[Bret L]

((FWIW I agree 100% with Taunton on abortion because it keeps the
stupid population down somewhat, although I think free Norplant for
underperforming teen girls is more cost effective. Bret.))


Building the New Majority—Speech To The American Cause

By Peter Brimelow

"I mean, it’s quite obvious what the solution to our problem is—we have to elect Pat president in the year 2000!

Or, for that matter, in ‘96 or ‘92.

Instead, we got Dubya—George W Bush—who turned out to be the worst
president in American history, even worse than Franklin D. Roosevelt.
At least Roosevelt was a good party leader—he led the Democrats to a
whole series of victories.

But as Pat just said, and as Phyllis Shlafly said earlier, we’ve been
here before.

I’m old enough—though I still think I can read my notes here—I’m old
enough to remember being here in the 1970s after the disaster of
Watergate, after the fall of Vietnam. I was up in Canada then, and I
went down as a Canadian journalist to interview Bill Rusher, then the
publisher of National Review. (So you know he was a squish at heart!)

At that time, Rusher was trying to start a new party, a Third Party,
because he thought it was impossible for conservatives to get control
of the Republican Party after Ford had defeated Reagan in 1976. We
exchanged cabalistic signs and established that we were on the same
side of the debate. And he said to me, in confidence, “You know the
problem we’ve got here is insoluble, we’ve left it too late, and the
Red Flag will one day wave over the world—the Soviet Union will one
day conquer the world.”

But, he said, “We persevere. Because, for one thing, you never know
what is going to happen next. And for another thing, there are
theological injunctions against despair!”

(This is an audience that understands theological injunctions!)

Well, of course, five years later, Reagan was elected president.

So I agree with what some people have said here already. American
politics are very volatile. I’m not worried about a leader showing up—
a leader will show up. Or leaders. Maybe there’s one here today. We
can rebound much more quickly than people anticipate.

At a similar moment in British history in the 19th century, the
Conservative Party was in complete disarray and despair. And its then-
principle ideologist and eventual leader, Benjamin Disraeli,
promulgated, came up with the idea that the way the Conservative
Party, which was seen as an aristocratic and feudal party could win
elections was to appeal to the working class—on the basis of
nationalism, on the basis of patriotism.

A famous British historian whose name I forget, but Pat will remember,
said that Disraeli discerned in the working class "the Conservative
working man as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in a block of
marble." [This originally appeared in the Times of London, May 18th,
1883—the historian Peter was thinking of was Sir Robert Ensor, who
quoted it in his history of the period.] And that is exactly what real
political leadership is—to see the issues that you can build new
coalitions around.

And in America today, these issues have already in fact emerged. Let
me give you an example.

A good issue, a really strong issue, can leap sectional divisions
between Americans. It can leap racial divisions, if it is strong
enough. Up in northern Michigan, there is a man called Dr. John Tanton
who has really single-handedly built the immigration reform movement
in the U.S., because no political party would take it on. He’s founded
a number of organizations including FAIR—Federation for Immigration
Reform—and US English which was in favor of an official English
policy. [Subsequently succeeded by ProEnglish].

Tanton is not a conservative. He’s sort of a Northern Progressive.
He’s an environmentalist. The reason he got interested in immigration
reform—this is actually true!—is that he really likes trees, he’s
fascinated by trees. He prefers trees to people. And his view is the
more people you have, the fewer trees. So, therefore, you don’t want
mass immigration because that is what is driving American population
growth.

Now, something else about Tanton: you’re all going to have to pray for
him. He’s on the wrong side of the abortion issue. So much that he and
his wife were leaders in an attempt to get abortion legal is Michigan,
way back when, before the Supreme Court decided to do it for them.

Needless to say, this initiative lost. But nevertheless John Tanton
and his wife voted for Pat in the 1992 Michigan primary—because of the
immigration issue. That was more important to them than anything else,
more important than social liberalism and abortion issue.

So that’s how a strong issue can jump over the conventional wisdom on
what motivates people to vote one way or the other.

Now, it happens that we already know what these strong issues are—
because they’ve walked up the door of the stupid California Republican
Party and banged on it. Three of them!—Affirmative Action (thanks to
Ward’s 1996 Proposition 209), Official English (1998 bilingual
education Proposition 227) and illegal immigration (Proposition 187).

