Several of the participants at yesterday’s AEI forum focused on the need for Republicans to first “listen” to constituencies they want to win over. That is true of course, but one of our insightful regular commenters (Pseudoplotinus) pointed to the risks of this approach:
I found this particularly problematic when the point was made that the GOP has to get better at listening to diverse constituencies. This is true enough as far as it goes. However, I have the sneaking suspicion that what Republicans will find out is that ‘listening’ is really about making members of these constituencies ‘feel’ like they are being listened to in the democratic party sense, which is to say compensate said constituencies with some kind of policy or entitlement to gain their vote.
I think that the risks of the Republicans having that kind of conversation are real, and simply offering a Lite version of the Democrats’ proposals will seem like an attractive (even though ultimately futile) option. I do think that one of the purposes of “listening” is to find points of agreement between conservatives and some members of constituencies that are voting overwhelmingly Democratic. In my personal experience, those points of agreement exist – which is not to say we are talking about down-the-line agreement with the Republican Party platform. There is a lot more skepticism of tax increases and abortion on demand than you would think from looking at some of the subgroup in the exit polls. Listening might also convince Republicans that they need to offer something tangible on health insurance policy to people who have no or very vulnerable insurance coverage instead of the “greatest health care system in the world” stuff that pleases lots of people who have already bought into the conservative narrative. The good news is that moving toward something like what Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru proposed would actually be a move to the “right.”
I also think that “listening” should absolutely not be about paying political consultants to “explain” what members of this or that group thinks. It also should not mean buying into the stories of lobbying groups that are the self-appointed spokesman of this or that constituency. The economic and political incentives of those approaches are way too screwed up. Consultants are not going to save you. Self-interested lobbyists aren’t going to save you. They are going to financially and ideologically rip you off. And if you are lazy enough to think they are going to save you, then you deserve to get ripped off. Listening should involve a combination of survey research and ethnography and the RNC should be working on protocols right now.
November 18th, 2012 | 11:42 am
The emphasis should be on improving the GOP’s attractiveness to middle-class/working-class voters in general, not on attracting minority voters in particular. As had been said elsewhere, Romney lost because he did not attract enough middle- and working-class WHITE voters in PA and the Midwest. A better pitch to the concerns of ordinary voters could slightly reduce (but not come close to eliminating) the Dem advantage with minorities and new immigrants, but overemphasis on minorities will lead to gimmicks (e.g. Marco Rubio) that just distract from the need to have an agenda that attracts middle class voters generally, based on their real-life concerns.
November 18th, 2012 | 1:38 pm
As to Hispanics, immigration policy is a loony mess. We know some non-Hispanic couples in inter-national marriages who cannot live together in the USA because of current immigration law or policy. Since when is the USA so interested in citizen’s marriages?
One young friend married a Canadian whose rights to stay vanished when he graduated from college. Another young friend is currently living in China, unemployed and now finding himself unemployable as a Westerner in the small town where he is, having committed the political sin of marrying his interpreter several months ago. The criteria for who we choose to allow to stay has little rhyme or reason and surely bringing some sanity to this area of law and policy as well as others would be a useful platform.
If there is one criticism of the young that I agree with it is that the Republican Party is confused in its message. Are we all about individual liberty or not? We are all about smaller government, except when we are for bigger government. Republicans have their own lobbies and constituencies and they produce cacaphony. No wonder the young find Libertarians appealing; at least they have a consistent message.
November 18th, 2012 | 2:11 pm
Well, I’m one of the vast number of folks who voted for McCain, for W twice, etc., and wouldn’t dream of voting for the current Democrat Party, or the Libertarians, certainly not the Greens, but didn’t vote for Mitt. No one’s trying to open any dialogue with me.
Stripping aside the fact that Obama’s campaign didn’t “act” like a winning campaign of normal times (not even bothering to go for indies, or to try to expand his base), it’s not really that surprising that the candidate that won is the guy who said he would implement several trillion dollars of deficit reduction (a laughable lie in any sane universe) and that his opponent would impose huge middle-class tax hikes, and whose opponent let these statements go pretty much totally unrefuted.
