The spread of vibrant social diversity is constricting the GOP’s ability to champion conservative causes, such as smaller government and independent families, President Barack Obama said in a softball media interview.
“Over the long term, I’m pretty optimistic, and the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks,” Obama told Vox editor Ezra Klein.
“People are getting more and more comfortable with the diversity of this country, much more sophisticated about both the cultural differences but more importantly, the basic commonality that we have,” he said in his talk, which was recorded Jan 23.
But for Obama, “commonality” is a go-to euphemism for big, intrusive, nation-wide government by progressive experts.
The nation’s governors “all have a common interest, and that is making sure that their constituents — who are also my constituents — are able to gain opportunity, work hard, prosper, feel secure,” Obama said in a Dec. 5 comment about visiting governors. “That happens best when we work together, whether we’re talking about Democrats and Republicans and independents working together, or whether we’re talking about state, federal and local officials working together,” he said.
“What our country needs from us right now is a common purpose –- a higher purpose,” he said Nov. 20 when he announced his unpopular Oval Office amnesty for eight million foreign migrants working illegally in the United States. “Our history and the facts show that immigrants are a net plus for our economy and our society,” he insisted, even though wages have remained stalled since immigration rose after 1965.
“Everything we’ve done to heal the housing market is… about restoring our common values,” he said in a Jan. 8 speech in Arizona. Those values, he said, include a big government program to reverse the damage caused by the big-government housing bubble. “I want to just tell you a quick story… when things seemed darkest, Lorraine learned about something called the Hardest Hit fund –- it’s a program that we created to help folks in states like Arizona that had been especially hard hit by the real estate crash,” he said about “common values.”
Free-market variety is contrary to a common purpose, Obama said Jan. 21. “Our media is all segmented now so that instead of just watching three stations, we got 600,” he said in an Idaho speech. “You got the [single] conservative station and the liberal stations. So everybody is only listening to what they already agree with. And then you’ve got political gerrymandering… so there are a lot of institutional forces that make it seem like we have nothing in common,” he said.
In his Vox interview, Obama predicted that immigration would overwhelm conservative causes.
If “you go to Tennessee and it turns out that you’ve got this huge Kurdish community. And you go to some little town in Iowa and you see some Hasidic Jewish community, and then you see a bunch of interracial black and white couples running around with their kids… in these little farm communities, and you’ve got Latinos in the classroom when you visit the schools there,” he said.
“So people are getting more and more comfortable with the diversity of this country, much more sophisticated about both the cultural differences but more importantly, the basic commonality that we have,” he said.
That diversity hinders conservative priorities, he said.
Those goals include support for families so they can independently govern themselves and their kids.
“The Republican party, even the most conservative, they have much less ability, I think, to express [opposition to single-sex marriage] than they did even 10 years ago,” Obama said.
Obama also used the interview to declare the free-market has failed to deliver economic opportunities and decent wages throughout society. “A lot of the [economic] distributional questions that used to be handled in the marketplace through decent wages or health care or defined benefit pension plans — those things all are eliminated…the average employee, the average worker, doesn’t feel any benefit,” said Obama.
The market’s failure, he said, requires more progressive government intervention in the economy. “So part of our job is, what can government do directly through tax policy?” he asked. “[E]ven before taxes are paid, are there ways that we can increase the bargaining power: making sure that an employee has some measurable increases in their incomes and their wealth and their security as a consequence of an economy that’s improving.”
“There’s been some interesting conversations globally around issues like inclusive capitalism and how we can make it work for everybody,” said Obama.
But Obama’s progressive deputies and allies have worked with big business groups to depress wages by flooding the labor market with immigrants since 2009. For example, his administration has provided work permits to 5.46 million migrants above the normal 1 million legal immigrants per year.
In 2013 and 2014, Obama tried to provide work permits to at least 12 million illegals, and his Oval Office amnesty would provide another 5 million work-permits to illegals.
His push for more immigration was his top legislative priority over the last two years, but was defeated by public protests.
“Together with the Affordable Care Act — two major pieces of legislation — that when we look back 50 years from now, I think we will all just be extremely proud,” Obama’s top aide, Valerie Jarrett said in August 2013. “It will be a landmark piece of legislation.”
The immigration influx has reduced the proportion of working-age Americans in the workforce since 2010. In November 2014, one in every five U.S. jobs was held by a foreign-born worker, up from one-in-six jobs in January 2010, according to federal data highlighted by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The drop in wages and rise in government dependence caused by Obama’s policy of mass immigration simultaneously gives Obama the opportunity to justify even more immigration and to portray conservative as bigots. “I know some worry immigration will change the very fabric of who we are, or take our jobs, or stick it to middle-class families at a time when they already feel like they’ve gotten the raw deal for over a decade,” he said Nov. 20.
“That’s not what these steps would do. Our history and the facts show that immigrants are a net plus for our economy and our society,” he claimed.
“I believe it’s important that all of us have this debate without impugning each other’s character,” he added in his Nov. 5 speech, slyly suggesting that his GOP critics are bigots.
He replayed the rhetorical trick in his Vox interview, saying “the Republican Party, even the most conservative, they have much less ability, I think, to express discriminatory views than they did even 10 years ago.”
“And that’s a source of optimism. It makes me hopeful,” he said.
