Kevin DeAnna returns to Vanguard to discuss the results of the 2014 midterm election and the delusion of “taking back America.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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| Well, Kevin, we've taken our country back. | |
| How does it feel? | |
| Oh, thank God. | |
| Well, as Eric Erickson put it, Americans are in charge of America again. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, we're in charge again. | |
| I mean, I don't know what we're going to do. | |
| I mean, I think it's important that we push for job creation in a pro-growth economy. | |
| You know, if we can do those things, you know, riding tide lifts all boats. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, definitely. | |
| I think that we can lead the nation into the 21st century. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, as you might guess, we're talking about the recent midterm election. | |
| And I would say that I made this joke about taking our country back, which is what conservatives seem to always believe whenever a Republican gets elected. | |
| But I would say this, just in my I think there's been a kind of muting of conservatism and conservative politics. | |
| And what I mean by this, I can remember 2010, and that was a very angry and... | |
| Maybe you could say radical. | |
| At the very least, you could say angry conservative election. | |
| I just remember these things. | |
| It was the Dale Peterson era when he would come on and be like, you know, who is my opponent? | |
| What a dummy! | |
| And he's like holding a rifle. | |
| Yeah, and you had Ted Credo almost winning in a third-party run and everything like that. | |
| Yeah, and I remember there was this congresswoman in Arizona who her whole campaign ad was about her firing a machine gun. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| To be fair, there's still a lot of candidates who, that seems to be their campaign. | |
| Right, Joni Ernst. | |
| A film of them firing a gun, right. | |
| Right. | |
| Joni Ernst talked about castrating pigs and we're going to make them squeal. | |
| So I think there was a little bit of the spirit of 2010. | |
| But I would say, on the whole, it was a much more muted... | |
| I mean, midterms are almost always discontent elections, and they are a chance for the opposition to gain some ground. | |
| But I think this one was pretty muted. | |
| 2010 was the they-don't-give-a-rip-about-Alabama election, and 2014 was like, let's vote for Mitch McConnell. | |
| So that we can stop Obama or something. | |
| A couple things happened here. | |
| I mean, one, looking back at 2010, Dale Peterson, the guy you're bringing up, he didn't win. | |
| And that was the lesson a lot of Republicans took from 2010 was there were a lot of missed opportunities. | |
| There were a lot of seats that they could have picked up, which they didn't. | |
| And this isn't just the GOP establishment. | |
| I mean, Ann Coulter made this point explicitly that Republicans need to grow up. | |
| If they want to win these things, they've got to put forward good candidates and everything else. | |
| So what you saw in this cycle was the establishment really trying hard to make sure that you didn't get these insurgent candidates, that you didn't get these key party candidates. | |
| Sometimes you could say that they did it pointlessly, like in Tennessee, you had the primary challenge to Lamar Alexander. | |
| If the conservatives had won in that race, he still would have won the general election. | |
| But it seems like the establishment was taking no chances this time. | |
| Do you think that the Tea Party is over? | |
| Well, it's under control. | |
| It's definitely brought to heel. | |
| I mean, to me, one of the things I saw on the site there, you had the article from 2010. | |
| White America's Last Bender. | |
| And it mentioned, you know, a great victory of the old right when Rand Paul got elected, which is hilarious looking at it now and you see how he turned out. | |
| And I think the way what happened to him is sort of what happened to the Tea Party in general, where you had this kind of outsider coming in, taking on the establishment. | |
| I mean, keep in mind, he was like at Mitch McConnell's throat. | |
| McConnell hated him. | |
| And now this time you had Rand Paul I mean, Mitch McConnell, frankly, owes his Senate seat to Rand Paul getting out there and campaigning for him, even at Rand Paul's campaign manager for a while. | |
| So, what's really happened is that... | |
| The brilliant strategist Jesse Benton. | |
| Machiavelli for our era. | |
| No, I just... | |
| I actually met him, and I kind of worked for him in 2008. | |
| He was really... | |
| He has the intelligence of, like, a fourth grader. | |
| I'm not trying to say that as to be a jerk or something. | |
| He's an idiot. | |
| I don't know what has happened. | |
| He's one of the stupidest people I've ever met. | |
| I guess it's good to marry Ron Paul's daughter and you get all these jobs. | |
| That's the only thing I can think of. | |
| Whatever the case, Ron Paul is definitely setting himself up for the presidential run. | |
| Everybody we've talked to knows they're already setting up a campaign for 10 years. | |
| And what he did in this last election is he basically guaranteed a lot of people owe him. | |
| And what's happened here is that the Tea Party, as far as I'm concerned, has ceased to exist as an outside force. | |
| It's just become another word for the Republican wing of the Republican Party, basically. | |
| The other thing going on with this election, but I mean, let's break it down, what happened. | |
| I mean, the big story, I think, first of all, it happened in Oregon, which is huge, where you had, it was the only immigration thing that was on the ballot. | |
| And that was Measure 88. Measure 88 was, if it had passed, it would have given driver's licenses, what they call driver cards, to illegal aliens. | |
| And it got crushed. | |
| The no vote on 88. It was greater than the vote for pot legalization, greater than the vote for the incoming governor, greater for the vote for the senator. | |
| The Republican candidate, of course, took no position on the issue and got crushed in the election. | |
| But more than, I think, something like two-thirds of Oregon voters voted for no driver's licenses for illegals. | |
| So that's an interesting development, parallels what happened with the referendum in Montana last time around. | |
| Where, you know, you had, like, crushing defeats for the GOP ticket, and then this thing passes. | |