November 18th, 2012 | 2:14 pm
DJF,
“A better pitch to the concerns of ordinary voters could slightly reduce (but not come close to eliminating) the Dem advantage with minorities and new immigrants, but overemphasis on minorities will lead to gimmicks (e.g. Marco Rubio) that just distract from the need to have an agenda that attracts middle class voters generally, based on their real-life concerns.”
I do think that there is a real risk that Republicans will think that winning over a larger share of nonwhites and crafting “an agenda that attracts middle class voters generally, based on their real-life concerns” are mutually exclusive. But if that is the case they are doomed anyway.
I do think that historical memory, media consumption patterns, and peer effects can vary even among subgroups of voters who are at the same income level and that those differences can matter a lot if they are not taken account of. Henry Olsen had a good observation regarding the voting patterns of high income Indian-Americans.
The point shouldn’t be to figuring out what particular lollipop should be given to this or that group. That would be destructive even if it “worked” in the sense of winning elections. It should be more about crafting a message that can be (and is) heard and understood by more people.
November 18th, 2012 | 2:41 pm
Kate, agreed on all points regarding immigration. In my opinion, the lack of rational immigration reform suited both parties for awhile as a way to motivate their respective bases. Obviously this isn’t working anymore for the Republicans. But it is for the democrats.
One of the recent consequences from this last election appears to be the possible resurrection of the Schumer Graham immigration reform plan which basicly proposes to do the obvious: First secure the border, then create a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the country.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/11/schumer-bipartisan-support-immigration-reform/
Sounds great! But why do I get the feeling this is just Lucy and the football again, and we’re going to get amnesty without the secure border? That scenario, afterall, has worked out well for the democratic party.
It seems to me the Republican party will have to have a message in place to deploy if Lucy tries to pull the football away that in essence calls BS on the democrats. We need to convey to the hispanic community that immigration reform is being prevented by a democratic party that understands the tactical advantage of keeping this issue unressolved.
In other words, part of effective communication, in my opinion, will require tactical responses as well as the other party attempts to both get the credit from its minority constituencies even while confounding those policies behind the scenes.
November 18th, 2012 | 3:21 pm
Pete,
Regarding new immigrant groups, I think they now bring with them anti-colonial/anti-European ideological baggage – even if they are market-oriented and entrepreneurial, like, e.g., many immigrants from India, Pakistan and the Middle East – that makes it difficult for them to identify with the historical America and the ideas of the founding that the GOP still looks to, at least rhetorically, as a source of authority. (The Democrats since the 60s, by contrast, seem to regard themselves as founding a new and better, because “fairer” and more “racially inclusive,” country, and regard the founders’ significance as nothing more than a precedent for overthrowing old, “oppressive” “power structures” that don’t work; the content of the founders’ ideas are of little interest to them.) I haven’t read Olsen (of whom I think very highly) on Indian Americans, but I wouldn’t surprised if that’s what he’s getting at. If I’m right, what bothers new immigrants about the GOP is precisely the party’s celebration of American history (which used to be a bipartisan thing), not simply problems with “tone” (which basically means, don’t talk about limiting immigration) or silly things said by dim-witted, marginal politicians like Tancredo. It is difficult to see what the Republicans can do about this. Given the atmosphere of hysteria over “racism” and the “far right” that Democrats and their media friends have fostered over the last 30 years, the GOP is unlikely to do more than marginally improve their results with racial minorities. The situations with Jews and single white women are parallel.
November 18th, 2012 | 3:31 pm
Pete,
To the foregoing, I would add that the immigrants we have received from Russia and elsewhere in the former USSR over the last quarter century provide an example of an immigrant group that has consistently favored the Republicans over the Democrats due to the ideological mindset they brought with them (in this case, pro-capitalist and hostile to America’s foreign adversaries).
