Guilluy doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists, and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.
…As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants’ quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.
Pointer from Glenn Reynnolds. Read the whole thing. This is one of those articles that one cannot excerpt enough.
1) Win elections on populist platform, pass laws to restrain elites and expel minorities.
2) Minorities continue to grow until a majority and one party state. Become dysfunctional Latin America where a tiny elite lives in walled off communities and the rest live chaotic middle income trap lives at best (Tyler Cowen Average is Over model). Or at worse Venezuala.
I’d go with #1, but if you hate your own countrymen or are an amoral striver I guess #2 has its appeal.
1) What if they are citizens born in this nation? What if the immigrants are our wives or mothers? (And I almost married a Cambodian Legal Immigrant in the 1990s.)
And what are the jobs immigrants mostly do in our nation? Most are working the fields or mowing lawns or doing in house nanny/nurse support. (All illegal aliens I have known fit those categories.)
So will the lamented WWC in the Rust Belt going to pick seasonal agriculture in California and Texas? I heard Trump rallies about the factories and coal mines of yesterday not support for moving trucks to Texas.
1) What if they are illegal? Or what if they were born here only because their parents came here illegal and gave birth to them?
I favor expulsion of all illegals and children of illegals since Reagan’s 1980s amnesty.
Disproportionately, Latino immigrants and their children don’t do jobs compared to natives. They have higher unemployment, higher poverty, higher crime, etc.
The jobs they do work are usually low skill and don’t pay for themselves (they rely on government support to fill in the difference). Those services are usually paid for by middle class taxes. As the article states, people in the suburbs are taxed to subsidize a new servant class that uses crime, intimidation, and machine politics to take over portions of major urban centers. Then the urban elite gets cheap nannies subsidized by the middle class.
Get someone living in subsidized housing, with subsidized health insurance, and have them drive urbanites around via UBER. Subsidized transport for the elite paid for by the middle class.
Your major interactions with immigrants are people you hired to do something. Of course you think they are all hard working employees. You pay enough rent that they aren’t coming into your neighborhood and bringing all the negative externalities that produce white flight of the middle class.
Agricultural pickers represent a tiny portion of the cost your your fruit and veggies. Single digit %. We could double or triple wages and not have it impact end costs that much. White men do all sorts of dirty and difficult jobs today (crab fishermen, oil rig worker, etc) but they expect to get paid a living wage. Pay a living wage and the work will get done.
Bravo.
Some of us aren’t racist collectivist who who would prefer people be allowed to buy from whoever we please, rather than being forced to abide by some idiotic notion of racial solidarity.
You are free to move to Estonia or somewhere where there are only whites and plenty of socialist price controls left over from the soviet era. I have no stronger ties with white American strangers than Japanese or Ecuadorian strangers and see no reason why I should be forced to patronize the former of the latter can produce a better or cheaper good.
Unfortunately, Estonia has immigration controls. Unlike, apparently, the US.
And there a lot of ways illegal immigrants help the Middle Class as my Trump voting Father-In-Law had a live support nurse, who was illegal at times, for his elder mother for 4 years. Or I had an uncle who ran a local landscaping business. So the middle class does a number of things to ‘support’ and ‘benefit’ this illegal immigration.
Well, the strangest part of the whole Trump election from my neck of the woods is the Mexican border hoppers have disappeared the last eight years. (Draw a line at the Great Recession.) And now California is starting to have a labor shortage and I am not sure how this is fixed. In terms of seasonal agriculture picking, most farms are low margin, do compete against foreign producers and have always had a Uber like relationship with employees. (Grapes of Wrath for pre-WW2 days) Most farms need extra help 3 months of the year. And these jobs are probably never going to be decent Middle Class jobs as we remember the 1950s factory jobs. (Remember by the 1950s this illegal immigrant & guest worker was already the primary labor of California farms.)
If you run a business where you underpay people and have them make up the difference with government support you aren’t an entrepreneur. Your a sort of low level crony capitalist. You haven’t discovered “sustainable patterns of specialization and trade” when half your employees living expenses are subsidized by the state, funded by the taxes of others.
