- :up:

The elites navigated the 2008 financial crisis extraordinarily well, but the "morality card" has now been overplayed and the broader political movement has become trapped in oppressor-oppressed quicksand.

Demagogues might often use xenophobic rhetoric to take advantage of the fact that the West's migration policies are deeply unpopular, even among many minority communities at this point. However, the key reason the center and the left's efforts to push back on the ascendent far-right have failed is an absolute inability to countenance major changes or compromises on migration. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Changes like sending millions of people to destitution, misery and death is a bit hard to countenance. (Especially since we know that it was the allied powers' actions since WWII, and European imperialism preceding the wars, that cause most of the current displacements).
But that wouldn't be sufficient appeasement for the extreme right: next, they'd have to give the Christian militants control of reproduction, marriage, education, assisted suicide and gender issues. They've pretty well caved on climate mitigation at every summit. Soon, they'd have to start dismantling social services.
Major changes in that directions will come, but through coercion, not compromise.

I'm worried about fascism — Vera Mont

So am I. One of Timothy Snyder's latest books is The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America 2019, with an updated preface. Snyder has studied fascism for a long time. He thinks Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have significant commonalities in their personalities and plans. One of Snyder's ideas is that fascism is perhaps more readily identified by its methods more than by its ideology. Chaos and disorder is one of its methods. Contrary to popular belief, the trains did not run on time in Mussolini's fascist Italy. Whether the disorder of Trumps last administration was a mark of fascistic tendencies or unfamiliarity with the function of government, I don't know. We'll find out.

Trump didn't say all those horrible things about immigrants just to piss off the liberals; it always got big cheers. He got elected on paranoia and misdirected anger — Vera Mont

The urge to piss off liberals is normal and healthy, if it doesn't become a compulsion.

Trumps anti-immigrant rhetoric got cheers for a reason: Many in the working class audiences compete with low-wage immigrants for jobs in the former industrial heartlands (and elsewhere) which were hollowed out by Reagan's NAFTA plan, and previous/later de-industrialization programs sponsored by the financial elites. The millions of jobs lost were those held by less-skilled working class people. Who is an employer going to hire first: a less skilled immigrant (legal or not) who will work for $6 or $7 per hour, or a less skilled native worker who will work for $10 or more per hour?

Someone is paying the price for 11,000,000 undocumented immigrants in the US, and it isn't the liberal elites.

"America First" rhetoric may sound good to working people, but deporting millions and erecting high tariff walls is not going to help workers very much. Why not? Because the economic elite isn't running the country for the benefit of workers. It's run for their own benefit. So, workers get fucked over.

OK, sorry for mentioning the basket of deplorables.

A mainstay of socialist party thinking is that neither of the ruling class parties, whatever state they are in at the moment, intend to seriously upset the status quo. The voters slosh back and forth between relative liberals and relative conservatives, whoever appears to have the lesser of evils. And, honestly, sometimes it is hard to tell. Clinton seemed reliably liberal, but he's the one who ended "welfare as we know it". At the time, Nixon was the liberal nightmare, but in retrospect his administration wasn't that bad (most of the time). He started the Environment Protection Agency, for instance, and his drug policy was reasonably progressive.

The problem here is that it's unclear if immigration is appropriately thought of as a "civil right" of sorts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Tricky. How does a society extend rights to people who do not yet, and may never, live there? Do people in Austria, France, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, or China have a "civil right" to come to the United States, Australia, UK, Spain, etc.? I'm pretty sure I don't have a civil right to take up residence in Australia or Canada, just because I might want to.

It seems like the way immigration is supposed to work is that "you can ask to come here; we might say yes, but no means no." In reality, a lot of immigrants just walk right in, sit right down, and have anchor babies.

“Why is it that the ‘winners’ in the prevailing order seem so eager to associate themselves with the marginalized and disadvantaged in society?” is its key question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yascha Mounk in his book, "The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time" traces the elite's interest in the marginalized and disadvantaged to the history of postmodernism and identitarian politics that has developed over the last 50 years (Michel Foucault's crowd). The elites profess a preferential option for the minority / marginalized / disadvantaged in society. Elite rhetoric doesn't mean that they intend, or are even able, to do much about it.

But could Democrats even pivot on this? I sort of doubt it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree; it's doubtful. At any rate, "toxic masculinity" is a phrase I'm tired of hearing.

@Vera Mont One of the points Snyder made in a recent NPR appearance was that a number of incumbent governments have been voted out since Covid, the UK, for instance.

Someone is paying the price for 11,000,000 undocumented immigrants in the US, and it isn't the liberal elites. — BC

Nor is it the "conservative" elites. It's convenient that the famous American political amnesia has sainted Reagan and blamed everyone else for the consequences of his policies. It's convenient that nobody asks why so many Latin Americans are fleeing their homelands. Those questions would be far too complicated for the average Trump voter. They'd rather be taxed for thousands of bibles at three times the regular price than not have bibles in their schools.

"America First" rhetoric may sound good to working people, but deporting millions and erecting high tariff walls is not going to help workers very much. Why not? Because the economic elite isn't running the country for the benefit of workers. It's run for their own benefit. So, workers get fucked over — BC

Well, duh! And the coming deregulations are not going to bring any good jobs to Americans or reduce their rents, gas and food prices - but at least it will eliminate overtime and strikes. I'm sure enough scabs can be rounded up in the concentration camps.

At the time, Nixon was the liberal nightmare, — BC

He still is, to me, despite some of his good policies. His campaign advisors made the little snowball that turned into the Trump presidency and he dropped it in front of George Wallace, who kicked it down the hill.

One of the points Snyder made in a recent NPR appearance was that a number of incumbent governments have been voted out since Covid, the UK, for instance. — BC

Won't make any difference to the next catastrophe.