MetPoliceRapistScum

So, your epiphany occurred when you were a little vexed by some trivial and inconsequential consumer transaction, but it never occurred to you how mass immigration negatively pressed the lives of tens of millions of the poorest Americans, crushing wages, increasing housing costs, freezing them out of vocations, the social fabric coming apart leading to increased social atomization and alienation, rendering a sense of community for the poor almost impossible, bowling alone the new new, permanent normal. Ok, boomer.

American conservatives didn't care as much as about immigration from the 1960s through the 1980s. I think that speaks to the success of the nineteen-twenties' legislation that limited it. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act succeeded so well that American conservatives eventually forgot immigration was an important and consequential issue, and that their ideological forebears had, for good reason, fought hard to limit it. Goldwater published a short, but famous book in 1960 called THE CONSCIENCE OF A CONSERVATIVE in which he dealt with conservative issues he felt important to the country. You know, like farm subsidies and labor unions. Goldwater doesn't mention immigration once in the book. Not even in passing. The word "immigration" doesn't come up at all in a search of the book's contents. But starting with Goldwater, the GOP began a subtle and slow shift to the liberal vision of immigration, one that took decades to complete. In Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, he mentioned the need to revise the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Nixon followed in 1968 and 1972 with qualified support for the 1965 Immigration Act. Again, there was no emphasis by Goldwater or Nixon on immigration. They rarely spoke of the issue, and I don't think either one cared about it that much. Ford and Reagan did the same in 1976 and 1980, but a shift was taking place. Ford and Reagan made warm comments about immigrants and the centrality of the immigrant experience to American history. Republican political elites now largely saw mass immigration as a public good that benefited everyone rather than a potential public danger that needed to be tightly regulated. By the late 1980s, the issue of immigration was growing in importance and public awareness. It wasn't just the 1986 amnesty. Californians were beginning to feel the pressure of so many foreign residents, many of them illegals. A TV show called ALIEN NATION made its premiere in 1989, using a sci-fi premise to deal with themes like immigration and assimilation. Pat Buchanan began focusing on immigration in his writings in the early 1990s and featured the issue prominently in his first presidential campaign in 1992. California Governor Pete Wilson used the issue of illegals to win a come-from-behind re-election victory in 1994. That same year the state's voters overwhelmingly supported limiting illegals' access to benefits. Unfortunately, the two Republican presidents who would bookend the decade of the 1990s were the two Bushes, and their attitude toward immigrants would be far more accommodating than the Goldwater to Reagan sequence of GOP leaders. The first Bush enthusiastically passed one of the most liberal immigration acts in U.S. history in 1990 - legislation that was far more damaging than Reagan's amnesty. The second Bush tried to do the same in 2006 and 2007 (but failed), and when given the opportunity to shut unneeded immigration down after 9/11 for national security reasons, took a hard pass. Unlike GOP leaders from Goldwater to Reagan, there is every indication that the two Bushes were enthusiastic proponents of mass immigration.

Meet the new deputy mayor of Hackney UK. He wants to ban landlords earning profit.

How much of ‘anti-Russian’ policy is simply the will of people who wish to embrace a version of the modern world incommensurate with Russian pessimism, despotism and oligarchy and given tools created by western innovations to even the asymmetries of brutal scale will fight to the end to achieve for their children’s right not to be thralls of Moscow?

My reading of Russian literature teaches me something other- I am a fatalist about Russias ability despite its European DNA to ever master the modern liberal society. I don’t ‘know’ Putin or Dugan personally but I feel I know them. I felt I knew Navalny too as I ‘knew’ countless other Russian reformers who never stood a chance. You must be thousands of miles west of Moscow to be free of the inexorable dark malevolence that cannot open itself to or integrate with the outside world. It’s the tragedy of Russian pessimism.