Should Republicans Be More Explicitly Racist?

How opposition to immigration leads to economic collectivism

As I’ve previously written, Groyperization on everything but the Jews has already occurred on the right. That leads to the question of what we do from here. We basically have a mainstream conservative movement that is motivated by implicit white nationalism, being challenged by an insurgency that is explicitly white nationalist. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that people who stress identitarian concerns will often be very flexible with economic arguments. Often, they end up agreeing with the left on economic issues, because that is the easiest way to make nativist arguments in a relatively non-offensive way.

One of the main things that differentiates pro-market and anti-market thinkers is the degree to which each side believes that market processes are zero-sum. Socialists tend to assume that there are fixed amounts of jobs and resources, and politics revolves around fighting over who gets what. Capitalism rests on the idea that trade generally makes both parties better off, and we can set things up so that everyone gets wealthier in the long run. The entire history of the progress of our species is one long advertisement for how the capitalists are right and the socialists are wrong.

People always feel the need to argue that their preferred policies will make others in society better off in tangible ways. Even postliberals who stress that things other than GDP matter will when they can argue that their preferred policies improve living standards. They get to have it both ways, making economic arguments when convenient and retreating to “we’re a nation, not an economy” when things go wrong.

When opposing low-skilled immigration, to appeal to economic self-interest you can argue about welfare use and crime. But you can’t make that case for H-1B recipients, so in order to have any materialist reason at all for opposition, you need to invoke the lump of labor fallacy. In this view, each new arrival robs an American of his livelihood. People who find such arguments convincing, however, will tend to apply them more widely, and end up with worse economic views about everything. Labor unions, high minimum wage laws, banning new forms of technology, and other restrictions on commerce all rest on the exact same theory.

This leads to the question of whether explicit racism is preferable, because it helps avoid this problem. We must be very careful here, as adopting such a strategy would involve playing with fire. There are culture- and vibes-based reasons to remain opposed to explicit racism, and these mitigate some of the benefits of bringing subconscious motivations out into the open. Nonetheless, I prefer a more honest discussion in the end, because that’s the only way to stop right-wing politics from being forever dominated by fights over in which direction to channel subconscious racism.

There’s a question of whether to refer to the identity politics dominating the right as “nativist” or “racist.” I think racist gets at something more fundamental about what is going on here. It ties together the fact that people most hostile to civil rights and DEI and who want tougher crime policies – I’m sympathetic to these perspectives – also reject immigration. These positions all being linked doesn't make sense in terms of traditional ideological categories. I’m personally opposed to DEI because it involves interfering with market forces, and involves government prioritizing certain people over others on account of race. I also am favorably inclined towards immigration for similar reasons. But find someone taking an aggressive anti-DEI posture, and the vast majority of the time he thinks there have been too many new arrivals to the United States in recent years.

A concern with whites being threatened by nonwhites in terms of physical safety, status, or material interests is the thread that unites these positions. At a common sense level, I think we all get that an Indian with a heavy accent is going to face much more hostility in a deep-red rural county than a recent German arrival, holding behavior and class status constant. This is true even if, when you enact policies that make it more difficult to renew visas, the white foreigner suffers as much as everyone else. When I use “racist” here, then, understand that the concept is tangled with nativism in complicated ways, though I think the term is a good shorthand for the collection of attitudes discussed below.

Another reason to say “racial” rather than “cultural” concerns is that I see practically no evidence that the vast majority of groups are not assimilating extremely well. In Europe, there are cultural barriers between natives and Muslims, so there you can talk about non-racial reasons for being a restrictionist. In the US, however, changing racial demographics is the key to nativism. It may be in Europe too, but the European nativist has more plausible deniability about what his motivations are.

The Libertarian-to-Racist-to-Socialist Pipeline

It’s notable that when the race question in the US was thought of in terms of blacks and whites, right-wing populism supported Ronald Reagan and the Tea Party. The welfare state was seen as taking from whites to give to undeserving minorities. But as people woke up to demographic change in the 2010s — some of it due to liberal gloating in the aftermath of the 2012 election — the old arguments wouldn’t do. Immigrants usually come here to work. Some benefit from welfare, but the nativists couldn’t ignore the fact that this didn’t apply to newcomers above a certain skill level. It also for the most part doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants, who are barred from many kinds of government benefits. So if your worldview is shaped by racial resentment — and this has always been the heart of right-wing populism — then you had to come up with a new theory of economics. Before, people who didn’t work were freeloaders. Now, those who have jobs are hurting others because they’re competition in the labor market.