November 18th, 2012 | 3:42 pm
DJF, as I understand Olsen (you can follow the link to the AEI forum as judge for yourself), he argued that GOP language both about the platform and the US are needlessly exclusionary. You are right about the limitations of using the “founding” with more recent immigrant groups. There is a lot of context missing there, but there is also some rhetorical laziness too. You don’t need to try to explain why the founders would prefer a Mitch Daniels approach to health care rather than Obamacare. That doesn’t mean “no founder talk” but it does mean that certain kinds of founder talk are going to be met no so much with anti-colonial resentment as with incomprehension. This is just one kind of rhetorical short cut used among conservative when they talk to themselves that just won’t work with nonconservatives. If you want to talk founders, be ready to talk in specific about why they are right instead of asserting that “the founders said…”
I also don’t think that recent immigrant groups are against (or uninterested in)celebration of America as such. I can see why some celebrations might rankle as a disguised form of white identity politics. I think that Obama’s reelection was, for some nonwhites who are also non-African Americans, a sign that the United States was as much their own any anybody else’s and that this was an occasion for celebrating American patriotism. I’m not sure how many conservatives get this as some (granted I’m talking of people who I hear on talk radio) conservatives seemed to look at Obama’s reelection as a partial repudiation of American patriotism. I can’t promise any particular gains with any group, but it would help if Republicans had a noncondescending way of talking to recent immigrant groups that locates them in the sweep of American history and doesn’t make the feel like guests/cultural second-class citizens in a nation that really belongs to the people who want to “take America back” from the first African American President. All this of course in addition to crafting an agenda that speaks to people’s real life concerns.
November 18th, 2012 | 3:52 pm
Pete,
I would just point out that the incomprehension of talk about the founders includes almost all new voters educated in our schools, whether native-born, immigrant, or the children of immigrants. So the Democrats have already won this part of their battle without any shots having been fired.
Previous cohorts of immigrants, even if they were hostile to the WASP establishment and big business, came to identify with the founding and the country’s history. This no longer happens.
November 18th, 2012 | 4:01 pm
DJF, “I would just point out that the incomprehension of talk about the founders includes almost all new voters educated in our schools, whether native-born, immigrant, or the children of immigrants.”
I think that is less true than you think and the problem is somewhat less new. I do think that arguments from the founding have to be arguments based in reason and not from authority to be effective with those who are not already conservatives. The number of conservative elected officials who can do this are fewer than I would like. A lot of Republican rhetorical “founderism” (I’m thinking especially of Michelle Bachmann) consists of poses struck for the benefit of the likeminded and that bear no real scrutiny. Good riddance to that. I would not assume that there are not very large numbers of members of recent immigrant groups who “identify with the founding and the country’s history” – though not entirely in ways that conservatives habitually talk among themselves.
November 18th, 2012 | 6:55 pm
I was not suggesting taking as a model the witless way of talking about the founding we get from most Republican politicians, even intelligent ones (like Romney, unfortunately). I agree that relying on arguments from authority are not effective for conservatives (the Democrats and the Left use such arguments all the time, and get away with it). However, I’m not sure I agree with the last sentence of your 4:01 post. In the end, you’re much more optimistic than I am. I really do not see a way forward for us with immigrant groups. Young whites may come around as things continue to get worse for them as they get older, but by then it will be too late to reverse the damage the Left has done.
November 18th, 2012 | 8:23 pm
“Republicans will find out is that ‘listening’ is really about making members of these constituencies ‘feel’ like they are being listened to in the democratic party sense”
No. Listening is listening. I’ve taught people to listen and it is a learned skill. If the listened to spontaneously have something to say then you stop talking and hear them out. If they have no spontaneous starting point, you ask them something about themselves that you really want to know, *then* you stop talking and hear them out. You don’t have to give anything but your time and attention, and you don’t have to make them “feel good”.
The point is to be able to remember what they actually said, take this away with you, and think it through. What most people call “listening” is merely looking for something to agree with (or, sometimes, to disagree with) in what someone is saying and then discarding the rest.
If all you remember of what someone said is only your opinion of it, you haven’t been listening.
