The left is doomed to lose on immigration and related if it continues to pretend — and it shows no sings of stopping — that there aren’t valid concerns with communities rapidly changing, and the related worries of long-time residents distressed by being displaced or just finding themselves navigating unfamiliar territory and then being told they are racist for wondering why they can’t live in their own neighborhood any longer.

Call it xenophobia, call it racism, call it what you like — I call it human nature.

I’m for fairly high levels of immigration, by the way.

The left is absolutely excellent at shooting itself in the foot (both feet, really) and on this issue is no different.

People would be far more accepting of immigration and immigrants if:

1) The left didn’t insist that everyone who expressed any doubts about anything any less than full open borders is a fiendish, crazed cackling racist.

2) The left didn’t insist on siding with neoliberalism on this, where the desire for immigration has nothing to do with compassion or self-determination, but rather with the aim of preventing wage gains and for busting labor.

Sure, the left is marginally better than the right. But with their current ideological and functional-level dimwittedness, they are bound to lose.

Just as they usually do.

What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so unnerving is its plausibility.

A lot of dystopian fiction is escapist, because it feels incredible in the older sense of that word. By contrast, The Handmaid’s Tale for the US is something that could happen in a few years, or sooner.

It’s probably easier to grasp the show deeply if you grew up among the Religious Right as I did — it’s clear that many liberals have no idea just how many of them there are and even less understanding of their true beliefs and how well the show in particular reflects them.

What makes the book work, and what makes the show even more affecting, is that it’d only take a few crises for America to look exactly like that — and most liberals would be just as complacent and unaware as even the protagonists are on the show. That is, until it is far too late.