Lefty Activist Groups are Really, Really Angry About #ChuckUp

I think that the only appropriate reaction to the Donald latest #Winning on the failure of the Democrats' ploy to shut down the federal government over the DACA immigration issue is the Instapundit post.

WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE, DONALD? “To pass a tax bill, to stop a shutdown, to see the Schumers driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.” link

That Glenn Reynolds sure has talent.

But it appears that all the lefty activist groups are really, really angry that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) threw in the towel. Of course, conservative activists were livid after the GOP lost the last two (or was it three) government shutdowns.

Look, fellahs: Chuck did what you wanted: he took your pet issue (which does not have broad support among average people) and bet the whole Democratic Party on a government shutdown. Then, presumably, he looked at the polls and decided to break off the battle before his troops suffered a rout.

Let's admit it. Immigration is a huge issue, and it is one on which the ruling class and average people are divided.

The ruling class wants immigration, because it is doing the right thing, because nationalism leads to Hitler, because it's a global economy, because we need to keep US wages from increasing enough to make US products non-competitive, because American women aren't having enough babies, because Democrats understand that they need  to import more Democratic voters to keep it fair.

But the fact is that the immigration wave of the last half century has been pretty rough on below-average American workers, in particular I suspect, African Americans. Also, recently arrived immigrants tend to separate themselves into ethnic ghettoes for a generation or two, which increases the divisions in society.

So immigration is a big issue, and it needs to be resolved in a way that gives the broad majority of the American people what it wants and what it voted for. That is the meaning of democracy: the people get to choose their rulers, and the rulers accommodate the views of the voters as far as possible. The American people in 2016 elected a candidate that promised to "build a wall" to keep illegal aliens south of the border.

In other words, we have come to a point in American history where "something must be done" about immigration. But what?

I will tell you. We apply the Moynihan Rule. Here it is, according to David Frum:

In 1993, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned President Clinton against trying to ram his healthcare proposals through Congress on a party-line vote. "Anything that big and important," Moynihan predicted, "will pass the Senate 70-30 - or not at all."

Let me propose a corollary. If your issue can't get a 70-30 vote in the Senate then it isn't "big and important" enough.

In other words, it is not a good idea to try to cram through an issue like DACA on an ordinary funding bill and then hold up the whole country. DACA is a big thing only for lefty immigration activist groups.

If you want to pass a Big Thing then you must assemble enough bipartisan support that the measure passes 70-30 in the Senate.

Why is that? It's because the point of democracy is that it is not just civil war by other means, but a method of avoiding civil war. That means that democracy should not be winner-takes-all -- hello Obamacare -- but that when you pass legislation you try to sweeten it enough so that the losers do not pick up their dollies and go home in a huff.

On this theory you pass an immigration bill that stops chain migration, that mandates E-verify, that restricts immigration to well-educated people that are not going to form a new underclass, and then, at the last minute, you throw in a few sweeteners like giving residency to "Dreamers," kids brought to the US by their illegal alien parents. Hopefully, that gets you to 70-30 in the Senate.

And, need I remind my liberal friends, Donald Trump was elected on a platform of restricting immigration. To block his mandate by procedural shenanigans is to nullify the votes of the people, to spit in their faces, and to set up a shop of horrors.

So why did we get to this pass, and why are the lefty activist groups besides themselves?

Naturally, I can explain the whole procedure with my critique of lefty "activism culture." You can get the full story here in "A General Theory of Leftist Politics." The point is that the left's activism culture is young well-born kids looking  for an excuse for revolution, and the only excuse for revolution is the injustice experienced by people "outside the system." In 1850 the schtick was to riot for the unfranchised working class. But  pretty soon the bourgeoisie gave the working class the vote, and  the workers were inside the system. So now what? Votes for Women! Civil Rights for blacks! Marriage for gays! And now legalization of illegal aliens. See, once people have the vote and are inside the system then their concerns are naturally and inevitably accounted for in the two-and-fro of elections and legislation. Thus,  if you want to be an activist then you must find a group "outside the system" and be their shining knight fighting against the system for Justice. Otherwise  you are nothing.

Lefty activism culture is a conceit, the conceit of well-born sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie that want to put some relevance into their hum-drum little lives -- starting with the well-born Marx and Engels. It is the fantasy that in this age, which attempts to look after ordinary people and redress their grievances like never before in history, we need the extreme resort to force, to riots in the streets, and the silly rhetoric of Skip Marley:

We are the lions, we are the chosen
We gonna shine out the dark
We are the movement, this generation
You better know who we are, who we are

Yeah, yeah. Except the truth is that after 1850 the dreaded bourgeoisie did not keep the working class  in the dark, but let it into the system where its grievances could be redressed. Ditto African Americans after 1965.

I wonder if it is part of God's plan to use Donald Trump as His instrument to deflate the conceit of the lefty activism culture, and to drive the Schumers before him, and hear the lamentation of the pussy-hat women? 

Stranger things have happened.