Eric Cantor loses primary to anti-immigration challenger

Cantor challenger, Dave Brat, 'shocked' as results rolled in

The reigning view is that he lost because he wasn’t sufficiently firm in opposition to “amnesty” or any sort of path to legalization for illegals, not even the recent waves of unaccompanied kids.

Which, of course, has liberals shouting “Racism!” from the rooftops, accusing Brat, his voters, all who oppose the liberal position(s) on immigration, and the entire Republican Party.

Gleefully, in some cases, as they seem convinced this makes Hillary, or whatever eventual Democrat, a shoe-in for November of 2014.

It is the liberals, after all, who have decided that the Republican Party represents almost exclusively the white people of America, with whom they are at war.

Their electoral success with that message, I gather, depends in large part on their white supporters not taking it too seriously.

Much as their message of war on men – purely defensive, of course, and aimed only to save American women, and indeed all of us, from the bloody-minded Republican war on women – has not much penetrated the skulls of male Democratic voters.

Much as, according to liberals citing credible evidence, Republican voters regularly refuse to take seriously the radical views that the conservatives they vote for in fact do hold.

The truth is that the opposition to immigration, Republican and not, has two sources.

One is nationalist in the economic sense and goes back to the days when Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan campaigned furiously against free trade as exporting good American jobs and immigration as flooding the country with the cheapest available foreign labor to drive down American wages.

The other is nationalist in a partly cultural, party racial sense, based on fears that the racial and cultural balance of the population is being altered in a manner disadvantageous to native born Americans of all groups, but in particular white native born Americans, on account of either or both of their native-born status or race.

Most opponents of immigration are motivated by both sorts of consideration, though the proportions vary from one person to another.

Aside:

The latter motivation is fed by but predates fears specific to Islamic immigration, based on the current global outburst of Muslim terrorism and outright war directed at other Muslims, Muslim regimes, and anybody else in the entire world within reach of enough Muslims who want to attack.

The Muslims, after all, are the new Communists, having replaced the latter as global public enemy number one.

And that is so despite the fact that they, again like the reds of the old days, are broken up into numerous sects and tribes that are often reciprocally antipathetic and sometimes even hostile to the point of violence.

Or despite the fact that, unlike the reds, they are a centuries old movement that has been a global public enemy, though not continuously number one, since Islam first appeared, drenched in blood, on the Arabian Peninsula.

Geert Wilders was actually historically accurate when he pointed out that, in modern lingo, Islam was an exceptionally violent totalitarian political ideology and movement from its birth, and has in the years since the disappearance of European and Soviet Communism become so, again.

Only a boob thinks totalitarianism has to be secular in ideology.

/Aside.

Personally, if I were a liberal I would be wary of loudly trumpeting the inevitability of a Democratic victory.

That news would of course diminish rather than enhance the Democrat vote, possibly to the point of losing.

Update 061214

Or maybe not.

Kevin Drum