris Kobach have a seat a the table and did before Trump started his run. They want to undo the Immigration act of 1965 and get rid of the birthright citizenship. Targeting illegal immigration is just their starting salvo.
Peale
I don’t know. I do think one needs to give more thought to the issue of immigration than whether or not it’s a wedge issue for republicans. And I do think there are issues that the business conservatives and nativists can unite on. Ending birthright citizenship is one. the issues that the right call amnesty is another. As long as the government doesn’t fine business owners or hold them accountable for the people they hire, the CoC types might be fine with a lot of draconian changes. Their risk is that the immigrants aren’t just workers. They are consumers and also eventually voters. But they still have a decade to figure out the voting issue before democrat voting Hispanics really start to challenge their hold on rural states and congressional district. Reforms that tamp down on the creation of voting citizens could potentially delay that day further.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
Every time I hear it I giggle, yes I know it’s juvenile, but I’ll take my laughs and giggles where I can, The gnashing of teeth is hilarious, the round table on this mornings Joes debacle, was all a flutter because Trump has now the adopted Lil’ Marco and JEB ! position after beating them up for it during the primary. There was a aura of a 6 year old whining “that’s not fair”, he beat me up for it then stole it. Immigration has always been a very complex issue, but as long as the republicans have their carnival barkers out there on the airwaves reducing it to AMNESTY, they will never be able to support it. They’ve demonized everyone and everything, and now there is no grown up who could go out and tell them that it’s time to grow up and eat your broccoli. While trying to blow up ‘government’ over the last 40 years, they’ve managed to blow up their own party.
Tim F.
@ploeg: The Chamber folks looked at Jeb, they looked at Scott Walker, they looked at Rubio, and they poured half a fifth of scotch on their Wheaties.
They did not fucking look at Ted Cruz.
cmorenc
@TimF:
Brilliant analysis Tim. Plenty of other political commentators have made the same main points you made above, but never so clearly and succinctly, at a just-right level of detail. You’ve written about this in a way that makes it easy for we readers to carry your points forward in our own conversations with others.
Corner Stone
@ploeg:
But the “threat” of that much money was a weapon only a similarly situated candidate could have used so effectively. Even a relatively wealthy person, of say Romney level, could not have gotten away with threatening to self-fund – and gotten all the free air time from frequently spouting it.
Trump’s mythical $10B was the weapon, and no one called him on it effectively.
Major Major Major Major
Business wants comprehensive reform because they know reform is coming one way or another, and they want it on their terms. It’s bare greed, but in the tumbrel-avoiding way, like so many other bits of social progress.
schrodinger's cat
Visa violations are not a felony offense but the offenders are treated worse than convicted criminals by our government. In the bizarro world of Trumpbots illegal immigrants have it better than citizens, IRL migrant children have to fight deportation orders without a lawyer to advocate for them. Qualified immigrants have to wait for years even to get the opportunity to even be eligible to apply for a green card.
RareSanity
You were absolutely right in that 2007 post Tim…the split over immigration was inevitable.
Although, I think the business class is just as bigoted as the social cons (see: Trump, Donald), it’s just that they have financial incentive to shut their mouths and look the other way…the social cons don’t.
Corner Stone
I also agree with this line of thought. Once all vestiges of the inheritance tax regs are eliminated everything else can be bought within a generation or so.
enplaned
Agree NBC piece too optimistic. The Trump stain will not fade from the GOP.
The most likely scenario is what NBC calls Stalemate but which will like be Civil War w/in the GOP.
shomi
@Jeffro: As long as they keep winning elections there will be no rebuilding. Trump will lose badly, but from what I am seeing the downticket races are pretty close. I thought Dems were going to take the senate for sure but right now it’s only slightly better than a 50/50 proposition. It should not even be close with the amount of Repub senators up for re-election in battleground states.
Also, Dems are still basically fucked in the midterms. Whatever gains are made this election will probably be lost and then some in the midterms just like last time. For all the same reasons as last time. Dems just show up for Prez election years but Repubs show up for all elections.
Chris
Isn’t the obvious scam for business conservatives to wholeheartedly embrace harsher and harsher measures against Hispanic immigration (no pathway to citizenship, no guest-worker program, yada yada)? That way it looks like they’re doing what the base wants, while at the same time keeping as much of the immigration as possible (because of course it’ll continue) illegal, which is to say, the kind of easily exploited workforce with no rights that they love.
This may or may not still be possible – Trump having led the base into a campaign against the GOP elites and the GOP elites having been as anti-Trump as they have, the nativists’ trust in them may simply be impossible to rebuild.
Peale
Two years ago, they could have started to change, but couldn’t. The right bloggers actually had an immigration issue where the influx of children caught at the border was not being handled well by the administration. They found children being held in sordid conditions. Rather than use that as a way to reach Hispanic voters, they decided to demonize those children and oppose any measures to treat them more humanely. As long as mid-terms can be won by doing that, I don’t expect that to change.
enplaned
@RareSanity: no, actually Trump is quite unlike most (not all) corporate leaders. Corporate America, by and large, lined up in favor of gay marriage. In a multicultural world, embracing diversity is just good business.
cmorenc
@Jeffro:
I think Paul Ryan is deeply ambitious to be the one to make the attempt to undertake the project of a remodeling/rebuilding of the GOP. His policy ideas are slicked-over Randian bullshit filled with deeply dishonest presentations of budgetary ideas, but he’s a “true believer” in conservative patent medicine for the country, and he truly does have faith in his utopian vision for America’s future. Of course, we correctly understand that it’s a deeply dystopian vision, a key part of which is that the best way to lift up the “takers” is a lot of “tough love” from the makers (which conveniently pushes the takers out of the way of the makers), but we digress from the fact that he sees himself as a genuine secular prophet.
El Caganer
If you’re suffering from general election (“GE”) trouble, try PIVOT – proven in races at all levels of American government. When the moment is there to be seized, you can’t afford to be too rigid. WARNING: side effects may include lack of enthusiasm, incoherent rage and bewildered apathy. If softness lasts more than 4 interviews, seek immediate help from an alt-right professional.
enplaned
I used to have the same GOP taxonomy, except I called them the Venal and Fundy wings.
Turns out that wasn’t right. If this election proved anything, it’s that for most GOP voters, “conservative” and “evangelical” were meaningless labels over the racist reality. In other words, there was a hidden Asshole wing bigger than either of the Venal or Fundy wings.
schrodinger's cat
@Peale: Those children have to defend themselves against federal lawyers in deportation proceedings. NYT article
Tim F.
