The Numbers Game

There's only so many ways to skin a cat or win an election. Like gambling, you don't just take the easy money, you look for the big score. The Republicans have always taken the easy money, setting up their own dime store New Deal after losing to FDR and Truman, setting up affirmative action and HMOs after JFK and LBJ; scoring short term political victories and long term defeats.

As we speak, a small horde of consultants and would-be consultants is urging the Republican Party to take the easy money of amnesty, tax hikes and anything else that will make them an inoffensive version of last election's Democratic Party. And if any of that is followed by a victory, then the consultants order an expensive bottle of wine and the left goes on planning another big score.

The key to winning the game is in the numbers. Demographics.

The weakness of the kind of state that Western liberals love to set up, the one with 4-day workweeks where everyone is either in a university or a union, where no one goes to church or synagogue, where having more than 2 kids is frowned on and retirement can be had before your hair goes white, is that it demographically trends conservative. Not necessarily what most conservatives think of as being conservative, but nevertheless those retired 60-year olds who have one daughter named Inga and take four vacations a year, don't much like change. They don't like America, Israel, banks, war, monarchy and a lot of the things that the left expects them not to like; but they also form societies that lack the left's radical appetite for change.

Older societies trend conservative. And a low birth rate means that the society will be old and the growth in children will come from more traditional households. Those children can be broken down in the mandatory public education system and influenced through cultural dementia, but the long run prospects don't look good for the left. Eventually you end up with a society where everyone expects to retire at 55, even though there aren't enough younger workers to take their place, and half of those potential younger workers are getting useless advanced degrees or dreaming of moving to America, while the other half are joining some revivalist religious movement. And that's a bad deal either way.

The left's utopias are not only economically unsustainable (what else is new) but also politically and demographically unsustainable. The economics can't be fixed, but the politics and demographics can. As with all of the left's solutions, they involve finding ways of making things much, much worse. And their answer to the demographic and political problem is immigration. Bring in young people from elsewhere who will have lots of kids and vote the straight slanted ticket. Preferably the kind who won't get along with the locals and will be taught to constantly complain about racism, even though back where they're from, racism was as accepted as daylight drug deals and beheadings.

Bring them in, run their kids through the same system, add a few holidays to the calendar, enjoy the new ethnic foods and hopefully teach their kids to stop having so many kids if they want to retire at 55 and fill their house with knickknacks from their vacations in Greece and Brazil. And then fill the new gap with more immigrants. It's a plan that makes as much economic sense as the European Union and is twice as sustainable. After all lots of people in the world want free health care and a passport from a country that won't collapse into a murderous civil war when the price of bread goes through the minaret.

And if the assimilation program doesn't work, well then you only have to bring in half as many immigrants next time around, because all those countries you brought those immigrants from are now in your own country. Saves on jet fuel and coast guards. Not to mention language lessons, though it usually turns out that you need them anyway because your excellent schools no longer seem to be doing such a good job of teaching your own language and what used to be your language is now an argot composed of the languages of your immigrants and bits of your own language processed into the fake street slang of rap stars. And before you know it, you're using it too.

It's a dead end. It's Rome with the barbarians sorting through the loot. It's China when the wall fell. It's Byzantium when the Bedouin raiders poured through and began the centuries long process of tearing apart Middle Eastern Christianity, that Islam wrapped up. It's the long fall of civilization into night with a bloody pension and a hell of a retirement plan lost somewhere in the middle of a pile of broken marble columns.

But it keeps the left alive. Without diversity, the left is a bunch of corpulent unions protecting their pensions while the young people look at brochures of London and Los Angeles and finish their fourth degree. Without it, the left eventually dries up, blows away in the wind and dies after running a few protests against austerity and then has to implement it anyway.

Diversity isn't a moral principle. It's oxygen for a dead movement. It's the only way that the left can stay alive long enough to fulfill the accidental mission of every parasite by killing its host. It's the numbers game and as long as the left can cobble together these coalitions built on the backs of immigrants and tied together with community associations and piles of free stuff, then it can go on squatting on a society, dipping its proboscis in the sweet nectar of wealth and power, and then when the nectar runs out, switching to sipping its blood.

The left needs immigration to run its numbers game. It needs immigration to survive. It needs immigration to force further change on societies that would be static if left to their own devices. It needs immigration to provide it with a permanently disadvantaged working class from an infinite supply of billions. It needs to make its own failed society fail in new ways by injecting other failed societies into it.

Play the diversity of numbers and the kids stop dreaming of London and LA and start hanging out at clubs where diversity seems to make life more exciting. The declining native upper class and the immigrant working class shake hands over the bodies of the native working class and the whole broken train rumbles forward into the night.

But this numbers game depends on no opposition party emerging to represent the people left out of this arrangement. And there are two kinds of opposition parties. The cheerfully capitalist party whose leaders have gone to all the right schools and are obscenely enthusiastic about bringing some fresh blood into the country. And the other kind. The ones who aren't interested in fresh blood.

The opposition party and its composition doesn't matter that much until the crunch kicks in. That is what happens when economic unsustainability begins to outrace all the imaginary numbers and the accounting tricks that involve selling debt in exchange for debt and building all the debt into a tall house of debt cards and the knives come out and the sacrifices begin. And like all cannibal feasts, it's a question of who gets cut and who does the cutting.

The unofficial cutting order on the left, after everything else has been drained, the rich have fled to their tax havens and small businesses sell things that fell off trucks on the way to the government giveaway, is native pensions, immigrant benefits and then their own salaries. The natives will howl, of course, but the question is will they be able to do anything more than howl.

The left can control the table but democracy is also a number. The right amount of votes can change the nature of the game entirely. It's all a question of thinking long term and planning for the right moment, instead of the right sellout. Compromises don't win elections, strategic tactical grievances do. And then when the moment comes, the overton window opens, the grievance gets hurled and the game changes.

The difference between the left and the right is that the left has a five-year plan and the right has a five-second plan. The left knows what it's going to do four years from now when the numbers look even worse than they do today. But what is the right going to do? Run another cheerful capitalist who promises to use his Olympics experience to fix the economy, but never really seizes those grievances and goes for the throat? That's what the left is counting on.

And until then maybe it's time to serve up some more amnesty. Because who can have just one portion of a delicious demographic treat like unsustainable economics fused with millions of free votes?

No game is unwinnable. But you have to know the odds and play to win. Demographics, like all other games, is winnable, but you have to know how to play the game.