David Weigel writes for the Washington Post:
At VDare, a clearinghouse for immigration restrictionists, the news is not what happened in a meeting, but that the media keeps missing Trump’s passionate attacks on crime caused by undocumented immigrants.
The alt-right, in other words, is constantly focusing on the trees and not the forest. And their theory of how 2016 can be won, or how the Republican Party could save itself, is that a supermajority of white voters can be moved by the Democrats’ support of mass legalization of immigrants and greater Syrian refugee acceptance.
“The single biggest issue of the 21st century is whether the First World has the will to resist being inundated by the Third World,” said Steve Sailer, an influential writer for VDare and Taki’s Magazine. “If we do preserve our borders, the Third World will figure out how to control its own fertility like everybody else has. If we don’t, though, we’ll become Rio with worse weather and scenery. But [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s [mistake] last year of letting in a million Muslim mob shows how badly the ideology of borderlessness has warped the judgment of the ruling class.”
Last week, Trump began comparing Hillary Clinton to Merkel. The reference was lost in some coverage, Merkel being generally seen as a pathbreaking female leader. On the alt-right, Merkel is identified with one thing: the Syrian refugee surge. As the Center for American Progress’s Alice Ollstein reported, Trump highlighted the most shocking incidents of migrant crime in Europe, and said that in Germany “crime has risen to levels that no one thought they would ever see” — a loose phrase that ignores a recent drop in migrant crime…
The right’s success in Europe underscores what the alt-right believes to be true here: There is a clear path to success if Republicans are willing to become a party of national interests, against multiculturalism. By contrast, if the party thinks it can win on the margins, it will lose white voters as they stay home or fail to see a distinction with Democrats. In “How Trump Could Pull it Off,” American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor laid it out with charts from a new study of white Americans.
“Whites still cast more than two-thirds of the votes in national elections,” Taylor wrote. “They could theoretically choose the president even if every non-white voted against them. Donald Trump will win if he turns out whites in unprecedented numbers and persuades them to vote for him. His best chance is to keep hammering at his signature issues: build a wall, throw out illegals, get rid of birthright citizenship, keep out Muslims. All this strongly appeals to white ‘racial resentment’ and gives a sense of ‘political efficacy,’ thus solving the two problems that almost certainly account for part of the drop in white voter turnout. Mr. Trump could set new turnout records in the general election, just as he did in the primaries.”
Alt-right thinkers have been arguing this for longer than the “alt-right” moniker has existed. In 2004, Sailer purchased raw exit-poll data to prove that network estimates of George W. Bush’s share of Hispanic votes — still cited by Republicans who say the party can win with a nonwhite coalition — had been overstated.
“The Republican Brain Trust is notoriously innumerate,” Sailer wrote. “Look at the 2013 GOP Establishment ‘autopsy’ that claimed that Mitt Romney lost because Republicans hadn’t amnestied Mexican illegal aliens. There aren’t many Mexican voters in swing states. In truth, Romney let the election slip away by not doing very well among Rust Belt whites. According to the large sample size Reuters-Ipsos online panel, Romney won only 52 percent of the white vote across Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which he lost in the Electoral College. Romney apparently did especially badly among white working class men in those six states.”
* “A year and a half ago, Trump stumbled upon the Politics of the Future.”
Now this is one of Steve’s best quotes of the decade. It aptly sums up what is coming as well as the fact that it occurred in the past (relatively speaking, in 2015) and that it was grasped by the most unlikeliest of people.
The question becomes, was the stumble by Trump a conscious one or was it in fact unconscious? In other words could he have instinctively grasped what’s coming and actually as time wore on (in 2015) consciously became aware of the ramifications of what he stumbled upon? As in, ‘Omg, immigration, borders, America First, etc. this is very very important to America. Good thing I figured it out before everyone else, ’cause this isn’t going away and this issue’s only going to get bigger and bigger as time goes on’. I mean, Trump had to have a reason or two for latching onto immigration in particular. And, since that day, June 16, 2015, Trump has completely driven the news cycle. That’s incredible that any one person could entirely dominate every single political, national, even cultural news cycle for over 14 consecutive months. For better or worse, the issues that Trump stumbled upon has completely driven the election since last June.
And that is a possibility, namely, that Trump became fully conscious of what he had stumbled upon as well as the long term ramifications of the nation (e.g. bringing the immigration question into the foreground). Especially if we are to believe that he did in fact read, skim through, etc. Ann Coulter’s 2015 book a mere two weeks before his official announcement for the GOP nomination.
Hi, Ann!
* Well done. Weigel has always seemed quite willing to go beyond pointing and sputtering. I think he is more intelligent than the typical member of the clickbait lumpenintelligentsia at Slate or the Atlantic.
I give Weigel credit for the following (in addition to interviewing Steve).
1. Identifying VDare (accurately) as “a clearinghouse for immigration restrictionists” rather than (as is more typical) “a vile nest of Hitlerian, racist, unforgivably white racists”
2. Identifying Steve (accurately) as “an influential writer for VDare and Taki’s Magazine” (rather than, say, “controversial,” “extreme,” etc.)
3. Not citing the $outhern Poverty Law Center or any of its “hate group” designations anywhere in the article
and most importantly
4. Taking the time and space to actually present (at least the rudiments of) the “alt-right’s” argument, rather than isolating the most inflammatory quotations out of context and pinning them up for point and sputter.
