GOP Foot-Shooting

Here we are, a half year after a big victory in the Ricci firefighter Supreme Court case, and exactly what has the GOP done to follow up on that? We're almost a half year out from President Obama being publicly humiliated by a Cambridge cop who dared to stand his ground, and what has the GOP learned from that?

In VDARE.com, "Boethius" makes some points I've made before about places like Chicago and California, where working class and middle class whites tend to wind up in government jobs minding NAMs, and thus voting Democratic:

Gross stupidity within the California GOP’s leadership is certainly part of the answer. But California’s rent-seeking public service unions provide another. What is left of California’s white working class is largely employed by the State and dependent on the largesse of the legislature’s Democratic majority.

I do not believe that the rank and file share the radically pro-immigration politics of their union leaders. Nor do I believe that they consciously welcome the growth of the immigrant population because they calculate it increases the demand for their services. (Why worry about such things if you can’t ever be fired?)

But it seems clear that their own natural inclinations on "social issues" like immigration, which should make them trend Republican, are outweighed by the pocketbook issue of keeping the gravy train on track.

Indeed, the success of the Democrats in dominating a state where they routinely act against the interest of the white working class may point the way to the "anti-Sailer Strategy"—a "California Strategy" if you will—in which permanent political domination by liberal Democrats is founded upon an “iron triangle” of special interests comprising

(1) wealthy whites whose lifestyles are subsidized by cheap labor in their businesses and back yards;

(2) Immigrants who cannot resist the liberal Democratic package of welfare for the working class and affirmative action for the middle class;

(3) Coddled public service unions led by radicals and populated by working class whites who have in effect been bribed into going along with an agenda set by folks who despise them.

The main impediment to widespread imitation of the California strategy is, well, the example of California. Sounds good in theory, but who can afford it?

The obvious wedge issue to get more white government workers to vote Republican is affirmative action. For example, consider yesterday's Vulcan Society court decision that the Fire Department of New York's hiring test was discriminatory because blacks and Hispanics did as badly on it relative to whites as blacks and Hispanics do on all tests relative to whites. That would be a great issue for Republicans to raise a stink about.

Why not side with the FDNY, who lost 343 men on 9/11?

And yet, it was the Bush Administration that filed the Vulcan discrimination lawsuit against the FDNY!

In the wake of Ricci, I wrote many thousands of words about Vulcan last summer, even finding a poster boy for anybody who wanted to run with the issue, a 23 year old New York fireman who passed the 1999 test and died on 9/11. But I don't see anybody on the right who picked up on this as an issue. Yet, the Vulcan case isn't about some obscure backwater that's easy to overlook, it's about the Fire Department of New York. And the case doesn't even have a forgettable name: it's called Vulcan. But who else is talking about it?

The current GOP strategy is offer the worst of both worlds for white government employees:

- We want to cut your pay.

- We want to give your jobs to less qualified NAMs.

You don't have to say we'll pay you more, but would it kill the GOP to take a stand on principle against racial quotas for firemen instead of trying to impose them like the Bush Administration did? Taking a stand on principle won't get the public service union leaders and it might not even get the union members, but it won't hurt with their relatives, friends, and neighbors.

It's just nuts for the GOP to be for quotas and against firemen. Quotas are a lot less popular than firemen.

Apparently, that's the way the modern GOP thinks: anything that has to do with the racial IQ gap, as in Ricci and Vulcan*, is completely off limits as an issue. Unfortunately, practically everything in public affairs touches in some way on that gap.

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* By the way, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis's decision in Vulcan is about nothing but the racial IQ gap and whether you are allowed to take account of it in America. Garaufis granted summary judgment for the Vulcan Society and the Justice Department without holding trial on the fact that there was a "statistically significant" racial gap in the results. Hilariously, he rejected New York City's defense that they had met the EEOC's notoriously stupid Fourth Fifths Rule (by rigging the test so that it was so easy that something like 70% of blacks and 85% of whites had passed).

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer