Legend says a humble French scribe named Nicolas Flamel discovered the philosopher’s stone—the alchemical secret to physical transmutation. To immortality itself. After turning a half-pound of mercury into gold, fear consumed Flamel: what man could resist the temptations of unlimited wealth and immortality? In a show of Christian humility, Flamel hid his manuscripts and dedicated his life to philanthropy. What remained of his synthetic treasure built several schools, seven churches, and 14 hospitals. He died a lifetime later, in 1418.
The Democrats appear to have rediscovered Flamel’s alchemical texts and have used their knowledge of the philosopher’s stone to transform immigrants and blue-collar conservatives into reliable voters. This has made the once-dying Democratic Party all but immortal.
Family Ties
It is no secret that by 1965 the Democratic Party’s future looked bleak. The exploitation of black-white tensions—the Democrats’ bread-and-butter—no longer looked like a “growth industry.” To stave off their political decline the Democrats needed a new strategy. They needed new voters.
Enter the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This legislation (and the political zeitgeist animating its passage) had two primary effects. First, it opened the floodgates and ushered in the modern era of mass immigration. Since 1965, more than 45 million people have immigrated to the United States. This influx greatly increased America’s foreign-born population. Consider that fully 14 percent of people living in America today are foreign-born. In 1970, this figure was a mere 5 percent.
Second, the law changed the composition of immigrants to America by removing country of origin quotas and including a “family reunification” provision (which ironically was supposed to maintain America’s traditional demographic composition). This opened the door to virtually unfettered immigration from the Third World. Fully 75 percent of immigrants to America in 1965 came from Europe—a continent with which America shares indelible ancestral, religious, and cultural bonds. Now just 12.1 percent of immigrants come from Europe. The vast majority arrive from Latin America and Asia, while the number of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East is rising sharply.
The mass immigration of disparate, sometimes even feuding, groups of people into America has reinvigorated the Democratic Party. Why? Immigrants vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. The Center for Immigration Studies found that immigrants vote for Democrats by a ratio of at least two-to-one—and this gap is widening. This data is supported by a study from the Pew Research Center, which found that nonwhite Americans vote for Democrats by a roughly 3-to-1 ratio.
Not only do immigrants vote left, so do their children—and their children’s children. As it turns out, political affiliation is highly heritable, as Jonathan Haidt notes in The Righteous Mind. This is confirmed by research compiled by Alex Nowrasteh, an open-borders advocate so rabid and incompetent that he published data proving precisely the opposite of his thesis. Regardless, this is not to say that politics is reducible to genetics, but there is no question that the beliefs and values that underpin a person’s political opinions are configured by their biological and cultural predispositions. Politics runs in the family.
Replacement Population
Tying two-and-two together: the migration of tens of millions of Democrats into America has completely changed our political landscape. Remember when California was a Republican stronghold? Californians supported every Republican presidential candidate between 1952 and 1988 (the one exception being Barry Goldwater in 1964).
What changed? The people.
Since 1960, California’s population exploded from 15.9 million to 39 million. This growth was almost entirely due to immigration. In fact, some 10 million first-generation immigrants currently reside in California. This has changed the voter demographics so significantly that California is now a one-party state. Furthermore, immigration has also shifted California’s political midpoint to the left. This means that to remain (somewhat) competitive, California’s Republicans must abandon or soften many of their core positions. Immigration turned California blue.
And as they say: as goes California, so goes the nation.
Most people are shocked to learn that American-born voters have not elected a Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson back in 1964 (Ross Perot’s antics securing Clinton’s victory in 1992 aside). As it turns out, every Democratic president for the last 50 years won because the immigrant voting bloc tipped the scales in their favor.
A cursory glance at the data shows that immigration is greatly diminishing any chance that President Trump may have in 2020. Remember, Trump won by just 112,911 votes in Florida and 10,704 in Michigan—both states which may decide the 2020 election. Immigration is erasing these margins. A net 147,000 immigrants settle in Florida every year. Meanwhile, some 22,919 people immigrate to Michigan annually. If these people vote in line with the national average (which has held steady for decades), then just one or two more years of immigration will flip them.
Gold From Lead
While Nicolas Flamel supposedly used the philosopher’s stone to fund the construction of churches and hospitals, the Democrats did something sinister: they used political alchemy to transmute temperamentally conservative, blue-collar voters into reluctant socialists.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton promised that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would create “a million [American] jobs in the first five years.” He also said NAFTA’s “side agreements” would “make it harder than it is today for businesses to relocate solely because of very low [Mexican] wages or lax environmental laws.”
Since then, of course, a net 800,000 American manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico “solely because of very low [Mexican] wages or lax environmental laws.” In other words, Clinton lied. American companies simply could not pass up the opportunity to offshore their factories and save piles of cash. Why pay American workers a middle-class wage when they can pay Mexican peasants a pittance? Why adopt environmentally-conscious technologies when Mexico lets you pollute to your heart’s content? Imagine if the shareholders found out!
Fewer factory jobs is just the tip of the iceberg. Why? Manufacturing is an anchor industry upon which predicate industries depend. A factory is like an oilfield or a mine because it generates material wealth, which then supports a host of service industries. Lawyers and barbers need miners and factory workers—not the reverse. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, each manufacturing job supports roughly 1.5 service jobs. Thus, NAFTA likely displaces a net 1.7 million jobs.
Here’s where the alchemy begins in earnest. The geographic concentration of trade deficit-fueled unemployment was in America’s industrial heartland, now known as the Rust Belt. Factory closure after factory closure flooded the already-constricted labor market with fresh job-seekers. This drove down wages for everyone and virtually guaranteed that millions would remain chronically unemployed. Men who had worked a steady job for decades lost everything overnight. And in their despair, they turned to the government for help.
After all, the Democrats promised to care for the unemployed, to provide welfare for those honest, hard-working Americans who were “just down on their luck.” But it had nothing to do with luck: America’s manufacturing industry was slaughtered like a lamb by NAFTA and a host of other globalist “free-trade” agreements. As unemployment grew and wages shrank, the Democrats solidified their political supremacy by addicting the population to welfare. Meantime, the U.S. economy transformed from one of widespread innovation and production to one of low-paying service jobs, stagnating wages, and extreme inequality. California, again, is illustrative: the fifth-largest economy in the world boasts impossibly high home prices and the largest population of U.S. billionaires as well as one-third of the nation’s of welfare recipients and areas of endemic poverty rivaling Mississippi’s.
In the end, only the Democratic Party benefited.
What happened to California and states in the Rust Belt is not simply an example of political iatrogenics run amok—it is a clear case of political alchemy. The Democratic Party lost the war of ideas decades ago, but has remained a national force because it imported millions of new voters, and bought millions more.
No matter what it claims, the facts are clear: the Democratic Party does not care about the economy. It does not care about America. And it does not care about you. It cares only about winning elections.
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