Against the Wall

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

A provocative take from economist Noah Smith: “The GOP had a golden opportunity to become a multiracial majority party and destroy the left for two generations, and instead they turned things over to the Claremont Nazis.”

 

I disagree. Mostly.

 

Faulting a party led by Donald Trump for “turning things over” to fascists would be like faulting a party led by Bernie Sanders for “turning things over” to socialists. There was no bait and switch; fascism was always the plan.

 

Postliberals care only about empowering postliberalism, and of course Trump cares only about empowering Trump. Neither gives a rip about empowering the party to which they belong simply because they belong to it. What would they gain by destroying the left for two generations if doing so required them to subordinate their own priorities?

 

Ask the “Claremonsters” privately whether they’d prefer to be governed by Democrats or by Republicans who have disowned postliberalism, and they’ll take the Democrats every time, I suspect. After all, the worse the centrist wing of the right fares at the polls, the more willing Republican voters should be to give right-wing authoritarians a fresh hearing.

 

That was the lesson of the 2016 presidential primary. And it’s been the point of the GOP “hostage crisis,” in which postliberals threaten to boycott their party if they don’t get to call the tune on policy, ever since.

 

Smith is wrong in a second way. For all their faults, and there are many, postliberals aren’t chiefly to blame for the GOP squandering its shot at a durable majority. The war in Iran and its ruinous effect on oil prices are the main culprits in the looming Republican wipeout, and it ain’t the Tucker Carlson wing of the right that egged that on.

 

In fact, at last check, Tucker was calling on the president’s Cabinet to seize power from him under the 25^th Amendment, alleging that Trump’s threats of a nuclear attack on Iran are evidence that he’s non compos mentis. Given how unpopular Trump and his war have become, I’d guess that a multiracial majority agrees with Carlson about that.

 

I do agree with Smith in a sense, though. There’s an important area of policy in which Republicans held an electoral advantage in 2024, could have maintained that advantage by simply sticking with their traditional position, and have now seen that advantage squandered by postliberal fanaticism.

 

It’s not trade. The president’s tariffs have assuredly cost the GOP votes, but Trump-style protectionism isn’t the traditional Republican position.

 

It’s not intervening militarily overseas. That is a traditional Republican position, but it sure isn’t advantageous at the polls in a post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan world. Plus, as I said, the only thing arguably fanatical about the postliberal position on war with Iran is the vehemence with which they oppose it.

 

It’s not fiscal responsibility either. That too is a traditional GOP position and Trump has done everything possible to destroy voters’ trust in Republicans over it, but it’s hard to pin his profligacy on postliberalism. Despite J.D. Vance’s best efforts to get people excited about paying moms not to work, the Trumpist base has always been animated by culture war issues, not right-wing socialism.

 

Besides, some of the president’s most notorious spending moves don’t jibe with the postliberal agenda. Cutting Medicaid from working-class whites under the One Big Beautiful Bill while demanding a mind-boggling $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon is not the stuff of which America First dreams are made.

 

The issue where postliberals have blown it for the GOP is immigration.

 

The albatross.

 

Paul LePage served two terms as governor of Maine and is running for a House seat in that state this year. Sometimes described as “Trump before Trump,” he proved that loose-cannon right-wing populism could win at the polls before you-know-who entered politics. Like any politician in that vein, he has made illegal immigration one of his favorite targets—although he could be slippery on the subject in the past as his electoral needs required.

 

This week he had a new complaint about immigrants. He thinks we’re deporting the wrong ones.

 

“My son’s wife’s dad is here legally,” he said during a press conference. “But he’s being deported because he came from a country that’s not liked by certain people in Washington. That’s not right.” Noting that his in-law has a work permit, LePage couldn’t understand why removing him is a higher priority than removing “people in the gangs and criminals.” Of all the cases of leopards eating people’s faces since January 2025, few faces have deserved to be eaten more than his.

 

Reading that, you might wonder whether LePage’s electoral needs are once again making him slippery on immigration. He’s a blue-state Republican running in a tough environment, so he’s moderating opportunistically on a key issue before an election, right? It’s not just LePage, though: Some red-state Republicans have also begun pivoting to the center on immigration.

 

The most buzzworthy example is Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who cut an ad last week in which she addressed Trump directly and said, “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. … The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” Trump took 57 percent of the vote in her district two years ago.