@Peale: The truth is that they never could have started to change. The Chamber had a lot of hopes pinned on Rubio but Rubio was doomed to fail from day one. South Florida is just too much of an anomaly within the GOP. All those hard-right Cuban refugees provided a hothouse environment that left Rubio totally unprepared to deal with the inevitable nativist backlash. Every Republican knew that they had to finesse the issue somehow but at the same time every Republican BUT RUBIO knew the dittoheads in their home district too well to try something that stupid. Rubio was a virgin the GOP dressed up in pretty robes and carried on their shoulders right to the edge of the volcano.
MattF
I see it happening, I can see why they can’t resolve it, but… why, exactly, is immigration such a central issue for Republicans? For example, the anti-immigration sentiment comes from places that don’t actually get that much immigration. And, too, I can see why some businesses profit from the existence of low-wage staffing– but is it that big a deal?
My own guess is that immigration is a proxy for a long list of other things, including, e.g., racism.
schrodinger's cat
@Tim F.: The current status quo suits the suits at the Chamber. Until its is the CEO of Tyson sitting in detention centers instead of the workers who are caught in an ICE dragnet. Nothing is going to change.
Matt McIrvin
The thing I’m seeing is that there are really three factions. There’s the Chamber of Commerce faction, the Southern religious-bigoted faction… and a more Northern faction that is just bigoted, wants to stick it to liberals and doesn’t really give a crap about religion one way or the other. That third faction is actually Trump’s core supporters, and the developing split between them and Ted Cruz’s people in faction two was one of the more interesting things that happened this cycle.
schrodinger's cat
@MattF: They are not anti-immigration if the immigrants were the right kind. Look at how Melania’s possible visa violations story didn’t rile Trump’s base at all.
Tim F.
@MattF: I think racism is enough. You can dress it up in all kinds of economic language but ultimately a lot of people think there’s a shortage of stuff and they want to make sure only people like them get the stuff.
Meanwhile there is a shortage of stuff because assholes who own the Chamber of Commerce took it all. As long as the plebes they robbed fight each other the plutocrats get to keep all the stuff. That is why FOX exists.
jacy
Count me in the camp believes that the Republican party with learn nothing from this debacle. They will violently and completely learn nothing so hard, that it’ll be like Trump never happened.
Major Major Major Major
@enplaned: pretty much this. Somebody here the other day was noting how all of conservatism, except for business (and even then…), is just papered over racist bullshit. States’ rights, tax cuts, evangelical (‘white’) Christianity, guns, etc. Now, the second-gen conservatives seem to actually believe in some of these as ends rather than means, but otherwise, under that lens it’s not surprising that bare bigotry was able to unite them all.
See also: Lee Atwater, “n****r quote”
Quinerly
What time is HRC’s big Nevada speech today? Thanks!
enplaned
@MattF: because brown people.
cmorenc
We progressives should recognize that we have an analogous tension going on within the democratic party and progressive movement – that’s precisely represented by the tension during the dem primary campaign between Clinton and Sanders. The Clinton wing wants to somehow retain the embedded ties of mutual interest the democratic party has to the financial and more progressive-friendly business community, whereas the Sanders wing wants to mount a revolution to overthrow it. The difference is that although it took Sanders uncomfortably long to come around to realizing that coalition with Clinton and the constituencies she represents is the only practical way forward to achieving his goals, there is nonetheless a tension there that could split the progressive movement and democratic party asunder if as President, Clinton winds up sliding backward too far into a DLC-like approach.
But I would far rather take our chances on the progressive/dem side of finding common ground to go forward than over there on the gop/xenophobic side.
Tim F.
@schrodinger’s cat: The status quo is great for the Chamber. They would prefer more guest worker rules with lots of loopholes to exploit but the system right now is something they can live with. The problem is that bigots can’t live with it. They desperately want to do something draconian about undocumented immigrants. The CoC desperately does not want that to happen. They would prefer some modest improvements to the system but they can NOT abide reactionary changes like the disastrous Alabama bill which almost destroyed the state’s farming sector.
enplaned
@Major Major Major Major: interesting thing is that most liberals and even,quietly, some conservatives understood this to some degree. But it still came as a big surprise, even to the GOP.
Quite amazing the GOP managed to keep the crazy aunt hidden for all those years.
Cacti
What a lot of happy horse shit. The party of Reagan was a deal with the devil, built on wink and nod racial bigotry and white resentment.
The devil has now come for his due. Trump has wrecked the GOP because rather than dog whistle his bigotry, he’s been blaring it through a rusty trombone, and the rubes won’t have it any other way now.
Major Major Major Major
@cmorenc:
I am so sick of hearing this. Evidence of this possibility, please. Cuz it’s not her platform, or her speeches, or the last fifteen years of history.
Peale
@jacy: yep. There will be another blue ribbon commission of the nephews of GOP bigwigs just like the last time. They will note that in the long term they need to start winning more youth and appeal to Hispanics. They will note how the Hispanics and Asians are really the natural constituents of conservatism because they have social conservative values and are hard working (unlike those handout seeking blacks). And then that process will run up against the southern and rural firewall that never wants to make an appeal to a non-Christian, non-white, group because an appeal is the same as a concession.
Tim F.
@enplaned: The aunt was the sane one. She kept the rest of her loopy clan hidden away upstairs except for election time.
hovercraft
@Quinerly:
Thu, Aug 25, 2016, 10:00am – 12:00pm PDT
See Hillary in Reno!
Corner Stone
@enplaned:
Hidden where? I have been losing “friends” and have stopped talking to people because of their latent inhumanity and complete lack of empathy, for what seems like the entire Obama presidency.
There was nothing hidden about their approach to “others”, I just simply ran out of the energy to shrug it off and get the conversation back to football or our kids, etc.
MattF
@Tim F.: “What are those boys with the ropes doing upstairs? Well, bless my heart.”
RandomMonster
Great piece, Tim. The more things change, the more they stay the same — only this time with consequences.
enplaned
@Tim F.: the Chamber is in danger of not having a horse they can comfortably ride…
Ian
Jill Stein is coming to my town for a public meeting. What should I ask her?
Peale
@Corner Stone: yep. Trump has actually said nothing that anyone who has more than two republicans friends hasn’t heard since 1985.
NorthLeft12
Up here in Canada I think that most people recognize that we need immigrants to grow our economy due to the low birth rate and aging population. The tension occurs over WHO those immigrants are. The bigots are perfectly okay with “European” immigrants [as long as there are not a lot of swarthy ones] but object to Africans, Arabic, East Asians, and Latinos. For the most part, they seem okay with Chinese/Japanese/Koreans.
We hear the same old BS over immigrants “taking over”, “destroying our culture”, ad nauseam. These same bigots don’t have anything good to say about the indigenous people of Canada either, so they seem to make their judgements on a persons skin tone more than any other factor.
