This is a keeper, for sure. I'm hoping that this blog comes forward with some kind of model for what the last paragraph is calling for. This is one of those 'correct on the merits' things a center-left outlook has to retain, somehow. "Moderating on immigration" isn't anything. Providing an alternative vision to the "weird quasi-European form of ethnic nationalism" the right is putting forward can certainly espouse more restrictive elements like a less porous border, but I think at this point, particularly with the salience this issue has, it's hard to quietly moderate on in a rewarding way. I think Dems should be proud to disagree with Schmitt by offering people an alternative, not just by decrying his pernicious nonsense.
One historical point: the historical struggle of the Slovaks was against the Austrian-Hungarian empire, which denied Slovaks existed and suppressed their language.
Czechs have a very different history. I think Czechoslovakia should have stuck together, but it’s was a recent post-WWI development. The main complaint Slovaks had with the Czechs is that all the money and infrastructure went to Prague.
Sounds like "National Conservatism" is the latest attempt to rebrand racism. I guess that after calling it "racialism" didn't work, they realized they needed to stop including "race" in the name and used the nicer-sounding "nation" as the root word for "group of people with some common genetic ancestry" instead.
> could have put immigration policy on a sustainable basis without “mass deportation” had Harris won the election
The acceptance of reform to the asylum system was unenthusiastic and only when the election was closely aporoaching and when it became an undeniable liability. Does anyone seriously believe Harris would have stuck with it afterwards if she won the election?
Love of country and neighbors, like all natural, good loves, becomes idolatry, hateful, and demonic when we immerse ourselves and teach our kids fanciful, abominable lies about our origins and purpose as a people. C.S. Lewis wrote, “What breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious … is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history ... The image [we create of our past] becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken.” (Four Loves, 226)
Vance said pretty much the same thing, only not as crudely, at the Claremont Institute a few weeks ago. There have always been ethnic nationalists in this country--even Washington Irving mocked them. The difference now is that they're in the saddle & mean to ride.
This is why so many of us are politically without a country. In my case, I don't buy into the anti-Trump hype -- he's not what you'd want as a classic American leader, in all the ways Matt elucidates here -- but he's also not a fascist, white supremacist or most of the other wild hyperbole thrown at him by his opponents.
But the only alternative we have in the voting booth is the far left-addled Democrat Party, some of whose up-and-comers openly talk about repealing the Constitution. Those people aren't liberals and if anything they believe even less in the American idea than some of the "national conservatives."
> some of whose up-and-comers openly talk about repealing the Constitution
You talking about Trump here? Cuz he's done that quite a bit.
> Those people aren't liberals
Taking at face value that you're speaking of actual Democrats (I've never heard a single elected Dem say we should "repeal the constitution"), what exactly about that statement makes someone "not liberal"? I cannot figure out what you're saying here.
Er . . . not to over-simplify . . . but I think a permissible interpretation of what Mr Y is saying here is that in fact National Conservatism = fascism. Or at any rate has massive and troubling overlaps with what has traditionally been understood to be fairly characterized as "fascism". Certainly "authoritarianism", if the Comparative Government 101 types want to avoid the "F"-word. But more pointedly, we are at a point of crisis where both-siderism just will not do. Trump is as far away from normie Republicans (think Nikki Haley, Brian Kemp) as he is from the Democrats. And which "far left-addled" Democrats, exactly, who have actual and real-world chances of exercising political power are in favor of defunding federal agencies without Congressional approval, putting masked irregulars in the streets, sending National Guard personnel to wage war on cities whose only fault is that a plurality of citizens voted against him, etc., etc.? Sorry, but at this point, the assessment that the Ds (Mark Warner? Adam Schiff? Josh Shapiro? Hell, J.B. Pritzker?) are just as bad or worse is, I am sad to report, utterly delusional - it is equating social-media ravings of some marginal gang of wannabe assistant professors, on the one hand, with the menacing vandals who actually hold national executive power, on the other! Exactly the posture on the part of some elements of the center-right that, time and again (Pinochet's Chile, Videla's Argentina, Franco's Spain), can't get past both-siderism to realize that the only way to stop authoritarianism is to bite the bullet and ally temporarily and strategically with the party or parties of the center-left. Read the sad story of the Weimar-era Center Party deciding not to oppose Hitler's "emergency" decrees.
Given that "national" conservatism seems to be on the rise with JD Vance and his billionaire backers seemingly on board I have a more practical question:
"National" conservatism, when it is purely theoretical, is clearly not a deal breaker for the median voter but isn't the country already too diverse for any actual effort at racial purification to be possible via the democratic process?