| So, while the GOP establishment got a number of things right this election, you know, they're not – they're still the GOP establishment. | |
| It's still the stupid party, and they managed to not even make a real race in elections where you could have done something, especially in Oregon and especially in Michigan, was just, like, an absolute disgrace. | |
| Well, yeah, but Kevin, I – I think there's a danger in basically looking at one individual referendum about illegal immigrants and driver's licenses and then concluding that the whole population of that state is rabidly conservative or right-wing. | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| If you're going to put up a candidate, if you're going to put up a candidate who doesn't even take a position on it, and that candidate gets something like in the 30s. | |
| Right. | |
| And then the controversial issue you didn't take the position on gets like two-thirds of the vote. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, come on. | |
| And let's break it down in another state how this happened. | |
| It's Gillespie in Virginia, who is widely considered to be the great surprise. | |
| This is a race where he was down in double digits. | |
| I mean, iconically down, like 20 points or something against Warner. | |
| Nobody thought he had a real shot. | |
| This is... | |
| the definition of the GOP establishment, former RNC head, he's a professional lobbyist, corporate lobbyist fundraiser, I mean, like, the kind of thing that you had, like, caricature, really. | |
| And he got out-fundraised, he had to go dark, he couldn't even run ads for a while, and what ends up happening, his Hail Mary play at the end of the campaign is to run ads bashing Warner for not defending the Washington Redskins name, which is, like, the kind of thing that, you know, GOP consultants would, like, lose their mind over. | |
| I mean, that's, like, the definition of, like, boob bait or whatever. | |
| But it worked. | |
| And, you know, he dramatically closed the gap in the final days. | |
| Now, was it all because of the Redskins? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| But it certainly helped. | |
| And it was definitely an indicator that they're getting better, I think, the party is, at saying the right things to the base. | |
| But they're also getting better at, like, controlling the base, making sure these guys stay on the reservation. | |
| And you see this with, yeah, and it's not like Ken, where you had, I mean, they're losing seats, and you've got, like, intra-party fights and everything else. | |
| I mean, the fact is, when you've got Mitch McConnell, now Senate Majority Leader, and Rand Paul basically joined at the hip, you know, that's significant. | |
| As an aside, it's funny that Ron Paul, Rand's dad, is sending out tweets. | |
| Get ready for more war in Iraq now that the neocons are back in charge and stuff. | |
| So that's kind of hilarious. | |
| Now that my son is in charge. | |
| Yeah, well, I would say a couple of things. | |
| I mean, one demographic aspect of all this that I think is very important is that the GOP voting base keeps getting older and it also keeps getting whiter. | |
| There's actually some interesting stuff. | |
| On voter turnout. | |
| And I'll put this in the show notes, but this is just at 538, which is a kind of interesting... | |
| You know, number crunching site. | |
| But I mean, Maine, 60% of the people in Maine vote, which is, you know, almost 60% in Alaska and Colorado and Minnesota. | |
| And then you get down in these places like Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Georgia, Alabama. | |
| And there's some outliers here. | |
| But basically what you have is these deep red southern states that are demographically... | |
| If you just looked at the demographics, you'd think that they would be strongly... | |
| Yeah, they vote 90% for the GOP. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Whites vote like blacks for the Democrats. | |
| Whites votes for the GOP. | |
| And then also, basically, blacks, millennials, and Hispanics don't vote enough. | |
| And so you have this weird illusion where you think that Texas is like, oh, it just must be a bunch of white people out there voting for these hardcore... | |
| Republicans on statewide offices. | |
| But in a way, that's an illusion. | |
| That's not true. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And even if you look at, like, let's take Texas. | |
| I mean, that was going to be the great, you know, this is the year that Texas was going to go blue. | |
| And they had, you know, what was it, Wendy Davis, who was going to, like, ride feminism and abortion rights to victory, you know, through the votes of Austin alone, apparently. | |
| That's not true. | |
| Right, right. | |
| But it's going to happen. | |
| I think it shows the power of the GOP and it shows the racialization of parties, at least in places that are not... | |
| You know, like the Pacific Northwest, where, you know, maybe this is actually changing, but in the Montana, places like this, you have a lot of Democrats, and these are generally pro-gun Democrats, and they're kind of like, they seem to me at least, kind of like backroom deal, let's bring in some money for the logging industry, unions, Democrats, which is fine. | |
| I would vote for, effectively, I'm a liberal. | |
| Yeah, pretty much. | |
| I mean, in a lot of these states, if you were in... | |
| Montana, one of these western states, a lot of the GOP stuff is, let's hand the state over to mining interests or whatever else. | |
| You can see why people would be Democrats. | |
| I would rather support logging unions. | |
| They're a bunch of good people. | |
| Why don't I give them some welfare? | |
| If you look at the South, the last white Democrat lost, I think. | |
| Arkansas. | |
| Arkansas was the one southern state where you still had a certain remnant of the Democratic South. | |
| Now, every single congressman in Arkansas, I believe, is a Republican. | |
| And Tom Cotton, who is being promoted as the next upcoming conservative star or whatever, he's pretty by-the-numbers guy, solid on immigration, but pretty interventionist as far as fall on policy goes. | |
| I mean, he took out an incumbent senator, and it wasn't even particularly close. | |
| Yeah, that was pretty shocking, because I thought Cotton was down for a while. | |
| That was supposed to be like, well, maybe the GOP can flip this one. | |
| I mean, we knew that one. | |
| Before the night even really got going. | |
| Wow. | |
