I wrote the following two comments (to other comments) on Jennifer Rubin’s opinion piece in today’s Washington Post.
In a first, two people thanked me for my comments.
Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today.
So here’s something that’s topical, and near-zero marginal effort. And so far, hasn’t managed to tick anybody off too much.
On the urban/rural Democrat/Republican divide.
Just think of the entire Republican platform as promising to return to the past. They want to pretend to live in a world where: Global warming doesn’t exist. American manufacturing dominates the (Post WWII) world. Women know their place. Non-whites, non-English-speakers are a small and quaint fraction of the population. Coal is king.
I’m sure you can fill in others.
And this jibes well with the core audience, which is rural America. Just look at the red-state blue-state map. Even within blue states, the rural areas are red.
And, at a guess, that’s because rural America has been going backwards, economically, for about the last half-century. In large part from the gutting of light industry in the U.S.
I don’t think anything could have stopped that. But if I were in their shoes, I think I’d listen to anybody who promised to turn back time. No matter how illogical and frankly racist that promise was.
So Trump exploits that. Remember how he was (e.g.) going to bring back American Coal, when talking to West Virginia miners? Even though every trend said that was nonsense.
Well, truth or fiction just doesn’t much matter if you’re poor, getting poorer, and see no way for your children to make a living where they grew up.
Not making excuses for it. I have yet to see any positive policy proposals from the Republican side for doing anything about … well, anything. Just trying to grasp the mindset.
In response to somebody who pointed to the massive increase in asylum-seekers allowed into the country …
Then, if America is still governed by the rule of law, change the law. But what we’ve seen this past year is that, at Trump’s order, the Republican party would have nothing to do with revising immigration law. Because this is too juicy an issue for Trump to use in his campaigning.
In 2022, about a quarter-million people requested asylum, of which Cuba was the most common country of origin. So, roughly speaking, with a population of about 330M, roughly 1 person in 1000 in the U.S. was a new 2022 asylum-seeker. That’s a lot, by historical standards, but hardly a crisis.
That ramped up so much in 2023 that Biden temporarily shut down asylum at the southern border, by executive action, this year. He can’t do that permanently. Not unless he’s a dictator.
But that, along with cooperation from Mexico, greatly reduced the number of people trying to immigrate at the southern border.
And what was the centerpiece of the immigration bill that Trump shot down? It was to expand the immigration courts, and so clear the asylum case backlog and get almost all of those people out of the country, as actual grants of asylum in any given year number in the low tens of thousands.
Instead of just exploiting the issue, it would be a breath of fresh air if Republicans would, like, you know, try to govern. Which starts with addressing a legal issue, by changing the law.
