America is an exasperating place. We are eight months removed from an election where the electorate was whipped into something of a hysteria about immigration. It was by far Trump’s best issue in 2024, and he rode varying racist tropes into the White House off the back of these inherent nativist fears that have existed as long as America has. Now that Trump is implementing the agenda that many voters voted for in November, a lot of them are joining Joe Rogan to recoil in horror at what they wholeheartedly endorsed.
The Democratic popularists, America’s preeminent L takers, took another L today. Their belief that public opinion is unflinching so therefore we should let Trump eliminate the 14th amendment and build concentration camps was proven wrong by the American people yet again. Gallup conducted a poll from June 2nd to the 26th, and they found record-high support for immigration.
This shift has predominantly been driven by stove-touching Republicans, who painted a classic V-reversal at the top of this chart querying whether they would like to see immigration decreased or increased.
Overall Republican support for immigration has increased to 64 percent, higher than Gallup’s 60 percent figure in 2013 when the GOP conducted their post-election autopsy and concluded they needed to moderate on immigration.
It is very apt that one of the truest things ever said about America is a quote attributed to Winston Churchill that he never said: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Americans victimized by propaganda and voting for the mass deportation party, then getting mass deportations and realizing they don’t like mass deportations, is that fake quote manifesting itself in the real world.
The other culprit in this mess outside the stove-touching electorate is the Democratic Party. A lot of them would like you to forget this right now, but they spent much of last year trying to force a vote on an immigration bill filled with Trump’s priorities. One of the Democratic Party’s most cynical hypocrites, Sen. Chris Murphy, is currently trying to spin blame for the state of Trumpy immigration affairs by claiming he tried to pass a “bipartisan” immigration bill opposed by Trump. This is a very different characterization of what he said about it at the Democratic National Convention last year, claiming that “Donald Trump’s allies weren’t just in the room, they helped us write the whole bill.” Democrats spent much of 2024 very proud of themselves for this ham-fisted attempt to expose Trump’s hypocrisy that definitely didn’t reveal them yet again to be hollow hypocrites who don’t believe in anything.
“What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago,” said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, to NPR last year. Biden’s immigration policy focused heavily on enforcement to try to please this supposed silent majority of Americans who want our horrific immigration system to be even more depraved, and all he got for it was exiting Washington with one of the lowest presidential approval ratings in history. Great job Democrats!
Public opinion is not unflinching, and issue polling is not straightforward and does not translate directly to votes. If it did, Bernie Sanders would have coasted to the presidency in 2020 off the back of broad majorities in favor of Medicare for All. Democrats are rudderless right now because they have no central platform to express their values, and they think their job is to unflinchingly follow issue polling down a winding path of illogic to try to prove themselves as genuine people you can trust. It’s very hard for the ‘Trump wrote our immigration bill’ party to take advantage of this sharp shift in public opinion against Trump’s immigration policies. There is simply no vision for Democrats to offer right now in contrast to the fascist state of affairs because they spent all of last year proudly claiming Trump’s immigration policies as their own.
Political parties can shape public opinion, and all issue polling ever on immigration is proof. America’s history of draconian immigration overreach and subsequent backlash extends to our founding with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the United States’ political history would know that America has never really had a coherent and consistent position on immigration. What we believe is very dependent on the era we live in, with some defined by effective politicians pushing man’s nativist instincts to betray our founding values asserting that America is a land for everyone and there is no such thing as a foreign flag here.
But Democrats don’t know history despite fancying themselves as the big brain intellectual types in politics. They think their mid-20th century pivot away from a liberal platform that won the party a half-century of Congressional power was savvy, and that the modern neoliberal order that has been trounced by perhaps our two dumbest presidents ever this century is just how it has always been. Establishment Democrats would like you to believe that Susan B. Anthony and James Baldwin are heroes intertwined with their movement, but also that The Progressives are bad people trying to undermine the wise Democratic Party focused on bipartisan kitchen table issues.
There is a Vox article from 2016 that sticks with me, where a Black police officer wrote “On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.”
I feel that quote describes much of American politics. The ratios are different, but the central dynamic is true. We who read and pay attention to this stuff every day exist in the minority, and we all generally fall along good/bad lines between the two parties. The grand apathy of American political thought outside of us nerds is a difficult nut that politicians have struggled for centuries to crack. All we really know for certain is that in the absence of any kind of coherent message from those tasked with defending our egalitarian roots, demagoguery takes root. Now that this demagoguery is reaching its logical conclusion under the second Trump administration, many Americans are breaking out of that apathetic stasis to join those willing to stand up for our stated ideals. We can only hope that the rudderless Democratic Party leadership will now do what they do best and follow the lead of wiser people in the electorate like Joe Rogan.