November 18th, 2012 | 8:30 pm
Pete,
I am not seeking to extend this exchange indefinitely, but, on reflection, I think that giving up the founding as a source of authority -which you seem to be willing to do, and perhaps we have no choice but to do – is to admit that the old American Nation is dead. In the past, there were bitter debates about the meaning of the founding, but, notwithstanding sharp disagreements, nearly all – including the large majority (including me, and guessing from your last name, probably you) whose ancestors came to this country long afterward – saw the founding as the birth of the Nation and, one way or another, as a source of authority. Now, we are told, to invoke it is to “alienate” the recent immigrants and their kids, and apparently most of our own kids, as well. What, then, makes us a Nation anymore, as opposed to a multiplicity of mutually suspicious tribes gathered by chance on the same land-mass? It seems that the Left, with the help of its intermittent corporate allies and the feckless Republican Party, has called into being a new American Nation, dedicated to the proposition that the old American Nation was bad, and little more than that.
November 18th, 2012 | 8:38 pm
I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic exactly. I do think that there is a nontrivial number of strong Obama supporters have policy instincts to the “right” of Obama, but support him because they don’t really know about those policy differences, haven’t heard a reasonable and comprehensible argument from the other side and have an idea that Obama is “on their side” in a way that the center-right isn’t.
But even if the center-right gets everything right (whatever everything right is), there is still no guarantee of political success. The national GOP might just become a national version of the California GOP where the Republicans only rarely win elections and never win power. This could happen no matter what we do. On the other hand, both Tolkien and Aron reminded us that we shouldn’t need confidence (or even hope) of success to do the best we can, and we can do better.
November 18th, 2012 | 8:56 pm
Pseudoplotinus, securing our borders won’t be easy because we have such long borders. Then, how many millions of people come into our country from overseas by air or sea every year? Some stay. How would we track all of them?
But I agree about finding a way for letting people who have been in our country illegally find a legal way to stay. Last year I was with a group touring the local county jail. It is bigger than our county needs and takes in INS prisoners until they an be transported. They get people who have been here for 10-20 years or more and have built decent lives . Stopped for speeding or something similarly common and minor, they must go back to what is no longer home. How will they get back to family and the lives they built? My sons working in restaurants knew men who worked in those kitchens and had children in high schools or trying to get into colleges who merited scholarships that they couldn’t take without putting parents at risk.
Who wouldn’t want to come to America? If we love it, why do we think others wouldn’t? I don’t know any immigrant who is not grateful to be here and for all the patriotic stuff, too. Maybe that’s just Ohio where La Raza doesn’t think it has a right to the state. Immigrants I knew in NYC were the same way and more grateful for liberty than many native-born citizens there.
November 18th, 2012 | 9:23 pm
Hey Joseph,
Glad to see you’re contininuing contributions to these threads. I agree with your description of listening, and think it more or less is what Pete means by listening. When I stated my concern above which Pete sited in this post (thanks for the hat tip Pete) I was referring to the unfortunately debased form that ‘listening’ has taken in our political culture. In today’s political context listening is really a euphemism for ‘quid-pro-quo’.
I would be very happy to see the Republicans distinguish themselves as the party with Ears. It certainly would make them stand out from their rivals aka the party of mouths.
Kate, I am entirely sypathetic with your post above. I’m a second generation descendent of European Immigrants (Greek on my dad’s side, Italian on my mom’s side) who attained citizenship because both my grandfathers fought with the American’s in WWI. So for me things like the dream act are a no-brainer. I geneally agree with Thomas Friedman who said the solution for immigration is a tall wall with a wide gate. I’m willing to let that gate be as wide as it needs to be as long as said immigrants are law abiding and hard working, as most of them certainly are.
The problem I see is that immigration is a useful political football now for the democrats. So I await to see how the Graham Schumer immigration reform plan proceeds. I think somehow it will get confounded, maybe by the nativist wing on the right, or the brilliant political tacticians on the left who don’t want to let a winning issue go.
