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Trump has made me very fatalistic about this. The two options seem to be the following:
This captures why most people aren't actually against immigration. When they reach the precipice of telling other people: "No, you can't live here with us", they buckle. And it's not really a surprise given the media most people consume. For decades, news and entertainment have inundated the public with emotionally charged narratives venerating empathy for the outgroup. When boundary enforcement is systematically framed as moral cruelty, conservative voters absorb and even revel in that emotional conditioning. They favor closed borders in the abstract, but the moment execution demands personal backbone, their media-ingrained impulse to 'be soft' takes over.
To put things in context, conditons haven't been this bad for the left base since Bush Jr. Their footsoldiers are getting killed or jailed for their anti-ICE stunts that provide no tangible political or material benefit to them. They are to some extent demoralized to a point where their political coalition is fracturing in very polarizing ways.
All the right wing has to do is put their foot on the pedal and drive it home. Do a Charlie Kirk legislation, then do another, and another. Demonize 'protestors' who don't strictly abide by every law in the book. Arrest them on the spot. Call them terrorists. Raid their chat groups for dirt, sick the FBI on their parents or neighbors and ask about their childrens or neighbors potential terrorist activities. Every high card has been in the right wings hand for what, a year now? But no, neither the republican politicians or the republican electorate has the guts to maintain their society.
Law and Order is a slogan, not an actual thing most right wingers believe in. They feel angry when reading stories about repeat violent offenders miraculously getting off scot free for the umpteenth time, only to go out to maim or murder again. But there's no organizing around that problem. No consistent emotional animation. Not having law and order when convenient is just another thing the left gets to do that's filed under 'I guess that's just how things are now'. It's actually easier for right wingers in general and conservatives in particular to tolerate the raping and pillaging of their village than kicking out the rapists and pillagers since one has no positive emotional resonance in media whilst the other does. Not all outsiders are pillagers and rapists, don't you know?
Disagree. The Right's problem on immigration really isn't that it lacks viciousness that the Left supposedly has. It's that it's bad at harnessing popular anger against immigration mismanagement under Biden into durable political change. Part of that problem is Trump Cultism. Another part is valuing the optics of dunking on the Left over long-lasting results. The Right had plenty of political capital to do this, it just spent it ineffectively.
This critique would be significantly more effective if you could describe the more effective expenditures of political capital the Right has failed to exploit. To date, your argument appears to begin and end with "Pass more laws", in a context where the laws in place have been systematically ignored and subverted for multiple decades without cease. This has been pointed out to you, at length, many times and by many people, and you remain incapable of explaining how passing additional laws will succeed against the opposition's well-established tactic of ignoring or refusing to enforce laws it doesn't like.
These discussions generally tend to come down to a basic question of the nature of the problem the culture war presents to us. A popular answer, once upon a time, was that our procedures needed updating and then the problems would essentially go away. It does not seem to me that this is an argument that can be credibly made, given the last decade's-worth of evidence.
The problem, as I understand it, is that large portions of the population have incompatible values, and consider those holding opposing values to be an existential threat that must be neutralized. Further, even if such a belief is mistaken, once that belief is embraced and acted upon, it is no longer a mistake for the other side to perceive those who have mistakenly embraced conflict to be an actual existential threat. Given that democrats are willing to run on criminalizing significant portions of Reds' way of life, have demonstrated an ability to win elections while arguing that nits make lice, and that their grassroots broadly supports ideological murder as a solution to the present situation, it seems to me that we're a bit past the point where formalism and norm-respecting carries the day.
For Reds, there is no livable future where we go back to letting Blues run society with a blank check and zero accountability. Coordinating a legitimacy crisis for the current regime is the single most valuable use of political capital available to us, and if you cannot see that, it seems to me that you are going to continue to find reality a very surprising place for the foreseeable future.
If I had a magic wand to control Republicans on immigration, I would do the following:
I think the theatrics help, actually. For the left, it’s about demoralizing them. Showing them that they’re not going to get anything from throwing tantrums and that we aren’t impressed with No Kings rallies with little bouncy houses. It’s about getting the immigrants to understand that liberals cannot stop this and the conservatives don’t care about optics. And it shows the conservatives that immigration enforcement is actually happening, and will continue with no regard for whatever hostage puppy the left or the media put in front of them. The message is: we are serious and it will happen regardless of what anyone thinks about it.
That's all well and good... until the next election rolls around and you've alienated all the normies.
It is not clear to me that your model of "alienating the normies" is accurate. Certainly what alienates normies does not follow any sort of rational model, or that there is a way to take effective action sufficient to the situation that we can know in advance will "alienate normies" less. It is now established to a high degree of probability that Blues ran an illegal project to engineer novel plagues in secret, leaked their work-product, caused a global pandemic, killed thirty-two million people, wrecked the global economy and significantly and pointlessly reduced the quality of life of, to a first approximation, every human being on the planet. All of this is now strongly indicated by publicly available evidence, and somehow none of it has "alienated the normies" to any significant degree. If you are going to claim that normie-alienation is an important part of your model, I'd be interested in how your model accounts for that sequence of events.
It appears to me that Normies are alienated by, essentially, hostile propaganda, and the biggest gains we've made in reducing normie alienation are by direct conflict with the Blue knowledge-production apparatus, not by allowing it an uncontested veto. This is not to say that my side cannot make mistakes or be genuinely unpopular, but rather to note that most of the mechanisms offering granular control over what is popular are controlled by enemies, and to the extent that this is less true over time, it has become less true through an open-ended acceptance of conflict and escalation in the face of highly effective propaganda.
One way to never lose an election again would be to vote for Blues exclusively. Unfortunately, the point of elections is to secure power to coordinate the pursuit of good things; if the choice is between pursuing good things at the risk of "alienating the normies" or accepting bad things indefinitely with the approval of normies, the former is clearly preferable. Any level of immigration restriction beyond de facto open borders would not be a viable policy without "alienating the normies". Having police is not a viable policy without "alienating the normies".
We will definitely make mistakes, and we will definitely lose elections. When this happens, the proper course of action is to escalate. Procedural outcomes exist to be manipulated, and it is my side that should be manipulating them to secure positive outcomes. The hope is that we will be able to secure those outcomes before the escalation becomes uncontrollably self-sustaining, but the alternative is also acceptable.
For your first paragraph, lab-leak is a potential explanation but I've never seen it proved to a high degree of certainty over a random mutation. Also, calling the CCP part of the "Blues" is more than a stretch. There are a few tankies like Hasan Piker that idolize Mao as part of their shock-jock routine, but little beyond that. The modern CCP is basically just Fascism with Chinese Characteristics anyways (lots of nationalism, free enterprise + state capitalism, jingoism).
Obviously the both groups will try to demonize the other side, and the quality of their propaganda has a big impact. But both sides are still easily able to score a bunch of own-goals on that front, giving their opponents easy ammo or acting like ghouls. That's quite common with the Right when it comes to immigration at this point.
These are not the two choices. Political changes will generate a baseline backlash proportional to how substantial the changes are. But on top of that you can also have partisans being extra inflammatory to flex their ingroup credentials. It's personally beneficial to them since they gain advancement within the organization, but collectively detrimental as it hurts the movement's image. Trump is basically the king of this.
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