Tag: politics

The Government’s Other Party

Jim Geraghty laments the growing libertarian distaste for the Republican Party:

Considering how there was little dispute that another four years of
Obama would mean another four years of government growing bigger and
taking a more active role in citizens’ lives, and how no one really
thought Johnson would win, it would appear that the 1.22 million
Libertarian voters were content to “send a message” with their votes… a
message that will now be almost entirely ignored in Washington.

It’s their right; every vote has to be earned, and surely a Romney
presidency would have offered its own disappointments to the Libertarian
worldview. But it may be a continuing liability for the GOP that
roughly one percent of the electorate believes strongly in limited
government, but votes in a way that does not empower the GOP to do
anything to limit that government.

Even more problematic was the larger number of libertarians like me and Karl Denninger, who didn’t even vote for Johnson because we knew that while he was the nominated Libertarian candidate, he was no libertarian.  After eight years of unmitigated government growth under George Bush, several of them with the Republicans holding the White House, House, and Senate, many libertarians are completely done with the Republican Party.  We simply will not support the party of not-quite-so-big government.

The fact of the matter is that it makes no sense for any advocate of small government to vote to empower the GOP to do anything to limit government because the Government’s Other Party has absolutely no intention of doing so.

Petraeus starts talking

Two interesting bits of news to surface today:

1.  “Representative Peter King stated that former CIA Director David Petraeus
stated that he knew the Benghazi attack was terrorism and that the
talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice were different from the
ones prepared by the CIA. Petraeus stated Rice’s talking points were
edited to demphasized the possibility of terrorism.”

2.  “Reports from those who listened to recordings of the pleas
for help coming from the Benghazi Consulate on September 11 that caused Marine
Ty Woods to disobey orders and fight to defend the consulate suggest that the
tapes are “damning” proof of the Obama Administration’s mishandling of the
attacks.”

I’d provide the links, but that’s all there was.  It looks like Obama could be a lame duck a lot sooner than his two-term predecessors were.   There are going to be a lot of people interested in discovering who edited the CIA notes and why.

Locusts don’t vote ant party

The Right Wing News surveys the right wing blogs concerning the presidential election:

1) If you had to pick one reason why Mitt Romney lost, which of the following would it be?
D) He wasn’t aggressive enough in attacking Obama and/or his campaign
was too passive in defending against attacks. 48.5% (32 votes)
E) He didn’t inspire voters to turn out for him and/or his get-out-the-vote operation was poor 43.9% (29 votes)
B) He was too moderate overall. 7.6% (5 votes)
A) He was too conservative overall. 0.0% (0 votes)
C) His campaign was too socially conservative. 0.0% (0 votes)

2) Was Mitt Romney your first choice in the Republican primaries or was there another candidate you preferred?
B) There was another candidate that I preferred. 81.8% (54 votes)
A) He was my first choice. 18.2% (12 votes)

Even in the post-election analysis, the illusion remains strong within Republicans.  This is why they are in the process of rapidly going the way of the Whig Party.  Republicans still think that pandering to the Left will pull people to the Right rather than moving the party to the Left.  And they still fail to understand that people who prefer big government in their native lands are always going to prefer big government in the lands they’ve invaded.  This is as true of Californians moving to Texas and Massachusetts residents moving to New Hampshire as it is of Malaysians and Mexicans moving to the USA.  Very few people are abstract or long-term thinkers.  Most people want the wealth produced by a society with limited  government distributed to them more generously by bigger government.

The fact that this happens to be a contradiction when viewed from a long term perspective is totally irrelevant.  The locust doesn’t stop to think about the consequences of stripping the field bare, especially when all the other locusts are busily devouring everything in sight.  He’ll worry about next year when it arrives.  America always had its share of native locusts, but they were always outnumbered by the ants and they were not capable of rendering the fields barren.  Now, their numbers have been significantly boosted by immigration, but the Republican Party cannot hope to retain its viability by reaching out to the new locusts and attempting to convincing them that they are ants.

Romney lost for two reasons.  He was too moderate for his white traditional base and there are too many new big government voters in the electorate.  Republicans might complain that libertarians and conservatives staying home cost them a number of elections in 2012, including the presidential one, but then, that’s exactly what increasing numbers of libertarians and conservatives have warned they would do ever since George W. Bush revealed himself to be a fake conservative.

