10/31/2017
(My title is an homage to Richard Perle et al’s famous 1996 paper outlining Israel’s geopolitical needs in the Middle East, which does indeed seem subsequently to have largely implemented by the U.S.) It’s telling that President Trump is under siege because of the alleged misdeeds, committed years earlier, of Paul Manafort, briefly Trump campaign chairman. Though the Main Stream Media did its best to portray Steve Bannon as President Trump’s Svengali, and though MSM enforcers palpably fear the Breitbart media mogul may run for president himself, no one is suggesting Bannon is linked to Russia.In contrast, Manafort was the safe, Establishment choice who made his name crushing Ronald Reagan’s anti-Establishment insurgency at the 1976 Republican National Convention. During Manafort’s brief tenure as Trump campaign chairman, he tried his best to turn the Donald into a conventional Republican candidate. Nevertheless, it is Manafort who is at the center of the greatest scandal engulfing Trump’s administration.
This serves as a metaphor for the larger problem facing the Republican Party: the Establishment is not the solution, it’s the problem. A new Pew Research Center study [Political Typology Reveals Deep Fissures on the Right and Left, October 24, 2017 (PDF)] shows the Republican Party is deeply divided but held together by reflexive partisanship and dislike of Democrats. The core voters of the party and many of its officials have reconciled themselves to President Trump, and they aren’t going to break away from him. However, in order to build a winning political coalition, President Trump needs to deliver for working class voters who aren’t excited by the kind of free market fundamentalism championed by Conservatism Inc.
In short, Conservatism Inc. can no longer rally the masses needed at a time when the Left is resurgent and the parties are increasingly polarized.
The Pew study shows the country is splitting into two warring camps: the mostly-white Republicans and the significantly non-white Democrats, many of were imported after 1965. This emerging phenomenon is what VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow has termed “America” and “Anti-America.” Thus building a winning coalition by delivering for working class Reagan (now Trump) Democrats isn’t just a strategy for political victory, but a mission of national reclamation.
The Pew Research Center divides the Republican Party into four factions:
Some of what the study reveals is unsurprising. “Core conservatives” (which includes me, judging by my results) make up only 13% of the public but constitute 43% of politically-engaged Republicans. They are defined by their adherence to Republican orthodoxy about the overall fairness of the American economic system, approval of Donald Trump, and their view that blacks are largely responsible for their own socioeconomic standing.
“Country First Conservatives” are older and less educated than other conservative groups; and at 6% of the public, not quite as big as Core Conservatives.
“Market Skeptic Republicans” are suspicious of big business, believe the economy is rigged in support of powerful interests, and support raising taxes on corporations. Significantly, at 12% of the public, this group is also the second largest of the Republican coalition.
Though “Trump Republicans” are thought of as working class, populist voters, there is actually less support for President Trump by Market Skeptical Republicans than by Core Conservatives and Country First Conservatives. This might reflect their recent Democrat past.
Of course, what is most interesting to immigration patriots is various groups’ opinions on immigration.
Core Conservatives are the largest and most active part of the Republican base and the most supportive of Trump. However, only a plurality (43%-39%) believes immigrants “burden” the U.S. by taking jobs, housing, and health care. Presumably, this is the malign influence of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, which many of them still read.
In contrast, solid majorities of Country First Conservatives and Market Skeptic Republicans are opposed to immigration.
Still, the fact that a plurality of Core Conservatives opposes immigration is significant. Three out of the four major factions in the Republican Party have more people who believe immigrants “burden” the U.S. than strengthen it.
The only GOP faction that does support immigration: the “New Era Enterprisers,” the group that is the least white (though still majority white) and the least supportive of President Trump. This group is also the second-smallest grouping within the GOP as identified by the Pew survey.
“New Era Enterprisers” are pro-business, pro-immigration, and, according to Pew “more likely than any other typology group to say the next generation of Americans will have it better than people today.” This is the group most out-of-step with both the Republican Party and with the country.
And it’s this group which is exemplified by outgoing Senator Jeff Flake. Thus David Lautner at the Los Angeles Times identifies “New Era Enterprisers” as the group Flake most closely belongs to, a group that is “optimistic, favorable to immigration and international trade, pro-business and skeptical of government regulation” [The Republican civil war, and why Trump is winning it, October 27, 2017].
Not everyone agrees. James Hohmann at The Washington Post claims Core Conservatives are actually “Jeff Flake Republicans” because they generally support U.S. involvement in the global economy. He pays tribute to Flake because Flake worked on a ranch “that depended on the labor of undocumented immigrants, whom he came to deeply respect as human beings” [The Daily 202: The GOP civil war is bigger than Trump. A new study shows deep fissures on policy, October 26, 2017]. (Somehow, I doubt Flake “respected” them enough to pay them a decent wage, which would of course remove the reason for their existence.)
Hohmann also notes Flake was a “Mormon missionary in South Africa, which made him worldly” — though not worldly enough to notice the campaign of genocide against whites there, which even MSM journalists are finally reporting. [South Africans hold ‘Black Monday’ Protests Over White Farmer Murders, by Tom Porter, Newsweek, October 30, 2017]
But this attempt to claim that Flake represents the Republican mainstream falls flat. Hohmann appeals to authority in his weird tribute to Flake by calling him “an ideological heir to Barry Goldwater and a devotee of Milton Friedman.” Well, Barry Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, quite properly, on limited government grounds, and Milton Friedman said a welfare state can’t exist with open immigration. Does Flake believe the same?
