re: #342 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I think she wants us to cocoon ourself off like Medieval Japan: no trade, no foreigners, purity of ideology and blood guaranteed.

This itself is giving too much credit; the point is to say the line again.

What really happened, how frightening, how sad, how scary, how complicated to fix, is unimportant compared to saying the line again.

And it’s not even a position held in good faith: conservative nativism and isolationism is performative but substanceless. As politicians and commentators they exist to say whatever the system of ownership and exploitation needs said moment to moment, and there will be no consistent follow-through.

What happens next can’t be sakoku because the US is an imperial metropole: it needs cheap shit from everywhere else to even minimally function; “immigrant labor” props up whole industries; and the people that take that value are the people that FOX and the GOP respond to. Indeed, by all indications what’s coming is actually…much worse that genuine isolation, because it makes more explicit and aggressive the coercion we apply to poorer countries (that’s what unilateral deals are: a poor as shit country trying to make a deal with the richest, most-coup-backing MFer on the planet), effectively re-adopting the banana-war mode of “we don’t care what you do, we’re just here for the money” as international policy…but at the same time creating tons and tons of new niches of exploitation—child labor, penal labor, retiree labor—and expanding overall precarity such that people cannot help but participate.

They’ll only get rid of immigrants to the extent they can fill those same positions…at the same compensation level…with Americans. They’ll only bring home manufacturing if they can cut the same corners they do in Jakarta.

All the “anti-immigrant” stuff is just reinforcing that core conservative premise of natural unequalness: problems only come from inferiors, problems are solved by pinning those inferiors in place. They’re repeating to their audience they’re the better kind of people at all times…and the implication (and more and more the declared text) is that America can only be fixed by fully encoding this caste system into governance.

Whether it’s presented as inevitability for eugenic reasons or Norman Vincent Peale reasons, some people are just meant to die in mines in some forgotten corner of the earth, and some people are just meant to die in refinery accidents in a poor town in the Midwest.