The GOP’s 2016 electoral strategy

George W. “Compassionate Conservative” Bush’s brother apparently seems to think that having yet another progressive Republican cast in the mould of Theodore Roosevelt and John McCain leading the US would be a Good Thing. Which is not surprising, given that he is the Republican in question, but before you rush to the voting booth to pull the trigger and blow your own brains out vote for the lesser of two very terrible evils, just take a look at what he has to say about putting in limits to immigration:

“This isn’t a zero-sum game,” Bush said, taking issue with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s contention that an immigration policy should, first and foremost, be based on protecting American workers and American wages. “[If] you want to grow at 4 percent instead of 2 percent per year, you need younger, more dynamic people inside of our economy to get to 4 percent growth,” he said. 

“You can’t do it with a declining population, you can’t do it with a pathetic productivity rate,” he continued, warning that America ran the risk of going the way of Japan and parts of Europe if it didn’t institute immigration reforms.

Has anyone ever seen a classic British comedy series called Blackadder? This show is not, admittedly, for everyone; British comedy ranges from gutter-slapstick stupidity to highbrow intellectual (read: left-wing) musing, with the vast majority of truly great British comedy falling somewhere toward the latter end of the spectrum, and Blackadder was always somewhere a bit farther toward that end than other great stuff like Yes, Minister or To the Manor Born.

There is, however, one truly brilliant episode of Blackadder that concerns the British strategy in WWI. It involves Rowan Atkinson explaining the British strategy to overwhelm German defences on the Western Front:

The best quote:

And that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off-guard! Doing precisely what we’ve done 18 times before, is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time!

Evidently, the Republican Party’s leadership watched this episode and thought that it was a historical document telling them what they need to do to get Barack Obama and the Democrats out of office.

Because, of course, the exact same thing worked sooooooo well before, when George H. W. Bush ran for re-election. And when Bob Dole ran for President. And when Bush Jr. ran- and won, twice. And when John McCain ran for President. And when Mitt Romney ran for President. And now when the other Bush Jr. wants to run for President.

One is tempted to ask what kind of psychedelic drug they slip into the water at RNC headquarters, but that would be a tad uncouth, don’t you think?

Well hey, SOMEONE needs to ask the question

As is to be expected of a historically and culturally ignorant progressive, Mr. Bush gets the entire chain of reasoning completely wrong and mostly backwards.

He starts off well enough, to be sure. A growing economy definitely needs young, productive people to sustain its growth. A growing mature economy, like the USA’s, needs young, productive, skilled people to carry on its growth.

He is also correct to argue that white Americans of European descent are not producing enough children to meet these requirements. Fertility rates by race tell us clearly that whites and Asians- the two races with the highest mean IQs, the highest productivity per capita in industrial and high-tech jobs, and the highest education levels- are reproducing at well below the theoretical “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman.

Hispanics, unsurprisingly, are reproducing above that replacement rate.

And all of this, by the way, is before we think about factoring in both legal and illegal immigration.

Growing your way out of trouble through immigration simply does not work, as Singapore and other low-fertility Asian nations are now finding out. It is a policy designed by people who took Bertold Brecht seriously when he wrote, satirically:

After the uprising of the 17th June

The Secretary of the Writers Union

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

Anyone who has visited the southern states knows full well the effects of untrammeled immigration by Mexicans into the USA. Allowing them in greater numbers, legally or otherwise, is not a solution for what afflicts America. It is a very good way to destroy what little is left of the culture and history of the USA- a country built, lest we forget, on the ideals and sacrifices of white English and Dutch Protestant settlers who wanted nothing much more than to preserve their historical freedoms.

The traditions that built this country are not shared by other races, nations, and ethnicities. For some reason, “conservatives” like Jeb Bush and his brother are silly enough to believe that people will be magically transformed into Americans just by coming here.

That sort of thinking is going to end up destroying the world’s greatest country. And all because of “compassionate conservatism”.

Take me, for example. I’ve lived here for nearly 8 years. I agree with America’s founding ideals completely. I regard the Constitution as the most brilliant document of its kind ever written. I think that it says exactly what it means, that not one word of it is “open to interpretation” of any kind- especially the Second Amendment- and that if you want to change it, then you damn well do it through established due process.

Americans have, to my face, stated that I am more American than most people born in this country. To me, there is no higher compliment.

Yet no one in his right mind who meets me and speaks with me is going to come away thinking that I’m actually American.

If someone like me cannot be regarded as American- and, remember, I feel like I scored a winning lottery ticket simply because I have the privilege to live and work in the US- how, then, can one possibly regard millions of invaders from foreign shores who do not share America’s most fundamental ideals and core vision to be Americans?

There is only one kind of conservatism that actually makes sense. It is the conservative vision of people like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Ron Paul. It is a vision of a world in which men and women are free to choose their own destinies and are responsible for the outcomes of their own actions; where Western culture is defended vigourously and ardently against those who wish to destroy it; and where evil is recognised for what it is, and fought without hesitation.

We can have plenty of disagreements about how well this vision was enacted when real conservatives were actually in power, of course- as Reagan once said, “politics is the art of the practical”, and the reality is that most so-called “conservatives” are not exactly above using government power to achieve their own ends. But the fact remains that the greatest electoral successes for conservatives have always come about when a stark line is drawn separating us from them.

Jeb Bush, like most compassionate conservatives, cannot recognise this, because his kind’s worldview is based on fundamentally incorrect principles.

He appears to think that by compromising on issues where there can be no compromise, such as fiscal rectitude, foreign policy restraint, and strictly limited immigration, he can appeal to all sectors of the American electorate.

In reality, all he is doing is ensuring that the world’s greatest nation gets to choose the speed at which it meets its final doom: 100% or 90% of full speed.

That, my friends, is your choice if Jeb Bush becomes the Republican nominee for President- it really doesn’t matter who the Jackass is.

And people wonder why paleolibertarians like me are so disgusted with the entire concept of representative democracy?