Babe! It’s 4pm – time for your “Attempt to head off the right by adopting their policies” article. Luckily, we can see in the UK that this is an automatic “the far-right loses” button, right?
EDIT: On a more serious note, I wonder how Yglesias would’ve felt reading articles urging Democrats to toss the LGBTQ community under the bus after the 2004 election when anti-LGBTQ ballot measures were successful all across the US.
The_James91 on
On immigration I do agree. It’s pretty unsurprising that anti-immigration parties are thriving at a time when a) migration is at very high historical levels, and b) countries are conspicuously failing to control their borders. I’m sympathetic to the first, but the second is complete electoral poison. I think the policy situation is more complex than Yglesias puts it (voters want lower immigration but also not to suffer any of the economic consequences of lower immigration. We want fewer immigrants except for doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, farm labourers, builders etc. etc.) but it’s pretty reasonable to say this.
Crime I think is different as the rise of the populist right has coincided with historically low levels of crime. Essentially it’s the complete opposite of immigration in that regard. I think crime is also different as so many of the populist right are criminals in their own right (Trump, Berlusconi etc.) or sympathetic to criminals (see Farage on Lucy Connolly). Here I’m probably more sympathetic to the Stancil vibes view.
Unterfahrt on
He’s obviously right, I don’t understand why people don’t get it. It’s immigration and crime. It’s always been immigration and crime. Representatives don’t represent their voters on immigration and crime. In the UK 4 successive governments in a row were elected on a mandate of decreasing net immigration “to the tens of thousands” and we ended up with net migration reaching almost a million, and illegal migration in the tens of thousands. Labour will decrease migration, but probably nowhere near the level that the electorate actually wants them to.
In Germany, in France, in Spain, in the US – it’s the exact same story.
> in their view they were just voting to uphold the immigration policies of Helmut Kohl and many other mainstream German politicians of the past who nobody thought were Nazis. I raised the point that AfD really does have alarming neo-Nazi ties, and they kind of got annoyed and said their first choice would be for the Christian Democrats to be more restrictionist on immigration, but what are you going to do?
This is also obvious. People are not ideological. They also don’t view themselves as extremists. You can talk about how the AfD are neo-nazis, but if nobody else is proposing policies you agree with, then they’ll vote AfD.
3 Comments
Babe! It’s 4pm – time for your “Attempt to head off the right by adopting their policies” article. Luckily, we can see in the UK that this is an automatic “the far-right loses” button, right?
EDIT: On a more serious note, I wonder how Yglesias would’ve felt reading articles urging Democrats to toss the LGBTQ community under the bus after the 2004 election when anti-LGBTQ ballot measures were successful all across the US.
On immigration I do agree. It’s pretty unsurprising that anti-immigration parties are thriving at a time when a) migration is at very high historical levels, and b) countries are conspicuously failing to control their borders. I’m sympathetic to the first, but the second is complete electoral poison. I think the policy situation is more complex than Yglesias puts it (voters want lower immigration but also not to suffer any of the economic consequences of lower immigration. We want fewer immigrants except for doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, farm labourers, builders etc. etc.) but it’s pretty reasonable to say this.
Crime I think is different as the rise of the populist right has coincided with historically low levels of crime. Essentially it’s the complete opposite of immigration in that regard. I think crime is also different as so many of the populist right are criminals in their own right (Trump, Berlusconi etc.) or sympathetic to criminals (see Farage on Lucy Connolly). Here I’m probably more sympathetic to the Stancil vibes view.
He’s obviously right, I don’t understand why people don’t get it. It’s immigration and crime. It’s always been immigration and crime. Representatives don’t represent their voters on immigration and crime. In the UK 4 successive governments in a row were elected on a mandate of decreasing net immigration “to the tens of thousands” and we ended up with net migration reaching almost a million, and illegal migration in the tens of thousands. Labour will decrease migration, but probably nowhere near the level that the electorate actually wants them to.
In Germany, in France, in Spain, in the US – it’s the exact same story.
> in their view they were just voting to uphold the immigration policies of Helmut Kohl and many other mainstream German politicians of the past who nobody thought were Nazis. I raised the point that AfD really does have alarming neo-Nazi ties, and they kind of got annoyed and said their first choice would be for the Christian Democrats to be more restrictionist on immigration, but what are you going to do?
This is also obvious. People are not ideological. They also don’t view themselves as extremists. You can talk about how the AfD are neo-nazis, but if nobody else is proposing policies you agree with, then they’ll vote AfD.