In Vox, Matthew Yglesias channels the Dark Matter:
The false choice between equality and globalization Updated by Matthew Yglesias on August 4, 2014, 9:30 a.m. ET @mattyglesias [email protected]… It’s not fans of [Thomas Piketty's] Capital in the 21st Century who are pushing nationalism as an alternative to plutocracy, but its detractors. And though the recent politics in the US Congress have been driven by the somewhat odd sequence of events around the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the underlying pattern runs much deeper than that.
In the United Kingdom where the transient political factors are entirely different, the ruling Conservative Party runs on a platform of Capping Welfare and Reducing Immigration. Inside the United States, a major debate has taken place inside GOP circles as to what to do after consecutive Republican Party losses in presidential elections. An initially popular idea, especially in business circles, was that the GOP should moderate its stance on immigration and seek Latino votes. This was, of course, countered by the party’s most retrograde elements — the Michele Bachmanns and the Steve Kings. But more importantly, the pro-immigration impulse was also opposed by the most forward-thinking elements in American conservative politics. Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and other “reform conservatives” have positioned themselves as leading opponents of a compromise with the White House on immigration.
It is this reformicon ideological tendency, not mainstream liberalism, that has embraced egalitarian nationalism.
And the cause of its rise is not left-wing worries about inequality, but the failure of traditional supply-side economics. Reagan-era conservatives could be for welfare state rollback and broadly pro-immigration because they promised a rising tide that would lift all boats. Now that we’re decades into an era of wage stagnation, those kind of easy promises ring hollow. So for Cameron and the reformicons, a tilt against immigrants is the new answer. On this view, the big problem with trickle-down economics is that the bucket is too leaky. Let the rich get richer, but prevent them from hiring maids from Latin America, and soon enough wages for native-born maids will rise.
But don’t worry your pretty little heads about such insidious thoughts:
The moral math whereby this policy becomes more attractive than the win/win/win alternative of broadly freer movement of people paired with progressive taxation and more provision of public services has always escaped me somewhat. It appears to involve putting a negative value on the interests of foreign-born people. But it is a real movement. But it’s a movement on the right of politics in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Progressives, rightly, see no need to chose between equality and cosmopolitanism.
Mexican democracy speaking truth to wealth
In fact, since there’s no need to choose, there’s no need to even think about it. We can have Equality and Cheap Maids! What’s not to like?
You see, we progressives know that if we import enough Mexicans, we are going to Elect a New People who will finally stick it to the billionaires.
What, you’re saying that almost all the billionaires, like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers, favor more immigration just like we do? You ask: why are we so sure we know something they don’t know?
Well … if you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich? Huh?
After all, look how the wise, activist voters of Mexico have made sure that nobody in Mexico is a plutocrat.
What, you say that Carlos Slim is just about the richest man in the world, and he got that way by charging poor Mexicans high monopoly prices to phone their loved ones?
Yes, but he’s in favor of more Mexicans coming to America so that means Slim is a Good Guy. Don’t you read the New York Times? Didn’t you read Piketty, who explains that criticism of Slim is motivated by “Western ethnocentrism?” What are you, some kind of racist?