| But if you look at the states where they struggled, North Carolina, Tillis was a horrible candidate, Speaker of the House, very unpopular state legislature. | |
| And he ran, I mean, just catered as a political consultant. | |
| I mean, really kind of a, basically, Gillespie without Gillespie charisma. | |
| And that's not meant to be a compliment. | |
| Like, he was god-awful stances on all these things. | |
| And even he was able to pull it out just by sheer inertia, it seems like. | |
| The big one is Brown, I think. | |
| That's the one state where you've got to take a step back and wonder what the hell happened. | |
| You could say, look, he's taking on an incumbent, he made it close. | |
| But Brown, I think, was the most interesting run of the entire cycle. | |
| He's actually pretty good. | |
| He's good on immigration. | |
| And obviously, he's handsome, he's charismatic, and so on and so forth. | |
| Well, he's a moderate. | |
| He's kind of a, think of like Pete Wilson, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Where you have Pete Wilson back in the day was somebody who was going to challenge kind of the pro-life plank on the Republican Party platform. | |
| Social moderate and everything else, but how did he win? | |
| Prop 187 and taking a strong stand against immigration. | |
| Right. | |
| Back when California voted to save itself, and then the court said, no, that's not allowed. | |
| I know in passing that Jerry Brown just got his fourth term as California's governor. | |
| California, we were always indeed. | |
| But Brown, Brown made it close. | |
| But had he won, he could have been kind of the return of this social moderate. | |
| You can't really peg him as some pro-life fanatic or anti-gay or whatever else, but we're going to have common sense stances on immigration and things like that. | |
| The question to me is what happened with foreign policy, how that broke. | |
| He was also pretty interventionist on foreign policy. | |
| I don't know how voters in New Hampshire like the idea of, let's say, the strong stand on the Islamic State and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Well, I don't think people are thinking about foreign policy. | |
| Well, that's what he's contained on, which is just as bad. | |
| If you're not thinking about it, you shouldn't be talking about it. | |
| Yeah, no, I think that's true. | |
| I'm sure there is some residual pressure. | |
| I mean, I think the neocons have lost a tremendous amount of power. | |
| Without question. | |
| But nevertheless, I think in a way, these conservatives, they don't even know what to think, because the neoconservatives have been thinking for them on those issues for so many years. | |
| They're now like, oh, what do we do? | |
| You know, I guess we should just talk like Bush. | |
| Yeah, it's striking. | |
| I mean, to take a step back before we get, like, mired down, what happened in this state and that state. | |
| I mean, I think there's two really big takeaways. | |
| One, three really. | |
| The first, just in passing, is that the GOP played it safe. | |
| They did do some campaigning on immigration and things like that, but they didn't really nationalize the election. | |
| They didn't lay out an agenda. | |
| They didn't really take it to them. | |
| Their campaign was, we're not Obama. | |
| And that was enough this time. | |
| The second point is now, of course, they have Congress. | |
| They've got a pretty ridiculous majority in the House, a fairly strong majority in the Senate. | |
| And they're going to be expected to do stuff, and I don't think there's any consensus about what they should do. | |
| So that would be interesting. | |
| And I think if I'm the GOP, just being a cynical politician, what I would do is absolutely nothing. | |
| I would just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct until 2016. | |
| Because the minute you try to do something, everyone's going to get furious. | |
| And the last point is... | |
| Looking at the white share, nationally they got about 60% of the vote. | |
| I'm getting this from Peter Brimlow over at V-Day. | |
| But turnout was actually higher than what Romney got in 2012, white turnout. | |
| Really? | |
| Which is interesting. | |
| And so what's happening is that... | |
| As a percentage of the voting population? | |
| As a percentage of the voting population, yeah. | |
| Oh, well that's actually not surprising. | |
| A lot of people stayed home. | |
| Only old white people voted. | |
| I mean, did you vote? | |
| I didn't. | |
| I just talk about voting. | |
| I just record podcasts about voting. | |
| I don't actually go into a booth. | |
| It's kind of embarrassing. | |
| I actually went to show up and I thought I should get all sharp on the case. | |
| I was disenfranchised. | |
| I thought I'd registered when I got my new driver's license. | |
| Apparently I didn't. | |
| Oh well. | |
| I'm a bad citizen. | |
| The bigger thing here is that the GOP It's actually... | |
| Think of where we were right after 2012, where the smart money was like, they have to pass amnesty, they have to do more outreach, they have to... | |
| Basically, they were going to be kind of a pro-corporate party with a lot more multiculturalism. | |
| That was the plan. | |
| That was the master plan that came out of that way. | |
| And when you had this time, you had people talking about income inequality, you had people talking about immigration, you had people spending Wall Street. | |
| It's all rhetoric, of course. | |
| But this is what they ran on, and they didn't pass amnesty. | |
| In fact, they just kind of didn't pass anything. | |
| They just kind of held the line. | |
| Well, I think this is what I would say, and this gets back to what I was saying before in terms of basically the GOP, their job is to channel and maybe... | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, you know, and so, and that's why even I say this. | |
| I mean, I'm 36. I'm not exactly a... | |
| I guess I am a millennial of some sort. | |
| I'm not exactly a young person. | |
| But I feel very distanced from any conservative politician. | |
| They don't speak my language in the slightest. | |
| I don't really like them. | |
| I don't resonate with them at all. | |
| And I think it's not my party. | |
| I think if I feel this way, I'm sure someone who's 26... | |
| Or 16 feels this way intensely. | |
| Gosh, I keep going off on these tangents, but I'll say one thing. | |
| I think you can't underestimate the degree to which... | |
| Yes, something like immigration or going after affirmative action, that is a more powerful, that's a more popular issue than people imagine. | |
