by
Patrick
J. Buchanan

Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: The
Coming Age of Austerity

After its second
defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, under whom unemployment has
never been lower than the day George W. Bush left office, the Republican
Party has at last awakened to its existential crisis.

Eighteen states
have voted Democratic in six straight elections. Among the six are
four of our most populous: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and
California. And Obama has now won two of the three remaining mega-states,
Ohio and Florida, twice.

Only Texas
remains secure – for now.

At the presidential
level, the Republican Party is at death’s door.

Yet one already
sees the same physicians writing prescriptions for the same drugs
that have been killing the GOP since W’s dad got the smallest share
of the vote by a Republican candidate since William Howard Taft
in 1912.

In ascertaining
the cause of the GOP’s critical condition, let us use Occam’s razor
– the principle that the simplest explanation is often the right
one.

Would the
GOP wipeout in those heavily Catholic, ethnic, socially conservative,
blue-collar bastions of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois,
which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept, have anything to do
with the fact that the United States since 2000 has lost 6 million
manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories?

Where did
all those jobs and factories go? We know where.

They were outsourced.
And in the deindustrialization of America, the Republican Party
has been a culpable co-conspirator.

Unlike family
patriarch Sen. Prescott Bush, who voted with Barry Goldwater and
Strom Thurmond against JFK’s free-trade deal, Bush I and II pumped
for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and opening America’s borders to all goods
made by our new friends in the People’s Republic of China.

Swiftly, U.S.
multinationals shut factories here, laid off workers, outsourced
production to Asia and China, and brought their finished goods back,
tax-free, to sell in the U.S.A.

Profits soared,
as did the salaries of the outsourcing executives.

And their
former workers? They headed for the service sector, along with their
wives, to keep up on the mortgage payment, keep the kids in Catholic
school and pay for the health insurance the family had lost.

Tuesday, these
ex-Reagan Democrats came out to vote against some guy from Bain
Capital they had been told in ads all summer was a big-time outsourcer
who wrote in 2008, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt!”

Yes, the simplest
explanation is often the right one.

Republicans
are also falling all over one another to express a love of Hispanics,
after Mitt won only 27 percent of a Hispanic vote that is now 10
percent of the national vote.

We face demographic
disaster, they are wailing. We must win a larger share of the Hispanic
vote or we are doomed.

And what is
the proposed solution to the GOP’s Hispanic problem, coming even
from those supposedly on the realistic right?

Amnesty for
the illegals! Stop talking about a border fence and self-deportation.
Drop the employer sanctions. Make the GOP a welcoming party.

And what might
be problematic about following this advice?

First, it will
enrage populist conservatives who supported the GOP because they
believed the party’s pledges to oppose amnesty, secure the border
and stop illegals from taking jobs from Americans.

And in return
for double-crossing these folks and losing their votes, what would
be gained by amnesty for, say, 10 million illegal aliens?

Assume in a
decade all 10 million became citizens and voted like the Hispanics,
black folks and Asians already here. The best the GOP could expect
– the Bush share in 2004 – would be 40 percent, or 4 million of
those votes.

But if Tuesday’s
percentages held, Democrats would get not just 6 million, but 7
million new votes to the GOP’s less than 3 million.

Thus, if we
assume the percentages of the last three elections hold, the Democratic
Party would eventually gain from an amnesty a net of between 2 and
4 million new voters.

Easy to understand
why Democrats are for this. But why would a Republican Party that
is not suicidally inclined favor it?

Still, the
GOP crisis is not so much illegal as legal immigration. Forty million
legal immigrants have arrived in recent decades. Some 85 percent
come from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Most
arrived lacking the academic, language and labor skills to compete
for high-paying jobs.

What does
government do for them?

Subsidizes
their housing and provides free education for their kids from Head
Start through K-12, plus food stamps and school lunches, Pell Grants
and student loans for college, Medicaid if they are sick, earned
income tax credits if they work and 99 weeks of unemployment checks
if they lose their job.

These
are people who depend upon government.

Why would
they vote for a party that is going to cut taxes they do not pay,
but take away government benefits they do receive?

Again it needs
be said. When the country looks like California demographically,
it will look like California politically. Republicans are not whistling
past the graveyard. They are right at the entrance.

November
10, 2012

Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.

Copyright
© 2012 Creators Syndicate

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