On immigration, Hillary is right (and wrong)
unless you’ve got a strong position on immigration, because people are worried about it. If you don’t, you leave a large space into which the populists can march.”
This has been the argument for reasonable immigration restrictions for decades. The basic position of National Review, where I am a senior editor, has been that if responsible politicians do not address legitimate immigration concerns, it will create a political vacuum for unreasonable politicians to exploit. If you don’t like how President Trump talks about immigration, you can appreciate the point.
But even better examples can be found across Europe and Scandinavia. James Kirchick, in his book ”The End of Europe,” notes that across the Continent, “oncemarginal, anti-systemic parties increase their popularity at the expense of mainstream ones almost entirely because of their absolutist stance against immigration.”
The Sweden Democrats, a far-right party in Sweden that grew out of white nationalism and, some claim, neo-Nazi ideology, won a handful of seats in Parliament for the first time in 2010 solely because it was the only party to run on a platform of cutting immigration.
The government, the media and the political establishment in Sweden waged an all-out campaign to demonize the party — and the policy. “Stigmatizing the Sweden Democrats in the hope that no selfrespecting Swede would contemplate voting for them, however, had the opposite of its intended effect,” Kirchick writes. Five years later, during the migrant crisis of 2015, ”the Sweden Democrats had become the most popular party in the country.”
Clinton’s problem is that she understands the need to triangulate the way her husband did, by taking culturally fraught political issues and framing them in ways that win over voters.
But Clinton, like so many in her party and in the press, is captured by a narrative that insists anyone who disagrees with her (or supports Trump) has no moral legitimacy. She wants it both ways: “They” are evil, but we should appease them anyway. That isn’t appealing to anyone.