Racialization of American Politics

Why It’s Important for Trump to Win

Trump’s 2016 victory was seen as nothing less than a cataclysm by the American establishment—the greatest shock to the system in memory and perhaps in the entire history of the Republic. After all, Trump was vehemently opposed by the entire establishment  from far left to the neoconservative and Chamber of Commerce right. It was, one might say, a hostile takeover.

The left was on the cusp of going into end-game mode, so losing was incredibly frustrating, especially since Hillary Clinton was expected to win easily. But Trump won. Whatever you think of Trump’s actual performance, the fact is that throughout the campaign and since taking office the media and pretty much the entire left has been labeling him a Nazi and White supremacist (I wrote 5 articles for Vdare on this). And it’s continued, even into the recent presidential debate and the town hall hosted by Savannah Guthrie.

When Trump won, they were apoplectic — on the verge of complete victory with a “sure thing” Hillary victory, to having “White supremacists” in the White House. The tears that flowed after Trump won were replaced by anger and sheer hatred. The practical result was that Trump’s victory has had the effect of mobilizing the left.

And because this was framed from the beginning as a contest between the forces of good (our glorious multicultural future) versus evil (the “White supremacist” American past being promoted by the Orange Nazi in the White House), anything was justified. The media ought to throw out normal standards of journalism and do everything they can to destroy Trump’s image. Violence against Trump supporters and certainly against the dissident Right is entirely justified.

The result is a level of political polarization not seen in this country probably since the Civil War. But the polarization is what had to happen for any possible movement in the direction of the dissident right. The absolute worst thing would have been another Hillary-vs.-Jeb-type election where America keeps sleep-walking to Armageddon. The mobilization of the left has made clear the fault lines. This is about removing the traditional culture of America, and it is about removing Whites from the center of the American story. It is about replacement — first the monuments and the culture, then the people.

Solid majorities of Americans oppose removing the statues, and ratings for the now-politicized NFL, NBA, and MLB are way down, even though former sports fans are trapped in their homes with nothing much to do because of the pandemic. This means the traditional American majority is moving down the road toward being explicitly aware of what the game is. Reasonable White people watching this unfold cannot possibly believe that the glorious multicultural future will be anything but a disaster for White America. The hatred for White America that has been so obviously directed against activists on the dissident right is inevitably seeping through to “just plain White folks.” The hatred will only intensify when Whites have less power. And this means that the racialization of politics that we have emphasized so much here will accelerate. The ~60% of White America that votes Republican (not including Jews and other people grouped as Caucasians deriving from the Middle East and North Africa) will increase.

If the left wins they will go into end-game mode. They will establish a more-or-less permanent hegemony (via massive surge in legal and illegal immigration, amnesty to illegals and Dreamers, adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states, and packing the Supreme Court). A Democrat victory would mark the end of the First and Second Amendments and likely lead to eventually locking up dissidents, as is already the case in Europe.  There is now a rich body of academic literature by leftist academics (but I repeat myself) on reining in speech related to diversity. Their mantra is something like, “We won the intellectual war on issues related to race and gender. It’s all over, so anyone disagreeing with our pronouncements on race and gender can and should be shut down — your words do violence to muh feelings.” And liberals like Elena Kagan would love to use these ideas in majority opinions — indeed, she has already written on this.

With enough of a mandate, the Biden-Harris administration would also get rid of the Electoral College and two senators per state, resulting in the complete domination of the left-leaning urban centers—the issue has certainly been raised by many leftists since 2016. This is already the case in many states, such as California, where rural areas are effectively disenfranchised and all the statewide offices are held by Democrats, including around 75% of the State Legislature. The only Republican who could possibly win would be one who can fit into this new context, but even such a person could likely only win by taking advantage of some major Democrat screw up, like an economic depression or rampant corruption. In other words, once this happens, there’s no turning back. It’s over.

A Democrat victory would speed up the transformation of the educational system. Already, Critical Race Theory, which is basically anti-White hatred and guilt-tripping, has a strong foothold in the public schools and corporations. Trump outlawed teaching it to government workers, but that would change and there would likely be federal money for such programs at all levels of the educational system and for corporations.

