Paul Gottfried joins me to talk about the Cantor victory and the implications for the future of the immigration debate in Congress, and why the establishment failed to see the potential vulnerability of their whip, the House whip, in the Cantor primary.
00:04:03.360You're still in an alternative universe because I've discovered the only reason that Brad won was that Democrats came out on Moss to vote for him.
00:04:12.780Well, according to George Will, the people really didn't care about immigration.
00:04:16.520The big issue was that Cantu did not visit his district often enough.
00:04:22.640I mean, we're in an alternative universe of these kind of liberal Republicans like George Will.
00:04:26.900But the one thing I would say, though, is that this seems to fit a familiar pattern.
00:04:33.560And that is that—I mean, let me set this up for a little bit.
00:04:36.700I think Brad is clearly an intelligent guy and someone who at least wants to think about these issues after reading some of his writings on—brief snippets from some of his writings on theology and economics.
00:04:54.600I can't say that I can't say that I agree with anything from his worldview, but nevertheless, he clearly has at least wants to think about these things, which sets him apart from many politicians, probably most all of them.
00:05:08.620But that being said, there seems to be this familiar pattern where there's a wave of very negative social mood.
00:05:18.040And I'm thinking about, say, the midterms of 2010 and particularly following after the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009.
00:05:29.160And then, you know, it just kept getting worse.
00:06:24.260Because he tapped into the negative mood.
00:06:26.220Yeah, but the rest sort of sounds like the kind of stuff that libertarians talk about.
00:06:33.040You know, we might have seen Cato publishing some of these statements.
00:06:37.100However, most of those libertarians want, like, open borders.
00:06:40.200They're in favor of massive immigration to keep the labor supply here, you know, and people should be able to do a transferable labor and be able to cross borders, etc.
00:06:49.860No, no, no. Paul, you don't understand.
00:06:50.900If we bring in 25 million unskilled workers, that will only benefit American workers.
00:07:05.760Yeah, but I think the point is that he was smart to take the anti-immigration position because that is what distinguishes him from other libertarians who probably would, you know, would have simply failed miserably in running against Cantor.
00:07:24.680I mean, people did not vote for his libertarian economics.
00:07:27.320Yeah, but what I'm getting at here is that we seem to see this familiar pattern where you have all this negative mood, people are mad, and they'll vote for someone because they kind of—they get a sense.
00:07:41.520But they basically elect these fairly, you know, high-minded libertarian types who I don't think will really do much of anything to change what's bothering them.
00:08:27.820But then this guy is this kind of libertarian, somewhat goofy, though high-minded, you know, professor.
00:08:36.680And he won't do anything to help them.
00:08:39.300And then the process begins again in six years.
00:08:42.260So it's just—it's a kind of predictable wave that happens.
00:08:46.520But I disagree with the view of this as sort of like, you know, pushing up the rock of Sisyphus.
00:08:52.280I think what you see here is a growing mass of people who are associated with the same kind of reaction that we see in France among those who voted for the Front National or the people who voted in Hungary for the Jobbik Party.
00:09:10.460Although in Hungary, you're dealing with a much—still a much more conservative country than you have in Western Europe or the United States.
00:09:15.980But probably some of the people who voted for UKIP were like that.
00:09:19.860And their presence and their protest will not go away, even if Brad turns out to be, you know, another Paul Ryan in disguise or something sort of equally innocuous, because the protest is there.
00:09:37.260And the things people protesting against have not really been addressed.
00:09:42.120The system cannot address them, in fact, because the system is based on open borders, globalism, and multicultural ideology together with corporate capitalism.
00:09:52.700And that system is not going to satisfy the 20 or 25 percent of the population that remains irreconcilably on the right.
00:10:00.860And that's where the votes came from that put Brad over the top.
00:10:05.720I mean, you're perfectly right, I mean, in the sense that, you know, he might just be some goofy professor who will turn out to be exactly like the other guys who are sitting in Congress.
00:10:22.980But the protest can and will be controlled.
00:10:26.360I think unless it changes, it can be controlled endlessly.
00:10:31.040Because if all you do is articulate your discontent, your angst, in terms of some kind of no amnesty and vague free market ideology, we've seen this before, and we'll see it again a thousand times.
00:11:20.800The same thing is imaginable in the United States.