| People imagine that it's controversial. | |
| In fact, it's actually quite popular. | |
| That being said, I think people underestimate the degree to which conservatism, quote-unquote, is deeply unpopular amongst people who are under the age of 50. I mean, no one wants... | |
| The idea of a kind of... | |
| Bible-thumping George Bush, let's go invade the world, let's talk about the culture of life. | |
| That stuff is just toxic. | |
| And I think actually the big problem for people who are interested in immigration reform, I think their fundamental problem is not that the GOP is too wishy-washy or something. | |
| You want wishy-washy politicians. | |
| Those are good. | |
| They'll do things for you. | |
| The problem is that immigration reform is associated with these Bible... | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That's why, that was the Scott Brown thing. | |
| If Scott Brown had won, that would have changed that perception. | |
| Yeah, no, I think that would have been interesting. | |
| I mean, I think a liberal, like, you know, things like, again, I... | |
| I don't, all the gay rights stuff, I wish we would just get over that stuff. | |
| But anyway, you know, at the end of the day, most millennials want gay marriage. | |
| I think most millennials just want to get, they want to just pass by this whole saga and just get over it and say, yes, allow them gay marriage, stop talking about it, and let's move on. | |
| That is my impression of people. | |
| So yeah, I think in a way, the great hope for immigration reform would be an anti-Wall Street, anti-foreign intervention, anti-George Bush, pro-gay... | |
| and pro-gay social moderate, who, yeah, I think that would, if you could associate immigration reform with stuff like that, I think it would get so much further. | |
| Because now, I mean, you and I know that Ted Cruz and these type of people are bad on immigration, in fact, or Rick Perry. | |
| But the problem is, perception-wise, Yeah. | |
| You know, when you think about immigration reform, you have all this baggage. | |
| This is who you associated there, yeah. | |
| I mean, who is the number one guy who's actually been talking about, who's actually connected to dots, don't give the masters of the universe they're in, and see everything else, it's been Jeff Sessions. | |
| But what's the problem with Jeff Sessions? | |
| He's from Alabama. | |
| And, you know, Sessions, now, it's actually kind of funny, Sessions... | |
| Literally won with 100% of the vote because he ran on a vote, which is kind of funny. | |
| But Saddam Hussein of American politics, I mean, that is a compliment. | |
| But I mean, the thing is, let's say, I mean, Ed Sessions has been brilliant on the issue, the way he's been framed. | |
| He's a good guy. | |
| But, you know, to look at your critique, let's say you put him up there in a debate. | |
| Okay, he's running for president. | |
| He won't, but let's say he did. | |
| And then the debate comes, he talks about immigration, he hammers Wall Street, whatever else. | |
| And then the conversation turns to gay marriage, which is something that the electorate has kind of moved past, and he'll still be railing against this kind of stuff, in a thick southern accent and everything else. | |
| And fair or unfair, that's going to be used against him. | |
| So he's not... | |
| I mean, that was the thing. | |
| I think the Brown defeat was... | |
| As absurd as it sounds, I think that was like the most important thing that happened. | |
| That's a good point. | |
| Because he was the one guy who could have actually been a new direction. | |
| And the thing is, like, and again, this is what Peter Brimow said, you know, the ball just kind of bounced in the right direction. | |
| It wasn't a wave election the same way as like 94 or 10. I mean, you basically had a number of close elections break the right way, and you had a number of people win, you know, by a few percentage points. | |
| And the real question, a lot of this is like what we're not talking about. | |
| I mean, you had Ebola, you had the rise of the Islamic State, you had Barack Obama basically saying, no, we're just... | |
| We're not going to enforce immigration laws with this surge of the so-called children, who are in fact mostly adults, coming from Central America. | |
| I mean, you had about a perfect, and you had Obamacare, nobody likes it. | |
| You had this perfect lineup of circumstances, and they couldn't even make a race of it in critical states. | |
| And also, California, I mean, we almost don't even talk about it, but I mean, the state is essentially just lost. | |
| I mean, it's not even, it'll never be competitive again. | |
| And that's, you know, the GOP, the racialization of the electorate that you pointed to, is going to keep the GOP competitive for a few more cycles. | |
| But, you know, eventually you really do elect a new people. | |
| And in California, that's already happened, where the GOP put up, you know, their minority candidate. | |
| He's going to be young and vibrant. | |
| He's going to do all this stuff. | |
| And it wasn't even close. | |
| I think, exactly. | |
| I mean, we might disagree, excuse me, we might agree too much. | |
| Perhaps I'll take some crazy issue just so that we can have some debate in this podcast. | |
| But yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. | |
| I mean, I think what we might see is this transition where, you know, at the end of the day, the... | |
| Having a party that is based around older white people, that is better. | |
| One older white person is the equivalent of 20 Hispanics or blacks, just in the sense of that older white person is going to vote regularly and reliably. | |
| Yeah, in the midterms. | |
| They're going to vote in the midterms. | |
| I'm sure a lot of Americans just didn't even know that there was an election yesterday. | |
| I mean, that's serious. | |
| I mean, it's just not on the radar. | |
| I kind of forgot about it myself until it was like 3 p.m. | |
| Okay, let me finish real quick and then I'll let you riff on this. | |
| But I just think we're in this transition state where, you know, I think it's going to be very difficult, maybe impossible, for a white Protestant Republican to win the presidency again. | |
| Oh yeah, that's done. | |
| Very difficult. | |
| We've seen the last of that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But we might actually, we might just have this for the next, maybe even the next 10 years. | |
