Trump and Consequences

One of the major questions of the Trump era is whether political actors will attempt reform in the wake of dis-Trumption (what direction that reform takes, is of course, up for debate) or will instead double down on the socio-economic-political trends that gave Trump an opening in 2015-2016 in the first place.  Related to that question is another one: Will political actors attempt to restore a rhetoric of civic integration and humane humility, or will they escalate narratives of negative partisanship and ideological totalization?

The election of Trump has caused many in Washington to embrace a kind of politics of emergency--in which all norms should be overthrown to save America from the supposed horrors of a Trump presidency.  As I've written before, "destroy the public square in order to save it" is a highly problematic strategy and will likely end up making politics even more toxic.

 In a time of frenzy, it is especially important to remember the power of precedent--and to think hard about the consequences of an argument.  Any weapon to hand tactics might at first seem appealing, but they have deeply destructive results.  For instance, there's a growing interest at the highest levels of the media-government infrastructure in promoting the notions that "Russian bots" somehow determined the outcome of the 2016 election and that maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump is therefore not a legitimately elected president.*  (This claim is often talked around, but it haunts many "resistance" narratives of the Trump presidency.)  However, if one is concerned about "authoritarianism," normalizing this argument seems incredibly risky.  After all, one of the major tactics of authoritarian regimes is to argue that nefarious outside forces have contaminated election results, so the powerful should feel free to ignore those elections.

Indeed, it doesn't take too much imagination to come up with the following scenario: A politician facing a tough reelection has a friend create a company in a foreign nation that uses social-media bots to target that politician.  If that politician lost reelection, he could say that his opponent didn't legitimately win--foreign bots disqualified that result.  Saying that American democracy has been rigged by foreign bots sets a very dangerous--and, so far, entirely unsubstantiated--precedent.  If you want to oppose the undermining of faith in democratic institutions, the "bots hacked the election" narrative is counterproductive in the extreme.

Andrew C. McCarthy's latest column is worth reading in its entirety, but the end in particular drives home a key point: The escalating factionalism of American politics is increasingly paralyzing the governing process and dividing the body-politic.  By voiding norms of good faith, social trust, courtesy, and so forth, we risk undermining our ability to form a political consensus on any topic.  There doesn't need to be (and never will be) a consensus on every topic, but, if there is no consensus on anything, the political system itself might start to disintegrate.  If you're an anarchist, that lack of consensus might not be a bad thing.  If, however, you want a durable republic under the rule of law, destroying the foundations of consensus is a far more troubling prospect.

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*This has nothing to do with whether or not alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election should be investigated.  Of course, it should be.

Returning to the Facts

I don't always agree with what he says (and often approach things from a different starting point than he does), but John B. Judis has offered some revealing analysis during this era of populist disruption (see my write-up of his 2016 book, The Populist Explosion, here). His latest article on immigration in The American Prospect is very much worth a read.

Judis approaches immigration from the left, finding that immigration maximalism ends up undermining the position of the worker.  The idea that open borders would have negative effects on many workers' wages used to be a conventional belief on the left, and some (such as Bernie Sanders) have not forgotten that.  While many on the left have adopted an ideological commitment to immigration maximalism, Judis's article reminds them that large influxes of "low-skilled" labor can drive down the incomes of working-class Americans (a category that obviously includes numerous recent immigrants themselves).

About one-third to one-half of the immigrants coming legally into the United States are unskilled or lower-skilled. According to a Brookings Institution study, almost one in three don’t even have a high school diploma. About half lack proficiency in the English language. Those percentages are considerably higher among undocumented immigrants. About 70 percent lack proficiency in English. As a result, the greatest percentages of immigrants find unskilled work in agriculture, construction, health care (as aides), maids and housekeeping, and food service...
In 1997, the same year the Jordan Commission issued its findings, the National Academy of Sciences published a report on immigration. While lauding the overall effects of immigration, the report acknowledged that “almost one-half of the decline in real wages for native-born high school dropouts from 1980 to 1994 could be attributed to the adverse impact of unskilled foreign workers.” Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published a new extensive study of immigration. It found again that “to the extent that negative wage effects are found, prior immigrants—who are often the closest substitutes for new immigrants—are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high school dropouts, who share job qualifications similar to the large share of low-skilled workers among immigrants to the United States.”

Judis makes a lot of other suggestive points in the article.  He notes that, media hysteria to the contrary, the immigration-reform proposal by Tom Cotton and David Perdue to shift immigration toward a more skills-based system is one that has a bipartisan (and centrist) lineage.  He also warns Democrats that declining social cohesion could actually undermine the project of a sustainable welfare state.  Judis supports a wide-scale amnesty for illegal immigrants, but he also reminds Democrats that a policy of immigration maximalism could, over the long term, undermine many goals favored by the political left.

As I suggested in NRO yesterday, our current immigration policy--like most other kinds of policies--involves certain trade-offs.  Maybe those policy trade-offs are worth it; maybe they're not.  But the point is that there are certain trade-offs--and the American people have a right to deliberate about which particular set of trade-offs to choose.