00:11:23.380So that the libertarianism may drop out of the picture eventually.
00:11:28.280It might, but I think at least now, and maybe not even for people who are my age and younger and maybe a little bit older as well.
00:11:37.540But I think more for people who are your age and the baby boomer generation, you know, they've gone through this massive wave of good times, certainly since 1980.
00:11:50.180And it really was, you know, really since the end of the Second World War.
00:11:55.940And so for them, you know, the free market, that just means like a bigger house or a second vacation home or another car.
00:12:04.620But I think maybe for people my age and people who are younger, I'm around 35, that we almost don't have that American dream at all.
00:12:16.360And it's a lot bleaker and a lot, it's a lot more obvious that globalism can bite back.
00:12:25.100It's not always good for everyone that, you know, it might actually eliminate the kind of jobs that people want and give them, you know, jobs folding T-shirts in the gap.
00:12:37.760But, but I don't know. I mean, this is my, my prediction is that BRAT, within two years, let's say within four years, BRAT will vote for comprehensive immigration reform.
00:12:52.260And it, but it will be some weird, it will come from the Republicans, and it will be some weird, you know, free market-y, conservative kind of thing.
00:13:03.420But it won't be this Chuck Schumer and his amnesty proposal, which is easy for them to oppose.
00:13:10.780It will be some conservative, quote-unquote, version.
00:13:13.540And they'll support it, because they almost, they in a way kind of paint themselves into a corner.
00:13:18.780Because when they talk about amnesty, amnesty, it's about like rewarding a lawbreaker.
00:13:35.580So just talking about amnesty, amnesty, you're kind of, it's a euphemism, and in a way you kind of paint yourself into the corner of saying like, okay, no amnesty, never, that would be terrible.
00:13:46.180But we'll have, you know, we're going to double legal immigration, because all legal immigration must be great.
00:13:51.660So I just think this is what's going to happen.
00:13:53.920I just feel like, I mean, I'm sorry, maybe I'm more, I'm more pessimistic than Paul Godfrey.
00:13:58.440But I just kind of see this happening.
00:14:01.400I agree both are bad, but I would say that amnesty is particularly bad, because it doesn't just mean amnesty.
00:14:10.420As my son, who lives in London, pointed out to me yesterday, all those kids who are being put on the border and becoming a cross,
00:14:19.560these are the anticipatory signs of amnesty, because they know what amnesty means,
00:14:26.240is you can come into this country illegally to let you in and give you all kinds of social rights.
00:14:32.160And the 14th Amendment has now been interpreted as being universal, not just limited to American citizens.
00:14:38.460That's what came as a result of this California decision that stopped the application of Proposition 187 about 10 years ago.
00:14:51.340So, I mean, I think the amnesty is also very, very bad.
00:14:55.080I agree with you, ultimately we have to deal with legal immigration as well, but I think amnesty has implications going beyond this.
00:15:02.060It is clear to me that you are right, the Republican Party is committed to amnesty and further immigration,
00:15:10.420largely because of its dependence on multinational corporations.
00:15:14.720Even now, they have replaced Cantor with Kevin McCarthy, a representative from California,
00:15:22.140who is much more openly and emphatically committed to the amnesty than was Cantor.
00:15:27.700Cantor was, they went after Cantor because he equivocated.
00:15:30.960This guy is openly in favor of the amnesty.
00:15:33.440So, obviously, the leadership is not afraid that anything is going to happen,
00:15:38.780and they believe they can control people like Brat.
00:15:41.340And they may be able to, because I think the Republican Party cannot be reformed.
00:21:44.700And that really was what defined us, at least for a number of years.
00:21:49.980And I think in some ways now we're at the end of it all.
00:21:53.400And this foreign policy, I think clearly the American global hegemony is weakening.
00:22:00.000We might have a, what is it, a force, a centrifugal force pulling back into the center.
00:22:07.300We are not as a decisive global factor, actor.
00:22:11.060We are not the indispensable nation of global affairs.
00:22:13.680And so I'm kind of curious where this leaves us.
00:22:19.480Sorry, that was a very long-winded way of asking a question.
00:22:22.000But what do you think about all this, Paul, in the sense of, to put it in a nutshell, the
00:22:26.460fact that the paleocons or the alt-right or whatever you want to call it was really defined
00:22:32.560by foreign policy over the last 15 years.