Sorry, but none of that is a “populist” platform at all. You sound like as the poster said before, wanting some type of “nationalism” with “free market” system. Sorry that is as bad as Bolshevism. A fable.
asdf, expelling immigrants from France, won’t help, because they simply don’t toil up enough to matter. Paris has always been a fuck/drunk city with foreigners and “rich cash” coming around. In 1780’s to the 2080’s. Basically, you are trying to have it both ways. You can’t. Maybe it is time to move toward socialism yourself and seek a ecological revolution and eugenics programs. Most “real” red states are poor except for Texas(and they are very globalist). None of the blue states are socialist and you need to admit that. It will take central planning to bring the kind of production needed to these more ‘rural’ areas and
decentralize capital. Capital and business doesn’t want to go there. Services are just the “reward’ of production.
This is a great article. Yes, it should be completely read-it’s well worth it. This situation that we find ourselves in isn’t local/regional or even national. It’s a festering crisis that is affecting the entire developed world. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the essay:
“The banding together of establishment parties to defend the system against anti-system parties is happening all over the world. Germany has a “grand coalition” of its two largest parties, and Spain may have one soon. In the U.S., the Trump and the Sanders candidacies both gained much of their support from voters worried that the two major parties were offering essentially the same package.”
“But he (Guilluy) is moving toward a more politically engaged view that the rhetoric of an “open society” is “a smokescreen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes.””
“Since Tocqueville, we have understood that our democratic societies are emulative. Nobody wants to be thought a bigot if the membership board of the country club takes pride in its multiculturalism. But as the prospect of rising in the world is hampered or extinguished, the inducements to ideological conformism weaken. Dissent appears. Political correctness grows more draconian. Finally the ruling class reaches a dangerous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its legitimacy but also a sense of what its legitimacy rested on in the first place.”
Yes, this is being passed around. Heavy on *feeling* but a bit light on evidence.
I see Tyler Cowan linked to it today. Just a few days ago in Bloomberg his argument was that no one cares about inequality.
Arnold,
I am confused by the conservative libertarian laments of the French and US realities. It is absolutely true the Leftist coast large cities are made of very successful educated population with the minority populations dominating the lower wage jobs. (Added bonus the largest wage gains in the US have come from urban Hispanic & African-American workers since 2014 due to this high urban reality.) However, the decline of the WWC Rust Belt towns or similar French towns are primarily because automation and global trade, both of which you and other libertarians completely support.
So why are conservatives lamenting the towns so much? I think there is a degree of nostalgia for a better time and these towns better represent small c conservatism, but according to creative destruction doctrines we should let them fail. In my neighborhood, I don’t see this Charles Murray ‘Coming Apart’ stuff as in fact most of working class neighbors are hard working Hispanic-Americans.
There is another way of looking at productivity. The coastal cities are dominated by services, services in sectors with low productivity growth, hard to measure value, and a cosy relationship with government. It’s not that hard to look at the “productive” coastal cities and see a lot of Taggart’s. My guess is that they do contain a few very productive individuals, but an awful lot of smart hard working people doing zero sum work. That seems consistent with my own observations and the observations of many others.
Meanwhile, the Rust Belt was fantastically productive. So productive it may have made itself obsolete. We should be celebrating these peoples productivity, not telling them they are bums. That we have more real goods that make real impacts in peoples lives for less is a testament to what the Rust Belt accomplished. When someone in a coastal city moves numbers around on a spreadsheet it may be remunerative, but who knows if its making anyone better off.
In terms of moving to the city there are a lot of difficulties in doing so, not least of which the fact that if you can’t pay a high enough rent the remaining housing stock is subject to ethnic based turf wars for the working class. Reading about how white flight happened, actual accounts of people getting their neighborhood taken over by minorities and their kids beat up, would let you know why that’s a difficult solution.
Several points here:
1) OMG on the white flight stuff and this stuff is way over-exaggerated. Seriously, my neighbors like their Bimbo bread and Galaxy soccer but I hear nothing of this La Raza crap. I literally do live in a Hispanic dominated city and find my Hispanic neighbors to be fine people and my kids best friends are Hispanic-Americans. (Actually it reality one is Hispanic-White and another Hispanic-Asian! At my kids school I see about 8% of mixed race.) Going to college at UC system in the late 1980s, the school was already majority Asian-Americans and I did not feel out of place and any violence.
