Incidents such as these continue to turn the tide of public opinion concerning immigration, and they willl continue to change neocon minds, also, as we are seeing at National Review.

Recent polls indicate that George Bush will receive about 2% of the Muslim vote in 2004. Perhaps even Karl Rove and W can now understand that their pandering outside their base will not buy them any votes and will lose their base.

However, there is an alternate theory, circulated at vdare.com over the last two years, that Rove is not really going afer the Hispanic, Muslim, etc., voters with the open borders/amnesty/national suicide policies. Rather, he is going after the “soccer moms” who will see the non-racist neocon policies as comforting and non-threatening. Thus, the much larger white suburban vote is the indirect target of this too-clever man.

In that case, we have to hope that world events, and our persuasive words, of course :-), make the soccer moms perceive these issues in totally different ways. When they are worried about the safety of their children, perhaps neocon image positioning will mean little to them. Or, perhaps Rove is not judging them accurately in the first place. If he is, we have yet another good argument against women’s suffrage, although I suppose that battle cannot be refought at this late date.

The “soccer moms” theory of why Bush continues his unrequited courtship of hostile minorities has always made sense to me. However, it just occurred to me that there is a problem with it. Appealing to soccer moms does NOT require Bush to be chummy with terror-supporting Muslim groups such as CAIR. He could easily exclude such people from the White House, and invite only genuine Muslim moderates. He would still get the same lovey-dovey photos of himself standing with Muslims, and thus win over the soccer moms, without having to betray his country in this process.

But he does persist in courting terror friendly Muslim groups. Therefore the “soccer mom” theory fails as a complete explanation.

However, a mitigating factor could be that there are simply not enough genuinely moderate Muslim groups around to form a party at the White House. The terror supporters are basically the only game in town. See my November 2000 article,
“The Clintons, Abdurahman Alamoudi, and the Myth of ‘Moderate’ Islam.”

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2000/11/6/170946.shtml

However, a further possibility occurs to me, which is that even if there were enough moderate Muslims around to invite to the White House, the “soccer moms” strategy would not work if Bush made nice-nice only with genuinely patriotic, pro-Western Muslims. To the soccer moms, that would not be a convincing enough display of “tolerance” and “outreach.” In order to demonstrate to the soccer moms’ satisfaction that he’s not a bigot, Bush has got to be friends with outright enemies of America. That shows the soccer moms that he’s the kind of man they can be comfortable with.

About the time of the 2000 GOP convention, I read somewhere that the display of minorities was meant to “reassure” white suburban voters that the GOP was “non-racist.” They didn’t REALLY think they would get many minority votes.

A couple of years ago, I saw a piece in frontpagemag along the same line. The writer said something like, “You have to understand that suburban voters are “anti-racist. We just won’t stand for any appeal to a white backlash, or attacks on immigrants.”” I’m not sure those are the exact words, but it was something like that.

People like this invariably live in the whitest section of town they can find. They will favor “diversity” while insulating themselves from it. I know people just like this.

It is a catch-22 situation. The only practical way for the Republican party to win elections is to go after white voters. But if they are perceived to be doing so, or even worse, are said to have adopted a “Southern Strategy,” there is a wide backlash among those same voters.

Part of the problem is the endemic double-think on issues of ethnicity. Almost everybody believes, deep down, that unrestricted immigration is bad for America. (Even, or perhaps especially, the immigrants themselves.) But most Americans also believe that there is something somewhat immoral about saying so. So we have a willful blindness that makes any practical discussion of immigration at a national level impossible.

Right now, I believe that we have passed the high tide of the demonization of the Immigration Reform movement. Web sites like Vdare and books like Mexifornia are wearing down the taboos on debate. There are probably a number of publications (including National Review) waiting for the moment when the water will be safe to swim in again, and then they will jump back in the pool.

It is possible Bush is merely ruthless in achieving whatever he does care about (his adoptive Mexican/Hispanic culture). He will go to any group for support as long he perceives or hopes it is a net gain for him. He thinks these extreme reaching outs usually have little effect on his lackeys, that is, those deceived by the ideas that it is more sensible to vote for the lesser of two evils and he is the lesser.

I am ignorant of the principled response, if any, to the principle of voting for the lesser of two evils. I only know the group think of Republicans and Democrats are so similar, I prefer neither. Indeed, if it is a close election and the near-traditionalist candidate has only a miniscule chance, I might vote Democratic in an attempt to rid the Republican Party of its destroyer, the two Bush presidents. The math governing close elections makes individual votes more powerful if exercised for one of the two closely matched candidates.

To add to my above first paragraph, one can see that Bush is not catching any flak from the Democrats and from only a few of his lackey Republican elites. Bush is politically covered by the shallow anti-terrorist actions of deporting some Muslims. He is risking a great deal though, if a Muslim terrorist makes it across the Mexican border and does substantial harm.

“The only practical way for the Republican party to win elections is to go after white voters. But if they are perceived to be doing so, … there is a wide backlash among those same voters.”

That’s really funny. But it’s not only funny. It’s a reflection of the fundamental paradox of America, its combination of implicit particularity with explicit universality.