Utah
It occurs to me that more needs to be said about the topics we spent so much time on last year: immigration, whiteness, conservatism, tactics, and politics.
I was right about some things, but wrong about some others.
Hits
(1) In hindsight, I was right about hardening White racial attitudes. The polling data that we have seen this year has more than confirmed our suspicions from last year.
(2) In light of changing racial attitudes, I was right about the need to engage a conservative audience and remove unnecessary barriers to communication.
(3) I was right about the Republican Party being divided between the pro-business, Chamber of Commerce establishment wing and the grassroots conservative, Tea Party insurgent wing.
(4) I was right about the prospects for immigration reform in a handful of states. See especially the huge victories in Georgia and Alabama and now North Carolina.
(5) I was right about both the need and potential to “mainstream” a pro-White political message.
(6) Finally, I was also right about the fantasy based approach of the vanguardists, which six months later has accumulated nothing more than fresh podcasts, blog posts, navel gazing essays, and forum comments.
Misses
Where was I wrong?
(1) I was too optimistic about the relative strength of grassroots, anti-immigration conservatives in the Republican Party, especially in the Western states.
(2) I was too optimistic about the willingness of the Republican Party to use its 2010 midterm election victories to pass a popular anti-illegal immigration agenda at the state level.
(3) I let my impression of Alabama and Georgia politics change my general impression of the Republican Party.
It turned out that Alabama and Georgia Republicans were serious about passing immigration reform whereas Republicans in other states had simply talked about it to get themselves elected.
In the future, I will remember that the Deep South is the exception, not the rule, in Republican politics.
Reflections
We learn from our mistakes.
Basically, I still think I was right about the most important point that I was making last year: the need to engage a conservative audience and connect with a broader mass constituency of White people.
It is clear now that White people in some states (Alabama and Georgia) are much further along than others (Utah and Kansas). In particular, the most egregious example of the failure of immigration reform this year happened in Utah, where the Utah Republican Party passed and signed into law a guest worker amnesty which was widely heralded by the MSM.
Utah is a clear example of the need for “a Republican strategy”: by a Republican strategy, I don’t mean the need to support the Republican Party in elections, or even to like the Republican Party, which we have poked fun at lately.
Instead, I mean the need to engage and connect with the White conservatives who are involved with the Republican Party, who share many of our positions on the most important issues, and win them over to our cause.
We need to draw a clear distinction between the Republican politicians, who are often in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce, and ordinary conservatives who are strongly in favor of securing the border and opposed to amnesty.
The Southern Baptist Convention is another example of this: we need to draw a clear distinction between the Southern Baptist leadership, who recently endorsed amnesty for illegal aliens, and ordinary people who are Southern Baptists who are overwhelmingly opposed to rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty.
Instead of attacking White people, we should be attacking their so-called leaders, most of whom are already unpopular.
Utah Revolts
Everything that we have said here about the need for a Republican strategy is playing out in Utah where ordinary conservatives never swallowed the guest worker amnesty and immediately started working toward its repeal.
Yesterday, Tea Party conservatives captured control of the Utah Republican Party, which passed a resolution that endorsed the repeal of the Utah guest worker amnesty.
The guest worker amnesty bill was the handiwork of the Republican-controlled Utah legislature and the Republican governor of Utah. Their “compromise” has since been repudiated by their own party.
In Alabama and Georgia, the business wing of the Republican Party was defeated by the conservative wing. Now, the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which lost in states like Utah and Florida, is revolting against the business wing there.
I guess the “lemmings” weren’t fooled this time around.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this bit of good news. The moral of the story here is to never give up on our people. They are not as far along as we are, but they are moving in the right direction.
The split amongst Republicans in Utah over illegal immigration is indicative of a split that lies under the surface of the GOP and which as far as I know isn’t talked about plainly.
Libertarian economics of some degree or another has been the de facto economic perspective of the GOP for decades now. Illegal immigration points up a split that I think is lurking there, which pushes back against this libertarian tendency. The question is: pushes back with what? Libertarianism has dominated for so long that populist, grassroots conservatives (as opposed to Chamber of Commerce, country club conservatives) have no other way to talk about economic issues. Middle class white conservatives need some sort of new economic language, if you will.
In my view, this alternative conservative economics needs to be focused on white-owned small business in Red States, not Wall Street. It needs to be focused on middle class and lower middle class whites in Red States and their very specific concerns. If it can’t be explicitly racial, then it should at least trace its program back to the concerns of Red State whites. It should put nationalism above multinationals.