TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
It's not really about getting to 0 illegal immigration as that's not plausible, it's about having better control over the levers of who gets in, and preventing crazy Biden-era spikes. There's definitely a lot of cynicism when it comes to R politicians on immigration, with how the base wants strict controls but plutocrats want cheap labor, so politicians dance like they're making a change and then do nothing to keep the donations rolling in. MAGA was supposed to be the end of that, but unfortunately it seems like they're too broadly incompetent to actually do much of anything other than temporary fixes.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.
Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.
The Wall was always partially/mostly symbolic since it's not like it would stop people committed to getting through it, and it wouldn't do anything to touch people overstaying visas which was a big part of the problem. Sure it would help, and it wouldn't cost that much so it was always worthwhile, it just wasn't something worth fighting tooth and nail for relative to other parts of enforcement.
I wholeheartedly agree though that it's a heck of a lot easier to stop people from getting in beforehand than trying to deport them afterwards, for logistical and political backlash concerns. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.
In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post
I think this is pretty easily explained as the intersection of the filibuster, Trump’s authoritarian temperament, and Republican Party domination of the Supreme Court.
We saw progressive versions of this kind of thinking in things like The American Prospect Day One Agenda from 2019 or the late-Obama effort at dramatic climate (Clean Power Plan) and immigration (DAPA) policy via executive branch rule making. But Democrats get much less leash from the judiciary than Republican do, because the Supreme Court is very conservative. We never got to see what the universe in which Biden halts all new oil and gas leasing on federal land looks like, because he just lost in court.
At the same time, Biden genuinely did not have the Trump-like aspiration to be a plebiscitary dictator. When he lost in court, he mostly folded and moved on. If anything, his administration was happy to be able to tell the Sierra Club that he tried and then reap the economic benefits of record oil and gas production. Biden really enjoyed legislative dealmaking, was very good at getting bipartisan bills like CHIPS and IIJA done, spent decades in the US Senate, and was frequently the Obama administration’s “closer” on the Hill. There’s a reason Frank Foer’s admiring biography of Biden is titled “The Last Politician.”
To Biden, shooting the shit with other elected officials and striking bargains was the peak.
Trump, despite the art of the deal bluster, has never shown any interest in legislative dealmaking. At no point during either of his terms has he attempted to engage with Democrats on passing some kind of immigration bill. He spiked the bipartisan border security bill from the Biden era, and has never gone back and said something like, “If we tweak these three provisions, I’m okay with it.” It’s just not of interest to him — he wants power. And the broader conservative movement has become weirdly deferential to that, both because it’s a bit of a personality cult and also because the filibuster has acculturated everyone to thinking of this as being the way the government ought to work.
A bunch of people have asked me whether the 2024 election outcome doesn’t make me glad that Democrats didn’t scrap the filibuster. But honestly, I feel the exact opposite. I would be much more comfortable with a world in which the answer to the question “Why don’t you just get Congress to change the law?” wasn’t just “Well, Democrats will filibuster if I try.”
So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.
But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Same. Not a high confidence bet on my part, but seems far more readily plausible than a cyberattack.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I'm perfectly fine with just being mean at this point.
OK, you've decided to be mean. ICE agents are screaming at crying toddlers and dragging them kicking and screaming away from their parents, who are put in concentration camps until they can be deported to a country that may jail or execute them.
Problem: Normies hate seeing things like this. They balk and the other party wins the next election. All of Trump's policies are written in chalk that can just be erased when a new POTUS is in town. Now there's talk about going back to the defacto open borders of Biden's times.
What's step 2 in your master plan then?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18d ago
What? Are you saying Russia's occupation of Ukraine has been substantially less brutal than the US occupation of Iraq?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18d ago
Because most people won't care that much no matter what happens, as long as the Russians don't do something completely crazy like bombing nuclear power plants or nuking cities.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18d ago
Russia cares about worldwide public opinion to some small degree, it's just at a much lower level than you seem to think. If you asked the median Ukrainian if they thought Russia was fighting with "several hands tied behind its back", they'd almost certainly laugh at you. With the electrical bombings trying to freeze civilians to double tap strikes, there's a reason why citizens of the former brother-state of Ukraine are now calling Russians "orcs".
Russia is supply-constrained in many of its munition types nowadays. It doesn't have infinite rockets to just level every building. It's used its stockpiles and has to wait to produce more, then launch them in salvos. Even artillery shells are getting somewhat scarce (relative to the typical Russian way of war) which is why they bothered to get a bunch from North Korea.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
Russia has been more than happy to bomb historic buildings and civilian targets like shopping malls, apartment complexes, and hospitals. It hasn't moved the needle. They've also been happy enough to bomb bridges and electrical infrastructure almost continuously. There was supposed to be a minor truce at one point I think where they wouldn't bomb some electrical infra, but it fell apart almost immediately. They have limited themselves in attacking civilian ships and nuclear power plants though, as the risk of a nuclear meltdown is just bad for everyone. And yeah, they can't bomb logistics in NATO countries like Poland due to diplomatic repercussions, but otherwise Russia is fighting pretty much as hard as it can. I don't know why you think Russia is fighting with "several hands tied behind its back", as its not true for the most part. Russia even blew up that dam a while back (although they tried to muddy the waters and make it look like Ukraine could have done it).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19d ago
I don't really think this peace offer is real. Both Zelenskyy and Putin have been doing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as "the one who doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump. Most of Trump's public ire has been directed at Zelenskyy so far since much of the US right has nothing but searing, red-hot hatred for him. But Trump wanted to get a "deal" of some sort within the first 100 days and Putin's wargoals are still quite maximalist, so it was inevitable that Russian attempts at can-kicking peace negotiations would get old at some point. This is probably just a play by Putin to keep pinning the blame on Zelenskyy by leaving out the crucial component of security guarantees.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
Most leftists agreed that they were in total turmoil just a few months ago, but that soul-searching is pretty much done now. This article doesn't present a lot of evidence that any of this is true, but it matches what I've seen anecdotally. If you think it's wrong and that MAGA is still feeling as triumphant as they did on election night and that leftists are still just as dejected, feel free to make the case.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
I added another blurb to the end, hopefully that's sufficient.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
From a certain perspective, nothing Musk is doing here is all that objectionable. If two consenting adults want to exchange money for privacy or childrearing, I don't see why that shouldn't be allowed.