| We might have the situation where the GOP, they get these big House victories, they win these statewide or regional congressional elections and so on and so forth. | |
| And this is the kind of status quo we're going to have for maybe the next eight years or so. | |
| But again, it will happen. | |
| What I was pointing to before about Texas being, oh, it's deep red. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| It's this place. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| I mean, I think politics are a lagging indicator and they're an illusion. | |
| Very lagging. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it gives people false comfort. | |
| The Erickson thing is very revealing when he says, you know, Americans are in charge of America again. | |
| Well, what does that mean? | |
| Keep in mind, you know, red state kind of like bans. | |
| Right. | |
| They feature writers who say, like, the great thing we should do is pass amnesty, and that'll take away the issue somehow. | |
| But, of course, you know, like Peter always says, you can't get beyond the immigration issue. | |
| Like, it's always there. | |
| Like, no matter what you pass, it's just going to keep being there. | |
| Immigration is an issue in South Africa, for God's sake. | |
| So if you look at, let's, you know, to go a step further with what you were saying, It's going to be longer than eight years. | |
| One of the big things that happened, perhaps more important in the long run, is the GOP won some pretty crushing victories in a lot of these state legislatures. | |
| If you look at a map of where the GOP controls states, it's staggering. | |
| It's just this sea of red. | |
| And the key there is, of course, redistricting. | |
| So what you're going to do, they basically are going to set up a system where the GOP is going to control the House for a very long time. | |
| And all the minority voters are basically, I mean, they can say whatever they want about, oh, we're going to do outreach and we need to do this. | |
| But, I mean, you see the GOP's true colors when it comes to redistricting. | |
| They don't need to do outreach. | |
| They're just going to pack them into these little districts and you'll get, you know, Sheila Jackson Lee will get her congressional seat forever, but the Democrats are not going to get, you know, any moderates in there anymore. | |
| You're not going to get these districts where you might have enough minority voters that will push you over the edge. | |
| So the GOP is going to control the House for a very long time. | |
| The second thing, and I think this is where I'm actually going to agree with a lot of the hard leftists and hopefully take this conversation into some sexier territory, so to speak. | |
| There are certain times in American politics where you can change. | |
| The underlying dynamic. | |
| So, you know, if Buchanan had gotten elected somehow after Reagan or after Bush's first term, I think he would have set up the country in such a way that, you know, we'd be much farther to the right than where we are now, just because so many of the underlying things, so much of the momentum, the demographics, just the way the law is structured, the courts, all of that would have been adjusted. | |
| Because people, you know, think of gay marriage, right? | |
| I mean, once you make something possible, people tend to like it a lot more. | |
| And one of the things that I think Barack Obama did wrong is he should have gone big before the election with unilateral executive amnesty. | |
| Because had he done that, he would have gotten... | |
| I mean, Colorado was supposed to be this huge thing, or the Latino vote was going to push the Democrats to victory, and it wasn't even close. | |
| Those people stayed home. | |
| Had he done that, he would have gotten a lot of these activists. | |
| He would have given the Democrats something to run on. | |
| You could say, oh, well, the GOP would have gotten angrier. | |
| The moderates would have voted against him. | |
| But all those people voted against him anyway. | |
| And I think Obama, just judging from his press conference today and just judging from what his options are, I think he's going to pull the trigger on this. | |
| And I don't think the GOP is going to have any idea how to stop him. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| What would you do? | |
| I mean, if you were Obama, right? | |
| And you say, okay, I'm a lame duck. | |
| They've got both houses, and you've got the House and the Senate. | |
| There's not much I can do as far as getting the policy initiative through. | |
| There might even be some effort to screw around with Obamacare. | |
| What can I do to retake the offensive? | |
| You do this. | |
| Because all these moderate GOP senators and the Lindsey Grahams of the world and everything else... | |
| They'll quibble about the technicalities, but they're not going to quibble about the substance. | |
| And at the very least, you're going to create some sort of a compromise where they'll be like, oh, we'll pass a bill that will retroactively legalize 90% of what you just did, and that'll be a great compromise. | |
| And I think a lot of the GOP wants it to happen. | |
| They just don't want to take responsibility for it. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I would say this. | |
| I look at it from a slightly different angle. | |
| I would say that I... | |
| My view of what Obama would want to do is to get the Republicans to put forth an immigration bill that they would like. | |
| Because remember, Obama, despite all of this rhetoric of Obama being this crazed third world communist, he's actually a kind of accommodating president. | |
| I mean, he's more realistic than people give him credit for. | |
| I mean, he didn't create socialized medicine. | |
| He created the Heritage Foundation's plan for immigration. | |
| He did the Romney Care. | |
| You know, he kind of does things. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| Not in Afghanistan. | |
| He's not radically anti-Israel by any stretch, but he has actually kind of moderated his views of that. | |
| He's much more of a moderate president than people imagine, when they imagine he's crazed and angry. | |
| He's simply not. | |
| But anyway, I think from one standpoint, one strategy would be to kind of get the Republicans to do this on their own, because there are a lot of forces within the GOP that want some kind of amnesty. | |
| And yeah, they are under the... | |
| It's not even immigration in a way. | |
| It's demographics and race. | |
| That's never going to go away. | |
| And you can't wish it away by doing some stupid legislation. | |