Could the fact that Trump is attempting to appeal to Hispanics and Blacks undermine the GOP as the party of White people? It’s common for politicians to try to expand their base, and the fact is that these groups would benefit from many of the same policies that would benefit White America—opposing the defunding of police, curtailing immigration, and ensuring a robust economy (which Trump delivered on until the virus-induced lockdowns). Latinos in particular may be more open to Trump because of the national obsession with Blacks in the Summer of George.

No one is saying Trump is the savior, but the reality is that a great many White people are hopelessly caught up in the liberal/left mindset. This is especially true of educated Whites—the White working class has been solidly pro-Trump. These educated urban and suburban Whites are not going to vote Republican in the face of the constant stream of propaganda from the elite media and universities which has resulted in the left dominating the moral high ground, and in massive virtue-signaling and mindless conformity by great masses of liberal Whites whose hatred toward Trump has been fanned into a fever pitch by the elite media. No one on the dissident right saw Trump as the solution, but only as a stepping stone to a more explicitly White candidate. That is still possible, but only if Trump wins. In the meantime, trying to get non-Whites to vote for Trump makes a lot of sense.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the Trump victory in 2016 energized the left. There were riots in the immediate aftermath of the election and off-and-on throughout his term, crescendoing in the Summer of George—~130 straight days in Portland, with no serious effort to rein it in. The leftist media became nonstop Trump hate, and university professors routinely expressed their hatred in classrooms and in op-eds. Could one argue that a Biden victory would result in the civic peace and tranquility so eagerly desired by all those urban and suburban liberal Whites? I suppose it could, although in Portland the BLM-antifa have made leftist mayor Ted Wheeler a consistent target of their attacks, and they also turned on the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey; riots have continued to occur in cities dominated by very liberal-left mayors, such as New York and Atlanta.

But the question is, would a Biden victory be good for the dissident right, and the answer is no. The worst possible outcome would be to return to elections between Hillary types and Jeb types. Flip a coin, it really wouldn’t matter. We don’t really want peace and harmony. Polarization is good because the bipartisan center-left—center-right consensus is suicide but would just take a little longer than if Trump hadn’t come on the scene. But now that he attained the presidency, a victory by the energized, radicalized left would result in hegemonic, authoritarian control by the left and a complete eradication of expressions of White identity politics, opposition to immigration, public discussion of the genetics of race, likely the eventual shutting down of sites like The Occidental Observer, and even putting dissenters in prison. When I hung out with radicals in the 1960s, it was common to hear opinions like “worse will be better”—if the present system gets worse, it will ultimately result in a revolution of the left. But when a revolution of the left gains power, as would happen if Biden-Harris win, they will arrogate all power to themselves and ensure that it won’t be possible to give it up. Revenge and punishment will the the order of the day. Just recently Robert Reich, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, suggested Truth and Reconciliation commissions should be set up in the wake of a Biden victory on the model of South Africa after 1994—although what he really has in mind may more resemble Nuremberg and denazification that occurred after World War II.

A victory by Biden would be a green light for a return to power of neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin (who have more or less defected to the Democrats, but they would be happy to return to the GOP so that fanatically pro-Israel policies  like war with Iran would be bipartisan). Another group eager to seize power in the wake of a Biden victory would be political operatives like those associated with the Lincoln Project, such as Rick Wilson and George Conway. Forget about a populist GOP. The GOP would once again be the party of Big Business (and hence liberal policies on legal and illegal immigration), wars for Israel, and tacit, if not overt, support for Critical Race Theory indoctrination. I realize that Trump has been gung-ho about doing things Israel wants, but he has stopped short of war and, in my opinion he has done all he can to extricate U.S. troops from the Middle East in the face of powerful opposition from the military (Trump accused them of gunning for post-career sinecures with defense contractors), the Israel Lobby, the media (where the left is dominated by liberal interventionists), and many politicians on both sides of the aisle. Just today Trump renewed pressure on the Pentagon to lower troop levels even further in order to fulfill his election promise, but the Pentagon is resisting the move.

On the other hand, another Trump victory would cement the populist wing of the party, where opposition to immigration is a major issue. Trump’s victories on immigration have been largely ignored by all sides, but as the LA Times notes,

He has targeted the Silicon-Valley based tech industry by squeezing high-skilled foreign labor, and has restricted immigration based on family reunification even as he’s separated thousands of migrant families at the border.

