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Wednesday, August 19, 2015

The Wall St Journal's War With the Republican Party's Id

The Wall Street Journal had a critique of Trump's immigration plan that was don't get me wrong on the issues totally right,

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deportation-party-1439853705

I agree with virtually everything they said in panning his plan. It's based on horrendous economics and even worse would require the rise of a very expensive and repressive police state.

The whole premise of Trump's plan is that immigrants are stealing are jobs and depressing wages and this is all totally false. It totally overlooks that population growth is a good thing as it adds to growth and the kind of attack on immigrants Trump has in mind would sharply reduce population.

All we need to achieve what would be a major step backwards is to bang on every door in the country and round up entire families both legal and illegal immigrants alike along with their children house by house.

Even Bill O'Reilly said last night that he's a little worried that maybe even he might get deported which actually has some historical truth in it.

"The last time Republicans tried this, in the 1920s, they alienated immigrant groups like the Irish and Italians for decades until Ronald Reagan won them back. If they want to lose in 2016, they’ll follow Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant siren."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deportation-party-1439853705

Ok, so the WSJ is kind of functioning as the GOP's ego here-in the language of Freudian psychoanalysis.

It's going back into the GOP's' history. This foray through the GOP's history is very painful. The party at this point has truly come full circle and taking a long refreshing piss right on Abraham Lincoln's grave.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/08/18/birthright-citizenship-was-one-of-the-republican-partys-greatest-accomplishments-now-some-republicans-want-to-end-it/

The GOP gave us birthright citizenship-this has really become a core part of the American Idea-where being an American is about more than it is for other countries where it's simply family, ethnic, and religious ties.

No, American citizenship is transracial and transethnic. Its not based on who your family is or your ancestors were.

I've said recently that Trump's ideas would not seem so outrageous in Britain right now who is all up in arms about refugees crossing the Channel. After all  they don't have birthright citizenship

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/trump-really-could-win-in-britain.html

So the present GOP-and by the way Trump is not the first GOPer to call for the end of birthright citizenship, even Bobby Jindal, the son of immigrants-wants to

1. Destroy what makes being an American unique

2. And repudiate the entire legacy of the party of Lincoln.

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Soil-Labor-Men-Republican/dp/0195094972/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439991453&sr=1-1&keywords=eric+foner+free+soil

This is why we have put the GOP on the couch-they have now literally spat in Lincoln's face.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/psychoanalyze-gop.html

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/gop-pscyhoanalysis-william-buckley.html

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh the other day and he confirmed the obvious: the reason the Republican party is so virulently anti-immigrant is the belief that most of these new Latino American citizens will vote for the Democrats. Of course, there is some truth in this but cracking down on Latino immigration only creates the viscous cycle of making it self-fulfilling that they will be Democratic voters.

But as we saw above, the WSJ eluded to the fact that the GOP has gone gonzo over immigration before and it was the same thing at work-the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, the Poles, these all went for the Democrats as the Dems had those old powerful party machines at the city level. Tammany Hall may have been corrupt but it did do a lot to help newly arrived immigrants.

So let's look at all this in a Freudian sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-id-ego-and-superego.html

Let's schematize it.

1. Trump is the party's id

2. The sainted and venerated Ronald Reagan remains the party's superego ideal-by no means is it Lincoln of course. The GOP has long forgotten Lincoln and it's Northern abolitionist beginnings. That's one element of the GOP psyche or what Freud-and Lacan for that matter- calls the Unconscious. The party doesn't learn.

When it wins it becomes more and more supercilious and arrogant When it loses it just blames the liberal media and maybe the wrong messaging-but never the message.

3. Finally, the Wall Street Journal here assumes the place of the ego trying to negotiate between the Trumpian id and the Reaganite superego.

The trouble is that while the WSJ has been pretty consistent in showing the folly of this virulent anti immigration mania it has been too compromised by its own politics to really do anything about it.

By now it's way too late-that cow left the barn a long time ago. The time for the WSJ was when Heritage came out with that study a few years ago that said that maybe the GOP didn't need the Latino vote after all-it should just try to maximize the white vote even more than in the past-even as the white vote was shrinking as a percentage of the electorate.

In any case. the WSJ might have been taken more seriously if it could have admitted that it supported the bipartisan Senate immigration reform bill in 2013. But it feared alienating the House GOP and the base by lauding this plan that the House had dismissed as the Senate Democrat plan.

And then even Marco Rubio who had been the lead Senate Republican on the bill-it was named after him-repudiated it.

The WSJ just couldn't do the unthinkable and admit that for once the Democrats were right about something. So it's way too little too late for their piece even though it's totally correct.











6 comments:

  1. Mike, what would you do if you were Jeb's campaign manager at this point? Or perhaps his biggest donor (Sheldon Adelson?)? What would be your advice to kick-start his flagging campaign? Ideally something attention grabbing and also leapfrogging Trump with the base, right? So....

    ...how about having Jeb join the Klan?

    ...Bold, forthright, decisive, unapologetic... red white & blue sheets at the next debate... there's no downside, right?

    Maybe I should write that up as an op-ed for the WSJ... and see if they like it. Well, *something* has to be done!

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  2. That might be the only thing that would get the base on his side.

    I don't know. Mostly I have such a low opinion of Jeb and I don't see what could help Jeb other than a lobotomy.

    Also that name is killer. No way another Bush wins.

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  3. I once heard what was presented as an old Russian joke (as told in Russia) that supposedly highlighted and poked fun at an aspect of the Russian character. It goes something like this:

    A genie in a bottle is released by a Russian peasant and she tells him that in gratitude to him she will grant him one wish, but that whatever he asks for, his neighbor will get the same thing, only double. The peasant man thinks for a bit and then proclaims "I wish for you to blind me in one eye."

    I wonder if that can be reworked to fit the current GOP base?

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  4. Yes, Sumner kind of said something like that in a new piece at Econolog.

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/08/is_europe_becom.html

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  5. I'm about to write about Sumner's post now. The whole post. I mean it's' a very pessimistic piece-he is arguing that people will only have a welfare state if the recipients look like them.

    ReplyDelete