I’m happy to report that at present, non-bigots seem to be winning this argument and Canada is allowing more people to enter. A win win IMO.
greennotGreen
The fact that we as a nation turn away children! at our borders is deeply shameful. How can the fundamentalists have so much love for the unborn and so little for the born? I do not care that they come illegally. We know that refugees (“immigrants”) from much of Central America are fleeing violence, and it they return many will face death. And we do nothing.
Until every church in the U.S. is hosting at least one child or family, they better not even spout their Christianist bullshit at me.
“…Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
This.
If hidden, it was hiding in plain sight. Most major websites have gotten rid of un-moderated or anonymous comment sections, because they turned into a sewer of right wing racism and misogyny.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Doesn’t this account for the Southern faction as well?
Donald Trump is probably the poster boy for “bigoted and want to stick it to liberals and don’t really care about anything else,” yet he won most Southern states, IIRC
nominus
Lawd Hammercy, go read the comment threads on that 2007 post. I’m getting Angela Rye-level eyerolls up in here.
Cacti
@Ian:
As a Harvard-trained physician, how do you sleep at night knowing that coddling the anti-vax movement costs lives?
Tim F.
@enplaned: The Chamber is in danger of becoming the horse.
Corner Stone
@cmorenc: Not more of this crap, sheesh.
Corner Stone
The only “revolution” related to anything Sanders is that the word is used in the branding of his already failed political organization.
Ian
@Cacti:
Thats good. I like that one.
enplaned
@Tim F.: fair enough. But it is surprising how long they were able to maintain the façade, and that was because the scam was two-way. They scammed the US public to believe that the racist assholes who violently resisted civil rights had become principled conservatives or pious evangelicals.
But they scammed racist assholes into believing that the GOP gave a shit.
And what do you know, it turned out the racist assholes got wise to the scam before the Very Serious People in the media or elsewhere who really believed the bullshit about the principled conservatives and the pious evangelicals. You know, the Real Americans, salt of the earth types…
Roger Moore
The other thing that’s driving a big wedge between the CoC and the bigots is the big demographic shift we’re always talking about. It used to make sense for businesses to cater to the bigots both because the business owners were often bigots and because the bigots outnumbered- or at least out purchased- the people they were bigoted against. Now, though, the businesses are mostly faceless corporations, and minorities have enough purchasing power that businesses want to cater to them instead of the bigots.
Chris
@jacy:
Every Republican who’s not a Trump supporter right now is deeply committed to the notion that Trump is a fluke, an accident, a mysterious and inexplicable one-time event, which has absolutely no relationship to anything conservative at all. That’s pretty much the tell right there. No, they are going to be very careful not to learn anything from the Trump mess.
Cacti
Tweet of the day:
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
People being willfully blind is not the same as hidden, the GOP has been giving themselves plausible deniability for decades. African Americans have been voting for democrats at rates of over 90 % for years for a reason. We are not blind or stupid, we saw that every time there was a way to keep us down or push us back, the republicans championed it, or created it. We are not naive, we know that the democrats are far from perfect, but compared to the other side we’ll take then every time. Donald , unfortunately for them doesn’t seem to think the dog whistle is necessary, he thought since yelling has always worked for him in the past, it would work here too. Unfortunately removing plausible deniability makes a whole bunch of people skittish.
enplaned
@Tim F.: nah, they don’t have the votes. The Chamber is always the parasite, needing a host to infect…
Just One More Canuck
@Ian: “Dr. Stein, how much does Putin pay you?”
greennotGreen
@greennotGreen: BTW, the U.S. has about 350,000 Christian congregations, so if each one sponsored one (or one more) family or child, that would help alleviate a lot of suffering.
Knight of Nothing
@RareSanity: their bigotry allows them to ruthlessly exploit them as workers (see: slavery, American). FIFY
ThresherK (GPad)
OT: It’s precautionary but S-T-K is now getting her second wheelchair ride of the day into the ER. It’s not an emergency, but here we are. We stopped to get coffee between the Urgent Care and the ER, that’s how non-emergency it is.
Our insurance is good so that’s not the issue. Just seems like a misapplication of resources.
Peale
@Cacti: ah. So that explains it. They were in Mississippi to talk secession?
enplaned
@greennotGreen: but, but, but, they’re *brown* children…
Capri
@MattF: Even in places with little immigration, the right wing media talkers dwell on it like nothing else. Listen to conservative radio more than 20 minutes and you will hear that immigrants get free health care no matter what time of day or who is talking.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
@Cacti:
Yep and yep.
If there’s any difference, it’s that in the old days, Republican leaders preferred to hide behind a paper-thin veneer of respectability – religion, economics, what have you. Trump doesn’t even bother with the veneer – he appeals to the assholes by being an asshole with no pretense rather than the cutesy wink-wink-nudge-nudge “if you know what I mean and I think you do!” thing that most politicians hide behind.
But that difference was only ever in the public image. Nobody who’s spent any time at all in the Republican blogosphere is surprised by Trump. He’s what most of them always were.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: They’ll vote for him, for the most part. But Trump is weaker among whites in deep-red Southern states than even John McCain or Mitt Romney was.
Speaking anecdotally, I keep hearing that people support Trump without much enthusiasm in the reddest states… you don’t see the storm of yard signs, bumper stickers, etc. But conservatives in blue, blue Massachusetts? They love the guy! Can’t get enough of him. Red-state majorities will vote for him, but the blue-state minority of Republican assholes are really his people.
Knight of Nothing
@enplaned: you’re thinking of the corporate world of finance, retail, and hi-tech. In the cutthroat industries of agribusiness and garment-making, to pick two examples, RareSanity is absolutely correct.
Felonius Monk
@Ian:
Were you born a moron, Jill, or did you just recently become one?
hovercraft
@NorthLeft12:
Glad to see you guys stepping back from the abyss, the longevity of Stephen Harper and his ilk had me concerned there for a while. Nativists are in for some tough choices over the next few decades. Japan is trying for a robot future, Russia is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but at least they have a huge diaspora that they may one day be able to lure back. Unfortunately for your Eurocentric Canuck brethren more black and brown people are fleeing their home country’s than whites. Evangelicals have been trying to boost the white birth rate for years now, unfortunately for them, slogans don’t house, feed, clothe or educate those kids, and there can be only so many 20 kids and counting shows.
enplaned
@Chris: yes, but credit to the GOP for running one of the most successful scams in American history, from 1968 to 2015…
Betsy
@Ian: Don’t ask her. Tell her. You’re the voter, you’re her boss.
Tim F.
