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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   30483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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In the weeks up to the election, I started listening to the NYT podcast, especially "The Ezra Klein Show" by Ezra Klein, "The Daily" by Michael Barbaro, and "The Run Up" by Astead Herndon. I usually thought of the NYT as this bastion of liberal thinking leftist thinking, uncritical of what they are. I no longer think so. I now think that the best journalists of the NYT (the ones who get to have podcasts) are self-critical, intelligent, and are powerful voices articulating the current problems of the world. Obviously people have flaws and they might not be able to understand their own biases from time to time, look no further than Michael Barbaro's recent interview with Bernie Sanders where Sanders at one point exasperatedly remarks "Michael, you haven't heard a word that I've said, and that's... impressive". But on the whole, I respect individual NYT journalists a lot more after this US election.

For my first top-level post, I want to draw attention specifically to an episode of "The Daily" titled "On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted" which has Barbaro interview David Leonhardt on his investigation on the immigration issue. I thought it was a good look at the historical progression of immigration laws in the United States. And like the journalist on that episode, the conclusion was: "It's the Democrat's fault, and the elites". Whether it was LBJ and RFK (sr) who fought for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, promising that the country won't be flooded with immigrant worker, but then didn't think to close the loophole that is family immigration, or it was Bill Clinton who couldn't deliver on the findings of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform lead by Barbara Jordan (btw, an absolutely awesome woman), or Biden with his perplexing loosening of the southern border compared to Obama.

The closing was especially poignant, Leonhardt noted:

It simply is not sustainable in a democracy to have our elected representatives promise us one thing and then have it do the exact opposite of what they promised ... I think we're not going to get to a sustainable immigration system until Washington reckons with the past failure to produce what it promised the American people it was going to do.

To be fair, like the video pointed out, there were reasons why the Democrats made such missteps. LBJ/RFK was too idealistic regarding family immigration (they never thought of chain migration) and the opponents of the bill were racist (right message wrong messengers). Clinton had the pulse of the electorate, he set up the commission, but was opposed by both Democrats (pro-immigration idealists) and Republicans (corporate interests in keeping wages low). Biden, worst of all, had Trump-derangement syndrome with regards to immigration and loosened policy.

One might ask "why now? why didn't this become such a huge issue for the American electorate in the last half of century". Well, it's because times were good. Immigration is just another big issue but never one of the biggest. Economic growth smoothens immigration concerns (and there are a lot of upsides to immigration). The crux is this exchange [emphasis mine]:

Barbaro: I guess I don't quite understand why Bill Clinton would have bowed to those pressures David, because it sounds like a bunch of elites activists, business leaders, are the ones trying to torpedo this. But Bill Clinton has many political gifts and one of them is to recognize what gets someone elected or reelected, and it feels like what Barbara Jordan is really telling him is that high levels of immigration, legal and illegal, are a threat to working class America. And Bill Clinton would have understood, I'd have to think, that working class America is really essential to the Democratic party that he leads.

Leonhardt: I think two things are happening here. One the economy just keeps getting stronger over the course of the 1990s, which is a reminder that immigration is just one force among many that shapes an economy and it's not the main one. And the second thing is that political elites really matter. And what has happened over the last few decades is that both of our parties became ever more dominated by college graduates, and people who had the concerns and interests of college graduates as opposed to working class people. And so Democrats become a little bit less focused on what blue collar workers want, and we see this with both trade and immigration. And in the Republican Party those same corporate interests that have long had huge sway over the Republican Party do. And so when you think of official Washington and the people who are making policy and who are lobbying for it, you just have much less pressure for changes to the immigration system than public opinion might suggest that you would.

Barbaro: this is reminding me so much of what happened with NAFTA, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is that elites, powerful entrenched forces in Washington, increasingly disconnected from working class America, see nothing but upside in globalization and free trade, and don't anticipate the ways in which NAFTA will hurt working class America. there's not much dispute that it does.

Leonhardt: I think that's exactly right. And I think one of the real mistakes that proponents of immigration have made, and this is both business conservatives who want more immigration, and it's progressives who from a justice perspective want more immigration, I think one of the real mistakes they've made is they tend to argue that immigration is a free lunch and in fact immigration just benefits everyone. And the research doesn't support that idea nor do people's everyday experiences support that idea. Immigration has trade-offs, it has enormous advantages for an economy, but it also has some costs, and those costs do tend to be borne disproportionately by working class people and that's part of why so many people are so anxious about it.