 

He won the same share statewide in Kansas, yet both of that state’s Republican senators complained publicly a few days ago about ICE executing warrants in southwest Kansas without coordinating with local law enforcement. One of them, Jerry Moran, relayed reassurances from the Trump administration that only “individuals who have been charged with criminal activities” have been targeted.

 

Moran isn’t on the ballot in November, but his colleague, Roger Marshall, is. The latest major poll of the state has him trailing his Democratic opponent by 2 points. In Kansas.

 

God only knows what sort of internal polls he and Salazar are seeing that have moved them to distance themselves from ICE. But if the GOP drowns in a blue wave in November, particularly in normally red states with large Hispanic populations like Florida and Texas, a major subplot in the aftermath will be the political damage done by Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign. The script writes itself: Postliberals wanted nonwhite immigrants expelled indiscriminately, they sacrificed rudimentary professional standards to get their wish, and their reward was a Democratic wipeout.

 

The White House knows the issue has become a liability, too. Lately, ICE has largely—but by no means entirely—avoided the sort of goon-squad muscle-flexing that it demonstrated earlier this year in Minneapolis, when I warned that its tactics were going to discredit immigration enforcement. But it’s too late. Whereas 53 percent of Americans trusted Trump on immigration in November 2024 versus 46 percent who didn’t, by July that split had turned to 41-58. A Politico poll taken in August found nearly a quarter of Trump’s own voters believe the “mass deportation” effort has been too aggressive. Among those who described themselves as “non-MAGA,” 31 percent said so.

 

It’s true that Trump campaigned on “mass deportation,” not on deporting the criminals first. It’s also true that most Americans nonetheless support deporting the criminals first, or even deporting only the criminals, despite the president’s preferences. Immigration is like tariffs in that regard: Trump was candid with the electorate about his intentions, they voted for him anyway, and now they’ve discovered that his intentions are stupid or malicious. They’ll have a chance in six weeks to do something about it. They look poised to take it.

 

And so we might refine Noah Smith’s point this way: The GOP had a golden opportunity to establish itself as the “responsible” party on immigration for two generations, and instead it turned things over to Stephen Miller. The icing on the cake will come if and when Trump deputizes ICE to harass Hispanics at the polls in November. That ought to finish off whatever benefit of the doubt persuadable voters have been giving him and his party about the virtues of beefed-up border enforcement.

 

What now?

 

Compromise?

 

My editor reminded me this morning that we’ve seen this movie before. The GOP wins a momentous victory on a divisive issue, as Trump did by besting Democrats on immigration in 2024; Republicans blow their advantage by acting waaaaay too aggressively in the aftermath; and voters punish them for it by spanking them at the polls.

 

That’s the story of abortion, of course. Restricting abortion finally became legally feasible in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Despite strong public opposition to that decision, a number of red states turned around and passed strict bans instead of meeting the majority where it was with more modest regulations. Voters reacted by turning out in force to defeat state referendums aimed at limiting abortion, then squelched the expected Republican midterm wave by holding the GOP to a measly nine-seat pickup in the House and a one-seat loss in the Senate.

 

A funny thing has happened since then, though. The two parties have, sort of, compromised on the issue.

 

It’s the coldest of cold peaces, but the leadership on both sides appears sufficiently satisfied with the status quo on abortion that neither wants to disturb it. Trump was plainly spooked by the 2022 backlash and has steered away from any federal crackdown; not only has the FDA not moved to ban “abortion pills” like mifepristone from the market, it approved a generic version of the drug last year. The easy availability of the pills and the rise of “telemedicine” have made it simple for women to dodge state bans. The result, per best estimates, is that abortions in the U.S. have increased slightly since the end of Roe.

 

Republicans don’t want to poke the bear by revisiting the issue. And Democrats seemingly see little need to take it up, as issues like affordability and the war are more fruitful electoral targets. If women remain largely free to terminate their pregnancies at home and GOP lawmakers are comfortable with that, there’s little reason for their opponents to pick a fight.

 

Might we reach a similar compromise on immigration if the blue wave crashes down on the GOP this fall?

 

The political stars would seem to have aligned. Democrats lost the trust of voters in 2024 by being too soft on enforcement, and Republicans appear to have lost the trust of voters in 2026 by being too hard on it. The obvious consensus that would serve both parties is that aggressive efforts should be made to deport criminals; restricting illegal entries at the border should remain a high priority while removing noncriminal illegal immigrants should be a low one; and ICE should be radically reformed to reprofessionalize the force. In short, the left gives up on “open borders” and the right gives up on “mass deportation.”