I am thinking about places like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina where sufficiently many non-whites vote GOP because they do not feel attacked for their race or religion but how is this going to work if "national" conservatism becomes the GOP's platform? Would brown skinned cowboy-hat wearing Hispanics in Texas who vote GOP for business/religious reasons be willing to self-deport to Mexico after voting for JD Vance?
Yes, this is a point I've brought I'm elsewhere in response to people sweating about how Trump is supposedly going to reimplement *literal* chattel slavery for black Americans and perpetrate a *literal* Holocaust-style genocide of the US Hispanic population -- the Jewish population of Germany at the time of the Nazi takeover was about 1%. White nationalism is very bad, and I'd be sincerely fine with very bad things happening to Schmitt and anyone else actively advocating for it, but there's no way to implement it in the US at this point that doesn't precipitate a full-scale civil war. (Which would be extremely bad, but a qualitatively different "extremely bad" than a largely unchallenged program of genocide.)
Ethnically cleansing the US is the goal of the ICE boondoggle but as you say it's tough to remove enough people to reverse the "majority minority" trend. They'll still try and the odds of a shift from concentration camps to "just shoot them" will go up over time as frustration sets in
I think we can all agree that literal slavery and forced relocation of brown skinned people is a very remote possibility only possible after democratic collapse.
A more reasonable question is what level of "insult" or "second class status" would non-white GOP voters be willing to endure?
Say JD Vance's SCOTUS says that birthright citizenship is invalid and only children born to two parents with 80% or higher European ancestry are US citizens at birth and everyone else has to earn it through some form of national service. They may also apply this retroactively and denaturalize some segment of the population and give them a kind of "second-class" provisional citizenship status. Something like this is clearly within the realm of possibility as it does not involve any immediate violence or material wealth transfer. It is merely a transfer of "status". So what happens then?
I don't think any sort of putative retroactive change on birthright citizenship is possible outside of a civil war scenario because, most obviously, that literally implodes the entire US legal system overnight and the US economy likely within a few days thereafter at most since there is nothing that can be done to change birthright citizenship retroactively that isn't going to result in, at minimum, tens of millions of people instantly becoming legally unemployable without going through the process to obtain work visas.
There is no inherent contradiction between saying "We should be more like Europe in terms of the social safety net while retaining the universalistic ethos of America"
The left is not saying "let us make the USA a racially homogenous country in order to have a social safety net like Europe".
Let us grant that the USA is already superior to Europe for it's founding ideals but that is not the aspect of the USA the left is criticizing.
There is no inherent contradiction between saying "We should be more like Europe in terms of the social safety net while retaining the universalistic ethos of America"
Isn't the contradiction that as far as we can tell, these are basically exclusive i.e. the public will not support that level of safety net for such a diverse country with lots of immigrants?
Sure, but the level of welfare democratically feasible at a given level of diversity I suspect is not a static thing, it can evolve with the overall wealth and education level as well as the nature of the diversity. California is much more diverse than the median American state with lots of immigrants but it is rich and if it were it's own country and did not have to send tax dollars to the Federal government on net, the welfare state here would probably be stronger not weaker.
The content of "be more like Europe" depends entirely on the context and it is not liberal-coded in a vacuum.
Maybe there is some type of right-wing jingoistic individual who thinks "be more like Europe" is bad no matter the context and if Matt's argument moves such a person away from national conservatism, sure.
"He criticized the design of the H-1B program, which he correctly noted does not actually select for the most-skilled workers in the way that a skilled visa program ought to."
It is true but I trust the markets to do a better job of doing the selection rather than the government. The government can set some salary floors per job category such that businesses are not abusing this program. Where I disagree with a purely salary based approach is that different fields have different salary bands. IMO, it should be separated by field as well.
I don't think there should be a limit to H1-B visas, nor a lottery system. But the salary floor should be like $500,000 to prevent nepotism and attract actual talent.
That sounds like you're talking about the O1 (exceptional talent) or EB-5 (investor) visas, which are fine and probably should be expanded but are different from the H1-B.
This is a keeper, for sure. I'm hoping that this blog comes forward with some kind of model for what the last paragraph is calling for. This is one of those 'correct on the merits' things a center-left outlook has to retain, somehow. "Moderating on immigration" isn't anything. Providing an alternative vision to the "weird quasi-European form of ethnic nationalism" the right is putting forward can certainly espouse more restrictive elements like a less porous border, but I think at this point, particularly with the salience this issue has, it's hard to quietly moderate on in a rewarding way. I think Dems should be proud to disagree with Schmitt by offering people an alternative, not just by decrying his pernicious nonsense.
One historical point: the historical struggle of the Slovaks was against the Austrian-Hungarian empire, which denied Slovaks existed and suppressed their language.