He has attempted to repeal federal protections for young immigrants who entered the country illegally as children and sidestepped the Supreme Court’s rejection of his plans. California has more residents covered by those protections, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, than any other state. He has also ended Temporary Protected Status for refugees from El Salvador and other Central American countries, a disproportionate number of whom live in the state.

And his administration has discouraged thousands of other students, refugees [refugee admissions dropped precipitously], asylum seekers, workers, and entrepreneurs — many headed to California — from coming to the United States at all, most recently by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification for largely shutting the nation’s borders.

Even more importantly, legal immigration has dropped by an astonishing 92 per cent in Fiscal Year 2020. Moreover, the fall in immigration workforce population predates Covid—apparently due to regulatory tightening. “Thanks, in part, to Trump’s (relatively) hard line on immigration, expressed basically via administrative measures, the Trump years saw a labor market where native-born Americans lost relatively fewer jobs than immigrants. This is not quite what Trump supporters had in mind in November 2016. But it’s something.”

Yes, and a Biden victory would end up being a radical reversal of these trends.

And finally, the Center for Immigration Studies:

Two new analyses of recently released Census Bureau data show that the total number of immigrants in the United States grew much more slowly 2017-2019 than in prior years, despite economic growth and low unemployment. This shows that the level of immigration is not a force of nature beyond our control, as many have suggested, but rather responds to policy changes. …

Trump administration policies that may have caused the slowdown include:

—A significant reduction in refugees allowed into the country;
—Requiring immigrant self-sufficiency through reform of the public charge rules;
—Mexico & Central American countries agreeing to offer safe haven to asylum seekers;
—Increased barriers and fencing at the border;
—More worksite enforcement against illegal workers and some employers;
—Efforts to end TPS and DACA, may have discouraged illegal immigration;
—Other modest administrative changes that may have had a cumulative effect.

A Trump victory would exacerbate the social unrest and polarization that has already reached levels not seen at least since the 1960s, but another Trump victory would unleash far greater violence than in the wake of his 2016 win. We have already seen the huge BLM-antifa crowds in urban areas and seen what they can do. It would be much worse as the left, anticipating another victory, would be plunged into despair and become further radicalized. Rioting in all the major cities is to be expected; indeed, the NYPD has already issued a memo saying “We should anticipate and prepare for protests growing in size, frequency, and intensity leading up to the election.” Riots are sure to exceed the violence that occurred after the 2016 election and the riots of this past summer, and continue for long thereafter. Attempts to shut them down, especially by the feds would likely look a lot like civil war—a civil war that I think the right would win at this point. But the longer this thing festers, the less likely that becomes.

As noted at the outset, the 2016 election was a huge defeat for our hostile elite, including the media. Another defeat would be an even greater catastrophe for them and a great victory for everyone else. Not only are the liberal-left media going all out to defeat Trump, now we have social media companies actively censoring information on covid from high administration officials and medical experts. Recently the social media companies and left-leaning newspapers and television (i.e., virtually all of them) have buried the New York Post series on the Hunter Biden-to-Joe Biden kickback scandal. The Trump administration is finally fighting back, suing Google under antitrust laws and reviewing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “If Trump wins, Big Tech will know it’s screwed. The tech giants want to rig the election. Trump won’t forget that, and he will have the power and political capital to pay them back.” If Trump loses, this iron grip on information would be further empowered, even without going after the First Amendment. In effect, it would be a Ministry of Truth run by the private-sector and decidedly on the left.

Finally, the #1 reason to want a Trump victory would be simply to see massive crowds of Trump haters weeping on TV, a repeat of 2016, but much worse. I would just love to see the likes of Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Lawrence O’Donnell, their faces grim, lashing out at Trump voters as racists, misogynists, haters, etc. Get out the popcorn!

 

 

 

White-Latino Relations in America’s Southwest: Why a Paradox of Race Relations Is a Sign of Growing Political Polarization

Last year’s midterm election results were hardly unusual for a party holding the presidency. Similar electoral setbacks had occurred during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But this one was portrayed as if it were somehow unique — an explicit rejection of President Trump’s nationalist and anti-immigration policies.