This has profound cultural impacts on the right. It makes work itself the problem. The intellectual and moral quality of the movement declines, as “work harms society, but only when it’s done by foreigners” is the kind of argument that mostly appeals to stupid people and grifters. The oppositional culture, the scams, and the Based Ritual all follow from this.

Immigrants therefore commit harms both when they work and when they don’t. Complaints that they compete for housing coexist with gripes that they build too much of it. There’s nothing new arrivals can do to make nativists happy other than stay out. I think switching the focus on racial issues from blacks to immigrants made right-wingers sympathetic to economic statism more generally, and even more hostile to ideas like individual liberty and personal responsibility.

One of the more interesting aspects of his interview with Tucker was when Fuentes said he started out as a Ron Paul supporter who believed in limited government. Eventually, with Trump’s rise it dawned on him that minorities would not support the same principles, they were mostly voting Democrat, and there was a need to restrict immigration. I kind of doubt Fuentes was ever really motivated by concerns over the Constitution or limited government. He was just imbibing the respectable form of racial politics of the pre-Trump era.

This is actually similar to my own political development, simply delayed by about a half decade or so. Free market economics simply made sense to me, and I agreed with those like Ann Coulter who argued that if conservatives lost on the immigration issue, they would lose on everything else. In a racially diverse society, groups that on average did worse off would reject the capitalist system and support redistribution.

This view eventually became untenable, as immigrants started to vote Republican. The day after the 2024 election, I published an article called “Time to Retire ‘Demographics Is Destiny.’” At the same time, white Republican voters started eating up the economically collectivist rhetoric of politicians like Trump and Vance, as long as it was given a right-wing gloss. I don’t know how you can think Ibram X Kendi is a malevolent force in our politics and culture and then not be disgusted by the way the vice president talks about Appalachia. Vance is such a dangerous figure because he’s selling not only misguided policies, but spiritual poison. Ironically, this is something he understood clearly at the time he wrote his memoir.

Clearly, there was never anything special about whites that made them uniquely inclined towards loving capitalism, and the whites who believed in racial identity were those most hostile to it within the conservative coalition. No population likes capitalism and markets! The polling data is clear on this. The public is tribal and largely goes off vibes, and elite culture shapes the kinds of choices they face on Election Day. Argentines elected nationalistic socialists forever and then picked Milei. Demographics is not destiny because the average voter of every race is not informed and thoughtful enough to have a consistent ideology, and so what really matters is how elites think about and frame these issues.

When it became clear to me that racism and support for capitalism didn’t fit well together, I chose markets. Most people who were young and right wing in the early-to-mid 2010s chose racism, as that was always the underlying motivation of their politics. The logic of the movement, along with the human capital decline, has therefore turned conservatism more and more towards economic collectivism.

The Libertarian-to-Racist pipeline of the pre-Trump era goes back decades, and at one point had a certain logic to it. In 1992, Murray Rothbard, one of the most important libertarian philosophers of the twentieth century, threw his support behind David Duke, arguing that there was

nothing in Duke’s current program that could not also be embraced by paleo-conservatives or paleo-libertarians: lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what is wrong with any of that?

Interesting that Rothbard doesn’t mention immigration here when talking about Duke, which shows how off the radar it was. Even when covering the most famous white nationalist of that era, the main racial topics people discussed were all coded as black issues.

In recent years, another pipeline has emerged, which goes Racist-to-Socialist. David Duke in the early 1990s framed his worldview in terms of the Reaganite revolution. Yet the GOP establishment had always been friendly to immigration and trade, while having an uneasy to hostile relationship with black activists who called for more government spending and racial preferences. Given that Republican leaders justified openness to the world in economic terms, a new generation of identitarian activists beginning in the late aughts and early 2010s started to separate itself from the mainstream by attacking libertarian economics. They were inspired by writers like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, who were conventional right-wingers in many ways but opposed trade and immigration, and were more strident than mainstream conservatives in being opposed to affirmative action and other forms of anti-white discrimination.

Conservatives today want to oppose immigration, but can’t be as honest as Nick Fuentes about their racial motivations, so they pretend that their views have a basis in material concerns. When trying to be respectable, this turns into discussions about how newcomers “lower wages” and “compete for jobs.” As mentioned, adopting such a perspective would indicate that you should also be against trade and automation, since foreign workers abroad and robots also compete with workers. Vance makes a distinction between competition from machines and competition from humans, considering the former good and the latter bad, even though it makes no sense.

