05-15-2017, 05:58 AM
(05-14-2017, 01:06 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:And perceived economic problems with immigration has also always been there. Since the 1850's people have objected to mass immigration because it takes jobs from natives. And policy action against immigrants is also not new. Mass deportations of dangerous immigrants and an increasingly restrictive series of policies enacted happened over the 1919-1924 period. It was not a 4T then so this is not a 4T indicator.(05-14-2017, 10:10 AM)David Horn Wrote:(05-13-2017, 05:46 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Actually, the antiimmigrant sentiment is economic, not social.
I disagree. I think it's both. Some see immigrants as threatening and others as competition. The result is the same though the feelings are not. Xenophobia operates on many levels.
The social prejudice against immigrants is not new; those feelings have always been there. What's new is economic stresses from immigration translating antiimmigrant feelings into actual policy action. That points to a fourth turning. Only Mikebert's desire to preserve his political misconceptions prevents him from seeing that.
You did not address the other ideas presented. Two observers, one on the right and one on the left, have noted the resemblance of modern protests to era of creedal passion, which are 2Ts. If you read Huntington's definition of a creed passion era and S&H's definition of a 2T they are very similar. S&H cited Huntington, so I believe they read him, and probably were influenced by him.
You ignore the absence of economic protest. There is nobody promoting heterodox economics. Georgism, Socialism, communism seem equally dead and nothing new has taken their place on the streets (there are economic theories that explain how inequality suppresses economic performance, and Steve Keen has elegant theories on how capitalism creates unstable financial structures. Both of these notions were present in the last 4T, and policy enacted then reflects them (in fact it provided the observations which led to the theories being developed). Nobody is pushing these ideas. There is plenty of protest, they just aren't about economics, but diversity themes.
Maybe a decade ago I floated the idea of moving the troops stationed abroad to the US southern border to defend against terrorists coming across the porous border (at that time there WAS net immigration across that border). I figured reducing the size of the American empire and reducing the low-wage labor supply (something unions understood) would appeal to the Left, while shutting down illegal entry into the country on the Southern border would appeal to the Right. When I proposed this idea on Daily Kos, boy was I shut down fast! It was made clear to me that support for people's rights to come here to improve their lives overrode the rights of people already here to a living wage. A few months back I read a Vox propaganda piece on immigration that nicely lay out the *moral* case for immigration. It reads like a secular religious piece.
About 5 years ago I bemoaned the fact that nobody was talking about tariffs. I pointed out that the case for free trade is counter-intuitive while that for protectionism is easy to understand, making attacking free trade an easy sell. There is a solid Leftist case for opposition to things like NAFTA, which unions have been making for decades and been ignored by Democrats. There is also a solid Rightist case for opposition to free trade: conservatives prefer taxing consumption (sales taxes) rather than income. The argument against consumption taxes has always been that is suppresses sales and job growth. Tariffs are consumption taxes on suppress foreign sales and jobs, so what's not to like? Hence we have always had tariffs, historical arguments have been about their size--which is a size of government argument not an economic one. Also one can frame opposition to free trade in nationalist terms, which has always appealed to a subset of the Right. Buchanan pursued these themes on the Right in the 1990's so I am not smoking something here.
Well wouldn't you know, Vox also produced a free trade propaganda piece, which laid out the *moral* case for free trade, which again reads like a secular religious piece.
The pieces on the left are part of the case for a 2T. And on the right, the argument for ending the Medicaid expansion (or never implementing it in the first place) has also be a *moral* one. More secular religion.
Finally in 2016 we had two candidates (Sanders and Trump) who argued against free trade. Also Sanders was initially favorably inclined to enforcing borders, but quickly got shot down. Trump had no such problem and ran on both.
But look. You yourself favor free trade. And you are also are a free market guy, and so would tend to support the right of business to employ abundant low-cost labor as they see fit without labor supply restrictions. Yet you voted for Trump. Maybe because you didn't think he was serious? Well if so, you were right, he's apparently not. Since then he has pursued healthcare with tax cuts to follow. Obama did healthcare rather than deal with economics. Trump is following that script. As for tax cuts they have been a Republican staple since the 2T. Nothing new here, nothing 4T about any of that.