For some, the electoral losses in Orange County, California were particularly galling. “You want to see the future? Look no further than the demographic death spiral in the place once considered a cornerstone of the party,” wrote one GOP strategist.

In a state that had once launched the careers of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, Republicans had fought the rising tide of demographic change and were crushed, they said. Now the GOP was repeating the same mistake on the national stage.

Such arguments are not new. They have long been a staple of establishment Republicans who support the corporate open borders agenda. They also represent a fundamental misunderstanding what is happening in the American Southwest.

California, New Mexico, and the region’s other states are not trending left solely (or even primarily) because of Republican intransigence on immigration. They are trending left because of larger socioeconomic trends and migratory patterns that may lead to America’s eventual dissolution.

The Southwest Paradox

For any close observer of race relations, the politics of California and the Southwest must be puzzling. Extensive research on the 2016 election found close links between White attitudes toward race and immigration and support for Donald Trump. Other research has found a similar link between these attitudes and greater awareness of demographic change, with close physical proximity to Latinos playing an important contributing role.

Given the breadth of this evidence, recent general election results in America’s Southwest seem incomprehensible. These states — defined for our purposes as including California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas — all have large and growing Latino populations, but their White populations have responded not by shifting right, but to the left.

Some observers, such as Ron Unz of The Unz Review, have noted this unexpected trend in race relations and concluded that those who argue that increased diversity will eventually tear the country apart are simply wrong. According to Unz, the Dissident Right has erred by treating White-Latino relations as if they are the same as White-Black relations. There is ample evidence that proximity to Blacks has produced a significant backlash among Whites in places like the old South, but there appears to be less evidence of a similar backlash to Latinos. Unz attributes this difference, at least in part, to lower Latino crime rates and greater mutual understanding once Whites get to know their Latino neighbors better.

“With such a large fraction of our immigrant population living in states displaying such negligible levels of nativist rancor,” he wrote, “the likelihood that today’s immigration controversy at the national level will produce any long-lasting negative consequences seems very low to me.”

Is Unz right? Will America’s Latino population simply follow in the footsteps of previous generations of immigrants by assimilating and contributing to America’s culture and growth? Are the Dissident Right’s fears irrational and unfounded, as the left and corporate elite keep assuring us?

The answer is no. The extensive research on this subject is not wrong. The Southwest Paradox is merely an artifact of larger socioeconomic forces.

Solving the Paradox

To understand why, first consider a related paradox. If one were to closely examine White voting patterns across the United States, it would be natural to assume — consistent with the experimental research — that Whites who live in highly diverse neighborhoods would be more likely to react negatively and become more conservative. But this is not true. Whites who live in diverse neighborhoods are not more conservative than other Whites, they are usually more liberal. The primary reason for this is uncomplicated: White flight.

The research on White flight has shown a common recurring pattern. When minorities first move into a White neighborhood, the reaction among Whites is only mildly negative at first, but after diversity rises above a certain tipping point — believed to be around 25 percent for Latinos — White flight begins in earnest. In general, the Whites who move first are the most ethnocentric and/or most likely to be adversely affected (often families with children). Their departure causes the neighborhood to become less White, which in turn causes more Whites to leave (and others to avoid moving in). This process produces a cascading effect that usually transforms the neighborhood within a few years.

After this process has played out, such neighborhoods will often retain a small White population, but it is usually one that is more tolerant of diversity or more able to protect itself through higher housing prices, gated communities, and private schools. The pattern is similar for Whites in gentrifying urban neighborhoods. In each case, the demographic profile of such Whites is fairly consistent — they tend to be disproportionately liberal, single, and childless. Depending on the neighborhood, they often have higher incomes and are more likely to have a college degree. These are the Whites who are responsible for the seemingly paradoxical result of Whites living in more diverse neighborhoods being more liberal.

The political effects of White flight and gentrification are reasonably well understood, but it is becoming increasingly clear that interstate migration is playing a similar role. This phenomenon was first noted in the popular press by Bill Bishop, author of an influential book on the subject called The Big Sort, which attributed much the nation’s growing political divide to differences in where we choose to live. Although Bishop’s methodology was criticized, his conclusions were substantially confirmed by other academic research. The only real disagreements were not over whether it was happening, but why.