We shall see. Either way the Republican party has to learn up on how to respond effectively in a tactical sense, especially if Lucy once agains decides to the pull the football away.
November 19th, 2012 | 9:38 am
Does anyone here have a sensible definition of the mindlessly ubiquitous phrase “secure our borders”? Does this mean build two 3000-mile concrete walls with razor wire on top? If not, what COULD it mean?
And any form of it sounds like a “very big gummint” project to me, small gumminters.
November 19th, 2012 | 10:45 am
Dr. Kate:
“They get people who have been here for 10-20 years or more and have built decent lives . Stopped for speeding or something similarly common and minor, they must go back to what is no longer home. How will they get back to family and the lives they built?”
1. These people broke our laws and entered the USA illegally. They could have chosen to enter legally. For whatever reason they didn’t.
2. This nation is under no obligation to accept people who have no “prospects” and in the end only take jobs that Americans might have.
3. No immigrant should be eligible for ‘welfare’, ever. The American taxpayers should not be responsible.
4. No immigrant should be able to vote for at least three years and then after learning to read and write, English.
5. Any immigrant must either have sufficient funds to live or skills in which to make a living.
November 19th, 2012 | 11:37 am
Bob,
1. The point is that you cannot choose that. As one legal immigrant from Nigeria put it to me, “If you are very lucky you get to come if you apply.” There is not much choice involved. I see that as a problem.
2. What about immigrants who would do jobs that not many Americans want to do? That’s what most illegals from south of our border do.
3. Agreed.
4. How about applying for citizenship?
5. Absolutely.
November 19th, 2012 | 11:40 am
HT, exactly my problem with that proposal.
November 19th, 2012 | 12:02 pm
Kate, respectfully, I disagree. One can immigrate to the USA legally. However, if you’re saying the immigration laws need reform, I won’t argue but we can only work with the laws we have.
The welfare reform of Gingrich-Clinton must be re-established (this is critical). As such these jobs are going to be needed by Americans on the lower end of the income ladder…not illegal foreigners. Welfare must be removed from the jurisdiction of the central gov’t and returned to the states.
Reading and writing English must be among the criteria necessary to earn American citizenship.
November 19th, 2012 | 12:14 pm
“Does anyone here have a sensible definition of the mindlessly ubiquitous phrase “secure our borders”?”
HT try not to read my words in too literal a manner. I meant “high walls” in the same sense as a “wide gate”.
The relevant question would be what are effective ways to manage and control a border, and there are plenty of borders that are being managed in the world to supply some of those answers. Perhaps we need to come up with some of our own, but controlling a border seems to me to be one of the fundamental responsibilities of a nation state right up there with a standing military.
As to what is sufficient to justify beginning the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the country, I would just be satisfied with some compelling indication that our government is willing to manage our border in a responsible way. By which I mean the METAPHORICAL wall doesn’t need to be completed to begin the process of citizenship, but we should atleast have a plan for the METAPHORICAL wall before the citizenship process is initiated.
I hope my words were clearer this time.
November 19th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
I would have to agree with HT. It would require militarization on an unprecedented scale here, with all the old Iron Curtain trappings like land mines. And the policy is both a loony mess and fundamentally un-American. It has been so since the racial and ethnic quota system of the 1920′s, and for much the same reasons.
I wonder how many who are hysterical about the expulsion of “lawbreakers”, are such of nicety about keeping the law against jaywalking or the one against speeding when in a hurry or even the one of stopping for railroad track warnings whose breaking got all those veterans killed in Texas.
And I am virtually certain from close observation of the people in our state of Ohio that nobody’s politics is a barrier to driving drunk.
Nor is their any need to “defend” English as the Lingua Franca here. There is no way that an open immigration policy would turn Spanish, Bejing Mandarin, or Somali into a threat to anybody, any more than Polish, Yiddish, and Italian were long ago.
One of the things I’m proudest of in my own town of Columbus is how well it has adapted to the incursion of babel of languages from Bosnian to Swahili and those in between. And how welcome it has made the speakers. That welcome alone has made it an objectively better place to live for everybody, immigrant or not.