But other people who have more of a need for intellectual consistency won’t do that, and instead argue that all competition for wages is bad, which in effect turns into a rejection of technological progress and ultimately the underlying logic of capitalism itself. Josh Hawley advocates that AI companies should have to file a report every time their technology costs a job, and demands that humans always be in control of self-driving cars. The Republican Party has become much friendlier to labor unions as it has become more nativist. And Trump has found it easy to convince the Republican base of his crank views about trade being a zero-sum contest because they’re used to thinking about foreigners as taking opportunities that should be their own.

Around 2015, bashing libertarian economics was a way to signal you were “based” on identity questions. Over time, however, the conservative coalition began to adopt the ideas of economic statism on their own terms as the rhetoric became reality. Now there are all kinds of economic cranks within the Republican coalition, since no mainstream economists accept the idea that trade and immigration are things to be avoided, much less that they’re the main threats to the material interests of Americans.

I don’t know if Peter Navarro is motivated by identitarian concerns, but his bizarre views on trade have been welcomed in an administration driven by hostility towards foreigners. Today, MAGA intellectuals are influenced by writers like Michael Lind, whose underlying principle appears to be friendliness toward economic populism, in contrast to individuals like Stephen Miller, who are mostly concerned with identity issues but will adopt economic populist arguments in order to justify expelling foreigners. Lind seems to see the entire economy as a kind of conspiracy of the rich and professional class against noble and innocent workers. Postliberals think similarly, but in their case the motivations are more theocratic than racial, and they have less power than the nativists since their views have a much weaker grounding in public opinion. At an institutional level, American Compass was formed to reverse engineer intellectual justifications for the kind of anti-foreigner bias that has been key to Trump’s political rise. Its ideas are not taken seriously by real economists on either side of the political spectrum, but it is able to exist because it has invented its own alternative version of the field where contact with people from other countries is the cause of all the nation’s ills.

Selling Openness as the Based Position

A person who is honest about their motivations can simply oppose immigration and otherwise have sensible opinions on trade, letting technology replace jobs, and labor unions. Someone who feels the need to justify his distaste for having foreigners around on economic grounds, in contrast, ends up holding a wide range of irrational views on these topics. Nativists sometimes approvingly cite Bernie Sanders saying that Open Borders is a Koch brothers plot, implying that he’s a liberal who gets it. This is funny, as they usually understand that Bernie Sanders is out of his mind on economic issues, so it’s weird that they would start approvingly citing his worldview only on this particular topic. Hostility to immigration as a source of wage competition makes sense from Sanders’ perspective, since he rejects markets and believes in the lump of labor fallacy. But this is an illogical position to take for a party that pretends to believe in capitalism.

People on the right who complain about H-1B visas simply don’t like Indians and don’t want them around. We know this because there is perhaps no other issue on which all the facts and logic are on one side of the debate. My argument to racists is that even if you hate Indians, you should hate being poorer and dying of cancer or suffering from Alzheimer’s more. We can accept that our fellow citizens have tribal attachments, but be honest with them about what the costs of indulging those preferences are. US economic gains over Europe have been overwhelmingly concentrated in the tech sector, which has been built in large part by immigrants. This is exactly what you would expect from a dynamic industry, since most of the talented people in the world are likely to have grown up outside the United States. Anything great humans do from now on is going to require the best talent in the world getting to the most productive places.

The countries in the world that have best handled immigration are the Gulf Arab states. This is true both from the perspective of helping their own citizens, and the humanitarian impacts of their policies. They let in large numbers of migrants who work, but don’t give them citizenship rights and have zero tolerance for crime or social dysfunction. You therefore get the economic gains from immigration, but without the harms that often accompany newcomers in terms of how they vote and effects on public safety. It is interesting that the people who get this issue most right are from one of the least liberal major cultures in the world. Gulf Arabs are selfish and therefore end up being among the world’s greatest humanitarians as a result. I was amused to learn from Bryan Caplan that if you talk to their government leaders, they think they’re exploiting newcomers, but celebrate that fact.

Regardless, their systems work, and in the long run Western societies should try to move towards something similar. There’s no way you can do that, however, if people continue believing that foreigners working is itself what harms natives. This is the kind of lie you need to sell if you want to find non-racist reasons to oppose immigration.

I prefer arguing about facts over values, because I think facts are either true or false, while values are subjective. Tribal instincts run deep, and I doubt that you can talk people out of them most of the time. If I were going to sell Groypers on higher levels of immigration, my pitch would go something like this.