As an aspiring US immigrant myself, how Leonhardt interpreted the findings of Barbara Jordan keeps ringing in my head:

there's a fundamental difference between being pro-immigrant and being pro-immigration and she says we are a nation of immigrants but at the same time she says that doesn't mean we should always want higher and higher levels of immigration in fact sometimes having higher and higher levels of immigration can hurt immigrants immigrants who came here several years ago are often the ones who compete for jobs with the very most recent immigrants and when immigration gets too high it can lead to a political backlash that hurts people who came here often legally several years before.

Or as Barbaro summarizes:

if you're to pro-immigration it will undermine the position of being pro-immigrant

Or as how I would put it:

Being pro-immigrant does not mean pro-immigration

In the end, I have a growing sympathy for the anti-immigration argument (irregardless of how much more stress or heartbreak this is going to cause me the next few years), a new respect for the journalists of the NYT, and at least three more podcasts I look forward to every week.

I suppose my question to kick off discussion are:

  1. How have your thoughts changed on the issue of US immigration after this election season?
  2. Who are the people/pundits that you've changed your opinions on?

I’ve been struggling quite a bit to understand the whole Trump phenomenon. Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters. A complex multicausal explanation involving loss of institutional prestige, social media, economic changes, and the like seems attractive, but there are good reasons to be suspicious of such explanations.

Maybe it’s just immigration. The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration. The UK is the prime example of this. The people voted to leave the European Union, causing easily foreseeable economic damage, because they were tired of immigration. Then the Conservative government in power proceeds to not actually lower immigration.

If you live in a Western Democracy and you want a secure border and less immigration, you can’t just vote for someone who says they want a secure border and less immigration. You have to vote for someone who viscerally hates immigrants. Someone who hates them personally, and who hates the very idea of what immigration represents. If their heart isn’t in it, they will predictably fold. Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.

Trump isn't campaigning, conventionally. He's performing kingship. And people love their king.

When Trump visited the hurricane Helene devastation, he didn't say 'when I am elected my administration will release x gazillion dollars for flood relief'. No, his message was that he was already moving assets into place to help them. His strongest retainer was solving communications in the region and he had other vassals sending relief. Royals reassure their people.

Trump's pitch can be summed up as 'if only the tsar knew- put me on my rightful throne, because I'm the tsar who knows'. That's what the McDonald's shift was about, was empathizing with the commoners. He's got a claim on legitimacy from the 2020 stolen election that at the very least isn't any more spurious than descent from Amaterasu or Woden. And people know, intuitively on a pre-rational level, that the gods of the land are angry when the rightful king is usurped from his throne, and they know that the harvest will be poor and the weather bad and the kingdom's enemies stronger because of it. Joe Biden was not making a gaffe when he referred to the 'great MAGA king'.

Trump is a larger than life character playing a role in a storybook that's written in every human mind. There's the kingdom, torn asunder by turmoil(border chaos and inflation) and with foreign conflict(Gaza and Ukraine), ruled by usurpers(democrats) with the rightful prince(Trump), exiled and persecuted(felony convictions), supported by a handful of loyal barons(republican governors), and the viziers(Musk and RFK) who defect to him when it is clear that all is not well. And people listen to and believe in stories. Not economic analyses and statistics. If you want relentless popularity, treat math as a four letter word and imply a story.

Is there an amount of reality that the world does not work this way that these people could experience that would change their view or would such an event likely be of a magnitude that it would just kill them?

It might help if those attempting the reality check had some plausible claim to a superior grasp on reality themselves. By all means, list off the victories of the Establishment, the evidence of their prudence and sound judgement. They've been running the country as a coherent bloc since at least the fall of the USSR, so there should be plenty of victories to list, no?

I mean I could but most of what I think of as victories I would imagine you would classify as defeats. The truth is it doesn't matter as more that one person can be wrong at once and as a great man once said "facts don't care about your feelings". No amount of anger at the establishment makes the "Trump is a king and he is going to hit the make the economy good button as well as the decrease prices button" worldview any less delusional.

I mean I could but most of what I think of as victories I would imagine you would classify as defeats.

Why speculate when you could give it a try and find out for sure?

No amount of anger at the establishment makes the "Trump is a king and he is going to hit the make the economy good button as well as the decrease prices button" worldview any less delusional.

There are degrees of delusion, and "We can trust Elites/The System/The Science/The Acolytes of Codified Procedure to police themselves and secure good outcomes, because they've done such a good job in the past" is considerably more delusional.

Trump is in many ways a buffoon. He is winning a straight popularity contest because his opponents are arguably worse. I am not confident that he can "hit the make the economy good button as well as the decrease prices button", but leadership and good stewardship do in fact exist, "leading economists" predicted his first administration would tank the economy when in fact it was one of the best economic periods of my life, and his opponents were very recently denying the existence of inflation before they pivoted to proposing federal price controls.

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