The Center-Left Flees The Field

Ross Douthat on the collapse of the center left. He makes a good point: The Rubinomics "center-left" focused on economics issues, such as trade, tax reform and health care but unlike Bill Clinton were silent on cultural issues.

Ross barely mentions the great trainwreck of the day, which has also been the trainwreck in Europe, to wit, immigration, especially illegal immigration. He does say this:

But then consider a third distillation, a third narrative, in which the center-left’s signal political failure was that it never really sought to preserve a cultural centrism, which meant over time that its party’s approach to social issues has been dictated more and more completely by the left. In this story the political success of Bill Clinton reflected not only his compromises with Republicans on taxes and spending, his tacit nods to Reaganomics, but also his ability to infuse a centrist liberalism with reassuring nods to various kinds of moderate cultural conservatism — the school uniform and v-chip business and the rhetoric of “safe, legal and rare” on abortion, the easy Baptist religiosity, the tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage.

If Clinton had matched this cultural conservatism with decency in his private life, Al Gore would have won re-election as his heir and the larger story of the center-left might have been entirely different. But instead, from the mid-2000s onward, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party looked at the country’s changing demographics and growing social liberalism and decided that Clinton’s compromises with cultural conservatism weren’t as politically necessary as they had been (which was true), and that therefore they were free to become increasingly ideologically maximalist on everything touching gender or race or sexuality or immigration (which was … not true).

Team Rubinomics fled the field on immigration, which has clear economic and cultural components. As an example, in 2006 Krugman briefly touched the third rail and acknowledged, citing Borjas, that unskilled immigrants (legal or otherwise) depress the wages of the native unskilled.

By 2017 Krugman had more comforting studies and realized that such a conclusion was "wrong", although the once-admired Borjas continues to push it. Thank heaven for the liberal take-over of academia!

So what happened? Please. Peter Beinart explains the obvious - faith in their emerging Democacratic majority and rising political correctness pushed the Democrats to their current "Stop hating, hater" position on illegal immigration.

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

Let's not overlook Big Business, which had sway with both Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans:

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

The experience of unreconstructed socialist Bernie Sanders was instructive:

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Say what?!? Americans first?

Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

 "Proven incorerect"! Yet as a political theory it worked for Trump and here we are. Beinart goes on:

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.

There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Wow. How could so many be so wrong? Beinart mentions that some academics are funded by, eg, Microsoft. But his second point will surprise no one:

Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

Beinart goes on to float all sorts of proposals that would address the conflicting concerns of two groups the Democrats claim to care about, unskilled natives and immigrants. That is a conversation a center-left could lead, but it won't be happening. Lest you trail off before what seems to be his punchline I will put it here:

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

As if. Beinart goes on:

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

Uh huh.

Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. 

Oh, "English spoken here". That will happen.

And if you have made it this far:

Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.

n 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

He may be right about Clinton winning but obviously she didn't and couldn't say those things within her party today.

Kind of grim - when the proposed solutions are this far from possible for the Democrats one wonders where we are headed.

 

 

Comments

[Sandy Daze]

YCSTA:

When good splits the difference with evil, evil pockets the half then works on the other half.
(OL @ 3:08)

[Captain Hate]

David Corn goes where Desi Accoster doesn't dare:

http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=380089

[Jim Eagle]

NEW!

[anonamom]

I'm no expert, but he clearly had control over his drinking, to never drink at home or in violation of the constraints of his job. More important, I suspect he engaged in a bit of joking hyperbole. For example, on Sunday when he posted here about being "two sheets to the wind" at the bar with me and Peter, we were on our first beer, or maybe not even. Similar to his comments about Jodi, I suspect.

Jimmy k, got that, and have always assumed it. As one could say about me.

My point here people--we are older than we were last year. These electrolyte imbalances and arrhythmias do NOT mean you are a lying in the gutter, drinking out of a brown paper bag alkie.
It's intrinsic to the compound that makes drinking so pleasant for so many of us. ETOH.

Take care.

[President-Elect Jim,SunnyvaleCA]

New

[cathyf]

I'm not so sure that the emergency declaration vote isn't canny politics. If enough Republicans say that they will vote with the dems, but only enough to give them 51 votes, then this forces the dem senators -- all of them -- to vote against border security, and in favor of terrorism and drug and human trafficking. Those votes can be used to bludgeon them in the election. And, since they DON'T have the votes to override the veto, no-harm-no-foul on actually promoting invasion/terrorism/trafficking. The Republican senators are Rand Paul, who won't be hurt because Texas admires a man of principles as long as he's not hurting them, and the Dope Sisters are just dopey. This is standard legislative politics -- on close votes, once you have enough votes to win, you let a few of your guys vote the other way to help the individual lawmakers with the voters at home, but with the understanding that if you need him to switch to your side he will. (This is the job of the House and Senate Whips of each party -- counting the votes and calling for the vote at the right time.)

This is similar to the Republicans scheduling a vote on the Green New Deal. Force the dems to actually vote for the thing rather than just talk.