They all carried overwhelmingly, despite being in California, which
we’re not supposed to be able to win any more, and despite being
opposed by overwhelming weight of the California Establishment and
even substantial parts of the California Republican Party. But they
still carried.

The response of the Californian Republican Party has been to dive
under the bed and hide. Which is why it’s not won any statewide
elections since Proposition 187 carried California in 1994.

But the issues are still there. And they can be developed.

They’ve all been gone into today, so I won’t say very much more about
them, except to add this about Affirmative Action: People ask, how do
we appeal to younger people? The only section of the white vote that
Obama carried was people below 30—he narrowly carried them. But the
fact is that it was suicidal for any white male to vote for Obama
because affirmative action quotas are a zero sum game. The more quotas
there are, the more white males will be squeezed out of everything—as
also will be the families that depend on them. That’s the issue that
should have been used to appeal to the young.

And this ties right into the immigration issue. Because the amazing
thing about Affirmative Action it that immigrants are immediately
eligible for it, even though they weren’t slaves in this country.
They’ve never been discriminated against. But they’re still eligible
for Affirmative Action.

By the way, on the immigration issue, I think it’s important that we
start thinking about legal immigration too. Legal immigration is as
much out of control as illegal immigration, because of the “family
unification” policy, which basically means that foreigners who have
relatives in America have a sort of civil right to come here, and
ultimately it has the same effect. The tremendous cross-subsidization
from the American taxpayer to illegal and legal immigrants in this
country just makes no sense from an economic point of view.

I really do recommend the language issue, because that polls even
better than immigration and Affirmative Action. Eighty-odd percent
[actually 84%] of Americans say they are in favor of an official
English policy. The wonderful thing about this is that, if you look at
what is actually going to happen here, you find that the Obama
administration is going to gradually institute institutional
bilingualism in the country—is going to require people to speak
Spanish in key positions in the police force and so on. This is a
direct attack on the American working class because they are not going
to be bilingual.

Language policy has tremendous public-choice consequences. We’ve seen
that in Canada, where language policy has been effectively used to
simply displace English Canadians from the federal civil service, so
the permanent government of the country is in the hands of the
Quebecois. That was done, not by directly banning English Canadians,
but just by insisting that civil servants speak both languages, which
as a practical manner English Canadians just don’t do.

Then there’s the trade question. It has always irritates me as a
financial journalist when Pat talks about trade. For one thing, I
think that he ought to be talking about immigration. That’s a far more
important issue. I mean, no one throws bricks at you when you talk
about tariffs. It’s immigration that provokes the riots—it’s much more
exciting. Fundamentally, economics is a boring issue, you know. I have
to write about it for a living, but it is fundamentally boring.

But Pat is unquestionably right—regardless of minor technical
disagreements we might have—that there is a tremendous redistribution
effect from free trade. It costs some people income and it directs
income towards other people, and they’re not the same people. I might
also say by the way that econometrics show that the aggregate gains
from free trade are quite small. I think they’re there, but they are
quite small, so I don’t think it’s worth arguing about.

What I do recommend to Pat, again, not for that first time, is that he
talk about exchange rates. You know, people go around saying that Pat
is a terrible fellow because he wants tariffs. But in fact what we’ve
had in this country, really since the Clinton years, is a policy of
effective negative tariffs—inverse protectionism. Because Washington
for some reason has allowed the Chinese to peg their yuan, their
currency, to the dollar. The Chinese currency is massively
undervalued. Nobody has raised a peep about this, really, for nearly
twenty years.

The Chinese are doing this because it makes their exports cheaper to
the US and it makes American imports dearer in China. And they want to
do that, although it is not necessarily in the aggregate economic
interest of China, because they believe in concentrating manufacturing
capacity in their hands. They’re exchange-rate mercantilists.

But what’s the Americans’ excuse? What’s the excuse of the Clinton
administration and the Bush administration for this?

I don’t think there is a very nice explanation. I think what we see
here is a conspiracy by Peking, Washington and Wall Street against
Main Street. (Applause).

(My word, Pat—I guess people are interested in economics.)

What happened was that the Federal government in Washington decided it
wanted to fund these enormous budget deficits, it wanted to borrow the
money from the Chinese. Wall Street wanted to sell the paper, the
bonds, to the Federal government, to be the middle man between the
Federal government and the Chinese. And the Chinese wanted, as I said,
manufacturing capacity.