From another perspective though, a lot of this reads as pretty rapey. Submit to Musk's impregnation ultimatum or he'll financially pummel you? Not a good look, and it'll probably be another attack vector that leftists will wield against him.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
I've never gotten a captcha from archive.is. Are you on a VPN?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
You're correct. 4chan was a huge originator of memes back in the 2000s to the early 2010s. Then there was a burst with Trump's 2017 election. But since that, there really hasn't been that much creativity on the site. /pol/ feels like a Facebook group for Boomers at this point. Last time I checked /b/ was like 90% porn instead of say 30-40% it once was.
MAGA experienced a wave of euphoria from Trump's election until about around the time of the trade disputes. They felt like they were on top of the world, and that nothing could stop them. They notched a few wins against wokeness, but their major victory was in the realm of vibes.
It's increasingly seeming like those days are over. Scott Sumner's article details who's up and who's down over the past few weeks:
Who's Up:
-Neoliberals
-The experts
-TDSers
-The elite media
-Chinese and Canadian liberals
-Deficit hawks
-Principled conservative free speech advocates
-Integrity hawks
-Rules hawks
-Critics of bullying
Who's Down:
-Mercantilists
-The populists
-Anti-anti-trumpers
-Fox News
-Non-US nationalists
-Deficit doves
-Unprincipled conservative free speech advocates
-Issues people
-Autocracy advocates
-American exceptionalists
Edit for more opinions per moderator request: I agree with this article that the vibes have definitely shifted, as it's been clear in my (adversarial) conversations with MAGA that the mood has changed from combative (pre-election) to triumphalism (post election until a few weeks ago) and then back to combative with a hint of disillusionment (today). Any opposition movement is going to have principled believers and cynics, e.g. people who think we should have free speech as a general rule and people who only claim to like free speech but really want to censor their opponents when they come into power. Winning means these splits that could be swept under the rug get blown out into the open, and the pendulum starts swinging back the other direction. Hopefully we don't swing back to crazy wokeness, but I'd pretty much take any alternative at this point. A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30d ago
The point is you should blame them for the response they had to the event, not the fact that the event happened under their watch. There's not much evidence to say that Biden instigated Russia to invade, and its obviously ludicrous to insinuate that Trump caused COVID.
Hunter was in Ukraine being corrupt. I've not seen any compelling evidence saying he was there to goad Russia to invade.
BLM riots breaking out during Trump's term isn't really Trump's fault. He might have instigated it to some small degree, but it was primarily caused by the high point of woke mania. I agree Trump didn't really respond to it (nor COVID more broadly) well, but that's a separate discussion
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30d ago
Leftists have their own version of populism which is mostly focused on billionaire-bashing. The left hasn't been particularly interested in balancing the budget since Clinton, and he was basically forced to do that by a Republican Congress.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30d ago
I sincerely don't understand how you're coming to that conclusion based on what I wrote.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30d ago
Sure, there's always been a bit of dissent around the fringes (/pol/ has had similar debates). But these people are nowhere close to being in the driver's seat when it comes to MAGA. The tariffs debacle was really the ultimate test, as it was 1) a big policy that 2) affects something almost everyone cares about (the economy) and 3) had a pretty significant flip-flop in a very short timeframe. Basically everyone should have been pissed either when the tariffs were announced, or when the tariffs were significantly watered down.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30d ago
Yes, they've essentially captured the Republican party in its entirety by this point. Criticizing or even disagreeing with Dear Leader too consistently is seen as a crime worthy of (political) death, no matter the topic or how wrong Trump is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30d ago
Your comment is excessively fatalistic. Countries undo their bad decisions all the time. Massive peacetime deficits were not a normal occurrence in this country for the first couple hundred years of its existence. Whether the US will cut its current deficits is up to the electorate. I'm not particularly hopeful about the prospect given that the current electorate is full of populist idiots that would punish politicians for making the correct long-term decisions vis-a-vis deficit reduction, but it's certainly theoretically achievable. Tariffs are not the way to get there, as the amount of money raised would be comparatively tiny relative to the damage done.
The US isn't printing "infinite money", as that would have resulted in hyperinflation (inflation of high single digits or low double digits doesn't count as hyperinflation).
It grew in strength over time. Even in early 2021 there were some rumblings with Kamala Harris making her "do not come" speech (satirized by the right as "do not cum"). Then agreeing in principle on a conservative immigration package that I talked about. Biden doing stuff like trying to reimplement "remain in Mexico", and eventually cutting deals with the country to try to staunch the flow of immigrants without having aggressive enforcement at the border. There were always progressive groups chanting for open borders throughout the process, but the more centrist left realized they had an issue fairly early and gradually picked up steam.
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