As the LA Times Lautner notes, Core Conservatives have no patience for Cultural Marxist views. As Lautner observes:
They [Core Conservatives] also have little patience for Republican officials, like Flake, who say the GOP badly needs to reach out to minorities and become less of a white-person’s party. Among the group’s defining views is the belief that discrimination against blacks and women is largely a thing of the past.And although Core Conservatives may not be monolithically opposed to immigration, remember that a majority of them are willing to say immigrants are a burden, rather than a blessing. So even in this core constituency of the GOP, Flake is out of step.
There is an important lesson here for immigration patriots. The war has been won. The hopelessly stupid/ corrupt Beltway Right may claim to speak for conservatism, but VDARE.com is far closer to the self-defined conservative grassroots than any nonprofit head in Conservatism Inc. The grassroots “conservative movement” itself should not be abandoned to the cucks. By right, it belongs to immigration patriots.
There are serious ideological divisions within the GOP. But as almost every commentator noted, the party is holding together because opposition to the other side is sufficient to keep the party together in an era of extreme polarization [The GOP base doesn’t really love Trump. This poll shows it, by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, October 24, 2017]. As Kevin Phillips once noted: “the whole secret of politics — knowing who hates who” [The Politics of Grievance, by Garry Wills, New York Review of Books, July 19, 1990]
What is really driving the polarization between the parties is race. As seen by the breathtakingly crude ad run by the Democrats against Ed Gillespie, stoking up fears of “white nationalism” is now key to the Democrats GOTV strategy — the “KKKrazy glue” of the Democratic coalition, as Steve Sailer has often observed.
[video width="1280" height="720" mp4="/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Latino-Victory-Project-ad-attacks-Republican-Ed-Gillespie.mp4"][/video]
The Latino Victory Project took it down after a pickup truck attack by a Muslim immigrant on Americans.
And as the Pew Center points out, the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly non-white. And, significantly, Democrats’ own anti-white stances are hardening.
The Main Stream Media’s championing of Black Lives Matter, and the migration from the college campus fever swamps of Left-loony concepts like “white privilege” and “intersectionality,” has had a huge impact. As Pew Research notes, in absolute terms an increasing number of people both believe discrimination is now responsible for blacks’ poor socioeconomic position and that immigration is good. However, the change in both
has come among Democrats, who increasingly take liberal positions on race and immigration… Republicans’ views have changed little in recent years [and] as a result, partisan divides have widened considerably.Thus, MSM Bigfoot Thomas Edsall worries in New York Times about how Republicans even more tribally attached to their party than Democrats and how this may lead to a far-Right future for America [The Party of Lincoln Is Now The Party of Trump, October 26, 2017]. But this is simply the European-American population rallying to the “Generic American Party,” the GAP/GOP. It is the one vehicle Americans have with which to push back in self-defense against an endless anti-white onslaught.[Race and discrimination, opinions about immigrants and Islam, October 24, 2017]
Needless to say, the conventional Republican Establishment has no interest in pushing back against this cultural attack, and is in many ways complicit with it. It just wants the GOP to be a corporate elitist party which delivers for the donor class, while fobbing off its middle class and social conservative supporters with rhetoric.
The exemplar of this strategy: George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, won on the strength of turning out white voters and a pledge to defend traditional marriage. Of course, the traditional marriage pledge was swiftly abandoned after the election in favor of an effort to privatize Social Security and give Amnesty to illegal immigrants.
But what will actually prevent Bush-style Republicanism from regaining control of the GOP: the new, more militant Democrats. For all the hysteria about Donald Trump, and the Strange New Respect for the likes of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, we can all remember how these Republican standard-bearers were smeared during their presidential runs as the second coming of Hitler. Republican primary voters remembered too, and tuned out attacks against Trump.
This Leftist hysteria surrounding race is only going to accelerate in the future. Which also means that even soft Republicans, like the “New Era Enterprisers” or the Chamber of Commerce types, are going to be under increasing pressure from Democrats who are growing ever more uninhibited in declaring their overtly Totalitarian Left priorities and who define “racism” in increasingly expansive terms.
For example, the Pew study reveals “Solid Liberals” are close to half of the Democratic coalition and have almost monolithic (over 97 percent on every issue!) disapproval of President Trump, demand for universal healthcare, and for more “changes” to “give blacks equal rights with whites.”
What “rights” do whites enjoy that blacks don’t in contemporary America? Never mind. Just asking the question is probably racist.
But against this formidable force, Donald Trump isn’t doing very much. Editor Peter Brimelow once humorously summarized John Kasich’s “conservative” philosophy as “blah, blah, blah, balanced budgets, tax cuts, jobs.” But this is in effect what President Trump is trying to do now. He’s desperately trying to get the nation to stop paying attention to the Russia investigation by offering tax cuts. It won’t work. And President Trump needs to give his crossover voters a reason to fight for him.
Donald Trump has remarkable political instincts. He notably sought out Rick Santorum’s Blue Collar Conservatives before the election and followed much of the strategy better than Santorum himself did.
But Social Liberals aren’t going to be appeased by getting a few more bucks back from the government in April. And “low taxes” isn’t what’s holding the Republican Party together any more than the booming economy is giving President Trump high approval ratings.
President Trump needs to give his people, even those who believe capitalism isn’t working for them, a reason to go to war with the Left. As the Pew data shows, even those Republicans who don’t want to be drafted will follow him, in the end. They have nowhere else to go.
The Republican Party is, implicitly, White America — which is to say, the Historic American Nation itself. Donald Trump, amazingly, has emerged as its leader. Only those who consider themselves members of that group are going to fight for him at this time of crisis.
And, after all, the war between America and Anti-America is already here.
It’s just that right now, only one side is fighting. And it’s not us.
James Kirkpatrick is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.