Decline and fall: the picture

As you look at this graph produced by Steve Sailer, keep in mind that, with a few exceptions, America was founded by married white Protestants of English extraction.  Then recall that there is not a single white Protestant on the Supreme Court and neither party saw fit to nominate one for President. And then recall that demographics is destiny.

Some on the right claim that it would be a mistake to engage in the same racial politics that have created a left-wing majority.  That is like trying to play football without acknowledging the newfangled rule that permits the forward pass.  Racial politics are now the rule, and the only way the right can win is to start playing the game and taking advantage of its numerical advantages while it still can.  The conventional abstract appeals to “freedom” and “America as an ideal” so beloved by conservative Republicans are the political equivalent of “three yards and a cloud of dust”.

The poison is the antidote

Or so numerous pundits, a number of whom actually voted for Obama in 2008, would have us believe given their advice to the Republican Party:

It was a crushing defeat.  Despite
an economy as underpowered as a cheap flourescent light, Mitt Romney
somehow failed to unseat Barack Obama.  And now it is time for the
Republicans to rethink their platform in order to attract new voters–or
doom themselves to permanent minority status.

I
think the obvious place to start is with immigration reform.  Increase
the number of visas available.  Explore guest-worker programs.
 Establish a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought
here as children and have never known any other home.  This not only
gives the GOP a shot at the Latino vote, but also softens their image in
the eyes of the professional class, who might be willing to give the
party another look if it didn’t seem so committed to deporting poorer,
darker skinned people who just want a shot at picking fruit, trimming
lawns, and cleaning houses.

The
GOP would also help itself with those people by embracing gay marriage.
 To be sure, this might cause them some problems with the evangelical
base whose organizing support is crucial to Republican get-out-the-vote
efforts.  But the GOP could assuage that tension by promulgating a
hard-core, Republican version of gay and straight marriage.  That’s why
they should pair it with making marriage mandatory, and eliminating
no-fault divorce.  The message should be that if everyone can get
married, then there’s no really excuse not to be.   Oh, I know, the
divorce changes might cause friction with the kind of Republicans who go
through wives the way other men go through undershirts, but this seems
like a small price to pay for a shot at the 1-3% of the electorate that
is eligible for gay marriage.  

The frightening thing here is that McCardle attempts to portray herself as an economist.  My suggestion is that one never take either political or economic advice from an economist, however tall, who cannot figure out that 20 percent is larger than 2 percent….

Regardless, there is only one viable long-term solution for the Republican Party, indeed, for the survival of constitutional America throughout the current territorial limits of the United States, and that is a repeat of Operation Wetback on a vastly larger scale. Such an action would require the banning of all dual-citizenships, mass deportations on an unprecedented scale, and likely inspire violence of the sort that has not been seen in America since the riots of the 1960s.  And, needless to say, it is clear there is now no chance that it is ever going to happen.

Which is a real pity, because it would actually have been the lesser of the two probable evils.  What is going to happen instead is some sort of civil war following the next major stage in the ongoing economic meltdown.  How big it will be and how it will turn out, I don’t pretend to know.  But it is as easily predictable as the wars in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and the former British empire in India, because war is how diverse groups of people usually negotiate imperial divorce.  The USA has not truly been a single nation since imperial rule was forcibly imposed upon the southern states in 1865, but the difference is that it is no longer possible to plausibly pretend that it is still one any longer.

It’s not a question of hate, race, or religion.  It is the simple historical observation that the Kuomintang will not voluntarily live under the same governance as the Chinese communists.  Pakistanis will not voluntarily live under the same governance as the Indians.  Americans will not voluntarily live under the same governance as Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, or Arabs.  They just will not do it, and to pretend otherwise isn’t so much foolish as insane.

It doesn’t matter what you do.  It doesn’t matter what you think.  Winter is coming.  The only question is whether it will take you by surprise or not.  And there really isn’t much excuse for being surprised when the temperature has been dropping and the leaves have been falling for quite some time now.

A timely resignation

Interesting timing for this resignation, considering that CIA Director David Petraeus was scheduled to testify about Bengazi next week before Congress:

Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus has resigned, citing “extremely poor judgment” for having an extramarital affair.

