Neocons Have Only Themselves to Blame

Immigration dooms Reaganite politics

With the nomination of JD Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the Neocons are bemoaning the fact that their influence in American politics has been severely diminished. Trump has not achieved everything we might have hoped, but let’s acknowledge the substantial progress that has been made. The Bushes are out. Bill Kristol is out. Liz Cheney is out. John McCain is dead and his daughter is a co-host on The View. The RNC features speakers who openly question America’s belligerence towards Russia.

National Review is despondent. Writing on Vance’s speech at the convention, Noah Rothman complains that Vance called the invasion of Iraq “disastrous.” Rothman defends the Iraq war on the grounds that it paved the way for the Abraham Accords.

Over at the Substack blog The Cosmopolitan Globalist Claire Berlinski called for a “national unity ticket” to defeat Trump (who is about to end democracy). Berlinski’s suggestions for this unity ticket are at once quaint and absurd. She proposes:

• Democrats should “Banish every hint of wokeness”

• Shut up about transgenderism

• Kamala Harris should win over moderates by promising to put Republicans in her cabinet, especially John Bolton.

Of course, the Democrats will do none of these things. If the Democrat party was capable of “banishing wokeness” there never would have been a Donald Trump phenomenon in the first place. (Berlinski’s suggestions are best understood as a form of fan fiction.)

But the other choice in this election is also not entirely friendly to Neocon foreign policy goals. Vice President Harris skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and expressed reservations about the way Israel has conducted the Gaza war. Harris’ pick of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro for VP reflects the fact that the Democrat party is beginning to incorporate the anti-Zionist sentiments of its activist base. Writing in Commentary, Seth Mandel wails that Harris has been “played by liars” and duped by “anti-Israel propaganda”.

Certainly neither Trump nor Harris represents a full break with Neocon foreign policy consensus, but both are far more skeptical of that consensus than their predecessors. Neocons are right to feel that their power is waning a bit.

And Neocons have no one but themselves to blame, because this moment of departure from bipartisan unanimity on Neocon foreign policy would not have been possible without the Neocon-approved program of mass third-world immigration into the United States.

Whites have long been more supportive than other groups of foreign military intervention. There’s also a large racial divide in support for Israel. 72% of Whites want America to support Israel while just 51% of non-Whites think the same. This racial divide is at least part of the reason why younger Americans (18-29) are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.

Kamala Harris is the child of third-world immigrants and she shares that demographic’s innate sympathy for the “brown” Palestinians. As Vice President, Harris was one of the voices within the White House calling for Biden to moderate his pro-Israel stance. Fully half of Gen Z is non-White. Kamala Harris represents the future of the Democrat party.

On the Republican side, Bill Kristol and his ilk thought that they could exile non-interventionists like Buchanan and still remain an electorally viable party – and if not for mass immigration, they would have succeeded in remaining electorally viable.

So the retreat (if only a small one) that we are seeing today from the Neocon foreign policy consensus is attributable to mass immigration. On the Democrat side, the new immigrant voting bloc demands that Democrat politicians scale back their support for Israel. On the Republican side, recognition that demographic change will doom Republicans led to the Flight 93 election attitude; many Republican voters who disliked some of Trump’s positions or character were nonetheless willing to vote for him because the situation is so dire, and that has made room for non-interventionist sentiment within the GOP.

These are grim times, but we should take a moment to gloat at the way the Neocons have sown the seeds of their own undoing through their own stupidity and arrogance. Bill Kristol and George Bush have spent decades pompously asserting that only a “racist” could be concerned about the long term effects of mass non-Western immigration into America. Now they wish to throw a tantrum because they are witnessing their policies’ obvious and inevitable result.