| Legislation is meaningless. | |
| It's like a little sandcastle and there's a big tidal wave of race and demographics. | |
| It will just knock it over. | |
| Legislation is meaningless. | |
| So I think from one standpoint, an Obama strategy might be to just get the GOP to do it for him. | |
| But another strategy, if he wanted to be a little harder and a little more edgy, he could basically do a... | |
| You know, an executive order amnesty. | |
| And he could kind of racialize politics. | |
| Because remember, the GOP, they want to, you know, any company that you want to maintain repeat customers. | |
| Before you start outreach to new customers, you want to maintain customers. | |
| And just like the GOP, they're going to hold on to being an older white people party. | |
| They're going to be the kind of the Christian party in some... | |
| They're going to be the party against abortion and slightly against gays. | |
| They're going to be the normal person's party. | |
| They need to do that to maintain their hold on this population. | |
| I think in a way, Obama could tempt them to become a little more racial. | |
| If he did an executive amnesty, which again, that's very much in the cards. | |
| Maybe it's even probable in the coming year. | |
| If he did that, he would really racialize politics, and he would actually inspire all these Latinos who don't vote to go out and vote Democrat. | |
| I mean, it would be almost like maybe you need to divide people a little bit. | |
| You need to polarize people in order to rile up your base. | |
| Well, that's a democratic platform, and that's all it is. | |
| I mean, all it is right now is it's just this kind of... | |
| One thing that happened, I think white males voted GOP like 65%, like nationally. | |
| Just like some stupidly high margin. | |
| And, you know, for the whole country, basically. | |
| And the democratic... | |
| Basically, the Democratic Balancing Act is their whole platform these days, or at least their media presence, is just kind of this politics of resentment against white privilege or whatever else. | |
| But the problem is these people can still vote. | |
| And occasionally it just bleeds out, certainly in the media. | |
| That any election where white males or white people generally have an electoral impact is somehow automatically illegitimate. | |
| I think Amanda Marquette was basically saying something like that in Slate today, like the revenge of the angry white male, as if the real problem is that they're still allowed to vote. | |
| So, I mean, I think that... | |
| That is the problem. | |
| In the long run, that is the problem. | |
| What they're trying to do is, you know, in North Carolina, for example, I mean... | |
| If Tillis had lost, I mean, this would have been a big thing. | |
| The fact that you didn't need an ID to vote. | |
| The fact that you had O 'Keefe going and James O 'Keefe going and they're voting 20 different times with all this kind of stuff. | |
| I mean, you've got to imagine for every one of these things we find out about, there's like a hundred that we don't find out about. | |
| And, you know, every one person who does that undoes the vote of somebody else who obeys the law. | |
| So, I mean, at this point, the numbers game of American politics, just the very cynical, head-counting, one tribe against the other tribe, and this is how we're going to do it, it's becoming more blatant, it's becoming more explicit, it's becoming more racialized. | |
| And what's happening, really, I mean, the critical thing about whether this will just be kind of a slow decline of America from first-world status... | |
| Or whether you're going to see some kind of real shake-up in the years to come, like everybody on the right seems to predict, is whether whites start voting nationally the way they do in the South, where you'll still have people in the media and you'll still have the Lena Dunhams of the world campaigning against them and everything else. | |
| When all is said and done, like the president of Singapore said, in multicultural societies, you don't vote your interest, you vote the group. | |
| And there are some signs that that's starting to happen. | |
| The GOP doesn't want that to happen. | |
| They certainly don't deserve the votes of the people they take for granted. | |
| I think they are in that direction full on. | |
| Full throttle. | |
| Sixth gear. | |
| I mean, I think this is, we really underestimate, I mean, again, this is maybe one of my criticisms of the VDR type thing, which is, why don't they just talk about immigration and affirmative action? | |
| If they did that, they would win. | |
| They already do it, and they, in a way, don't need to do it. | |
| You know? | |
| I mean, Lena Dunham is the greatest gift. | |
| For GOP, they just want to focus on this woman. | |
| Why are we thinking about this woman? | |
| The more we think about her and criticize her and care about her stupid book, the more power she has. | |
| I don't want to have a life in which she takes up brain space. | |
| Anyway, they don't need to do it. | |
| They basically have... | |
| ...channeled this population successfully, and they've done it to a large extent through race baiting. | |
| I mean, I think it's just... | |
| The idea that you can... | |
| I don't think you can underestimate the degree to which the GOP race base... | |
| And the left are the only ones... | |
| Who pointed out. | |
| I mean, Keith Olbermann is right. | |
| When Newt Gingrich, when he talks about the food stamp president, all of that is subliminal race baiting. | |
| It is exactly what the left says it is. | |
| They're playing footsie with their base under the table. | |
| They're saying, we are the party of normal people. | |
| We're the party of... | |
| Good, upstanding Christian people. | |
| We are you. | |
| That is the message, and there's a little bit of anti-black and anti-Hispanic stuff thrown in the mix. | |
| But it's basically, we are the normal party. | |
| You are normal. | |
| You vote for us. | |
| And it's a way for them to control these people. | |
| And they've been doing it for decades. | |
| And everything the left says about the GOP is correct. | |
| What was the George Bush, the Willie Horton ad? | |
| That was the most race-baiting thing. | |
| Ever! | |
| It's associating Democrats with black criminals. | |
| This is what the GOP does, and this is why I think we need to resist it. | |
| We don't need to give in to it. | |
| We don't need to encourage them and say, oh, if only they talk about this more. | |
