Friday 27 January 2012

Hardening The R And Softening The D

In "Florida", that is.

Romney is leading both among the Cubans and among the Puerto Ricans. The Puerto Ricans probably wonder why Gingrich thinks that their homeland cannot have statehood but the moon can. But now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade on Cuba, which only attracts sympathy for a regime which does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain's impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.

The Cuban pretend-exiles are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like. Far from being conservative, they merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.

Republicans crowing over the apparent loss of Hispanic support for Obama and the Democrats should think on. Obama should consolidate his black base while reaching out to blue-collar whites by rejecting any suggestion that they should merely accept the loss of their jobs, the running down of their wages and working conditions, and the confinement of their children and grandchildren to the bottom of the heap by means of de facto State bilingualism.

And no, these things are not somehow to the good of the Catholic Church. In fact, far from Hispanics' being the great hope of American Catholicism, Latin America has never been a particularly Catholic place, with slight if any Mass-going majorities, huge numbers of the unbaptised, rampant syncretism and surviving paganism, and a very heavy dependence on (historically European, these days usually North American) missionary priests.

No wonder that the strongest opponents of the present levels of immigration, of any amnesty, and of the erosion of English in American life, are themselves traditional Catholics. The GOP obviously doesn't want them. They should try their luck elsewhere.

4 comments:

  1. "But now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism"

    You're mad.

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  2. No, you are just too ill-informed to pass comment. Google "Max Shachtman", for a start. Or any of the first-generation neocons after him.

    The Marxist coup was not in 2008. It was in 2000. In 2008, it was at last displaced by a sort of Eisenhower Republican, complete with the more or less open endorsement of Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel.

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  3. The Trots are hedging their bets this year, mostly using Gingrich as their Manchurian Candidate but with Nile Gardiner whispering in Romney's ear at the same time.

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  4. A swansong, although they might not know it. Obama is going to be re-elected, of course. By 2016, the rising power in the Republican Party will be internationally noninterventionist economic populism, as socially conservative as ever, while the rising power in the Democratic Party will be internationally noninterventionist social conservatism, as economically populist as ever.

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