It's The Bad Faith, Stupid
It's The Bad Faith, Stupid
The GOP's border security double cross presents Democrats an opportunity to lay Republicans bare—if they get the appeal right
The Republican business elites who want Donald Trump to win the election in 2024 also want you to believe they care a lot about immigration, and that Trump was ahead of the curve on the issue.
Jamie Dimon went to Davos a couple weeks back and said Trump was “right about immigration,” without much further elaboration.
Elon Musk, the immigrant apartheid beneficiary, is by contrast a human megaphone for every right-wing blood libel circulating on the internet. Immigrants poison the blood of America, and are part of a coordinated “globalist” effort to “replace” the electorate with reliable Democrats. The whole repugnant catechism.
It’s hard to know what Dimon wants us to think he has in mind, other than that he hopes to normalize Trump’s aberrant views on an issue that Republicans exploit during elections. Does Dimon support lying to voters about building a border wall that Mexico will pay for? Or the idea that countries where many people are impoverished and brown-skinned are “shitholes”?
I doubt Dimon is fluent enough in immigration policy to cite anything he genuinely admires about Trump’s record, and would demur that Trump has been vindicated on the issue of “border security.” But over the past several days, Trump spearheaded the GOP effort to kill border-security legislation, and leave the issue festering for partisan advantage in the election. Does Dimon support that?
I’m guessing (just guessing) he’d say no. But Musk, the blood-emerald industrialist, is happy Trump killed the bill. We can contort ourselves into imagining Musk is in on the ruse, playing along like a good sport to help Trump get elected. Or we can apply Occam’s razor and stipulate that he’s just a brain poisoned shitposter who’s being conned.
The truth of the matter is important, but not as important as the larger insight that Dimon and Musk are two faces of the same system. It’s a system of bad faith and incitement that has brought the country to the brink of destruction. And the challenge for Democrats is to stop getting sucked into cycles of manufactured outrage and make Republicans suffer politically for the bad faith itself.
JAMES AND THE GIANT BREACH
Republicans exacerbate race division and manufacture frivolous outrages to advance plutocratic ends. They underwrite and feed a vast propaganda machinery that pumps out slander against the racial underclasses, and drives people to vote for politicians who then prioritize corporate tax cuts and deregulation over (e.g.) border security.
This is morally and ethically outrageous, but the problems run deeper.