2) Look at Compton, CA. Back in the Reagan era, this was literally gang capital of the world and we had the Rodney King riots. Now crime is down 70% for a variety of reasons and it decent to live as long as you mind the Latino Gentrification.
3) In terms of Rust Belt, Why aren’t we complaining about Koch Brothers versus coastal elites? They are the ones in Kansas who are literally outsourcing and in our state with Tech & Hollywood our state might be a net exporter.
4) The big problem in California politics is simple that the Republican Party is half Trumpism and half Libertarian. And the half Trumpism, where a lot of early Trumpism came from, are hated by the majority of the Californians for obvious reasons.
1) I don’t know who you are or who your neighbors are. I can only really speak to the statistics.
However, I can look at a map and see white flight very clearly.
https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/
If you want a good write up of what caused white flight here is a good one:
https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston
https://devinhelton.com/lost-world-of-west-philadelphia
“majority Asian-Americans and I did not feel out of place and any violence.”
Asians are well behaved. They are also racist collectivists that would never allow browns to immigrate to their countries.
2) Steve Sailer did have a theory that Latinos were used as shock troops to drive out the blacks in order to gentrify former warzones. The theory being that Latinos are kind of like halfway between a white and a black, less scary, less politically organized, etc. Once the blacks were driven out, the Hispanics could be driven out next.
I have no doubt that has worked in some places. I think the risk to making overall statewide demographics majority non-white are even bigger.
My experience is with NYC, and the Latinos we get there are Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans are one of the worst Latino groups, with higher then average rates of dysfunction even amongst Latinos. They aren’t as great a candidate for this black displacement strategy.
3) I believe the whole point of the populist movement was to destroy the GOPe.
4) California Republicans lose elections because they imported a Democratic vote bank. Aside from celebrity novelties they will never win an election again. Certainly not with a libertarian platform.
Libertarianism has only ever been supported by white men, as any libertarian conference attendee list should attest to. If you want more libertarianism in this country you should be doing everything you can to make it whiter.
I live in the Inland Empire, CA which is majority Hispanic-Americans. Although my city is majority white due lots of retirees in the area but my kids schools are majority Hispanic-American and very multicultural. And there has never been a Master Plan of importing Hispanic-Americas the way Steve Sailer has described but a lot micro-economic activity.
1) Yes, I have seen a lot of the White flight with the working class although this is more cost of living. (Lots of movement to Las Vegas before 2008 and Texas.) Hell I moved to Minnesota for six years. Also Socal lost a lot of defense contracts in the 1990s where a lot Middle Class whites worked in the post WW2 years.
2) In reality the HUGE decrease in crime started in 1990 and several years before these Latino changes. In reality, it mostly a Cost of Living and some Hispanic-American simply invested and moved to Compton. What is wrong with that?
3) California has had a large number of Asian- & Hispanic-Americans as there was the joke that “The Border moved!” (I believe Hispanic 20% in 1980.) So this is not new here.
4) In terms of illegal Immigrants, Ronald Reagan speeches give a good history of them. My guess Reagan didn’t mind the illegal aliens were breaking Chavez union formations back in the day.
5) And yes, we can all state how well Asian-Americans have lived in this nation. But again most Asian-American consider this their home not the homelands. And the nationalist attacks on multicultural California businesses, especially tech companies, that is an attack on Asian-Americans in their eyes. (Notice how Asian-Americans are majority Democrats today which was not true in 1980s.)
5) In terms of my experience with multiculturalism, I remember some best friends in High School were Asian-Americans or best friends in college were Hispanic-Americans. I dated a Cambodian Immigrant for two years. My experience of multicultural wasn’t brainwashing, it was natural experience growing up in California. That is going my kids experience.
I lived here and experienced the California multicultural blow-ups of the early 1990s with Rodney King video & riots and 1994 Prop 187. (2014 -2016 felt like history was rhythming)
There has never been a master plan to import Democratic voters but a goal of the California Democratic Party to represent all citizens. And the some Republican Californians went Trumpism (Pete Wilson, Steve Sailer & VDN) and lost long term because of this. And now it is a nasty circular function. The more national complaints about Multiculturalism by Republicans, the more Democratic we became. I do know some long Republican voters (all under 50) who went Obama and HRC and down ballot Republican. Heck I voted HRC and completely voted downballot Republican because our needs conservative voters.
