Recall Andy Divine’s essay of October 12, 2018?

Headline: The Danger of Trump’s Political Accomplishments

It was the usual political travelogue that is Andy’s  specialty. ‘Kanye and Khashoggi and even Kavanaugh’

…

The Kavanaugh-Ford showdown also helped upend the overly simple view that women somehow form a monolithic bloc, all united around “women’s” issues, with those issues being defined by the left. In fact, partisanship and tribe trump gender, and always have. Women are no more a single ideological bloc than men, as a majority of white female voters proved in the 2016 election, when they voted for the gross dude over the feminist icon. (One of the really eye-opening parts of Jill Lepore’s new history of the United States, These Truths, is her account of how indispensable women were to the construction of the conservative movement.) These cultural fights, after all, are dynamic. They can rebound on you. If you’d predicted that the Kavanaugh hearings would have been a net-plus for the GOP a couple of weeks ago, people would have deemed you crazy. Today? Not so much. By November, who knows?

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-sullivan-the-danger-of-trumps-accomplishments.html

Andy can’t suppress his political enthusiasm for Conservatives and their opinions. note the insights of Jill Lapore’s book that provides information , on the part played by women in the rise of Conservatism.  Andy’s ignorance of American political history in terms of Conservative women-the names Phyllis Schlafly and Peggy Noonan are just two of the well known writers/activists.

There are some other ‘points of interest’ on his itinerary but Andy finally lites on Christopher Browning essay at The New York Review of Books titled “The Suffocation of Democracy.” Political Melodrama resonates with Mr. Divine, and Weimar, and its ‘suffocation’ by the Nazis, is rife with a usable example of a more than possible historical recrudescence, in American terms. Reader beware! as the New York Review of Books has become the headquarters for Ukrainian Coup propaganda authored by Timothy Snyder and his fellow travelers. The New Cold Warrior has many cunning guises, and writes ideologically usable propaganda. How historically convenient that this essay should suit Mr. Divine ideological needs.

Next under the political analysis of Mr. Divine, he considers  Reihan Salam’s Melting Pot or Civil War?, but a more careful look reveals that the full title of the book is ‘Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders’ Mr. Salam is a First Generation American, meaning that his parent immigrated to America and is executive editor of National Review. He could more accurately be described as that favorite Conservative hybrid , the ‘Libertarian’ or should it be termed more like an light coating of whitewash.

The reason why Salam’s book  deserves mention is that it plays the part of sub-text to Mr. Divine’s essay of October 26, 2018 titled:

Headline:  Democrats Can’t Keep Dodging Immigration As a Real Issue

More political travelogue but with a full scale attack on the New Democrats for their failure to take a position on ‘Border Security’ . The  security he is speaking of is the Southern Border, where the great unwashed Mestizo Horde will invade and not just dilute Anglo-Protestant culture, as outlined in the paranoid hysteria of Samuel P. Huntington’s 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, but will cast it into mongrel status! Mr. Divine plays on the historical ignorance of his readership allied to his own cynical mendacity! There is no excuse for his ignorance of this Huntington racist tract!

Mr. Divine finds an ally in fellow immigrant David Frum:

David Frum is right: “If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do.” And unless the Democrats get a grip on this question, and win back the trust of the voters on it, their chance of regaining the presidency is minimal. Until one Democratic candidate declares that he or she will end illegal immigration, period, shift legal immigration toward those with skills, invest in the immigration bureaucracy, and enforce the borders strongly but humanely, Trump will continue to own this defining policy issue in 2020.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/democrats-cant-keep-dodging-immigration-as-a-real-issue.html

‘Shift legal immigration toward those with skills’ in sum immigrants like Andy Divine and David Frum are welcome, but the refugees from American murderous political adventurism, in its southern neighbors, that began with The Monroe Doctrine of 1823: in sum, America would be,and is, the ultimate arbiter of the political legitimacy of any and all political regimes in its southern neighbors.

Old Socialist

Further thoughts:

That Huntington, Andy Divine, David Frum are white males who were/are an integral part of a Conservative Elite,  Mr. Salam is jut a fellow traveler employed by the reactionary National Review, are  in their various iterations of xenophobes . Huntington’s xenophobia is the most extreme, as he views ‘The Other’ in  terms of  his Clash of Civilizations ,paranoia writ on a wold wide scale, yet he more specifically points to those Mestizo Hordes in ‘Who Are We?’ as the most imminent threat to American Protestant virtue: this bespeak a kind of extreme historical/political/ideological myopia , or just the prejudice of a white male from the 18th Century!

Frum is an immigrant from a very wealthy Canadian family, who came to America and became a propagandist for ‘The War on Terror’ and over time has ‘evolved’ into a self-proclaimed ‘Wise Republican Elder’, for a Party now utterly in thrall to the Dixiecrat racialist ethos.

Mr. Divine whose political enthusiasm for the ‘Bell Curve’ places him in the long tradition of the British Colonial mentality, that looks at the lesser beings of planet Earth as in need of the civilizing tutelage of The British White Male. With the proviso that ‘they‘ can never quite measure up to that standard, but must persevere under that life long tutelage.

October 28 & 29, 2018 10:55 AM PDT