Czechs have a very different history. I think Czechoslovakia should have stuck together, but it’s was a recent post-WWI development. The main complaint Slovaks had with the Czechs is that all the money and infrastructure went to Prague.
I wish I could read this post again for the first time. Absolutely well done MY.
Here here.
Sounds like "National Conservatism" is the latest attempt to rebrand racism. I guess that after calling it "racialism" didn't work, they realized they needed to stop including "race" in the name and used the nicer-sounding "nation" as the root word for "group of people with some common genetic ancestry" instead.
USA! USA! USA!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I have to take issue with this:
> could have put immigration policy on a sustainable basis without “mass deportation” had Harris won the election
The acceptance of reform to the asylum system was unenthusiastic and only when the election was closely aporoaching and when it became an undeniable liability. Does anyone seriously believe Harris would have stuck with it afterwards if she won the election?
cue the Team America theme
From the department of Not Great, Bob: SCOTUS 6-3 decision says it’s ok for ICE to pull over drivers in L.A. for Driving While Looking Hispanic
Love of country and neighbors, like all natural, good loves, becomes idolatry, hateful, and demonic when we immerse ourselves and teach our kids fanciful, abominable lies about our origins and purpose as a people. C.S. Lewis wrote, “What breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious … is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history ... The image [we create of our past] becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken.” (Four Loves, 226)
Vance said pretty much the same thing, only not as crudely, at the Claremont Institute a few weeks ago. There have always been ethnic nationalists in this country--even Washington Irving mocked them. The difference now is that they're in the saddle & mean to ride.
This is why so many of us are politically without a country. In my case, I don't buy into the anti-Trump hype -- he's not what you'd want as a classic American leader, in all the ways Matt elucidates here -- but he's also not a fascist, white supremacist or most of the other wild hyperbole thrown at him by his opponents.
But the only alternative we have in the voting booth is the far left-addled Democrat Party, some of whose up-and-comers openly talk about repealing the Constitution. Those people aren't liberals and if anything they believe even less in the American idea than some of the "national conservatives."
> some of whose up-and-comers openly talk about repealing the Constitution
You talking about Trump here? Cuz he's done that quite a bit.
> Those people aren't liberals
Taking at face value that you're speaking of actual Democrats (I've never heard a single elected Dem say we should "repeal the constitution"), what exactly about that statement makes someone "not liberal"? I cannot figure out what you're saying here.
Trump isn't a fascist, but all the people he surrounds himself with seem to be.
Versus the dumb wokies that at least have the honesty to tell us that they hate America without pretending they don't.
Er . . . not to over-simplify . . . but I think a permissible interpretation of what Mr Y is saying here is that in fact National Conservatism = fascism. Or at any rate has massive and troubling overlaps with what has traditionally been understood to be fairly characterized as "fascism". Certainly "authoritarianism", if the Comparative Government 101 types want to avoid the "F"-word. But more pointedly, we are at a point of crisis where both-siderism just will not do. Trump is as far away from normie Republicans (think Nikki Haley, Brian Kemp) as he is from the Democrats. And which "far left-addled" Democrats, exactly, who have actual and real-world chances of exercising political power are in favor of defunding federal agencies without Congressional approval, putting masked irregulars in the streets, sending National Guard personnel to wage war on cities whose only fault is that a plurality of citizens voted against him, etc., etc.? Sorry, but at this point, the assessment that the Ds (Mark Warner? Adam Schiff? Josh Shapiro? Hell, J.B. Pritzker?) are just as bad or worse is, I am sad to report, utterly delusional - it is equating social-media ravings of some marginal gang of wannabe assistant professors, on the one hand, with the menacing vandals who actually hold national executive power, on the other! Exactly the posture on the part of some elements of the center-right that, time and again (Pinochet's Chile, Videla's Argentina, Franco's Spain), can't get past both-siderism to realize that the only way to stop authoritarianism is to bite the bullet and ally temporarily and strategically with the party or parties of the center-left. Read the sad story of the Weimar-era Center Party deciding not to oppose Hitler's "emergency" decrees.
"...but I think a permissible interpretation of what Mr Y is saying here is that in fact National Conservatism = fascism"
Or to put it in internet meme-speak: "If not fascism, why fascism-shaped?"
Given that "national" conservatism seems to be on the rise with JD Vance and his billionaire backers seemingly on board I have a more practical question:
"National" conservatism, when it is purely theoretical, is clearly not a deal breaker for the median voter but isn't the country already too diverse for any actual effort at racial purification to be possible via the democratic process?
I am thinking about places like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina where sufficiently many non-whites vote GOP because they do not feel attacked for their race or religion but how is this going to work if "national" conservatism becomes the GOP's platform? Would brown skinned cowboy-hat wearing Hispanics in Texas who vote GOP for business/religious reasons be willing to self-deport to Mexico after voting for JD Vance?
