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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Also, from a realpolitik perspective, you can't easily enforce a law the people (or some concentrated geographic subset of people) legitimately won't tolerate.

Tell it to George Wallace. With modern state capacity you can enforce anything, if you have the will. For whatever reason only the left has the will.

For whatever reason only the left has the will.

I believe it would be more accurate to say that democrats have convinced themselves that only the left has the will and that's what makes these incidents are so shocking to them.

Recall that one of the first unguarded reactions captured from one of the protestors present at the Renee Good shooting was "WTF! Why would you have real bullets?" These people are so coddled that it never occurred to them that force might be met with force.

It should be remembered that George Wallace was more of a showman than a committed segregationist, the stand at the schoolhouse door was an engineered photo op, and that most of the Southern Democrats were to the left of their voters on segregation. Wallace himself campaigned hard on segregation mostly because he lost the '58 primary while endorsed by the NAACP to a guy endorsed by the Klan (who lived long enough to endorse Barack Obama; Southern politics can be funny like that).

Immigration is another one of those issues where the vast majority of politicians from any party are to the left of their electorate. Steven Miller might be serious about mass deportations, but the Congressional GOP is not and has spent the last 20 years desperate to enact IRCA: Part Two. Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible. Even Trump spent most of his political career calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi before aping his platform.

I think it’s less true today that politicians are once left of their voters on immigration. The lefts focus on woke made the right thing a lot more intellectually on race. And now you have hbd and Saylor and plenty of people with scientific arguments on why race matters and you need to get the people of the wrong races out of your country.

I would say pre-2020 you are in fact correct but in 2026 it’s a lot more popular with the average politician.

You have popular twitter accounts followed by everyone that promote “black people destroyed urbanism in America”. A lot of lefties actually agree with that comment.

Congress and the Judiciary are overwhelmingly pre-2020 and Twitter is not real life. No Republican politician, let alone Democrat, would dare utter the words "Black people destroyed urbanism in America". Steve King was castrated by the House GOP for less.

Illegal immigrants (and, really, most first-gen legal immigrants) have almost nothing to do with woke. Those people are mostly Made in the USA Americans like Kimberle Crenshaw with a helping of highly educated second-generation children of legal immigrants.

The GOP does have some genuine restrictionists (motivated by, if nothing else, being able to read exit polls), but the party as a whole is squishier than their rhetoric and quick to sell out to whatever lobbyist shows up. The old school labor types who used to act as a brake within the Democratic Party are all but extinct.

Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible.

I am generally a fan of expanded mandatory E-Verify for interdicting illegals more cheaply/efficiently than battalions of ICE agents, but I have to admit there is an obvious failure mode: what’s stopping Big Totally-Compliant Employer, Inc. from contracting $SHITTY_JOB out to some fly-by-night outfit that hires illegals and pays them in cash, and then going all surprised_pikachu.jpg if and when it comes to light that—shock, horror!—the contractors were not, in fact, unimpeachable exemplars of regulatory rectitude?

You write the regulation such that "Compliant Employer" is vicariously liable for any violations by the subcontractor, as is done to varying extents by OSHA and the NLRB.

For an example: busting Hyundai for using child labor. You would want to make the fines larger, but the principle applies. The factory and the temp agency are both fined for the labor law violation.

We could create this whole totalitarian bureaucratic paperwork nightmare with significant vicarious liability if anyone employed directly or indirectly by you turns out to not have authorization to work. Or we could just go after the people who are primarily responsible in the first place. The latter is better; there's a cost to all that Orwellian shit.

The libertarian idea echoed by Republicans that business owners are too special a class to fill out paperwork or obey laws is what is "primarily responsible" for widespread illegal immigration. Business owners are the original open borders constituency.

Yes, filling out paperwork has a cost. Paying competitive wages that command American adults and/or building one's facilities in a place that people actually live instead of staffing one's factory with migrant children in a rural nowhere county with less than 10K working-age residents is indeed more expensive.

Failing to govern also has costs. Republican politicians have spent the last 20 or so years either lying about being opposed to illegal immigration or being too spineless to actually enforce immigration laws if it meant irritating the Chamber of Commerce. Lying/failure to deliver has expensive consequences like incompetent populists winning primaries and becoming the face of your party. CPB/ICE's budget increase for the sake of deportations exceeds the budget for the entire Department of Labor.

If the right can't tell the Chamber of Commerce types (who, last I checked, are entirely incapable of mobilizing voters, let alone street protests) to take one for the team or try their luck with the Mamdanis of the world they don't stand a chance in Hell of accomplishing any goal that faces any organized opposition.

At this point the Republicans might as well give up and go back to the Reagan/H.W. Bush position of open borders.

For whatever reason only the left has the will.

Well, I'd imagine that the small government side of things would be less inclined to do big things while wielding the government

The right isn't really the small government side; that would be libertarians, and they're never in power.

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