The crack epidemic and the 1990s crime peak is a separate issue. Bottom line is controlling for other factors, Hispanics have higher crime then whites.
The majority of Republican voting Asians were from former communist countries, back when they were much more communist. Chinese for instance were big Rep voters. The same was true amongst Hispanics, Cubans were far more to the Right then other Latinos.
When the cold war ended and communism faded into a memory we’ve seen these particular sub groups voting trend more towards the average of their race that didn’t have communist backgrounds in their home countries. This explains most of the change we’ve seen in Asian voting patterns. That and the fact that Asians, though personally responsible, in general are not libertarians culturally or politically. They tend to favor technocratic soft authoritarianism.
A majority of California whites voted for Romney, they didn’t get Romney. This is a demographic story, pure and simple.
Can I offer a bit of a different take. France does not work. Unless you are a “creative type” the regulation, short work weeks, high cost of goods (think VAT), and high cost of housing (think restrictions on building roads limiting land that can be developed) make your value in a global market less than what it takes to live a decent life. Maybe for someone from the Middle East or Africa they will take it, as it is better than what they came from. And then you have welfare, which makes work even less attractive for those not in creative class.
Now look at US. Blue America is often very expensive to live and very regulated, with ofter more diversity and more income inequality. Red America is ofter much cheaper to live, less regulated (and less generous welfare) ,and sometimes a non college educated person has a value in the market to live a reasonable life. And maybe some of Trump was working class whites in Red America saying I do not want to end up like Blue America.
Put another way, every single immigrant that moves into an urban center becomes a spoils system vote bank that can be used for the urban elite to impose their political and cultural views on everyone else, even if those immigrants themselves don’t care for the elites values (they just want the welfare and de facto control of urban turf).
Whether you don’t want your kids taught there are 200 genders at school, or you don’t want the latest EPA regs, each warm body the other side can throw in its coalition means they have more power over you.
[These comments are not welcome here. Take them elsewhere.] –ed.
Put another way, every single immigrant that moves into an urban center becomes a spoils system vote bank that can be used for the urban elite to impose their political and cultural views on everyone else
Really? I sure if you drew enough AS labor curves the impact on WWC wages would occur. How much per hour $.25? $.35? I bet $.50/hour at the most. And please remember the beneficary of these low wages are Small Business Owners not the large banks or other companies. They are landscapers or farms or Maid Services companies, the ones are owned by middle class citizens. And the reality is most of these workers are citizens born in this nation and not illegal immigrants after 2008. Increasingly the illegal immigrant population is over-stayed visas by Asian Immigrants.
Again short term how is getting rid of illegal immigrants picking avocados going to get the local coal mine to open? (Remember say not only food will go up but some farms may close if you chart the economics here.)
The particular matter I was addressing from Michael is the fact that non-whites, especially NAMs, automatically vote for leftists in proportions that swing elections. The more of them that cram into cities, the more votes leftists have. This is true across the globe and true in non-white countries too.
As LKY said, in multicultural societies people inevitable vote based on tribe, not political issues or the common good. This is a fact of human nature that simply has to be accounted for.
This leads to situations where white America, especially non-elite urban dwelling white America, can vote overwhelmingly against certain policies, lose elections because they are swamped by minority voters, and then have a hostile way of life imposed on them. They are no longer living in a country where they have an effective degree of self governance.
It’s as if you had a white civil war, and the conservative side of that civil war won the hearts and minds of a majority of white people, but they still lost because the other side brought in mercenaries (cheated).
As for what these people cost, its not that hard to add up. I live in the Baltimore area. The city only 20% of its own education funding. The remaining $13,000 or so per pupil has to come from taxpayers in the suburbs via the state. The poverty rate is high, so you can figure much of the population is getting Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies, and EBT. A single one of those would be worth a lot. Baltimore also has a lot of housing subsidies. I could go on. It ends up being a very big bill.
