Brat delivers
by digby
My colleague at Salon, Elias Isquith has a piece up today about that Tea Party giant slayer, Dave Brat, whom everyone seemed to think won because of a libertarian revolt against Washington last year. Guess what he’s up to?
Brat’s defeat of Cantor was joyously received by many Tea Party-type Republicans, of course; but some left-leaning self-proclaimed populists — like Ralph Nader, for example — were fired up, too. However, these lefties were more excited by what Brat could be made to represent than by who he actually was or what he actually believed. They tended to ignore his pronouncements on immigration, seeing the libertarian-minded opponent of the 2008 bailouts as a fellow foe of Wall Street instead. But now that he’s been in Congress long enough to get his sea legs (and to start worrying about getting ousted himself) we’re starting to see what really makes this “libertarian populist” tick.
I hope you’re sitting down and are ready for a shock — because it turns out that it’s not fighting Wall Street; it’s fighting immigration. Actually, it’s not even that (though there’s little doubt about what Brat would do if a comprehensive reform bill were brought up for a vote). Because it turns out that Brat isn’t simply worried about comprehensive reform. He’s worried about immigrants, period. And he makes no exception for Dreamers (those who were brought into the country as children), even if they love America so much that they want to serve in its armed forces. These folks, he says, might as well be agents of ISIS.
No, really, that’s what he said. During an appearance on a Virginia right-wing radio show last week, Brat shared the story of how he helped defeat an amendment to allow Dreamers to enlist. “I wanted to stand up and shout,” Brat said, referring to how he felt when the amendment’s supporters talked about the Dreamers’ patriotism. “I mean, ISIS is willing to serve in our military as well,” he added. According to Professor Brat, the proposal was reminiscent of nothing so much as the downfall of the Roman Empire: “[P]art of the reason Rome fell,” he explained, “is because they started hiring the barbarians … to be troops in their own army.”
Elias says he thinks that’s probably not what most libertarians (or anyone else) thought Brat was all about and he’s probably right.
But some of us saw this coming. As I wrote in Salon last year:
[T]he one area where Brat diverges from a standard libertarian POV is the big flagship issue of his campaign: immigration. Libertarians traditionally believe in a loose, if not open, border policy and tend not to be hardcore immigrant bashers. It’s hard to know if Brat has a visceral objection to immigration as so many of his big-name supporters do or whether he genuinely objects simply because Big Business likes it. But he certainly knows how to talk the Tea Party talk:
Laura Ingraham: Are you a man who would separate a child from her mother or father and isn’t that a hard-hearted approach and a way that you’ll never grow the Republican Party or the conservative base. I mean it’s so mean. [The bigoted wingnut said sarcastically]
Brat: You hit it on the head, that is the crux of the issue and Eric Cantor is acting exactly like Obama and the Democrats basing public policy on emotion rather than reason. Just for starters, “making life work?” I mean the day you think the federal government and Caesar should make your life work, you’ve got a fundamental problem on your hands and you need to go re-read history books. Whenever you trust the federal government, federal governments do not love, they are incapable of love, so this emotional pitch that Caesar is going to take care of children is just completely irrational. Our founders knew much better. They wanted a contest of 50 states. And on the point you make about the passage of this great founding principle that children should not be punished, does that apply to all children across the globe that they somehow receive a right to be US citizens? And if that were true, that would mean all future DREAMers have a right to amnesty as every immigration law is bypassed and permanently void if you follow Eric’s logic.
I think you referred to it in the news, I know Mark Levin did last night, the Washington Times reported 60,000 kids are expected to cross the border at 225.00 a day per child., and big business gets the cheap labor that’s what they want, Eric Cantor’s their guy, but who has to pay the 225.00 a day per kids who are coming over the border in what some are calling a humanitarian crisis because Eric Cantor is sending all the wrong signals? … He wanted to put illegal immigrants into our military, which makes no sense. You’ll have non-citizens in one of the most key positions in our society, serving in the most honored spot.
He dog-whistled the Christian right with all that “Caesar” talk, winked at the anti-corporate populists, complained about costs to the taxpayers, genuflected to the military and blamed Eric Cantor for all of it. No wonder he won. He’s good. In fact, he ran a pretty textbook right-wing populist campaign, featuring an attack on “elites” (whom everyone hates these days) with a thinly veiled nativist appeal to national purity.
I’m not sure why so many people on the left and the right insisted that Brat’s anti-immigrant platform (and the national figures like Ingraham who swept into his district to support him and it) wasn’t the reason he won that seat. It certainly seemed obvious to me at the time that this was what fueled his campaign and that this was what that far right mid-term primary constituency was hearing that they liked. I’m sure they hate taxes and I’m sure they are sick of the current Washington scene like everyone else. But it takes something really visceral to get people to vote against a powerful congressman who is a national figure and a member of the leadership and it’s not something as abstract as “Wall Street.”
Xenophobia motivates the right at times like these and Brat brought it, big time. And he’s delivering. It turns out that’s what he really believes in, which makes him a true right wing believer.
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