 

If nothing else, the emergence of Hispanics as a crucial swing bloc in 2024 and 2026 might incentivize the two sides to move toward the middle. Democrats discovered to their dismay two years ago that a Republican could come within 5 points of winning that group despite running on the strictest anti-immigrant platform in modern American history. Republicans are about to discover to their own dismay that those gains can be incinerated in the span of one election cycle. One would think the sensible play, then, is for the parties to align their immigration platforms as much as possible with the preferences of Hispanics. Per one recent poll of that group, “76 percent preferred a candidate position calling for a bipartisan path to permanent legal status and immigration reform, compared with 24 percent who preferred a deportation-focused position.”

 

Easy peasy, no? Well….

 

Polarization.

 

One problem with my argument is that it’s perilous to assume that Hispanics weigh immigration more in deciding how to vote than other demographics do. (Although Trump’s version of ICE has certainly given them reason to do so.) When Mitt Romney was clobbered by Barack Obama among that demographic in 2012, one of the key “lessons” GOP party officials took from the drubbing was that Republicans would forever struggle with Latinos unless they moderated on immigration. Even Sean Hannity got the memo.

 

Four years later, Trump barged into politics vowing to build the wall and won his party’s nomination and the presidency. Eight years after that, campaigning on “mass deportation,” he nearly won Hispanics outright against Kamala Harris. Amnesty for illegal immigrants wasn’t the secret to winning Latino votes after all, it appeared. The apparent secret, very simply, is that Latinos are largely working-class and will be receptive to candidates who appeal to that constituency. In 2012 that was Obama, not the country-clubber Romney. In 2024 it was Trump, running against the high inflation of the Biden presidency. And in 2026 it’s Democrats, running against Trump’s failed promises on affordability.

 

Neither party needs to moderate on immigration to win Latino votes, in other words. (Although it might help!) Just convince them that you have better ideas for helping them stay ahead of the cost of living and you’re in the game.

 

The other problem with an immigration compromise is that partisan polarization will complicate the effort, as it always, always does. In many ways the two parties’ respective ideological vanguards have never been closer on the proverbial horseshoe than they are right now, but immigration is an exception. Abolishing ICE will be a priority for progressive Democrats for years to come, partly because they believe the agency has been deprofessionalized beyond repair and partly because its postliberal chud-ification is Trump’s most singular administrative legacy. The left wants to burn down the agency in the same way that it wants to burn down the White House ballroom.

 

And for the opposite reasons, the right will refuse. Rank-and-file Republicans will resist out of pure spite, to deny Democrats a key concession after their midterm victory and to protect the steep political costs Trump sunk into building the immigration force of his dreams. Committed postliberals will have a more ideological basis for resisting: Agreeing to abolish ICE and replace it with some kinder, gentler deportation squad would amount to capitulating on their most cherished priority, ejecting nonwhite undesirables from the United States.

 

Bad enough that their opponents would ask them to renounce “mass deportation” and admit that wielding state power ruthlessly against their cultural enemies was a mistake. But outright abolition of the goon squad is tantamount to asking them to repudiate postliberalism itself.

 

They won’t do it, and they won’t tolerate Republican lawmakers doing it. To repeat my point from earlier, postliberals don’t care a fig for their party’s fortunes relative to their own cultural priorities. They’ll happily punish GOP lawmakers for moving toward the middle on immigration by primarying them and/or boycotting general elections, even if that produces the sort of Democratic landslide that, ironically, would make liberal immigration policies more feasible. Radicals play the long game: If the only way to convince the wider electorate that they’re right is to let their enemy win and wait for a public backlash to that enemy’s policies, they’ll do that.

 

But this is all pie in the sky. Trump surely won’t be so chastened by a midterm drubbing that he’ll agree to compromise with Democrats on immigration, especially if doing so would require him to admit error on ICE. J.D. Vance, the party’s presumptive nominee, seems even less likely to support doing so given that he’s a postliberal ideologue himself and is palpably anxious about keeping that faction in his corner in the next primary. And if Vance did feel moved to compromise, that’s the sort of thing that might finally bring Tucker Carlson off the sidelines to provide a “real” America First option in the 2028 race.

 

In scolding Republicans for not maneuvering on policy to consolidate the coalition they built in 2024, Noah Smith is treating a kulturkampf as politics as usual. To the “Claremont Nazis,” there’s no point in having a democratic majority if holding it means having to give up on Nazism. On the contrary, as we saw on January 6 and are likely to see again before long, they’ll give up on democracy first.