@enplaned: Hah, no, being the horse means someone else is on your back holding the reins. Jeb Bush being the horse is ok because the Chamber has been riding that family for generations. They are really one and the same. But if the Chamber is the horse, then who is holding the reins? The bigots. That is not a healthy relationship. The party will collapse completely before that persists for long.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Peale: Looks like Texas has competition.
rikyrah
how powerful is immigration?
Shrub and Co were able to lie us into TWO WARS…
yet, even though they had a lot of genuine Democratic Party Support……
he couldn’t get immigration done.
Uh huh
Uh huh
Betsy
@Chris: AS YOU WERE WRITING YOUR COMMENT, I could hear the white Republican guy in my office saying to the black woman, “Trump only just registered as a Republican to run for President. The problem is he’s still Trump though .. not a real Republican.”
enplaned
@Knight of Nothing: ok, but the former way outweighs the latter. To first order approximation, there is almost garment making left in the US and agricultural employment is not high in the US.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: Its the opposite actually, you pay into both SS and Medicare when you are on one of the temporary H visas but you don’t get those benefits until 5 years after you get a GC or become a citizen (for which there is wait of 3 to 5 years after getting a GC depending on your situation).
If you are not documented you will never derive the benefit of those payroll deductions.
hovercraft
Speaking of “the softening” Katrina Pierson was on TV, cracking everybody up.
tsquared2001
@Ian: What the fuck makes her think she is qualified for an office that requires a very specific skill set?
Roger Moore
@enplaned:
And important point, though, is that “diversity” and “multiculturalism” aren’t things that just happened. LGBTQ people make up a fairly small fraction of the population, so that businesses could, and for a long time did, largely ignore them or even actively discriminate against them. The reason catering to them turned into a good business idea is because they became just one more part of “diversity” that businesses feel a need to cater to. That happened because liberals spent a lot of time and effort building a coalition between different groups of people who aren’t obviously natural allies except that they were all being left out by cis white Christian male society.
jacy
@Chris:
I’ve been watching Morning Joe for a bit in the mornings — I know, might as well hit myself in the head with a hammer — and while they’re currently tsk-tsking Trump big time, they keep saying “And he’s a Democrat!” What the fucking fuck? Pathological, the lot of ’em. But you can see the narrative being woven already, and they’re going to make a fine suit of it and wear that motherfucker out.
enplaned
@Betsy: the two GOPers I work with, on the other hand, think the GOP is dead/dying. Reality will impinge on people at different rates.
Trumpanzees are not going away. Shrieking and poo-flinging has been normalized and revealed as a primary-winning strategy.
hovercraft
@Capri:
Actually the most virulently anti-immigration people tend to be people the furthest from the southern border. Texas is not very keen on the ‘wall’.
Chyron HR
@Ian:
“In your professional opinion, is Secretary Clinton dying or just afflicted with Down Syndrome?”
enplaned
@Roger Moore: correct. But also because corporate types have more in common socially with liberals than with conservatives. Go to same colleges, follow same musicians, etc. And need help of creative types who are typically very liberal…
Corner Stone
@hovercraft: I just saw this on the twitters:
Roger Moore
@Ian:
What is she going to do about chemtrails?
SRW1
@Peale:
If it’s a question of a decade, then those Hispanics are already in country, citizens, and at most waiting to reach their 18th birthday.
hovercraft
@jacy:
Ever since the conventions, when his numbers started to crumble, this has been Joe and Mika’s mantra. The GOP’s mistake was nominating a ‘democrat’. I keep waiting for someone to ask what democratic positions he holds. Bigotry used to be a staple of the democratic party, but that hasn’t been true since 1965 when the great southern exodus began. I think they are using it to absolve the GOP of his sins, so that when he crashes and burns, the GOP can walk away unscathed from the wreckage that ensues.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I believe you, but then why did he do so well in the South during the primary? Did they just hate every one of the other candidates that much more?
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
Shuffles onto the stage, and takes her bow.
Stan
@schrodinger’s cat: “Republican party has always had an anti-immigrant streak, even from the days of the sainted Lincoln”
Actually no. Lincoln tried really hard to muzzle the nativists of his day. As we all know they were pretty damned strong, but they overlapped with the free soilers. In the 1850s the latest wave of immigrants were the germans and the irish, with the Germans coming first (and with only half of them being catholic, and not nearly as poor as the irish, they did better faster). Electorally they were pretty important. The Republican coalition of 1860 included the germans, and they did that by NOT being nativists.
The dems of 1860 included southern dems who were anti-immigrant also.
bluehill
The effect of Bannon and Conway on Trump is becoming more apparent. He’s trying to appear more humane on immigration and minorities to make it less painful for moderate repubs to vote for him while Bannon amps up the conspiracy machine to rally their base and try to depress dem turnout. It’s still a longshot strategy because of everything Trump has already said, but it’s the least worst one that I can think of; more cohesive than what Trump’s team was doing before; and for at least a couple of weeks they have kept Trump relatively contained.
Peale
@Betsy: Yeah. I know. When all is said and done, Republicans will just knock up the loss to not nominating a republican, whine that the focus on Trump (the Clinton plant) meant she wasn’t vetted, and shift back into whining more about how Clinton and the black voters stole the election. They will demand that only a true republican run next time. And surprisingly, that true republican will have all of trump’s “policy” concerns, since beyond protecting social security, there isn’t a hairs breadth of difference between what he wants to do and what Republicans have been promising to do since 1992.
nominus
@enplaned: I have a few Twitter friends who claim they’re “conservative but not Republican”. At this point I don’t think any Conservative nor Republican could define what either of those words mean anymore, the definitions shift based on their personal hypocrisies and neuroses. All they’re doing is pointing to one another claiming that they’re “not a real _________”. That’s what tells me the coalition is truly coming apart.
hovercraft
@SRW1:
50 k Latinos who were born here turn 18 every month. Every month. That’s why the next frontier is birth right citizenship. Something something barn door…..
Peale
@bluehill: Actually, its been five days of containment. Not weeks. And in that period of time he spent one more berating Joe Scarborough. And came out in favor of improving inner cities by allowing cops to torture (sorry, get tough with) suspects.
BR
I honestly think that despite our celebration on this, almost all of Trump’s supporters are going to look the other way, telling themselves he’s just lying to the media to get elected. They fully support that.
I think the numbers are going to show that this flip-flop won’t hurt him.
Chris
@Betsy:
Damn, I’m good.
