In The New York Times, R.R. Reno has an article on how progressives and conservatives lost the confidence of the White middle class:
“LONG after the dust settles in Iowa — and New Hampshire, and even the 2016 campaign itself — one question will remain: Why, after decades of supporting the liberal and conservative establishments, did the white middle-class abandon them? Wherever Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders end up, their candidacies represent a major shift in American politics. Since World War II our political culture has been organized around the needs, fears and aspirations of white middle-class voters in ways that also satisfied the interests of the rich and powerful. That’s no longer true.
As we know, the rich are now quite a bit richer. In itself, this need not disrupt the old political consensus. More decisive is the fact that the white middle class is in decline, both economically and culturally. …”
I’m going to start calling it the “uniparty” because the Democrats and Republicans enforce a “mainstream” consensus on several vital issues: both are committed to maintaining the US Empire and “America’s leadership role” overseas, both are committed to further globalization through new free-trade deals, both have repeatedly joined forces to push for open borders, both enforce the norms of political correctness and engage in endless virtue-signaling online, and both are in the pocket of the “billionaire class.”
In retrospect, there really hasn’t been much change through the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama years regardless of which party has been in power:
Immigration – Ronald Reagan’s most noteworthy accomplishment on immigration was the 1986 IRCA Amnesty which promised to “secure the border” while giving citizenship to millions of illegal aliens. George H.W. Bush expanded legal immigration with the Immigration Act of 1990. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush refused to “secure the border.” In 1996, the Republican Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1996, which was laughably never enforced by either party. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have repeatedly taken shots at “comprehensive immigration reform.” The elites have long conspired to advance their mutual goal of “there shall be open borders.”
Free Trade – Did you know that NAFTA was Ronald Reagan’s idea? Reagan signed the original free trade agreement with Canada that was the predecessor of NAFTA. His successor George H.W. Bush envisioned a “new world order” of global free-trade and negotiated NAFTA which was signed into law by Bill Clinton. It was Clinton who surrendered American sovereignty to the WTO which was created in 1995. It was also Clinton who granted permanent normal trade relations to China and celebrated China’s entry into the WTO which is the primary cause of our enormous trade deficit.
The free-trade baton was passed to George W. Bush who negotiated multiple free-trade agreements with Central America, Colombia, Chile, Australia, Morocco and a few other countries. George W. Bush passed the free-trade baton to Barack Obama who has signed free-trade agreements with South Korea and Peru and was given “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority” by the Republican Congress last summer to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade zone which is NAFTA on steroids.
Political Correctness – The dry rot of political correctness has been spreading like a cancer through American culture since the 1980s. It is hard to say now whether the true believer SJW is worse than the cuckservative furiously engaged in virtue signaling on Twitter. They are two sides of the same coin and decades of Republican electoral victories have done nothing to stem the problem. Indeed, the Republicans used their electoral power in the South to join the cultural cleansing crusade to eradicate monuments and symbols of the Confederacy. If anything is true, “mainstream conservatives” are the primary bulwark sustaining the system by shouting down all opposition to it as “racist.”
American Empire – Whether it is invading Grenada or Panama, Iraq twice, bombing Serbia, invading Afghanistan, or wrecking Libya, both parties are firmly committed as ever to policing the world and maintaining and expanding the existing liberal international order. It is a formula for endless wars which carries ever greater risk as America increasingly lacks the economic capacity to win protracted wars. What have we accomplished in Afghanistan after 15 years of being there?
Campaign Finance – Evangelical Christians were suckered into voting for George W. Bush out of the false belief that a Republican majority on the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade and reverse their losses in the culture wars. Instead, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court gave us Citizens United and the McCutcheon decision which opened the floodgates for billionaires to debauch elections. Oh, and it was the same Republican majority of that gave us gay marriage in the Obergefell decision.
Taxes and Deregulation – Republicans and Democrats argue over taxes and deregulation, but what is striking is that the top marginal income tax rate has declined from 70 percent to 35 percent under George W. Bush before climbing back up to 39.6 percent. The corporate income tax rate has been cut in half since the 1950s. Generally speaking, we have spent the last forty years moving toward a world of lower taxes and low tariffs.
The same is true of deregulation in transportation, telecommunications, energy and finance. Since the 1970s, entire industries have been deregulated, but the greatest change of all was the deregulation of the financial sector and banking system, which was a joint project of Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress in the 1990s. The White middle class and White working class now dumps its life savings into the stock market. Finance has eclipsed manufacturing in its share of all domestic corporate profits.
The effect of all of the above has been the rapid cultural and economic decline of the White majority which has loss faith in all national institutions. Trillions of dollars squandered on quixotic foreign wars were never invested in the productive economy. Countless thousands of factories have closed down and millions of jobs have been sent overseas. Millions of legal and illegal immigrants have been brought into the country to compete with a workforce that now has to compete with wage earners in places like Bangladesh and Vietnam. Unions have crumbled under the pressure as major industries have declined due to foreign competition. The middle class has shrunk as the wealthy now control a greater share of our national wealth than at any point since the eve of the Great Depression.
If this litany of woes wasn’t bad enough, college tuition and healthcare are increasingly unaffordable for millions of White Americans. The Democratic Party obsesses over women with penises. The Republican Party wants to start World War III with Russia over Syria. The only plan it has to improve the economy is the same prescription of Reaganomics – further tax cuts, deregulation, union busting, and free-trade agreements – that it has pushed for the last thirty years as wages have stagnated, women have gone into the workforce to make ends meet, and average household debt has skyrocketed.
