First there’s what Glenn Reynolds wrote and he would know:

The GOP establishment has an almost-religious attachment to open immigration. It appears to be their only firm principle. It’s what led to Trump’s rise.

And then there are the three top rated comments. First:

“It appears to be their only firm principle.”
GOP principles:
1. Have contempt for conservative voters.
2. Go after conservative members of Congress ruthlessly, but treat Democrats with respect.
3. Do whatever it takes to win the love of the main stream media.
4. Always believe in more government.
5. Immigration, immigration, immigration.

Second:

Get replaced by a foreigner brought in to do your job and see how you feel. You expect people to vote to give their jobs to cheaper immigrants?

And third:

I dislike Trump, and I distrust whatever his politics are. That said, I believe him on the immigration issue, which as we are seeing in Europe, is existential.

That’s it. Says it all. The party of closed borders will win the election but if it weren’t for Trump, no such party would exist.

There is now talk of Newt Gingrich as Trump’s Chief of Staff. And Chris Christie has endorsed Trump for President. So slowly – very, very slowly – there is a drift towards seeing the point. How abysmal every alternative is.

This is from Peggy Noonan via Instapundit. The last time she wrote something I truly agreed with may have been when Ronald Reagan was still president. But here I think she gets it. I am part of that buffered few but I also have a sense of how things change rapidly and I worry endlessly, and probably fruitlessly, about how things may end up. It may be too late, but then again maybe not.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that. . . . You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

These are the progressive internationalists who are ruining the world on behalf of their one-world open borders ideology. Europe is now the most advanced experiment with Southern California a close runner up. But unlike some experiments, this only goes in one direction. If it turns out not to work, there is nothing you can do to fix it.

The quote is from an article at Reason.com aimed at Donald Trump. But in spite of the author’s aversion to common sense, the article is quite interesting, coming as it does with the following title, How Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump. You are advised to read it all, but this gets to the essence of the matter. I will say here that the author seems blinded by his own prejudices but notwithstanding any of that, he was still able to work some of this out:

College students and Trump supporters, have at least something in common: both groups are plagued by legitimate economic anxieties: middle-class job losses and burdensome loan debt, for example. But the argument can certainly be made that these concerns are trumped (pardon the pun) by cultural issues, at least as evidenced by the priorities of both groups. And when it comes to the culture wars, they are on opposite sides.

The masses of people who show up at rallies for Trump—and have propelled him to Republican frontrunner status—are thought to be uneducated, coarse, and intolerant of immigrants [zero out of three in my case]. College students, on the other hand, are so tolerant their tolerance is borderline oppressive. Trump’s backers despise the political correctness of liberal elites: students think liberal elites are closet reactionaries who disdain leftist goals and refuse to nominate black actors and actresses for Oscars. The two groups might possess a shared distrust of social progress—Trump people, because it’s happening too quickly, and student protesters, because it’s not happening quickly enough—but they are on opposite ends of that fight, and virtually all others.

Not every college student is a SJW, and libertarians and conservatives least of all. Trump does have policies that make sense, although if you start from the standard presuppositions of our present much deformed age, you will have no idea what they are or how much sense they make. But it is very nice to see that even on an American university campus, Donald Trump’s message is able to get through at least to some.

Via Instapundit who, by the way, chose the following quote to highlight the article:

“For these students, Trump is not the leader of a political movement, but rather, a countercultural icon. To chant his name is to strike a blow against the ruling class on campus—the czars of political correctness—who are every bit as imperious and loathsome to them as the D.C.-GOP establishment is to the working class folks who see Trump as their champion.”

We working class folk have got to go somewhere, and to Trump we are now going, along with the occasional anti-PC student, and then some others like Rudy Giuliani and Art Laffer.