November 19th, 2012 | 4:20 pm
“I would have to agree with HT. It would require militarization on an unprecedented scale here, with all the old Iron Curtain trappings like land mines.”
Hence the importance of a “wide gate”. The existing ordeal a perfectly fine immigrant needs to go through to gain citizenship is a mess, and in my opinion also un-american. If the procedure for citizenship were responsibly streamlined utilizing a lot of information resources that simply did not exist in the previous era’s of mass immigration, then that would significantly reduce pressure on the border.
The objective of the (follow me here HT) METAPHORICAL wall would be to make it sufficiently difficult for illegal immigration that the majority of well intended immigrants would be more likely to utilize our standard more steam-lined citizenship protocol instead.
If done right a “wide gate, (METAPHORICAL) tall wall” would reduce illegal traffic to immigrants with ulterior motives that would justify the kind of patrolling resources that right is trying to stop a flood with a thimble.
November 19th, 2012 | 9:16 pm
Bob, until we can require reading and writing of English for our own citizens, I’d be inclined allow latitude on the requirement. Otherwise, I sympathize.
Remember, I teach English; you cannot imagine what I see. Did you know that 46% of incoming freshmen in the state of Ohio need remediation in either English or math or both? Privileged by birth with a free education; I get immigrants who know our language better, having learned it as a second language in their birth nations.
November 19th, 2012 | 10:15 pm
Looks like the guys at AEI are once again ahead of the curve.
http://www.aei.org/events/2012/11/19/conservatives-and-immigration-reform-now-what/
November 19th, 2012 | 11:05 pm
Kate, I absolutely believe you. I lost a number of Ohio Democrat teacher ‘friends’ in my support of SB 5. Obviously Ohio high school teachers and their thug union leadership have failed the students and taxpayers of the state.
I can not believe just how grossly ignorant some of these kids are. It’s frightening.
November 20th, 2012 | 8:58 am
[...] Listening Means (In Part) Knowing Who To Listen To – Pete Spiliakos, PoMoCon Can't Find What You're Looking For? [...]
November 20th, 2012 | 3:40 pm
So for those who don’t have the 1-2 hours to listen to a panel of talking heads debate over immigration on AEI’s streaming link here:
http://www.aei.org/events/2012/11/19/conservatives-and-immigration-reform-now-what/
I’ll summarize my take-away. Three of the four panelists were very pro immigration reform with the most articulate advocate being Alfonso Aguilar who represents a conservative pro-immigration group and had worked closely with the W. Bush administration on immigration reform policies. There was only one immigration reform skeptic, but it was Ramesh Ponnuru so the skeptics were more than well represented. The other two panelists provided color but the real core arguments for immigration reform were from Aguilar.
My summary of the main disagreement is as follows: Aguilar insists Romney lost the Hispanic vote and the election the moment he went anti-immigration in the primaries by which Aguilar sited his criticism of the dream act and endorsement of Arizona’s immigration laws as examples. According to Aguilar, Romney’s attempts to moderate those positions later came across as lacking credibility to hispanic voters. Aguilar insists Obama’s entitlements had nothing to do with why Romney did so poorly with hispanics. This latter point was a point of real contention between Aguilar and Ponnuru, the latter insisting that according to polls hispanic immigrants support a whole number of entitlement and statist policies that simply are not compatible with conservatives. Ponnuru’s main argument against the idea that hispanics cost Romney the election was that lack of white working class votes also cost him, and its unlikely that these voters will be brought back into the fold if Republicans suddenly become pro-immigration.
My other take away is that there definitiely seems to be significant antipathy between the pro-immigration side and what they describe in this panel discussion as a sort of insidious nativistic anti immigration consituency that is supposedly scaring the party from responsible immigration reform. They clearly were not talking about Ponnuru but others, so no rebuttal from this side of the debate was had, but I suspect that is where the battle lines will likely be drawn inside the party if immigration continues to be revisited by conservatives who are soul searching in the aftermath of this last election.