Can someone please start a second party? There is plenty of room for a Ross Perot in 2016.
I confess that not only did I vote for Reagan, but in his first campaign not only did I contribute a thousand dollars from a recent inheritance, but I spent election day 1980 accepting Citizens’ Band dispatches from Republican HQ to ferry voters to the polls. Why? The (quoting the language of R.I.C.O.) Continuing Criminal Enterprise called the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” If this country and the Soviet Union went to war, so I believed, and the United States lost, human life on Earth would not be worth living until that colossus of Moloch finally fell.
It really was that stark: Informally but deeply I had studied the history, organization, and techniques of atrocity-police organizations in both Nazi Germany an Soviet Russia. Bad as the Nazis might have been, the Soviets, beginning with the CheKa, were worse by far. I saw an atavism which still performed the occasional judicial execution by burning the victim alive in a crematorium, but also had both thermonuclear weapons and indecent designs — proclaimed long and loud — against this country. Reagan scared them bezgovnii, and that was reason enough.
On the one hand, when I first became interested in politics and world affairs, my Dad told me that the first victims, and worst victimized of all, by the Russian revolution of 1917, were the Russian people themselves. On the other, when I was in college, I hear a professor state that, in the event the United States won a hands-down military victory against the Soviet Union in World War Three, the recoil effect here would be to put the “… wrong people…” into power here and set “progressive reform” back a century.
Mr. Trump sounds like one of those “wrong people” (wrong by what standard?) Professor Fairfield talked about. Then again, on the surface at least, so did Mr. Reagan. After seeing the extraneous and discivic baggage Mr. Reagan brought with him to the White House? Once burnt, twice cautious. So excuse me, Trump supporters, if I think your man is just too good to be true.
Sounds like you suffer from skeptics syndrome. A wise man from Europe once said (paraphrased)…
At first I believed what I read in the papers. After all, why would they lie? Then I began to notice how often the things I read were at odds with what I saw with my own eyes. Gradually I became cynical, to the point that I was certain that whatever I read in the papers had to be a lie. After working on that assumption for a while I noticed that that didn’t fit reality either. Slowly I learned that the most successful propaganda was fiction intermingled with truth. I learned how to read between the lines.
Just because Reagan turned out to be a disappointment doesn’t mean Trump will necessarily be. (((They))) weren’t pulling their hair out over Reagan.
I also voted for Reagan, but only half-heartedly. As soon as he picked his VP in 1980 my enthusiasm dropped by 50%.
Well, I was born in 1980 and only vaguely remember seeing the Gipper on television as a child. I was a teenager when Bill Clinton was president.
By the time I got to college and began to think about politics, illegal aliens were flooding into my area to work in construction jobs and at a local chicken processing plant. I was growing concerned about immigration, but I was only beginning to research the subject. Then 9/11 happened and George W. Bush launched us into the Iraq quagmire.
A Trump who doesn’t deliver would be better than anyone else who does.
We don’t have illusions about him. Believe me. He is not Charlemagne Hitler.
He’s there to burn it DOWN.
Conservatives are there to establish legitimacy and draw a big paycheck. Legitimacy is the battle ground in 4GW some of the Empire’s brighter minds understand the importance of legitimacy and how conservatives contribute to maintaining that fiction
This post exemplifies the power of an elite consensus and the impotence of non elite politics. Even when the interests of the non elites are forwarded it is as a gambit of an elite faction. Not to be overly demeaning, but most folks can’t string two coherent thoughts together and usually go where opinion leaders tell them to go (as in Iowa).
And the solution isn’t a other impotent third party, but a new elite consensus among whites of certain territories (ie the Red States) to break away and form a new nation by means of civil disobedience and otherwise raising the cost of governing against our will.
There is no way to “take back America” and Clinton trouncing the GOP pinata will drive that point home permanently.
Unions fight to preserve Obama’s immigration actions, their members
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/04/11/unions-fight-to-preserve-obamas-immigration-actions-and-their-members.html
Sorry to collapse your narrative………again.
The biggest supporter of “comprehensive immigration reform” has always been the US Chamber of Commerce.
There is no chamber of commerce bending the law. Think instead of a small minority bending everyone over a barrel and dildoing them.
He’s got to get Geert Wilders over and have a chat about how you get fat, lazy, obese retirees to admit they were wrong to admit Muslims and or Mex into their respective nations.
Yes, Wilders is kosher but he’s built a movement of sorts.
‘Why, after decades of supporting the liberal and conservative establishments, did the white middle-class abandon them?’
That’s just it, Sir – ‘liberals and conservatives’ have NOT lost the white middle class – but, rather, those establishment politicians who postured as such for elections, and then governed adversely to the effect.
The posing and the posers have lost the white middle class.
Gee, schlomo its a mystery huh? Could after decades of drivel and bullshit on the electric jew, White people finally realized the Rich are not like them and all and hostile to them and their continued existence? Is it the celebrations of White power you have been having all over the rancid dead media?
Nah. The “goyim” could never figure that out. After all, you’ve been lying for years of how you’re far more intelligent when actually you have a generalised IQ around that of the Mexicans mowing your lawn. And of course, the White Race with its ingenuity and penchant for discovery could never get past the clueless delusions of schlomo and his stupid brigade of brown and black idiocy, right? You bet your life schlomo.