| We need to resist them, because this is one of the ways that they psychically control white people. | |
| And I know that might sound a little like a goofy way of saying it, but it is what it is. | |
| They know who their base is, they know who butters their bread, and they're going to ride this horse, to mix a metaphor, until it drops. | |
| And if we're going to ever have an America that is based on European values and based on European traditions and so on and so forth, we have got to destroy the Republican Party. | |
| I mean, it is an evil force. | |
| There's one thing that I would say suggests it's a bit more complicated. | |
| I think you're right about the race-baiting thing and how often they use it, and certainly a lot of them know what they're doing. | |
| But one thing that I've learned is that a lot of them really, truly, and you've said this in the past, really, truly do believe their own propaganda. | |
| Tim Scott in South Carolina, right? | |
| First black Republican senator since Reconstruction and everything else, won something like 80,000 more votes than Lindsey Graham. | |
| You had a lot in Utah. | |
| You had a number of Hispanic governors reelected and all this kind of stuff. | |
| You can say, oh, this is winter dressing. | |
| They didn't win the votes for all these people. | |
| You know, they still ran on all these things. | |
| Okay. | |
| But I think if you go up to the average Republican voter, the most hard-line, hard-right voter, They're really excited about this kind of thing. | |
| And it's not like a game. | |
| They're not doing it to look good in front of reporters. | |
| They really do believe this. | |
| And this is the kind of thing they're pumped up about. | |
| More than that, you go into an open bar with Republican political types in the Beltway. | |
| They're really excited about it, too. | |
| So, you know, everything you just said is true as far as the way they're moving and the kind of techniques they use. | |
| But that explicit connecting the dot, that is not there. | |
| I think it's completely, I mean, it's so obvious. | |
| It's so obvious to leftists, and it's so obvious to people looking, to like you and people looking at it from a demographic point of view. | |
| But to them, I mean, I think they don't, they literally don't even think of it. | |
| It never crosses their mind. | |
| And insofar as it does cross their mind, it like makes them ashamed and want to back away from it. | |
| Yeah, no, look, I think it's true, and I'm not trying to be wishy-washy when I say it's both. | |
| Because remember, this is not, when we're talking about, because we're not even talking about politics, we're in some ways talking about society and psychology and society and culture. | |
| And that's, it's not mathematics. | |
| You know, two and two don't always equal four. | |
| It sometimes equals five. | |
| And I think it's both. | |
| I think both things are going on. | |
| And both, in a way, they kind of need each other. | |
| You need a kind of flip between race baiting and then, you know, oh, Mia Love is, you know, what a, she's so articulate. | |
| Whatever they say. | |
| I would say, I don't know what kind of campaign she ran and everything else, but I assume she was pretty, quote unquote, conservative. | |
| And Tim Scott was like, what, Chief of Staff or Strom Thurmond or something like that at one point? | |
| That's interesting. | |
| Interesting when you think about Strom Thurmond. | |
| Yeah, South Carolina, they now have the first black senator and America's first obviously gay senator. | |
| So they should be proud. | |
| really... | |
| You're going to drop the mic and walk off that? | |
| Yeah. | |
| For those of you listening, he probably wrote that like half an hour ago. | |
| He's just been waiting this whole time just to deploy. | |
| No, but again, I think it's a little bit of both. | |
| And I'm sure a lot of those Utahns, Mia Love, I'm sure she basically said all the right stuff. | |
| She was a down-the-line, said the kind of conservative talking points of the last 20 years. | |
| And I think a lot of white Utahns, they felt really, they had this gooey, sugary feeling in their little tummies after they left the voting booth. | |
| They're like, oh, look how good I am. | |
| I just voted for a nice, good... | |
| When you see Twitter, it's interesting how that is. | |
| It's very aggressive, like throwing the pictures up and everything else. | |
| And this is the thing. | |
| There's a lot of self-selection. | |
| It's sort of like when you go to an evangelical Christian college. | |
| Back when I was working at Leadership Institute, I'd go to Patrick Henry, I'd go to Liberty, I'd go to any of these places. | |
| The most racially integrated places in the country. | |
| The one place where you can literally say race really doesn't matter too much as far as how ordinary people deal with each other are in these evangelical Christian campuses. | |
| You see a lot more in racial dating. | |
| You see people sitting together, talking together, friends. | |
| You don't see that at the University of Michigan where you'll have your tires slashed if you say you oppose anti-white racial preferences. | |
| But if you go to Patrick Henry College or Liberty, nobody cares. | |
| Just to interject really quickly. | |
| It doesn't matter because you're all coming from the exact same tiny little preselected social religious background where if you have differing values, you're going to be out on your butt. | |
| Just to interject. | |
| Just to interject, I mean, I've spent time at the University of Virginia and University of Chicago and Duke. | |
| All three of those campuses were radically segregated. | |
| I remember when there was two bus stops, I remember, at UVA near the library. | |
| And I imagine it's probably still length this way. | |
| And they were basically equidistant from the library. | |
| So there's no reason to go to one or the other. | |
| And there was a black one and there was a white one. | |
| It was remarkable. | |
| Duke, when you go to the gym, there's the black basketball game, and then there's the two white basketball games. | |
| I mean, it is just radically segregated. | |
| And those are all liberal places. | |
| I mean, those are not... | |
| These are not conservative bastions. | |
| These are like post-modern leftist places. | |
| And Liberty University might be the opposite. | |
| I mean, it's really remarkable. | |
| But go on with what you're saying. | |
| And the thing is, with the party, not the voters, because now you're dealing with huge sample sizes. | |
| But if you deal with the politicians, you deal with the... | |