But Americans— the American working class across the board—got it in
the ear.

I also think that we’ve not looked enough at what caused this huge
financial crash last year. As a financial journalist, I really do
think that it’s the excesses on Wall Street in the financial industry
that caused this crash. They’ve not only succeed in deindustrializing
major parts of the US, but they have also now brought down the economy
park for the world.

So, talking of popular issues, I think someone should stick a
pitchfork in Wall Street. Pat? When you’ve got the time?

I call these questions —Affirmative Action, immigration, language,
America versus trade and finance—I call them “The National Question”.
They all go to the issue of whether or not America is a nation, a
political community that looks after its own people, or whether it has
become a sort of global supermarket. And I think that people who are
interested in these questions are what I call Nationalists—National
Conservatives.

The National Question is the common thread that runs through all of
these issues. And there will be more coming.

One that is coming right now, and that I am urging Pat to write about,
is that the Obama administration is pushing this Hate Crimes
legislation. Now, as you know, it is already illegal to shoot museum
guards in the US. This Holocaust Museum shooter faces the death penalty
—how many times can they hang him? Then answer is that they are not
interested in this man, in these crimes. What they are interested in
is proscribing and banning political opposition. They are simply going
to blame these things on everybody that is interested in immigration
and so on.

One of the things that we do are VDARE.COM, which I edit, is monitor
the number of illegal aliens that kill people in drunk driving
accidents. There are hundreds of these cases. They never make it to
the national news. You have to watch the local news to find out about
it, and even there it is very hard because the police don’t ask their
immigration status.

Another thing we monitor is what we call “Immigrant Mass Murder
Syndrome”. For some reason immigrants, quite often Asian males, have a
habit of going amuck and killing lots of people. The most famous case,
of course, is the Virginia Tech killings in 2007. But just recently a
Vietnamese immigrant killed about thirty people in a Binghamton, New
York immigration center. There have been at least 20 cases of these
things in the last seven or eight years, and more than 200 deaths.
Nobody in the Main Stream Media seems to want to put this together and
ask why is this happening? If this were anything else in the world,
the MSM would be saying this is a Trend, with a capital T, and we have
to look at it. But as it is, you can’t find even the facts unless you
go to our site.

If this man who shot up those people in Binghamton had been a white
male, I’m sure that people in this room would be under arrest—because
that’s what Obama wants to see happen. So we only have a short time to
get a grip on this situation. And that Hate Crimes Bill is something
that the Republican Party should really be focusing on.

But then what’s unemployment going to get to eleven—twelve percent?
Why isn’t the Republican Party calling for an immigration moratorium?
It makes no sense.

Sometime I think Bill Rusher was right, Bay, we have to go to a new
party. Bay’s flinching she doesn’t like to hear that after
experiencing 2000! But I still think it’s going to happen.

I will end on an optimistic note. I’ve concluded that nobody knows
what’s politically possible, least of all professional politicians.
(I’m sorry Lou [Barletta!]. They’re like shrews, they have very
sensitive noses, they can sense exactly what is in front of them, but
they’re blind—they don’t need to see more than a week out as long as
they can do a 360 degree turn and come out facing the right way.

Do you remember price and wage controls? They were seen as
“inevitable” by all the right people at the time. They’ve happened and
collapsed and everybody has forgotten about them, and even Obama
hasn’t proposed them (yet).

Do you remember inflation? That was thought of in the 1970s as
irreversible. One amazing thing Reagan did was he stopped inflation—
again, for the time being.

Above all, think about the Soviet Union. Nobody expected the Soviet
Union to collapse. I was talking to Phyllis about it this morning. Not
only those of us who were anticommunists didn’t expect it to collapse—
because we were constantly being told how powerful it was and we
actually began to believe it—but the other side, the Sovietologists,
didn’t expect it. I interviewed one of the leading Sovietologists in
1987 for Forbes magazine, and he categorically said that the Soviet
Union was going to go on from strength to strength.

And yet, where is it now?

Well, actually, we know where it is now—it’s in the White House! But
we can get it out of there too.

Thanks very much!"

http://www.vdare.com/pb/090722_new_majority.htm