Guys, you’re totally right. We should care about the well being of white Americans first and foremost. And I’ve got some good news. There are literally billions of people out there who live on a few dollars a day. They would do anything to be here. And I mean anything. You can have your own butler and servants on your middle-manager at Walmart salary. Imagine how good it would feel to live like a British Lord. And the women, my God. Girls born here won’t even look at you unless they’re obese. You see how hot those Filipinas are, right? Well the average man in their country is 5’4. You’re a wealthy giant to them! Let’s do this. Don’t worry about crime. If they do so much as jaywalk they’re completely gone. We’ll make sure they never vote either. America First!

And then maybe liberals and libertarians can snicker in the background because you’ve tricked rightists into adopting the world’s greatest humanitarian policy by framing it as based. Nothing in that statement is a lie. I looked up the average height of Filipino men and everything. It’s just a testament to the degree to which false beliefs, not bad values, are the problem in the world. You can have a policy that is better from the perspectives of both global humanitarianism and looking out for the well being of white Americans. It just requires rejecting false economic views.

Conservatives, if they were pursuing an enlightened form of self-interest, would be thinking about how to use the fact that the world is full of poor people desperate to improve their condition to their collective advantage, whether they consider their in-group to be whites or all Americans. They can go ahead and compete on policy preferences in a Based Ritual sort of way.

Even if turning the US into a giant UAE isn’t feasible, admitting the true motivations behind immigration restrictionism will at least limit the economic damage that such attitudes can do. Pro-lifers are part of the Republican coalition, but few feel the need to connect opposition to abortion to their ideas about trade. It’s different with immigration, where since people don’t feel they can be honest about their own motivations, they need to adopt an entire worldview that touches on countless aspects of public policy.

The main reason I believe racists are bad isn’t necessarily the racism. It’s rather that lying about their racism makes them into economic leftists, and therefore threatening to human progress.

The Republicans are already a white nationalist party. The only question now is whether there are benefits to conservatives continuing to delude themselves about this fact.

Potential Dangers

There are of course real dangers to destigmatizing racism. Forcing people to come up with non-racist arguments for their positions might keep those who are particularly deranged outside the tent. Just the act of making up an economic reason for why you don’t want foreigners around might indicate some pro-social instincts and ability to be shamed.

By not letting conservatives be open racists – that is, continuing to isolate Groypers and self-identified white nationalists – maybe you end up with worse economic views, but make up for it by having fewer sadists and psychopaths. The people most comfortable arguing for explicit racism seem deranged. A person with subconscious tribal instincts who feels ashamed about it, in contrast, might otherwise be a good person.

Of course, if explicit racism takes over the right, it may be so repulsive to normal people that Republicans become a permanent minority party until they reform. In that case, we would have to worry less about its moral corruption.

Maybe we decide that enough of the American people dislike different races around, so that would justify restricting low-skill immigration. But I think the benefits of high-skill immigration, with a broad definition of high-skill, are so overwhelming that one needs to have a deranged value system in order to be opposed to it if you understand the underlying economics correctly. And yes, that includes H-1B recipients, and this would be true even if they were only slightly above average compared to the American population.

Maybe 10% or 20% of the public will vote to have a white country that only makes its own stuff regardless of how poor it makes us or how much it hurts scientific and technological innovation. This is basically the position of the government of North Korea. But the reason that nativists have to keep making economic arguments is that most people will not explicitly accept a massive decline in living standards to indulge cultural or racial preferences.

My bet is that if explicit racism is brought out into the open, it will be defeated. One does not need to argue nativists out of their preferences regarding what the country looks like. Rather, point out that the arguments they use to try to win people over are clearly pretexts and don’t make any sense. For conservatives, you can note that if they’re going to believe in populist economics they need to go full statist to maintain logical consistency. And if they decide that in that case markets are bad, then it becomes an easy decision to support the left, since the two sides will be similar in their economic thinking but one of them at the very least will be smarter and less racist. Hopefully, forcing the racists out in the open will help defeat them within the Republican Party before we get to that point.

In the end, this is the pragmatic case for explaining the underlying motivations behind nativist arguments. If it is worth restricting immigration, we need to get to a place where we can have a real conversation about the costs and benefits of doing so. Some groups have very high rates of crime and welfare dependency, and this is something we should be able to talk about. Yet we must also say that others make a massive contribution to the country, and people who want to keep them out are driven by little more than ignorance and hate. Whatever we end up doing on immigration, in a more honest world the overwhelming emotional resonance that this issue has with conservatives will not end up infecting every other debate.