00:22:36.600Well, I think that the paleoconservatives not only criticized the Iraqi war, but they also went
00:22:55.980after the neo-Wilsonian assumptions on which it was based, they were absolutely correct in what they said, but they had absolutely no influence that I can see on the political debate.
00:23:08.120The media, both liberal and neoconservative media, excluded them from discussion, so they didn't matter.
00:23:15.320Even if they were right, they were not listened to because they were considered to be the far-right.
00:23:22.440They were not the part of the right with which the left wanted to engage in dialogue with.
00:23:28.340And, of course, the neoconservatives did everything they could to destroy the credibility,
00:23:32.720the economic well-being or whatever of the paleoconservatives who were not reconciled to neoconservative domination of the right.
00:27:37.180I mean, I can't find anything conservative.
00:27:38.420Well, they're conservative in the most basic sense of the word, in the sense that they're just kind of perpetuating the status quo, and they don't, again, they don't challenge anything.
00:27:48.160I mean, you know, they're, in a way, they're deeply conservative, in the worst possible sense of the word.
00:27:55.520Well, they're conservative in the sense that they accept the leftist state as quo and defend it.
00:28:23.200Or Catholic converts, or something like that.
00:28:26.460They were not, when I wrote about the paleoconservatives, I mean, I coined the term, when I wrote about them back in the 1980s, they were not what they are now.
00:29:07.040No, I just think they're wandering all over the place because they're old, they have no effect on anything, nobody listens to them anymore.
00:29:14.180Or, I think there will be a right, but it will have nothing to do with paleoconservatism.
00:29:40.960What do you think will be some of the defining features of the new right?
00:29:45.220What I think will be the defining feature is the willingness to make friend-enemy distinctions, use Kohlschmidt's term, and probably a sense of ethnicity, broadly understood.
00:30:00.820Like, you know, defending Western men or something like that, against invasion, it probably will have some kind of racial overtone or undertone.
00:30:10.740I think it's unavoidable at this point.
00:30:12.600It is unavoidable, because that's the way we live in.
00:30:15.460It is unavoidable, because the whole left is organized as an anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western, anti-bourgeois, of course, you're anti-bourgeois as well, but the left is certainly an anti-bourgeois kind of coalition.
00:30:28.440So, I mean, obviously, what they've organized themselves against will react by being racial.
00:30:38.180Well, like all other anti-bourgeois...
00:30:39.520It could also be masculinist or something.
00:30:42.000Or favor male virility or something like that.
00:30:45.340It will look much more like fascism, I would argue, than like paleoconservatism.
00:30:52.700Neoconservatism will have nothing to do with it.
00:30:54.960Neoconservatism is a movement that came out of the Jewish left.
00:30:57.540Well, you know, this is an interesting thing.
00:31:00.080Obviously, I resonate with everything you're saying, but this is an interesting thing that I maybe hadn't thought of, which is that paleo and neoconservatives, they're in a way kind of twins.
00:31:15.840Because, again, I guess it depends on how you define the neoconservatives, but I define them strictly as this generation of Jewish intellectuals, and a lot of them have married one another.
00:31:30.940It's actually quite remarkable, who certainly came from the Trotskyist left and began voting for Reagan and then developed a very aggressive foreign policy and would often define it in terms of either supporting Zionism or spreading freedom or whatever.
00:31:53.340But, you know, I would define it as those.
00:31:57.780Because, you know, whatever you want to think of as Obama, as he's a leftist or what have you, you can see he doesn't have his heart in any of this foreign policy stuff.
00:32:13.140But I think the Syria situation was amazing, where he was just passed the buck to Congress, and it was kind of like, well, I don't want to do this, but maybe you guys can go evade Syria.
00:33:53.980When I talk about, you know, an ethnic right, one that does not favor the status quo, one that reacts against the left in a massive, violent fashion,
00:34:07.300I mean, I'm not praising these people, but this is the right.
00:34:12.240And at some point, it is going to emerge here and in Europe.
00:34:17.360And, you know, I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow.
00:34:20.640But I think people can just be pushed around so far.
00:34:23.640And there is going to be a reaction to what's taken place.
00:34:27.300And I think that in its own small way, this has begun in Virginia.
00:34:36.060I think the people who voted for Brad, they may have voted.