Some, like Richard Florida, have focused on the migratory patterns of college-educated Whites — specifically what he calls the “creative class” — who are disproportionately moving to a select number of cosmopolitan regions and states for economic reasons. Others have cited the departure of more conservative working-class Whites from these same areas, often because of rising costs of living. Still others have highlighted more explicitly political reasons or other lifestyle choices that produce the same net effect.

Whatever the reasons (probably a combination of the above), the resulting demographics look a lot like those produced by White flight. Just like the Whites who live in more diverse neighborhoods, the Whites who live in more cosmopolitan cities and states tend to be more liberal, better educated, less religious, and disproportionately unmarried and childless. Nearly every state in America’s Southwest exhibits these same traits.

These demographic changes have helped nudge southwestern states to the left, but the trend has also been reinforced by another recent political development. The “Great Awokening,” a sharp left turn in the racial attitudes of college-educated White liberals over the past few years, has further accelerated the leftward drift of Whites living in the nation’s more cosmopolitan regions.

Given this increase in White wokeness, a final contributor is noteworthy for its implied hypocrisy. Despite the Southwest’s purported reputation for benign White-Latino relations, these states rank among the most segregated in the country. Racial segregation is growing not just in more conservative places like suburban Dallas, but also liberal cities like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. According to a study by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, the two states where Latinos are least likely to attend a majority White public school are liberal New Mexico and California respectively.

The Impact of Latinos on White Voting

Taken together, these trends suggest that the liberalism of America’s Southwest is not due to more amicable relations between its White and Latino populations. Instead, they are the accidental byproduct of larger social factors that have offset and concealed the negative effects.

To confirm this hypothesis, we turn to a large, publicly available survey data set housed at Harvard called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). This survey was administered to over 60,000 individuals in 2016, over half of whom voted and were White. Each survey respondent was also geo-coded, which allows the incorporation of state, county, and local (zip code) variables such as local levels of diversity and other demographics from the Census Bureau.

The full multivariate regression results can be found at the bottom of this article, but the top-line results are straightforward. In general, after controlling for a wide variety of other factors such as gender, marriage, religion, and education, the analysis finds that Whites who live in more diverse states were more likely to vote for Donald Trump, with proximity to Latinos having roughly half the impact of proximity to Blacks. (The effects of living close to Asians and Native Americans were statistically insignificant).

These effects are not uniform, however.  As suggested by similar studies, Whites who live in heavily diverse zip codes (Black or Latino) tend to be more liberal and were thus more likely to vote against Trump. By contrast, Whites who lived outside of heavily Latino neighborhoods, either elsewhere in the same county or the same state, were more conservative and more likely to vote for Trump. These results demonstrate the variable effects of White flight.

Altogether, the combined effects — state, county, and zip code — shifted the White vote toward Trump by about one percent for every 6 percentage points of Latinos in a state’s population. In California, for example, where Latinos comprised 38% of the population in 2016, the model estimates that White Californians shifted right by about 6 percent from where they otherwise would have been based on their education and other demographic factors.

Importantly, however, these are average effects. A more detailed state-level analysis shows that in the Whitest states there were no county or state-level effects. The impact was strictly local, with growing local Latino populations causing Whites to become more conservative, a common pre-White flight result.

At the other end of the demographic spectrum in heavily Latino states, state level pro-Trump effects do not appear until a state’s Latino population approaches 20 percent. They peak at 30 percent (Arizona), and begin to decline after that (Texas, California, and New Mexico). This suggests that states with the largest Latino populations are starting to experience the same liberalizing White flight effects that are found in the nation’s most diverse zip codes.

The analysis also sheds light on why the politics of America’s Southwest are so different from the similarly diverse South. Whites in the South are conservative in part because of the presence of large Black populations, but they are also more conservative because their White populations are much more religiously conservative.

The migration patterns that helped make California and the Southwest more liberal are also having the reverse effect in the South. States like Alabama and Mississippi draw relatively few college-educated White liberals from elsewhere in the country. Unsurprisingly, the few exceptions to this rule (places like Atlanta or North Carolina’s Research Triangle) have politics that more closely resemble the Southwest.