@jacy:
Oh yeah. But it’s no different from their insistence that fascism was left-wing, socialist, because nothing bad can ever, ever come from their side of the aisle.
enplaned
@Stan: the cat is right. One of the threads that went into the GOP were the Know Nothings. And the GOP was anti immigration later because the Dems were the party of Irish immigrants, including Tammany.
nominus
@hovercraft: yep, I think that was noted in yesterday’s map thread – the anti-brown hysteria increases the further you get from any natural or artificial borders. The closer you are to it, the more used to it you are. Before it has time to breed contempt, familiarity breeds comfort.
schrodinger's cat
@Stan: Wasn’t the Republican party in Lincoln’s time pretty anti-Irish?
enplaned
@BR: there’s no reason for any kind of celebration until the race is called for Clinton. At which point you are all allowed 24 hours off before we commence worrying again.
Chris
@Stan:
Yep. That’s one of the sad things about the Republican Party’s evolution. You have to go really far back for this, but Abe Lincoln is one of the few politicians from the old days about whom I have absolutely no doubt that he’d be a liberal Democrat if he were around today.
enplaned
@nominus: familiarity breeds the realization that they’re human too.
btom89
If anyone remembers, I posted a children’s book PDF on Monday morning about Bill Clinton’s fun and obsession with balloons. I updated it with higher resolution copies of the watercolor pictures and redid the PDF conversion so it’s a better update with better pictures. I wanted to thank everyone for their feedback and see if it looked better to the ones who see this one. I loved the suggestion that i send this to Hillary. I may very well do that, but I don’t know if I need to put this up in a public forum first or not. Thanks again and let me know what you think. Someone also told me he saw a typo in the story and it’s throwing me because I know I saw a typo before, but now every time I read it, it’s like my brain is fixing the typo every time I read it so I can’t find it again. Let me know if you like this high res version better and thanks again.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2gmvn0i5ji6wln9/Bill%20gets%20his%20Balloon%20v3.pdf?dl=0
Fair Economist
@Matt McIrvin:
There may be a protest vote element here (remember a lot of Trump supporters want to “shake up the system”. In blue states they can protest vote for Trump without consequences. But in a swing or moderately red state, there could be consequences so they may be less excited about protest voting.
Iowa Old Lady
@BR: Lawrence O’Donnell had Glenn Beck on last night, and that’s essentially what Beck says he gleans from the calls he gets from Trump supporters.
Knight of Nothing
@enplaned: it is estimated that 3 million people work as migrant farmers in the USA. If you eat any meat or fresh produce, chances are good that a migrant worker handled it at some point. As for the garment industry, true enough, but sweatshops are still a thing in the USA in the 21st century. I used these two as examples, but I should have added the service and hospitality industries as well.
BR
@bluehill:
Yeah, agreed. And AP and other outlets will go along with the smears because something something optics.
I think the Clinton campaign has realized that the worst thing that could happen to Trump is that Bannon is outed for who he is.
Btw, we need journalists to ask Conway what she is in charge of and what Bannon is in charge of, specifically. Because no matter what she says, he won’t be happy with what she says, and it will likely cause internal division.
Chris
@nominus:
Yep. And they did it to Romney, and they did it to McCain, and at the very end they did it to Bush. It’s almost enough to make you wonder, if the GOP is so absolutely riddled with liberals, what the point of it is anymore.
@BR:
His floor is 45%. He won’t go below. I’m positive about that.
sunny raines
it is not correct to be calling the republicans fighting immigration as social cons – their social views have nothing to do with it. What they are is non-rich (aka working class) republicans that hate immigrants on their false belief that immigrants are taking their jobs, getting free social services, and the probably at least partially true notion that immigrants are suppressing their wages and work conditions. In other words, the republican schlubs blame immigrants for their loss of access to the mythical “American Dream” instead of placing it where it belongs on the very plutocrats they are in liege with and that work to further oppress them. A stupider, more manipulated group of schlubs you could not invent than the republican base- their vast oppression is the reagan legacy and they are so stupid they keep playing along: ‘hit-me, hit-me again please’.
nominus
@enplaned: not so much. Cognitive Dissonance is real and powerful. There’s a reason Texas is still quite red in spite of them not caring much about immigration. A lot red Texans still very much hate the Mexicans and don’t think of them as human, they just realize how the economic engines work down here and aren’t in any hurry to change that up for the sake of anyone.
BR
@Fair Economist:
Also folks have pointed out that in blue states like Oregon folks are ideological more than partisan, so they are more extreme and purist, which is why Clinton isn’t going to win Oregon by much. Whereas a state like North Carolina is more partisan than ideological so people will rally around their flag.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@hovercraft: My wife and I were having a late-night chat last night, talking about how, even though we’re pretty anti-child, we could have been talked into it in our late 20s/early 30s.
But even had we been married back then, we really couldn’t have done it, simply because we couldn’t have afforded it. We’re both college educated. We’re both professionals. We’re probably in the top 20% nationally for income if not higher. And there was no way, simply no way we could have done it. Have a house or have a kid, but not both. We opted for a roof over our heads.
Tell the fucking evangelicals to work on that if they want more fucking white kids. Because right now there is nothing but downside and poverty to having a child.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
Perfection.
Cacti
As distasteful as some find it, it think it’s necessary that Hillary make an appeal to moderate and educated Republicans in red states that are polling competitively.
Trump and the new American fascist movement doesn’t need to just lose. They need to be crushed at the polls in the most demoralizing way possible. Fascist movements need to have a stake pounded through their heart, their corpse burned, and the ashes scattered to the wind.
? Martin
California, having successfully reduced greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels (goal was by 2020), now has a goal of a 40% reduction from 1990 levels by 2030.
Businesses in states that are fighting this are going to be in for a shock down the road when they discover that they are uncompetitive with businesses that have already embraced this. Most of CAs energy advantages come from simply not using it, and clean energy is expensive to build but extremely cheap in future costs. Greenhouse gases are really indicative of money being wasted.
A bit over 50% of greenhouse gas comes from either electricity production or from transportation. CA will need to make even greater investments and incentives in residential and bulk solar and wind, and in EVs and autonomous EVs.
amk
@BR: It may or may not hurt his numbers but it sure won’t help.
hovercraft
I’m sitting in my cubicle listening to a co-worker lamenting the choices in the election. ” I liked Rubio, I liked Cruz, but Trump is a buffoon, now we are either going to get a buffoon or a criminal.”
At least Jersey is overwhelmingly democratic, so we’ll be able to swamp morons like him.
Sigh.
germy
“Roses are red
Violets are blue
If skunks had a college
They’d call it P.U.”
hovercraft
@Brachiator:
And she’s his national spokesperson.
p.a.
@sunny raines: Fed Reserve of SF did a study several years ago showing (intimating?) that higher immigrant areas increase natives’ wages: the ability to speak English becomes a labor market plus, and native English speakers get drawn into higher paying supervisory positions.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Depends on the business and the location. Some gays were reliable customers with a good chunk of disposable income. Businesses would find ways to signal that they were gay friendly. And gays have been dominate as business owners in some fields out of proportion to their percentage of the population.
