A Bully can Tolerate no Successful Challenge to Their Authority

This is an old meme.  The schoolyard bully rules through fear – once a single person stands up to them and avoids punishment, the bully’s power is gone.  So with states: Montesquieu has written that for a despotism there can be no cracks in the façade of invincible central authority: let there be one unbowed challenger to the order and it all comes crashing down.

An excellent example is the old Soviet Union.  A rigid dictatorship, where any criticism of the status quo was met with overwhelming force.  It looked like the Soviet Union would last forever – and then Michael Gorbachev allowed some dissent, and it all turned into dust.

In the United States we now face a similar issue.  They say that the United States is a nation of immigrants, but this is a meaningless statement.  Every nation on the face of this planet is peopled by immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, and many more recently than the United States.  Until 1970 the United States enforced the laws against illegal immigration, and thus, illegal immigration was until then utterly negligible.  Legal immigration was similarly low: yes there was a small (yes, SMALL) surge in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which nevertheless drove wages down and profits up, but it was eventually closed down by progressives.  In the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s there was hardly any immigration into the United States, and wages shot up and profits fell.  How terrible.

The United States is not special because it is a ‘nation of immigrants’.  It is (or used to be) special because, relative to its resources and developed capital, it has so few immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

But the rich want their cheap labor.  They want the United States to be like India, a miserably impoviershed land where most people slave away for sub-poverty wages and the rich live in private skyscrapers.  So the rich have opened the floodgates to the overpopulated third world.  Post-1970 immigration has already increased the population of the United States by about 100 million, and the pace is accelerating.  Wages are going down, rents are going up, and the lack of water in California is a harbinger that the days of Americans having abundant resources are coming to a close.

However, the rich don’t want any discussion of this.  Therefore they have used their power to intimidate anyone from speaking out.  Say that you are against Mexican nationals coming across the border: you must hate legal immigrants!  You must be a racist!  You must hate people of Latin American ancestry!  You must be a xenophobe, extreme far-right, a Nazi!  You can’t say that!

Certainly the rich have no problem enforcing the laws against trespassing on their vast estates and country clubs.  The rich have no problem carefully screening the children in their local public schools to make sure that no poor American ‘in search of a better life’ enrolls their kids there.  They only object to the average American having the same rights. 

The rich demand that Americans sacrifice all that they have achieved to make room for an endlessly swelling tide of third-world refugees.  Yet, the rich themselves offer to make no sacrifice at all, and indeed, look to make a lot of money.

There is little so disgusting as a rich person pushing policies that will make them even richer, at the expense of making everyone else poorer, and then claiming the moral high ground. 

So how do the rich get away with it?  Obviously by buying the legislature and the media and the universities, but also through bullying.  Anyone speaking truth about this will be hammered down and made an example of.

Thus it is that post-1970 immigration has doubled California’s population from 20 to 40 million, but nothing can be said by anyone about how this affects traffic congestion or the availability of fresh water.  Hundreds of thousands of medically unscreened children from countries with endemic diseases are brought in and distributed to (non-wealthy!) public school, and suddenly diseases that are rare or unknown in the United States break out – and we can’t talk about that.  (It must be an act of God).  American engineers are being forced to train their replacements from India – oh poor job prospects must be because automation is reducing the need for labor.  All rubbish.

No, there can be no deviation from this script.  Nobody dares to speak out, in fear of retaliation.

And now comes Donald Trump.  He dares.  And this makes him a deadly threat to the rich and powerful and their desire to turn the United States into yet another overpopulated third-world sweatshop. 

The elites want Trump crushed.  Not deflected, not settling for third in the Republican primary, but crushed.  If he is allowed to continue on his course unbroken, he might change the entire terms of the debate.  Sure he’s a billionaire, but he’s only one billionaire.  Massive forces will be brought to bear on him.  He will be variously slandered, ignored, ridiculed, harassed, sued, you name it.  Because this is a big deal.  It’s the biggest deal of the campaign. It’s the biggest deal in politics in a generation – perhaps, the biggest political deal in this nation’s history ever.  Because it's about whether there will even be a  recognizable nation left in a century or so.

What’s done is done: even if the border were sealed today, demographic momentum would increase the population of the United States to at least 400 million.  The old days of American exceptionalism and abundant resources will be gone forever, but that’s still not so many people that you can’t adapt and have a decent standard of living.  But the alternative is to shoot up to a billion and beyond, and become like India: where half the children are growing up chronically malnourished.  It can happen here, and if nothing is done to change policy, it will.  If you are under 20, you will live to see it.  Whatever your age, your grandchildren will live to see it.

We need to get past the idea that politics is about ideas and position papers and personalities and how well someone comports themselves on a stage.  I wouldn’t watch any debates at all: they mean nothing.  Barack Obama was a wonderful speechmaker: all of it was a lie.  Hillary Clinton has some wonderful position papers on how she’s going to boost the middle class: all rot.  Don’t bother.

Care only about the record.  The record is clear that Clinton and Jeb and Rubio and Walker are going to stab you in the back.  Period.  Trump is a little more dicey: he doesn’t have a record of stabbing you in the back, but he also doesn't have a record of following through. 

Still.  Normally I would shy away from the importance of symbolism in politics (Santorum is actually better than Trump on immigration overall - notice how he's been ignored in the media?), but here I make an exception.  What is important is if Donald Trump can brave the firestorm of attacks and make it possible to talk sensibly about population policy again.  The odds are still against him, but if anyone has the ego and resources to pull this off, he does.  I urge that you support him, and more importantly, to do so publicly and without shame.  Forgive him his eccentric personal style: you are not voting for best actor, but for your interests.  Don’t worry if he makes the occasional gaffe. If the person standing up for your interests is on the crude side, and the person who’s going to stab you in the back is smooth and suave, well, who’s your daddy?

A modern liberal will cheerfully march into hell if only they are led by someone that the New York Times declares to be respectable.  Don’t make that mistake.

Trump for President.