Two Americas

If our analysis stopped here, the conclusions would be only mildly interesting. Yes, the seemingly benign White-Latino race relations in the Southwest are largely illusory, the incidental byproduct of larger interstate migration patterns, but so what? The politics of these states are still trending left, no matter what the cause. How does this change the conclusion that Trumpism is a losing political proposition in the long run?

The answer can be found by stepping back from a narrow examination of trends in the Southwest and instead looking at the nation as a whole. The Whites who flee or avoid moving to these states have not disappeared into the ether. They have simply chosen to live elsewhere and, in the process, made the rest of the nation more conservative.

The following map shows White voting trends from 2000 to 2016, two comparable election years when the GOP won the presidency but narrowly lost the popular vote. As expected, the map shows Whites in the Southwest and on the West Coast trending left over this period. But it also shows Whites in much of the rest of the country shifting to the right. This rightward trend includes the midwestern states that helped elect Donald Trump. It also shows a substantial rightward shift even in the liberal Northeast, where Whites in states like New Jersey, New York, and much of New England have also been moving sharply to the right.

This is a story that one almost never hears from the mainstream media. There are countless articles concern trolling the GOP for its losses in more diverse states like California, but there is almost nothing written about the rightward drift of the rest of White America.

These trends are two sides of the same coin and they point to a very different conclusion. This is not the story of Republicans or the Dissident Right waging a losing demographic battle. It is the story of a nation that is slowly, but inexorably, becoming more divided along racial and geographic lines. (See The Racial Realignment of American Politics).

To anyone even vaguely familiar with the larger literature on ethnic conflict, this pattern is completely predictable. The fact that there is not even a hint of the dangers in the mainstream media despite obvious lessons from conflicts in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur only demonstrates the establishment’s control over the media narrative. The warning lights are flashing red all around us — and we are flying directly into the coming storm.

Patrick McDermott is a political analyst in Washington, DC.

Polarization is good

The assault by the left on pretty much every shred of traditional American culture is speeding up dramatically. Just in the last few months there have been well-publicized attacks on Confederate statues that quickly morphed into attacks on Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus. Inviting anyone remotely associated with conservative ideas — much less the Alt Right or even the Alt Light — to give a talk at a college campus is an invitation for protests and rioting. Going to an NFL game has suddenly become a political act, as fans are treated to protests against symbols of America still deeply revered by a majority of Americans: the flag and national anthem. And much more.

There are several likely reasons for this dramatic acceleration in attacks on White America, its history, and its culture. First, Hillary Clinton lost the election. The left was on the cusp of going into end-game mode, so losing was incredibly frustrating, especially since she was expected to win easily. Clinton would have been able to appoint a replacement for Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, which would have been the death knell for the First Amendment. There is now a rich body of academic literature by leftist academics (but I repeat myself) on reining in speech related to diversity: “We won the intellectual war. It’s all over, so anyone disagreeing with our pronouncements on race and gender can and should be shut down — muh feelings.” And liberals like Elena Kagan would love to use these ideas in majority opinions — indeed, she has already written on this. Read more

Claremont’s Codevilla On The Coming Revolution: “Americans Will Be Nostalgic For Donald Trump’s Moderation.”

drudge

Posted on Vdare, October 11, 2016, 11:06 pm

We are nearing the climax of a watershed election. The Ruling Class understands that Donald Trump represents a counter-revolution to all they have built up over the last 50 years. That emphatically includes GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan, who hastened not merely to step on Trump’s bounce back in the second debate by announcing he was suspending support, but is signaling he will continue to damage Trump as much as possible [Inside Ryan’s decision to (almost) dump Trump| The speaker might still fully rescind his endorsement before Nov. 8, sources told POLITICO, by Jakee Sherman and John Bresnahan, Politico, October 11, 2016]

This phenomenon has inspired an important essay from Angelo M. Codevilla, a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and emeritus professor of International Relations at Boston University, After the Republic. [Claremont Review,September 27, 2016]. Codevilla’s basic idea: the cultural revolution of the last 50 years has destroyed America as a constitutional republic. As many on the Alt Right have noted, there is nothing left to conserve. The question now is where our post-republic period will take us. Codevilla [Email him] writes

Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: “fake constitutionalism.” Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power. [Emphasis added]

This is why we see repeated crazy comparisons of Trump to Hitler—most recently, This New York Times ‘Hitler’ review sure reads like a thinly disguised Trump comparison. [By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, September 28, 2016] Despite absolutely no statements from Trump suggesting that he would suspend the Constitution and assume dictatorial powers, the concern is lurking that, like Hitler, he would do just that.