Patricia Kayden
@Felonius Monk:
So if he can do anything, change his position on anything, etc., why is anyone voting for Trump? Aren’t they pretty much saying that they aren’t voting for him based on principles but just because he’s Republican? I would never say that I support Secretary Clinton regardless of her position or what she says. That would be irresponsible of me. Democrats need to hit Trump with his flip flops and lack of detailed policies.
tsquared2001
@Cacti: If “moderate” and “educated” Republicans haven’t got the clue by now that they are voting for a party that eschews science, that is filled to the brim by hateful xenophobes, where women are NOT people and every fucking hateful policy they support would turn the US into a 4th world country, I am not sure Sec Clinton could do OR say anything to woo them.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
What energy advantages?
Shell
Reminds me of a soft-serve ice cream cone slowy dissolving on a hot sidewalk. Describes the Trump campaign pretty well.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Patricia Kayden: Read the rest of your post. Why bother? His voters don’t give a shit. It’s not a vote for Trump, it’s a vote to stick it to Hillary, those filthy blacks, and the goddamn liberals. Cleek’s law is the only law dictating the results of this election.
Iowa Old Lady
@hovercraft: Someone at the gym went off on that “criminal” tangent not too long ago. She utterly believed it. She thought Clinton had committed real crimes and should be in jail. It wasn’t just hyperbole to her.
enplaned
@Knight of Nothing: right, and 3mm people amount to what percent of the us workforce? About 6%
Corner Stone
OMG. Going from Tamron Hall to Andrea Mitchell is so awful I can’t even come up with a bad analogy to describe it.
enplaned
@Iowa Old Lady: that’s why Hillary wasn’t the best choice this year (no, not a Sanders fan). She attracts a level of hate far surpassing even Obama.
BR
@? Martin:
One of the big things we have going for us here in CA is that our climate is mild and we have long had good energy efficiency rules in place so per capita energy use has remained flat for decades.
liberal
@NorthLeft12:
That’s idiotic.
Global overpopulation is one of the biggest problems humanity faces. And this idea that we can’t have healthy economies without population growth is just nonsense.
eclare
@btom89: I love it!
bluehill
@Peale: For Trump in relative terms that’s not so bad. Obviously Conway is trying to direct his venom towards relatively safe targets (i.e. the media) and go back to coded language (i.e. law and order) and smooth over his inevitable slips. She seems to be the media face of the campaign, which is an improvement over Lewandoski and Manafort, and she’s got some experience making despicable candidates seem less so. It’s just that Trump has dug such hole that it’s unlikely he gets out, but they seem to have stopped him from digging even deeper.
jacy
@Corner Stone:
I’ve managed to avoid Andrea Mitchell for quite a while, but since I’ve been unable to keep myself from checking in with cable news lately, I’ve caught her a couple of times. Dog, but she’s and odious person. Nothing to recommend her, as my grandmother would say.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
Tamron is a journalist and cares about the facts, and Mitchell is all about the politics of the thing, and the he said aspect. Instead of reporting what the facts are, like she did in a moment of candor last night with Tweety where she said that Hillary did nothing wrong and followed all the rules, and that the people she met with would have gotten to see her regardless of whether they donated or not, she left herself open to speculation about wrongdoing even though there was none. This was all political she said. I guess now she’s back to the party line that the Clintons’ always skate to the edge of legality.
John M. Burt
@MattF: My own guess is that immigration is a proxy for a long list of other things, including, e.g., racism.
Alternatively, immigration is a proxy for a short list of other things:
1) Racism.
nominus
@Iowa Old Lady: it’s even worse if you question them on it, because the Right’s flailing attempt to throw everything they can results in a weird gish gallop of offenses that mush together in their heads. Apparently HRC had Vince Foster killed because he was about to secretly transport email servers out of Benghazi or something. They’re convinced she’s a criminal because reasons.
They don’t for a minute think that they hate the Clintons only because they’ve been told to hate the Clintons by the very same people that told them cutting taxes on the rich would be awesome, the Iraq war would be short and awesome for the Middle East, and that Obamacare would cause 20% unemployment. They haven’t learned to question any of it, they just take it as an article of faith that Baby Jesus hates the Clintons, so they must be bad.
As my wife and I are fond of noting: People hear what they want to hear so that they can hate who they want to hate.
Feebog
@Chris:
Not sure about that. Trump is polling well below 40% in several polls, and I’ve seen a couple this week where he was below 35%. Just sayin’.
hovercraft
@liberal:
The problem is where the population is occurring, many nations are facing population declines due to low birth rates. Counties that are open to immigration are for the most part simply replenishing that way, (though there is some backlash in European countries that have always been homogeneous, against this growing diversity). Countries like Japan and Russia which are resistant to immigration on nationalistic grounds are the ones who face economic peril due to aging population. Most countries cannot afford to import their entire workforce and care for their aging population at the same time. UEA has a small enough population and sufficient oil wealth right now, but their population is not aging, and with their high birthrate, it is not sustainable. World population explosion is a huge problem, but the necessary redistribution of said people is an even bigger problem.
Mike in NC
@Corner Stone: Mrs. Greenspan is why I refuse to look at MSNBC.
gvg
@Chris: In one respect they are right that Trump is not a Republican. He isn’t partisan. He doesn’t have any loyalty to the party and attacks them as much as Democrats. That shows what a moron he is because he has no allies. He didn’t start it either. The Tea Party radicals did as far as I can recall. Used to be that Republicans were maddenly lockstep and hard to outvote. Not lately though. There are only certain things that are attainable by voting no so some things are out of reach (thank goodness). Recall Reagan said don’t speak ill of other republican. Trump really is different there. Our system works by gathering votes. Right now the GOP is becoming a bunch of one person parties.
s I recall the Tea party beginners were funded by the Kochs who were trying to high jack the whole GOP. In spite of how many Republicans have always liked pieces of Libertarianism, the former party had different influences too and anyway they didn’t see themselves as sole employees of the Kochs. Something happened there.
We have had pro con discussions about if the GOP would finally break up and it gets pointed out that at state levels they are still winning and the state parties seem more efficient. That may be true but if the National Party disolves into no leadership, then the different state organizations will stop being alike over time and then stop cooperating.
I think we are going to see more lone bomb thrower GOP in name only. they may all hold the same views we have seen for decades but they aren’t cooperating any more.