80% of Trump voters are white. I'm sure he's happy to screw over 20% to please the rest
Yes, this is a point I've brought I'm elsewhere in response to people sweating about how Trump is supposedly going to reimplement *literal* chattel slavery for black Americans and perpetrate a *literal* Holocaust-style genocide of the US Hispanic population -- the Jewish population of Germany at the time of the Nazi takeover was about 1%. White nationalism is very bad, and I'd be sincerely fine with very bad things happening to Schmitt and anyone else actively advocating for it, but there's no way to implement it in the US at this point that doesn't precipitate a full-scale civil war. (Which would be extremely bad, but a qualitatively different "extremely bad" than a largely unchallenged program of genocide.)
Ethnically cleansing the US is the goal of the ICE boondoggle but as you say it's tough to remove enough people to reverse the "majority minority" trend. They'll still try and the odds of a shift from concentration camps to "just shoot them" will go up over time as frustration sets in
I think we can all agree that literal slavery and forced relocation of brown skinned people is a very remote possibility only possible after democratic collapse.
A more reasonable question is what level of "insult" or "second class status" would non-white GOP voters be willing to endure?
Say JD Vance's SCOTUS says that birthright citizenship is invalid and only children born to two parents with 80% or higher European ancestry are US citizens at birth and everyone else has to earn it through some form of national service. They may also apply this retroactively and denaturalize some segment of the population and give them a kind of "second-class" provisional citizenship status. Something like this is clearly within the realm of possibility as it does not involve any immediate violence or material wealth transfer. It is merely a transfer of "status". So what happens then?
I don't think any sort of putative retroactive change on birthright citizenship is possible outside of a civil war scenario because, most obviously, that literally implodes the entire US legal system overnight and the US economy likely within a few days thereafter at most since there is nothing that can be done to change birthright citizenship retroactively that isn't going to result in, at minimum, tens of millions of people instantly becoming legally unemployable without going through the process to obtain work visas.
"MAGA ... is ... a weird quasi-European form of ethnic nationalism"
I just love it. This frames conservatives as the side saying "we should be more like Europe", and they are wrong because USA is better than Europe.
Yet another example of why the center left loves Matt's writing, and the far left hates it.
I'm not sure what argument this is making beyond attempting to tally points for your ideological coalition of choice.
Hmmm...not sure I see your gotcha.
There is no inherent contradiction between saying "We should be more like Europe in terms of the social safety net while retaining the universalistic ethos of America"
The left is not saying "let us make the USA a racially homogenous country in order to have a social safety net like Europe".
Let us grant that the USA is already superior to Europe for it's founding ideals but that is not the aspect of the USA the left is criticizing.
There is no inherent contradiction between saying "We should be more like Europe in terms of the social safety net while retaining the universalistic ethos of America"
Isn't the contradiction that as far as we can tell, these are basically exclusive i.e. the public will not support that level of safety net for such a diverse country with lots of immigrants?
Sure, but the level of welfare democratically feasible at a given level of diversity I suspect is not a static thing, it can evolve with the overall wealth and education level as well as the nature of the diversity. California is much more diverse than the median American state with lots of immigrants but it is rich and if it were it's own country and did not have to send tax dollars to the Federal government on net, the welfare state here would probably be stronger not weaker.
I was noting the rhetoric, not asserting a gotcha or contradiction.
Matt took a liberal-coded argument, "be more like Europe", and assigned it to a conservative position.
The content of "be more like Europe" depends entirely on the context and it is not liberal-coded in a vacuum.
Maybe there is some type of right-wing jingoistic individual who thinks "be more like Europe" is bad no matter the context and if Matt's argument moves such a person away from national conservatism, sure.
Europe sucks. I feel like this is obvious, lol.
This is one of the best commentaries that I've read on the recent "blood and soil" moment in MAGA.
"He criticized the design of the H-1B program, which he correctly noted does not actually select for the most-skilled workers in the way that a skilled visa program ought to."
It is true but I trust the markets to do a better job of doing the selection rather than the government. The government can set some salary floors per job category such that businesses are not abusing this program. Where I disagree with a purely salary based approach is that different fields have different salary bands. IMO, it should be separated by field as well.
I don't think there should be a limit to H1-B visas, nor a lottery system. But the salary floor should be like $500,000 to prevent nepotism and attract actual talent.
That sounds like you're talking about the O1 (exceptional talent) or EB-5 (investor) visas, which are fine and probably should be expanded but are different from the H1-B.
Even Google and Meta doesn't pay that much to fresh grads.