November 21st, 2012 | 12:04 am
@Kate Pitrone
“No wonder the young find Libertarians appealing; at least they have a consistent message.”
There’s a difference between consistency and absolutism. Take it from a guy who was a paid subscriber to Reason magazine.
There’s a reason libertarianism is largely populated by disaffected young males and economics professors. Both tend to imagine they know something about the world and are largely insulated from responsibility.
November 21st, 2012 | 3:37 am
Bernard, that’s why I am not a Libertarian. The nub of their problem as a political force: nothing is ever that simple.
November 21st, 2012 | 10:07 am
Pseudoplotinus,
The idea that the GOP can save itself by embracing “immigration reform” (i.e., amnesty, which would in fact lead to more waves of illegal immigraion and more amnesties) is so ridiculous on its face (for reasons well explained by Ponnuru, Lowry and others) that the inference seems inescapable that establishment GOP politicians, operatives, consultants and think-tankers keep coming back to it because it is what their business funders (both big and small business) want. In other words, the establishment GOP position is being driven, not by any sort of long-term strategy for conservative resurgence, but by the short term financial interests of contributors. Namely, to keep down labor costs (for small business) and to increase sales volume (for big businesses that sell to the mass market). I hate to sound like a Marxist (which I emphatically am not), but this does seem to me to be an instance of the capitalists selling their enemies the rope with which the capitalists (at least the small business people -I’m sure Walmart will make out fine) will ultimately be hanged.
November 21st, 2012 | 10:58 am
“Bernard, that’s why I am not a Libertarian. The nub of their problem as a political force: nothing is ever that simple.”
I didn’t suggest you were-but your description of it as “consistent”.
November 21st, 2012 | 2:17 pm
djf,
In the spirit of Pete Spiliakos’ original post above, maybe this is an opportunity to actually listen to what the other side has to say. To wit, your previous characterization of the pro-immigration side is a cartoon. I am not even saying that the view you hold against immigration reform is incorrect, but responding to the argument by calling it ridiculous and then invoking a caricature of that opinion is a sure indication that, perhaps, your understanding of the issue may benefit from a more nuanced appreciation of the other side.
In which case I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts in response to Aguilar’s contribution in the panel discussion I linked to.
On the other hand, if you don’t think it’s worth your time, well, maybe that’s exactly the attitude that Pete is trying to warn against in the article that started this thread.
November 21st, 2012 | 3:44 pm
Pseudoplotinus,
I’ve heard what the other side (in this case, the other side of the conservative movement) has to say on this issue. They’ve been saying it for quite a long time, they have quite a megaphone, and, until, four years ago, they exercised quite a bit of power in this country. Probably, I would have agreed with them, for the most part, back when I was more mainstream/neo-conservative in my thinking (I still read Commentary and the Weekly Standard, incidentally, both of which are friendly to immigration reform). So I don’t think you can indict me for not being willing to listen to the other side. After informing myself and engaging in some reflection, I don’t think what they say makes any sense, from the point of view of reviving conservative political fortunes. Whether the damage they have done can be reversed is another question.
November 21st, 2012 | 4:16 pm
Pseudoplotinus,
Speaking of listening to the other side, have you listened to Haley Barbour on the immigration issue lately? It is reported that, at a recent, post-election Governors’ Conference, he said, in reference to Latino immigrants who work at chicken processing plants in his state, “Col. Sanders needs these guys.” So perhaps my inference about what’s driving the pro-immigration “reform” movement in the Republican Party is not too far off.
“Col. Sanders need these guys.” I suppose native-born Mississippians are not sufficiently compliant, and accepting of low wages, for the good Colonel and the politicians he sponsors. What an inspiring vision of the American future.
Gee, if only we had nominated Haley Barbour. Ah, what might have been!
November 23rd, 2012 | 2:40 pm
[...] on immigration and to Hispanics; as I have said in comments here, the most prevalent Republican policy on immigrations seems inconsistent with principles about [...]
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