Let’s say all that got cut. You could reduce taxes in the suburbs by a lot. The guys who fixed my HVAC, electrical, and plumbing the other day were all white. Presumably they could have a lot more take home pay if they weren’t paying for Baltimore’s minorities.
“most of these workers are citizens born in this nation and not illegal immigrants after 2008”
I choose 1980s amnesty for a reason, and I included people that are citizens but whose citizenship goes back to an illegal act. For instance, if you were born here only because your parent immigrated illegally, you are technically a citizen, but I would change the law to make you an illegal again and deport you. I would also look hard at our situation with Puerto Rican immigration.
If you run the math, this is what it would take to keep America majority white, which is the only objective that ensures a decent life for my children. It seems like the least disruptive Schelling point I can think of to achieve that objective. Had that original amnesty been followed up with strict enforcement and deportation of lawbreakers we wouldn’t be in the situation where such a large change was required. Now the math has changed and something more drastic is necessary.
If you can believe I was born in WWC Maryland town in between Baltimore & Washington so I do have memories of what you describe. However my bet is Laurel MD is completely a high end suburb at this point. My dad work in the defense industry and moved out in the Reagan boom of 1980 at age ten.
Even in Orange County 1980, we were already going multicultural as there were plenty of Hispanic-, African-, and Asian-American in our state. And we knew of the minority areas of town as well the image of illegal immigrants picking seasonal agriculture. But even by 1980s, many traditional working class jobs were done by minorities while the white population was mostly college educated white jobs. (I am simplify a lot here.)
Probably forgotten in the whole multicultural Hispanic-American discussion is Texas has a HUGE percentage of Hispanic-Americans at 37% compared marginally lower than California expect 40%. (Remember 15%+ are Asian-American in California which is the reason why it is believed Hispanic-Americans are the majority.) And they have very economically conservative state and they will grow up in multicultural reality.
Texas whites vote 70% R, which is enough for now because much of the Hispanic population is too young to vote. However, if you run the math once the 0-5 demographic comes of age even voting 70% R will mean Democratic dominance. In big cities you can already see the change occurring.
Well, populations and voting patterns change constantly. George Bush Jr. got 44% of the Hispanic-American vote in 2004 so it is not like there is a solid vote here. (Even McCain got like 35% in 2008) So it is apparent of urban Blue centers in San Antonio, Austin and Houston but long term we don’t if this will happen.
Young Hispanic-Americans might grow up in thriving Texas and continue voting Republican. Heck Trump almost took Minnesota which is the most sensible Blue state in the union and voted D in every election in post WW2 except Nixon 72.
GWB got 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, not 44%. 44% was from a single election poll that got widely reported and then quoted over and over. Follow up analysis showed that is was more like 40%, with a lot more in-depth detail.
First, GWBs performance hinged on a few things:
1) Hispanics that went to evangelical mega-churches (Bush got 55% of the vote)
2) His name recognition in Texas (candidates usually do better in their home state)
3) Anti-Communist Cuban turnout, which is a legacy GOP asset that is ever dwindling as I already discussed (Bush got 78% of the vote)
The main Hispanic block though, typical Latino immigrants with no special religious or historical affiliation, and GWB did no better then anyone else.
Put it together and your still well below 50% using a lot of positive assets that are either temporary and/or anti-thetical to your own political desires (or do you want Christian evangelicals to become a central force in American politics again).
Meanwhile, you will note that Trump did significantely better amongst Hispanics, in fact all minorities, then Romney. Proving once again that political correctness and immigration are not top issues for these people.
Le Pen will win the French election.
Not happening bud. Looks like Macron(which asdf supports in some neo-liberal policies, which cracks me up with that dude) or Le Pen/Mele who are neck and neck. Macron will kill either in the final draw.
Oh, so when Macron cuts spending, taxes and environmental regulations that should lead toward a incredible boom in those old industrial centers of France eh asdf? lol…………
Whatever Macron does will almost certainly be much better than Hollandian quasisocialism.
Brexit? It’ll never happen bruh.
Trump gets elected? LOL, are you out of your mind?
I see a trend here.
Arnold, a while back, you deleted a comment of mine suggesting that another commenter’s contributions were appropriate for a comedy club.
Take a look at some of the comments above. Do you really think they meet whatever standard you are trying to uphold?
no, they do not