James Kirkpatrick
VDARE
January 8, 2016
The Left already gets this, but Conservatism Inc. doesn’t. Or at least it pretends it doesn’t.
Jason Richwine spoke on Breitbart Radio about the delusion the Republican Party can win Hispanic votes.
We hear how the Republican Party needs to adjust, change and so on, or get the votes of new immigrants, or second generation immigrants. But I think what people forget is, immigrants and their children today tend to be on the Left. They tend to support Big Government. They sometimes express socially conservative views but they don’t often vote on those views. Sure, the Republican Party will survive. It will just become more liberal. But will conservatism survive a major demographic change? I really doubt it.
[Jason Richwine: Cost of Amnesty – $6 Trillion and the End of Conservatism in America, by Dan Riehl, Breitbart, January 6, 2015]
This is nothing new for VDARE.com readers. Hispanics support liberal economic policies by even greater margins than they support an Amnesty/Immigration Surge. And as Richwine notes, the myth of the Hispanic “natural conservatives” doesn’t stand up to reality. Most Hispanics certainly don’t behave like social conservatives when it comes to metrics like abortion or out-of-wedlock births.
The more important part of this may be Richwine’s contention conservatism simply cannot survive a major demographic change. The Beltway Right seems to believe “conservatism” is simply a list of floating abstractions like “limited government” equally applicable to any people or culture. Of course, even by the Beltway Right’s own standards, conservatism is supposed to be a Burkean worldview founded on the defense of existing cultures and institutions. However, to be a modern conservative, you are required to believe the entire population of a country can be replaced at this will have no impact on the country’s political culture.
As Michael Graham of The Federalist writes:
Unlike many of the Trump fans I hear from, I don’t care that America will become a minority-white country. I care about whether the next generation believes in the American ideas of liberty, opportunity, and equality under the law.
[The GOP has stopped hiding its identity politics, January 5, 2016]
Another priceless Graham quote:
For me, conservatism has always been a rejection of identity in favor of ideas: Free speech, free markets, small government, individual opportunity and responsibility, and so forth. I’m a MLK conservative—all “content of character,” no interest in “color of skin.”
Graham obviously doesn’t know anything about Martin Luther King. The Protective Stupidity of the Beltway Right strikes again.
Yet even from the oxymoronic “MLK conservative” perspective Graham seems to have invented, mass immigration is a disaster. In purely fiscal terms, Richwine calculates the lifetime cost of an immigration amnesty as over $6 trillion.
You would think the fiscal conservatives would care. But then, you’d be assuming the Beltway Right actually wants to win some kind of ideological victory. Instead, the point of Conservatism Inc. is to lose—and make a decent living while you run out the clock on Western Civilization.