The in response to two tweets I noticed:
On one level, these are both like “gotcha” tweets, implicitly claiming that J.D. Vance has accidentally advocated for more immigration. But I’m more interested in something else: what motivated Vance to make this claim?
Political statements can be evaluated in many different ways. You could see them as an expression of the politician’s opinion. But it is also worth thinking about why the statement was made. Politicians have many different views, but what determines which views are expressed in a political campaign?
It seems likely that successful politicians tend to put forward positions that they think will convince voters. Note that I am not commenting on the politician’s sincerity. Regardless of whether they believe “X is true” or do not believe X is true, they would not be inclined to campaign for “X is true” unless they think the message is effective.
In this particular case, I’m not particularly interested in what Vance believes. But I’m very interested What Vance believes the audience believes. The fact that Vance is making this argument in a campaign suggests that he believes the public does not view America as one of the richest countries in the world.
It would be interesting for a pollster to ask the public whether the US or China is the richer country. I suspect a significant portion of respondents would say “China” (although this is not a majority). Of course the US is many times richer.
Here’s another good question. “Is the US adhering to international trade laws while other countries cheat?” Again, I expect a lot of wrong answers. (Yes, we cheat a lot.)
It seems to me that when the public is optimistic about the state of the country, the ideology of nationalism has less appeal. If you go back to a period when the US was clearly number one, say 1965, the public mood was quite positive for the global institutions. If the public believes that other countries are ahead of the US, especially if they believe that other countries are cheating to get ahead, then the public is likely to become much more nationalistic.
A few months ago I did made a message pointing out the strange fact that the US was the country that had accepted the most immigrants and was also the richest country. Taken literally, Vance’s statement could be essentially identical to my post. However, despite the use of the term ‘if’, this is the clear implication of his statement that the US is not the richest country. But at least Vance and I agree on one thing: one fact implies another. We agree that the correlation between America’s high immigration rate and America’s position on the list of the richest countries in the world is likely causal.
Now we just have to find out whether America is indeed a very rich country or not.