During the Obama years a guy named Steve Sailer put together a plan whereby a Republican could not only run for president, but actually stand a chance of winning by capturing a larger percentage of the white vote. The big planks he suggested were:
- The restriction of immigration
- Trade protectionism
- Law and order
- Affordable family formation
These planks went on to be popularized by Ann Coulter and then scooped up by Donald Trump for his candidacy. That’s why I always tell people that Steven Sailer may be the most influential commentator no has heard of as his philosophy, unlike all other conservative commentators of the day, actually got a president elected.
However Trump also represents something else that Steve Sailer had pushed during the Bush II years that Sailer himself had given up on by the time Trump was elected: Civic Nationalism. The idea behind CivNat at a high level is that there is some common ethos that can be put together to keep all of America’s tribes together, basically that a nation can be formed around a core set of rules with which everyone agrees.
A major component of CivNat is a complete immigration lockdown. This goes beyond traditional red-team/blue-team disagreements on the issue, because if someone can just import more people to their team to score a win, then CivNat, and thus “America” in general, has no meaning, it’s just a landmass that people are warring over, not a nation. Now, Trump has done more harm than good in this regard, but the rules for Civic Nationalism are hard rules, while the rules for appealing to whites are “soft” (immigration freeze versus, I don’t know, cutting down on the number of H-1B visas); the point being that he cannot run as both, although that is exactly what he is trying to do.
Now a core issue in this regard is the fact that CivNat is a failure. There is no core set of rules and people like Ilhan Omar would import all of Somalia to the North American land mass in order to score a win for herself and, if there’s anything left, her people. Concern for other people on the landmass doesn’t make the list of things that she’s worried about. Trump’s inability to understand this fact is making what should be a slam dunk running against a criminal pedo with dementia into a struggle. He needs every white person he can to show up and vote for him, but he still insists on running as a CivNat that can appeal equally to all people (well, he might have the “equally” part right, just not in the way that he imagines).
Part of the issue may be that he might not have a choice: the office of the presidency has proven to be weak to the permanent bureaucracy of the inner party. For proof of this fact one need look no further than the fact that the inner party nominated someone who has trouble remembering the name of his wife. If the office held real power to determine the path of the inner party, is that who they would nominate? They obviously have no concern at all for who fills that office as, to them, that’s not who runs the country anyway. Perhaps the best Trump can do in such a circumstance is push as hard as he can where the inner party will let him while nibbling at the edges of their mile-thick rule book.
Unfortunately this has led him down a path of not only not running the “Sailer Strategy”, but in some ways running against it, as a failed CivNat. He’s a great verbal bomb thrower which gets his supporters worked up, but then his justice department locks those people up while the oligarchs ban them from “polite society”. His immigration achievements are mostly hot air along the lines of, like most of his accomplishments, “not as bad as”. His Supreme Court picks are of the “Sandra Day O’Conner”* variety who will vote for something close to the status quo and maintain the polite fiction of adversarial ideological politics.
Still, if nothing else he has removed the mask of what the country actually is, to the point that there’s anecdotal stories of people wanting Biden in just so that they can pretend the America from their memory still exists. However, it doesn’t, and living a lie does no one any favors and merely makes the day of reckoning that much worse. Despite his failings Trump is not “one of them” and in a good way and his accomplishments, while few, are notable. Even beyond all that, it’s worth voting for Trump because, if nothing else, it may be the last time we’ll be able to vote for a president that isn’t like Biden, or (any)Bush, or pretty much every other national pol: just a placeholder to keep the oval office warm while the inner party marches the country into the landfill.
*In working on this bit, I noticed that Sandra Day O’Conner is actually still alive. Were she as soulless as the vapid Jewish lady who recently passed, she could still be on the court ready to celebrate her 40th anniversary on the job in less than a year.