| You deal with the type of person who defines their life by saying, I am a Republican Party activist. | |
| You actually are going to get a good bit of diversity in there. | |
| You actually are going to get a good spread of candidates. | |
| And because Trump wants to put up these people, just like any party does, it's not because they're necessarily more artificial than the Democrats or whatever else. | |
| The Democrats had their own little kind of quasi-affirmative action. | |
| They put Jim Webb up. | |
| You know, here's this Scotch-Irish guy who can appeal to the world of whites, that kind of thing. | |
| They are going to have these candidates they're going to put up. | |
| And, you know, the old joke about CPAC, what do you call the one black guy you see at CPAC? | |
| The keynote speaker. | |
| And that's going to remain true for... | |
| It's going to remain more true as the decades go forward, where I think the GOP electorate is just going to get wider and wider and wider. | |
| Well, Kevin, should we put a bookmark in this conversation and come back to it? | |
| Or is there something we want to circle around? | |
| Before we go, let me just get this, because you're more tuned in to the immigration stuff than I am. | |
| Do you think we're going to, in this window of the next... | |
| Let's say the next three to maybe six months, you know, before everyone starts focusing on the presidential election and before everything gets kind of set for that, do you think we're going to see an executive amnesty? | |
| I'd say yeah. | |
| And you're not going to see the next 36 months. | |
| You'll see before the new year if it's going to happen. | |
| Oh, you think it's going to happen really soon? | |
| The only question I have is whether he's going to, he being the president, Kind of makes the GOP come out with something. | |
| And then he does his own thing. | |
| I mean, what he's essentially going to do, and I'm sure he's already doing this, or at least he will after the Louisiana election gets settled, is he's going to put forward, this is what I'm going to do. | |
| This is the text of the executive amnesty for however many millions of people, however he chooses to define it. | |
| And the GOP is going to look at that, and they're going to have the choice between either fighting that or coming back with a more limited amnesty. | |
| That will also be legal. | |
| That will go to Congress or whatever else. | |
| And then the ball will be back in Obama's court to decide whether, yes, I'm going to accept this, or no, I'm going to go farther. | |
| Now, I think he might do that. | |
| I mean, I think he will do something. | |
| I think he would go big just because... | |
| Why not? | |
| The disaster has already happened. | |
| One of the insider baseball things that I really do believe is that he just despises Hillary Clinton and the feeling is mutual. | |
| So he's not going to do anything to ease her path to power. | |
| He needs to protect the legacy. | |
| If Michelle wants to have a political career, I mean... | |
| You want to do it by setting up yourself as continuing the great social justice crusade and whatever else. | |
| His replacement for Eric Holder at Attorney General is much the same mold as everything else, so there's no sign of him backing down there. | |
| Why wouldn't you do it? | |
| And frankly, I'm sure he's kicking himself for not having done it before the election. | |
| And Gutierrez is also not going to lay off him. | |
| I mean, if he doesn't do this, he's going to have his own party sniping at him for the rest. | |
| That civil war, this is Gutierrez's phrase, you're going to have a civil war among Democrats. | |
| And Obama's just not going to have anything to do. | |
| Because once you've lost the House and the Senate, I mean, in his words, I don't want to be president without the Senate. | |
| So, I mean, if Obama has one trait that's kind of defined him throughout his life, that he just kind of jumps from one thing to another and doesn't stick with anything very long, he might do it out of like Moadie even doing. | |
| He might just do it out of Anli. | |
| *laughter* | |
| I hope, you know, I might start paying attention to politics. | |
| The power to destroy a thing is the power. | |
| He who can destroy a thing controls it. | |
| That's what he's got. | |
| Out of spite or ennui. | |
| If Barack Obama were actually like that, I would start to support politics again. | |
| Yeah, although if he starts turning into a giant sandworm, I might think about moving to Canada. | |
| This is the ultimate Radix Journal podcast. | |
| This is what our audience wants. | |
| Esoteric references to Dune while we talk about voting results. | |
| No, we should do this again, Kevin. | |
| Let's just put a bookmark in it, because I think there's more to discuss, but I think we've gotten a good 45 minutes in. | |
| I think that's a good place to stop. | |
| But Kevin, thank you. | |
| I definitely enjoy talking to you. | |
| Hopefully we can do it again. | |
| I think it's been almost two years since we did a podcast. | |
| So hopefully we can do one soon because it's a lot of fun. | |
| So thank you. | |
| And I think also, if you are correct, the next three months might be very interesting. | |
| Not even the next three months, the next two months at most. | |
| Yeah, the next two months. | |
| Maybe also, in a way, if Obama can take away that immigration issue, if he just forces it down their throat, maybe this will be a kind of opening for us to move on to something bigger and more civilizational. | |
| Well, it's going to force the GOP, I mean, not to reopen it again, but once that you did see, which we didn't... | |
| That neglected commission is one thing that won a lot with a lot of these state things on the minimum wage that got approved. | |
| And if you're Obama, again, think of it from a completely cynical, objective point of view. | |
| You do this immigration thing, you take that away, the GOP is propping at the mouth, but they're already like that, and then you start chipping away at their white support by going after white workers with things like minimum wage laws and all this kind of stuff. | |
| Now, of course, if you're going to have this immigration, you're screwing those people over anyway, but it still gives you something to campaign on. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And you might get, you know, 2%, 3% more, which is enough. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Interesting. | |
| Well, Kevin, let's do it again soon, and thank you for being on the program. |