Petraeus, 60, told President Barack Obama of the affair on Thursday and offered to resign, a senior official told NBC News. Obama accepted his resignation in a phone call Friday afternoon. 

“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position,” Petraeus said in a letter to CIA colleagues. “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.”

“This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation,” Petraeus said in the letter.

This is why it’s always helpful to have a few skeletons in your closet if you want to move up the ladder.  The powers that be don’t like high-ranking individuals who don’t come with an easy self-destruct button.  The question is why someone felt the need to press it for Petraeus now.

It’s too late, Republicans

Ron Paul, who was rejected by Republicans in favor of the supposedly more electable Mitt Romney, concludes it is Game Over for the USA as well:

Rep. Ron Paul, whose maverick presidential bids shook the GOP, said
in the wake of this week’s elections that the country has already veered
over the fiscal cliff and he sees no chance of righting ship in a
country where too many people are dependent on government.

“We’re
so far gone. We’re over the cliff,” the Texas Republican told Bloomberg
Television’s “In the Loop” program. “We cannot get enough people in
Congress in the next 5-10 years who will do wise things.”

Since the “drive toward the cliff slower” strategy has worked so well, perhaps Republicans will now consider attempting a “fall slower” approach.

Breakdown

This chart of the electorate fairly clearly illustrates the growing difference between historical America and third world America.

We already knew the “conservative Catholic Hispanic” vote upon which Karl Rove and George W. Bush were going to build their permanent Republican majority doesn’t exist.  But the theory of the conservative Asian voter appears to be even more of a myth.  Of course, why immigrants from cultures with zero tradition of limited government would ever be expected to respect the concept has never been explained to my satisfaction.  And where would they learn to appreciate it in modern America?  The public schools?  At university?

What I missed

It wasn’t the Jews, the Blacks, or even the Single Women that won it for him this time.    A lower percentage of Jews and Single Women voted for him than in 2008.  The Black vote was already maxed out.  What made the difference was the increasingly powerful, increasingly Democrat-leaning Hispanic vote.  First, look at what happened in 2008:

Hispanics voted for Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden over
Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin by a margin of more than
two-to-one in the 2008 presidential election, 67% versus 31%, according
to an analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of exit polls from Edison
Media Research as published by CNN.  The Center’s analysis
also finds that 9% of the electorate was Latino, as indicated by the
national exit poll. This is higher, by one percentage point, than the
share in the 2004 national exit poll.

There were 129,391,711 votes cast for Obama and McCain in 2008, of which about 11,645,254 were Hispanic.  Obama received 7,802,320 of them.  We don’t know yet how many total votes were cast in the 2012 election, but the Hispanic vote is reported to have not only grown, but to have gone more heavily for Obama than before;  I’ve seen reports indicating between 72 and 75 percent voted Democrat.

The numbers aren’t firm yet, of course, because the final totals haven’t been reported.  But even if we assume only another one point percentage increase so that 12.9 million of the approximately 24 million Hispanics eligible voted, the reported increase from 67 to 73 percent would be an increase from 7,802,320 to 9,417,000, which is a substantial portion of Obama’s reported margin of victory.  And those votes are spread out very liberally through swing states such as Virginia, Colorado, and even Iowa.

Before the election, I noted that the big difference between Nate Silver’s take and mine was that I simply did not believe the D+11 and D+7 weights in the state polls.  The reason those differences were justified was that in 2012, Hispanics apparently went from being heavily pro-Democrat to being even more pro-Democrat than the historically second-most reliable group of Democratic voters, the Jews.  That’s the key factor I missed; while I anticipated an increase in the size of the Hispanic vote as more immigrants became eligible over the course of time, I thought it was going to drop in line with the other demographic groups, not vote an even stronger pro-Democratic bias.  Had it fallen 9 points like the Jewish vote, to 58 percent, Romney would have been much more competitive.

This development is particularly troubling for future Republican prospects since even more of the 50 million Hispanics now in the USA will become eligible to vote in 2016.  My previous characterization of Mitt Romney as the last viable Republican presidential candidate may be more significant than I imagined.  This demographic shift indicates that no candidate can expect to run on a Constitutional platform ever again, and appears to seal the irrelevance of the document that George W. Bush once dismissed as a worthless piece of paper.