UnHerd: Why Brexit Britain should welcome more refugees

Morally, I think we get our attitude to migration entirely the wrong way round. Too many count as common sense that we want an immigration system that prioritises those workers that our economy might benefit from – doctors, engineers, crop pickers etc. To my mind, these are the people who may not need a welcome on our shores. Those who are the brightest and the best should stay with their home community and be of service there.

Taking doctors and engineers from poorer parts of the world is a form of asset stripping. If we need people to do these jobs we ought to be training up our young people, not importing cheaper labour from elsewhere. The free movement of labour is an extension of the flexible labour market beloved of big business, one that’s purpose is to keep wages low. It also allows the business class easy access to the international playground. Little wonder big business loves the EU.[...]

When it comes to this group, we must be as generous and accommodating as we can be, and then some more. I have no truck with the disingenuous idea that migrants stop being vulnerable and in need the moment they first set foot in a county where they are no longer persecuted. To those who say that the migrants crossing the channel are hardly escaping oppression – having come from France – I would refer you to the horrendous and insanitary conditions of the French camps like the Calais Jungle. I saw better organised refugee camps in Iraq.

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UnHerd: Trump’s white identity politics

Academic research has shown that whites’ political opinions are frequently linked to their views of minorities. For example, whites’ opinions about a range of issues such as civil rights, crime, and social welfare programs are linked to how they view African Americans, and their opinions about anti-terrorism policies are linked to how they view Muslims.

But white group identity has typically been less prevalent and less potent when compared to minority group’s sense of identity with other minority group members. This is because group identity typically thrives under conditions of separation, marginalisation, and discrimination – conditions that are more commonly experienced by minorities. Thus, whites have not necessarily felt a strong connection to other whites or made political choices with their identity as whites at the forefront of their minds. By contrast, minority group members’ sense of connection to their own group routinely affects their political choices. [...]

In ‘activating’ white group consciousness, Trump made it a stronger predictor of how people voted. The salience of white identity was not evident in recent presidential elections precisely because it was linked to Trump himself. Just as Domenech feared, Trump made white identity politics a modern reality. [...]

One other finding also suggests that Trump himself was the key factor. In the spring of 2016, a separate ANES survey asked people how they would vote if the general election matched up Trump and Clinton, Cruz and Clinton, and Rubio and Clinton. The results are telling: perceptions of discrimination against whites were significantly associated with support for Trump over Clinton, but not with support for Rubio or Cruz over Clinton.

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FiveThirtyEight: Republicans In Congress Have Been Very Loyal To Trump. Will It Last?

Democrats largely voted against the president’s positions, but they weren’t quite as unified against Trump as Republicans were for him: In the House, the average Democratic member agreed with Trump 23 percent of the time; in the Senate, 31 percent of the time.

The voting behavior we saw in the 115th is pretty much what we’d expect. Because Republicans controlled both the executive and legislative branches, they were more likely to vote in unison on issues and avoid bringing votes to the floor that would be divisive or unsuccessful — although that certainly wasn’t always the case. Times when Republicans broke ranks and voted against the president — like a few did in July 2017 on legislation that would have repealed parts of the Affordable Care Act — drew attention, but votes like those weren’t the norm. The three GOP senators who sank the health insurance bill — Susan Collins of Maine, the late John McCain of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — all had Trump scores of 75 percent by the end of the 115th Congress. [...]

But Trump’s approval rating might have to take a nose dive before Republicans defect. While it’s unclear how voting patterns will shift in the new Congress, what is particularly striking is just how effective Trump has been in securing party loyalty in the first two years of his presidency. As you can see in the chart below, Senate Democrats didn’t coalesce as neatly around Obama during his first two years in office as Senate Republicans did around Trump.

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The New York Review of Books: Return of the Neocons

Yet exactly this has happened. Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion. The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Others, meanwhile—call them neo-neoconservatives, or post-neoconservatives—are busy making policy in the Trump administration. They’ve gone with Trump for good reason. Although he is repudiating the export of liberal democracy and degrading its practice at home, Trump is also reasserting the American right’s pugnacious antipathy to “globalism.” He is acting as many within the neocon firmament have long favored, positioning the United States against a vicious world and fetishizing brute force in response. [...]

