Conservative populism can't catch a break. The party's elites have a stranglehold on policy. As Reihan Salam has pointed out, most Republicans are opposed to increasing immigration, but most Republican office holders favor vastly increasing immigration when they think the voters aren't looking. Only . . . . Continue Reading »
Donald Trump's fiercest critics have hoped that his outlandish statements will eventually undo him. Their mistake is that Trump is a creation of America's (and the Republican Party's) political elites. The Trump phenomenon exists because Republican elites scorned large segments of their own . . . . Continue Reading »
Today there are twenty million refugees who have crossed international borders to escape violence and abject poverty. Forty million more have been displaced within their own countries. In 2015, half a million refugees have poured into Europe, with thousands dying at sea or in cramped smugglers’ . . . . Continue Reading »
Neither political party is speaking to the collective interests of America's wage-earners. Each party, in its own way, is playing wage-earners off against one another. America's wage-earners deserve a party which recognizes that the working-class (and Americans generally) share common interests and . . . . Continue Reading »
Liberals are confident that they own the future, but conservatives have a chance to shape a better tomorrow. Ramesh Ponnuru notes that, even though the conservative voter base of white, married Christians is in relative demographic decline, American public opinion has been fairly stable over the . . . . Continue Reading »
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's transition from state to federal politics has been bumpy, but it is indicative of broader social trends. Walker seems to have a firm grasp of the opinions and priorities of the median Wisconsin voter on state-level issues, but has seemed terribly confused about . . . . Continue Reading »
Say what you will about Donald Trump. He has pushed immigration to the forefront of the 2016 Republican primary, and his crude bravado in speaking to this issue is one of the major reasons he’s still riding high.No one denies that US immigration policy is a mess. One poll found that 63 . . . . Continue Reading »
Back in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich observed that every society faces an immigration challenge (this was when he was a somewhat more reliable ideas man). He said that there are geographic immigrants (who come from some other place), and there are temporal immigrants (who are born into society). It is . . . . Continue Reading »
People in the Republican establishment have been suggesting that conservatives can either try to appeal to working-class whites by supporting limits to future immigration levels, or they can try to appeal to Hispanics by seeking to increase future immigration levels. The truth is that conservatives have never had to make this choice. In 2012, Republicans chose to alienate both working-class whites and Hispanics. In the future, conservatives should try to appeal to both groups by focusing on the economic priorities of those groups rather than ethnic gamesmanship.In the 2012 campaign, Romney's combination of economic priorities and immigration messaging proved especially toxic. On immigration, Romney advocated no amnesty and hoped that current unauthorized immigrants would self-deport. For Hispanics (and possibly even for Asians—among whom Romney did even worse than among Hispanics), the message was that Romney’s love for business owners was exceeded only by contempt for immigrants (legal and illegal). Continue Reading »
The GOP Washington establishment is launching an attack on Scott Walker because he tentatively (and vaguely) suggested that Republicans need to do a rethink on immigration. Continue Reading »
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