Read more

Trump Rally in Beaumont, Texas: Pounding Home the Anti-Immigration Theme

From a correspondent:

My family drove over from Houston to attend a Trump rally in Beaumont, Texas on Saturday, his first after the Paris shootings.  I’ve never seen him push the envelope like he did.

First, he made a comment about the French attacks, saying essentially, “if they, if our people had guns, this wouldn’t have happened.”  “Our people” here is referring to the French victims—perhaps hinting to the audience that he sees the French victims as White like us and that the problems France faces are the same facing Whites around the world. Phrases like “our people” uttered by a White person and including Whites in other countries indicate a transnational sense of White identity and are anathema to the social justice/cultural Marxist crowd.

Second, he brought out four families, all White, whose relatives were murdered by illegal aliens.  Trump is essentially running a live action road show with the content of an American Renaissance article, the ones that became so tiresome and depressing, chronicling non-White misbehavior.  Trump, however, just repeats these themes over and over.

It’s plausible that someone of Trump’s personality could be successful without pushing the immigration issue so hard, which makes a case for it being a genuine conviction for him.  All in all, a very surreal experience.  Trump tells these hugely parenthetical stories, and then will jump back and pick up the conversation thread from twenty minutes ago, all with no notes and all with keeping the language on a fourth-grade level.  He may be the most talented public speaker alive today.

He continued hammering his theme of Eisenhower and Operation Wetback.  Trump is pushing the talking points White Nationalists have been making for 20+ years.

Here’s a video of the speech

How it could happen: The candidacy of Donald Trump

We all rack our brains every day trying how to break through in a system that is completely stacked against us. How could it happen—a political movement that would ignite the imaginations of White America, depose the corrupt donor class in the Republican Party, and begin to really take the country back?

Right now, doing so is a huge uphill battle. The oppressive mainstream media environment is closed to obviously true messages that Whites have interests just like everybody else. Indeed, it is busy tearing down what’s left of traditional American culture. And despite the internet, the mainstream media, including outlets such as Fox News, continues to wield enormous power, and the vast majority of Americans, including educated Americans, accept its legitimacy and moral authority. Despite the First Amendment, we all know that there are a variety of very powerful social sanctions against anyone who contravenes the racial consensus.

Further, it is extremely difficult for a grass roots political process to gain traction in the U.S. where there are two entrenched political parties and winner-take-all elections, with no proportional representation. Political parties need money—big money, billionaire-type money, and they need highly recognizable names — neither of which is typically available to a grass roots movement. Such movements have a hard time getting traction or a sense of legitimacy, and it’s very difficult to get their word out, especially if it contravenes what our media elites want to hear.

But political celebrities have an enormous ability to shape public debate because the media cannot ignore them. The media can and will do all it can to destroy celebrities that err on the side of political incorrectness, but they can’t prevent the message from getting out. Read more

Patrick Cleburne smells Jewish money behind the Jeb Bush campaign

As American politics becomes ever more racialized, the powers that be are intent on defusing any hint that White people are at last determined to stop the unfolding horror. Back on December 8 the New York Times noted a desire to limit the field early on to prevent a “second-tier” candidate from winning the nomination.

Of special concern, no doubt, would be a “second-tier” candidate who was a populist conservative who opposed the immigration amnesty and wanted to change immigration policy to improve the labor market for middle- and working-class Americans. Indeed, there is fear that the “center right,” business as usual, chamber of commerce-type candidates favored by the donors would lose to such a candidate in messy and contentious primary battles. (“The Republican Donor Class Hopes to Avoid a Populist Nominee”)

Vdare’s Patrick Cleburne points out that Jeb Bush’s campaign is suspiciously well funded and seems determined to focus on a muscular foreign policy aimed at appealing to neocon sensibilities rather than populist sentiments (“Jeb Bush’s Function: AdelZuck Bagman for Corrupting the Whole GOP“). Read more