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Overnight Open Thread

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iceweasel3/23/2010 3:06:03 am PDT

re: #88 freetoken

I think the President would rather tackle financial reform first. However, forces beyond his control, outside the Beltway as well as in Congress, may push immigration to the front of the line.

As I wrote downstairs somewhere, financial reform is probably a political winner for the President, and the GOP wouldn’t want him to look too successful as the election approaches. As such the xenophobes will press on with immigration reduction/retribution, even though it will split the GOP. And, with plenty of immigrant rights groups pressuring the Dems at the same time (though for different reasons), it looks like the President might not be able to avoid it.

Immigration will be too hot for the President to look like a winner, I think. It’s just a nasty hot button, as hot as healthcare but nastier, more mean-spirited.

I agree with all this. When I said immigration was ‘next’ I meant it was the logical place for the teabaggers to next channel their rage, and that I fully expect the GOP to exploit that— partly for the reasons you mention.

It’s the logical next focus for illogical nativist, revanchist, populist anger.
I keep linking Eco’s old essay on Ur-Fascism, but only because it matters:

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.

This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.