The Republican Party: Not Much of a Horse But the Only One in the Corral

The tragedy of American conservatism is that its only electoral home is in a party most of whose funds come from those who agree with the globalist agenda and whose privileged position insulates them from its disastrous cultural consequences. In short, America’s corporate elite is making tons of money from globalism -- chiefly, mass immigration and manufacturing outsourcing -- while they experience no negative effects in their privileged and insular world. Oh sure, they advocate a bit of border protection here, a little improvement in US trade deals there, but basically they’re on board for free trade, relaxed borders and mass immigration. They have a wealthy person’s distaste for excessive government regulation and high taxes -- hence, they are “Republicans” -- but, stem the flood of cheap labor immigrants? Why on earth would they want to do that?

The first economic consequence of mass immigration is lower labor costs across the economy, from lettuce pickers to computer programmers, and that pushes historic quantities of money up to America’s corporate owners and executives. The working and middle classes endure the economic downside in the form of fewer jobs and much lower wages. This has all been discussed ad nauseam before. But it can’t be repeated too often: Mass immigration has been an economic bonanza for major owners and executives and an economic disaster for the other 80% of the population. Looking away from the economic to the cultural consequences of mass immigration, the divergence between America’s wealthy decision makers and the other 80% is even greater. Put bluntly, the American upper classes have yet to see the those consequences, let alone to feel pressured by them. They are Peggy Noonan’s “protected classes.” It has been said before but cannot be said too often: America’s upper class hypocrites who have brought the joys of mass third world immigration to middle and working class America are, as yet, absolutely immune from its baleful cultural concomitants. They live in elegant neighborhoods, behind gates and walls, protected as often as not by private security; their children attend the finest private schools where a learning environment still exists and the risk of being beaten up or shaken down for lunch money is zero; their family members and friends don’t have to ride BART, or the subway, or the bus in the middle of the night to or from poorly paid jobs; the members of their swank clubs look like they did in 1980 and all speak English; and their mode of transport is the first class cabin or private jet. I begrudge them none of this. My quarrel is that much of their wealth and ease comes from a globalism whose detriments are inflicted solely on the bottom 80% of Americans. But the cultural concomitants of mass third world immigration are well known to that bottom 80% of Americans. All over urban America, parents struggle to scrape together the money to buy a house in a neighborhood where the public schools have not been destroyed. In small town America, parents warn their kids about drug pushers from South of the Border who have discovered and targeted the once-safe American countryside. Illegal immigrants commit crimes at rates hugely in excess of those legally present. For 2014 the Sentencing Commission of the US Justice Department reported that of all crimes for which convictions were obtained and sentences imposed, illegals made up 13% (if the 11.2 million figure for US illegals is correct, illegals constitute slightly more than 3% of the population) And on and on. None of this reaches the neighborhoods of those who brought it to us. But It is the decision-making elites of these neighborhoods that fund the Republican Party. And therein lies the rub for this fall’s election: The Democratic Party, in its lunatic, massively unpopular stands on illegal immigration and border protection, has been leading with its chin as perhaps never before. Abolishing ICE, opening America’s southern border, and supporting sanctuary cities that shelter criminals and drug dealers may be the most toxic brew of Democratic Party electoral poison that party has yet concocted. It begs for brutal, repeated, brass knuckle exposure. This well could be the issue that turns an off-year election into a historic Democratic wipeout. Will the funders of the Republican party seize one of the most inviting opportunities in US electoral history to deliver a knock-out blow? Or will they wuss out?