For the dominant strand of neoconservatism, embodied by those who left the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s in order to keep waging the cold war behind Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump’s political ascent offered a unique opportunity, even if it did not look that way at first. Ever since the Iraq War began to lose the American public’s support in 2005, the neocon agenda had proved increasingly bankrupt, out of step with the world and therefore dangerous if imposed upon it. The hallmark of the mainline neoconservatives was their alarm against totalitarianism, originally aimed at the Soviet threat. But their anti-totalitarian ethos had little to offer in the post-totalitarian twenty-first century. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, some neoconservative mainstays, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, tried to conjure “Islamofascism” into existence. Here was a totalitarian enemy to succeed the Nazis and the Soviets, the idea went—except that numerically small terrorist groups, however threatening and odious, possessed neither the geopolitical strength nor the universalist ideology to sustain the analogy, even among Islamophobes. It was due to their basic intellectual commitments, and not just their particular policy failures, that neoconservatives spent the Obama years on the defensive, carping about Obama’s supposed weakness but unable to put forward a fresh program of their own. [...]

What best explains centrist Democrats’ rapprochement with neoconservatives isn’t an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style. Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats’ fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history. Decent citizens, the tale goes, will recoil at Trump’s profanities and banish his like for good—but only if they are led by the very authorities for whom those citizens have demonstrated deep mistrust. “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Dick Cheney claimed in March 2003, days before the first bombs dropped. The Never Trump neocons hold out a similar promise. The question is whether they have any more to offer America than they had to Iraq.

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The Atlantic: Evangelical Mega-donors Are Rethinking Money in Politics

In 2005, Time magazine crowned Howard and Roberta Ahmanson the most powerful evangelical financiers in America. As an heir to the assets of Home Savings and Loan, a mortgage and insurance empire, Howard Ahmanson became an influential philanthropist, backing projects in Bible translation, art, and—perhaps most notably—politics. The Ahmansons poured millions of dollars into ballot initiatives and Republican campaigns in California; in 2008, they gave more than $1 million to support Proposition 8, which successfully banned same-sex marriage in the state. The couple back the Discovery Institute, a think tank that promotes intelligent design, and the Claremont Institute, which promotes limited government. [...]

“The Republican Party is a white-ethnic party. And I don’t want to be identified with that,” Ahmanson told me recently. He dislikes that white evangelicals are largely supportive of Donald Trump—“Whatever this is, it’s not the Gospel,” he said—and has stopped giving to groups such as the Family Research Council, an influential advocate for socially conservative causes in Washington. These days, his giving is focused on issues such as land use and zoning in California—connected to his father’s work in facilitating home building—and he’s funding a project to create a digital illuminated Bible. “God is using this time, and Donald Trump, to purge the church,” he told me. “Are you about Christ and the Gospel first, or is your church just a Sunday extension of your political team?” [...]

One of the clearest shifts among Christian mega-donors is demographic. Gen Xers and early Millennials are just starting to take the reins of legacy family foundations or come into their giving potential, and their sensibilities differ from their parents’. “From a young age, being involved in work that was serving others was something I felt really drawn to,” said Robin Bruce, the 35-year-old president of the David Weekley Family Foundation, her family’s philanthropic organization. It gave away roughly $7.1 million in 2015, according to tax documents, with roughly $114 million in assets.[...]

As the shape of wealth in America changes, the shape of evangelical wealth is changing along with it: Some members of a new evangelical donor class made their money in entrepreneurship and are drawn to evidence of innovation, transparency, and accountability in the organizations they support. This “generation is … more concerned with outcomes, with causes, with getting things done,” said David Wills, the former head of the National Christian Foundation, which has given more than $10 billion in grants since it was founded in 1982 and is one of the largest donor-advised funds in the country.

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