Calouste
@Feebog: McCain got 45.7% in 2008 and he was generally polling in the low-mid 40s, with only a few polls below 40. It looks like Trump is polling a few percent below McCain, but usually those polls have 15-20% undecided/third party, where more typically that is 8-10%, like it was in 2008. It pretty much depends on how many Republicans vote for Johnson.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Chris: Agreed. Still have the post-it with the bet I made with our CEO as to the election outcome, this was before the primaries:
D: 53
R: 47
I’d change it now to 49/46 with the 5% going mostly to Johnson. Stein will poll under 1%.
Turgidson
People were saying the same shit in 2008 and 2012. And here we are. I’m as vociferous a critic of “both sides do it” analysis as anyone, but one area where it is true is that both sides find meaning, enthusiasm and unity in hating the other party when they’re in the minority. It takes more for Democrats to be roused to unanimous anger than it does the GOP (whose base has been marinating in resentment and anger since the 60s after all), but they will get there.
The GOP will reunite in its blind, unthinking hatred of President Hillary Clinton and continue to stagger along. Then it’ll probably win another midterm due to Democratic apathy, again, and take that to mean the 2016 election is null and void and they’re the governing party. If they haven’t impeached Hillary a couple dozen times by then (I expect Benghaaaaazi email impeachment papers to be drawn up before she’s even done taking the oath of office, though they may think better of actually going for it right away), they will almost certainly find it impossible to resist the temptation if they win big in 2018. And we’ll see what happens in 2020. I am terrified of that election already, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
But one thing I’m confident of is that the GOP will not dissolve into a puddle of hate and recrimination like so many are predicting. I certainly hope I’m wrong, but I’ve seen these predictions before and they have been wrong every time. The media will do its part, sweeping the Trumpocalypse under the rug the moment the election is called, agreeing with GOP pundits and elected officials across the land that Trump was a bizarre fluke that did not represent the “real” GOP, and insisting we get back to BothSides4Ever Basics. And, say, aren’t there still some unanswered questions about Hillary’s emails?
And so it will go.
JR in WV
@btom89:
On page 19, after Bill have found his balloon friend, he says “We CaM go home now…” The CAM should be can.
I also wonder about calling the crowd looming when Hillary makes her acceptance speech earlier… some other adjective maybe.
But the art is great. I don’t know if it needs to be this high res, since it’s watercolor, which isn’t a high-precision tool.
Good job, may we share with friends off the blog?
Thanks! Keep up the good work!
Knight of Nothing
@enplaned: I’m so old I remember when liberals cared about millions of workers vulnerable to exploitation. But even taking your point at face value, you’re looking at it in the wrong way. Everyone eats. Agribusiness is one of the biggest sectors in the economy, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And Americans eat so cheaply because of exploited labor.
BTW, nice dodge on the question of service and hospitality workers.
Peale
@hovercraft: Yep. My office right wing guy was all a flutter with “what did this country do to deserve these awful choices.” Oh, deary, deary, me. My party didn’t actually choose a candidate that we’re having second thoughts about. I’m not having a conniption. As for what this country did, well, lets start with events after Reconstruction and work forward.
Just Some Fuckhead
Now they’re seeing why Democrats lost the working class. They’re ignorant douchebags, generally speaking.
Stan
@MattF: Bingo! You got it
Peale
The reason that the republicans will be able to brush off Trump is that he’s singularly awful as a candidate in ways that make it almost certain that the way he would run his administration would be an incompetent disaster. He’s not surrounded himself with good people and there is little doubt that he would find them when the time came. With Romney, at least, you could imagine his policies as awful, but couldn’t imagine him forgetting details like the need to hire people to run agencies or submit nominees to the Senate. If a voter was upset with the way things were 2 years into Obama’s second term, you could imagine a Republican voters thinking “this wouldn’t have been a problem if we had voted for Romney.”
With Trump, I just can’t see that kind of remorse. On the liberal side, seriously, Hillary could get elected and change her positions on everyting. Sign the TPP. Shoot the Chinese ambassador. Start having an open affair with the head of Goldman Sachs. Agree to sell the national parks. Take the warning labels off cigarette packs and change the common core so that 8th graders would be given smoking lessons. And I would still think “man, we dodged a bullet.”
Stan
@CONGRATULATIONS!: “….right now there is nothing but downside and poverty to having a child.”
Oh I don’t know about that. There’s a couple decades of shitty sleep, massive stress due to school friends, heroin, finding jobs, five years of your car smelling like vomit, etc. …..so sure there’s THAT……
Stan
@enplaned: Yes, the know-nothings went into the early GOP, but my point was that Lincoln tried really hard to keep them under control because he was carefully courting the German vote. And I like to think he actually disagreed with them too.
Stan
@liberal: Growing Canada’s population via immigration is mathematically not identical to growing the world’s population. Via immigration it is in fact neutral on the issue.
JR in WV
@Mike in NC:
I switched from NBC to CBS because of Andrea’s lies.
The nights of the DNC they showed us speeches, and then showed us Andrea telling us we had seen something that wasn’t there. She lied about stuff we had just watched and listened to.
It was obvious, and no one at the convention said or did anything about it.
Someone above mentioned that the head of NBC wrote a book and admitted that he was – like most top executives – a Republican. So no surprise that both NBC and MSNBC are in the bag for Trump. A shame.
Jeffro
@Chris:
For a ‘normal’ GOP presidential candidate, that’s about right. But Trump has lost even higher-than-usual numbers of women, Hispanics, and college-educated folks. I don’t think he’ll go below 40%, but I’d be shocked to see him get 45% nationally – probably 41-42%. And in the EC that should be enough to produce a bigger margin than Obama in 2008.
(still gonna GOTV like crazy though!)
On a side note, thanks to Tim F for the original post and the shout-out about the NBC article!
EthylEster
Hilzoy ….wow, I miss her.
enplaned
@Knight of Nothing: Good god, who says I don’t care about any kind of abuse? That’s rather a stretch on your part.
I was just objecting to the notion that the business conservatives are as bigoted as the social conservatives. Even if there are some sectors where they are, on average, they’re not. I assume that’s not a controversial notion? I myself have been a C-level executive and I can tell you that our organization was highly inclusive. I’ve also worked for a couple of 50-100,000 employee organizations which were aggressively (and appropriately) inclusive.
Tom Q
@Jeffro: The people who keep insisting Trump will do 45% or better remind of the people who spent all of last year telling us Jeb Bush would be the nominee and it was foolish to pretend otherwise. Things are stable until they’re not…but everything indicates this year is NOT stable.
Clinton is still getting 7-10 point leads in some polls, and that doesn’t figure for the massive organizing/GOTV advantage she has. I’d bet the over this time around.
