Tag: Hungarian People’s Republic

The caravan itself — the way it's being portrayed in the media and manipulated by the president and his party, and the response to all of it on the part of the Democrats — encapsulates everything that's going wrong with politics in 2018. Let's take a look at three of the guilty parties here. The charlatan-demagogue in the White House Roughly 7,000 people (most of them Hondurans fleeing poverty and violence in their home country) are walking north through Mexico toward the southern American border over 1,000 miles away. This, says President Trump, constitutes a national emergency. Never mind that the caravan adds up to just 0.7 percent of the roughly 1 million people who will immigrate to the United States this year — or that there is zero evidence for Trump's race-baiting claims that "unknown Middle Easterners" are "mixed in" with the caravan. But treating a modestly sized group of people seeking to make a better life for themselves in the United States as some kind of existential threat to the country is both morally outrageous and an expression of world-historical cowardice on the part of the president. But it's a form of cowardice tailor made to appeal to timorous Trump supporters, and they appear to be responding appreciatively to the message. If those who favor a liberal immigration policy hope to prevail, they need to combine that position with an acceptance of the legitimacy of sovereignty and borders — with Americans consciously choosing to accept a high number of immigrants. But there's another reason as well. Put it all together, and we're left with a perfect storm of ugliness, civic breakdown, and dysfunction — with maximalist demagogues encouraging and empowering one another on either extreme, and no one standing up for a more sustainable and broad-based consensus on which a fair-minded and reasonable policy on the migrant caravan might be constructed.