REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION; WHAT REVOLUTION? :

Quiet Time (Peter Beinart, 05.02.02, New Republic)

...Clinton didn't only undermine xenophobia by ensuring that would-be nativists had secure jobs; he undermined it by signing welfare reform, which destroyed the racist belief that immigrants were receiving handouts for doing nothing. Europe's growing anti-immigrant backlash is stoked by the perception that left-liberal political elites are allowing immigrants to play hard-working native Europeans for suckers. But the welfare bill--whatever its moral flaws-- demolished that perception in the United States.

And Clinton undermined anti-immigrant racism in another way as well: He cracked down on crime. [...]

But if Clinton fought nativism by changing liberalism, George W. Bush has changed conservatism--thus ensuring that nativism's lingering appeal goes unexploited. [...]

Today many pundits consider Bush's support for immigration a matter of political survival--he's courting a Hispanic vote Republicans desperately need. But that calculus is still by no means received wisdom in the Republican Party. Before September 11, when Bush flirted with an amnesty for Mexican immigrants, many in the congressional GOP
expressed concern. And last month, when Bush tried to restore food stamps to some legal immigrants who lost them in the 1996 welfare bill, most House Republicans opposed him.

In truth, there remains a reservoir of anti-immigrant sentiment among the GOP base--and in the country at large. But with a popular, pro-immigration Republican in the White House, and without high unemployment or high crime as a spark, nativism has been silenced as a political force.

Mr. Beinart refers to American nativism as the dog that didn't bark (as in the Sherlock Holmes story); which is to say that the America which teetered on the brink of an anti-immigrant holocaust in '92 was saved by Clinton and George W. Bush and now the anti-immigrationists are mostly quiet. But within his story there's another dog that doesn't bark : the Congressional class of '94. If Mr. Clinton deserves credit for going along with welfare reform and city, state, and federal efforts to crack down on crime, don't the Republican mayors, governors, congressmen, and senators deserve some credit too? Who deserves more credit for the perception that crime in America is under control than Republican mayor Rudy Guliani?

But, of course, that ruins the liberal storyline, which requires that Clinton have spontaneously moved the Party to the Right and that Republicans only have become a responsible party in January of 2001. You may be able to get away with that delusional view in the pages of The New Republic, but in the wider world that dog won't hunt.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2002 6:42 AM