As for the down-ballot races: I’d bet the over there, too. Many pollsters (including GOP ones) have noted that, in recent years (esp. presidential years), some races have turned south for the losing presidential party as late as October. I’m reminded of 1980, when most most everyone I knew (Dems, mostly) acknowledged that Reagan would probably be elected, but at least he’d have a Democratic Congress to hold him in check. The GOP sweep down-ballot — especially in the Senate — contributed mightily to the notion that Reagan had a mandate, and it wasn’t apparent until the election returns came in.
Knight of Nothing
@enplaned: I get what you are saying. The OP speaks to the rift between CoC Republicans and the Republican base on the issue of immigration. My point is that in some essential industries (e.g, ag, service, hospitality, and garment) — huge areas of the US economy — CoC Republicans actually have an ugly synergy with nativist conservatives in seeing their workers as something less than human. From this perspective, it’s not so hard to see why they could make common cause for so long. And downplaying this reality lets CoC Republicans off the hook a little too easily.
burritoboy
Abe Lincoln’s core supporters were the Germans – he got the Republican nomination in large part because of his German-American supporters in the big Midwest cities. He was extremely closely connected to the German language press and to English language presses run by German immigrants (he and his people communicated multiple times a week to German-American newspaper editors in St. Louis, for one example). A lot of Germans in the USA in the late 1850s had fled from Germany after the failed 1848 revolution there. Some considerable percentage were socialists of one flavor or another, or involved in union organizing, or many other progressive causes of the day.
Lincoln was not as deeply involved in or connected to the Irish community, but he was strongly pro-immigration and was very against the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings. He also had many alliances and great popularity with the growing Swedish-American community. Many of his core German-American supporters were Jewish, and Lincoln did numerous things to indicate that the USA welcomed Jews, including appointing rabbis as military chaplains for the first time and meeting many secular and religious Jewish figures in the White House. He became friends with the great rabbi Wise, for instance, probably the most prominent rabbi in the USA of the time.
Corner Stone
@enplaned:
It’s good that you’re honest about it, and self-aware enough to do an honest evaluation. Keep working on it in this manner and I am sure you will someday progress to an A+ executive!
Xboxershorts
I would actually posit that most of these nativist bigots would never ever admit to being nativist bigots.
That’s because the REAL nativist bigots are on their chosen Media, be that Fox News, Talk Radio or some repeater of Drudge headlines…THESE are the voices that are leading the charge when your friendly neighborhood moron unleashes a spit flecked rant against their Mexican neighbors or African American LGBTQ wait staff. Look no further than Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to see where the anger comes from for these are the voices that keep saying over and over again that these select minority groups are destroying the America they love so much.
Our Media is worse than worthless.
enplaned
@Tom Q: There’s also the impact of third-party candidates, which look like they’ll do better this year than in years prior. There will be some members of residual rational wing of the GOP who will vote for Johnson, but who knows how big a deal this will really be. Apparently the normal thing is that support for third-party types tends to die off as you get close to the election. There will also be a few nutso progressives who vote for Jill Stein. Again, you have to be pretty hard core (or live in a deep blue state) to vote for her when Trump is on the ballot.
But the point is that it could be while there’s a 45% conservative vote, it might end up as 39% Trump and 6 percentage points to Johnson (with Johnson doing, say, a total of 9%).
You could see something like Hillary 48%, Trump 39%, with the remaining 13% split between third party types. Etc.
Tom Q
@enplaned: I generally agree, though I think even in this year 13% for third parties would be a lot, since that’s as high as their summertime polling shows. Normally, as you say, that number shrinks (Anderson, for instance, was up as high as 20%, but ended up 6-7). I’d guess by the end Johnson will get 6-8%, and Stein an insignificant 1-2%. Johnson right now is the repository of NeverTrumpers and at least a sliver of “Of course not Trump but I’m unexcited about Hillary” — by election day, I think the latter will have come back to Hillary, and Johnson will be almost solely the candidate of disgruntled Republicans.
Of which there are way more than some of our more fatalistic posters seem to want to acknowledge. How often do you see an election where multiple former GOP administration officials endorse the Dem candidate, and even more refuse to vote for their nominee? How does Trump get to 45% with that going on?
Brachiator
@enplaned:
A vote for Stein wastes nine.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@schrodinger’s cat:
Indeed; the No Nothings were one of the three parties that formed the GOP, though Lincoln wasn’t one. The No Nothing wing of the Republicans blocked Steward’s presidental bid because Steward belived in education for the Irish so the Nativists have always been idiot assholes. And do note this is all New York state politics, nothing Southern about it.
gorram
@Knight of Nothing: They need the threat of ICE detention/deportation, of generalized racist violence, and of racism/xenophobia in social practice and legal policy to help keep undocumented people undocumented (you can’t have them marrying US citizens or the like!) and also make them grateful for any modicum of security against all of that. To a large extent, the CoC types and the Build The Wall types have been cooperating to make undocumented people’s lives as difficult as possible to render them an easily exploited resource – economically for the CoC types and psychologically for the Build The Wall types.
Looking back at US history this is pretty par for the course, with a lot of the antebellum and Gilded Age political splits boiling down to just that. Slavers wanted enslaved Black people as a portion of the workforce they could exploit far more extensively than anything else for economic reasons. More than a few abolitionists politically operated in a way designed not to hamstring slave-owners but the enslaved. Even after slavery, a lot of similar dynamics continued, arguably applied to people of color and othered ethnic groups on a wide scale. Communities terrified of being uprooted in a race riot have less time and energy to consider whether they’re selling their labor under fair circumstances, and are more likely to be selling their labor than holding capital or property because of those race riots (and that is this continent’s history in a certain nutshell – Whites plundering).
Arguably, that’s what the Democratic Party since Fannie Lou Hamer is supposed to represent – a rejection of the two party system being aligned along those terms. We have our warts and our failures, but the basic premise of the party is that we have people from operating on either side of those supposed “opposed” sides. That is, the banks have to stop redlining and the unions have to integrate and cooperate, among other things. The thing is, that leaves the Republicans the advantage of being able to capitalize on both flavors of racist but also the disadvantage of neeidng to reconcile their contradictions. Boo hoo, I’ll cry them a river.
btom89
@JR in WV: I don’t know if you’ll see this, but thanks. Sure, you can share with friends off (or of) the blog. I’ll post the fixed PDF tomorrow morning if you want the proofread version. Thanks again for your help!
JGabriel
Tim F. @ Top:
To be fair, the modern inheritance tax wasn’t enacted until 1916. It would probably be more accurate to say something like:
good2go
“…so it seems ludicrously insecure to think that one more [a Mexican invasion] will kill us.”
Actually, we invaded them. With guns and shit…a REAL invasion. It strikes me as extremely funny that 150 years or so after we invaded Mexico and ripped off half their nation, the Mexicans are “invading” back.