Ann Coulter believes the left has ‘lost its mind’. Should we listen?
The bestselling author has been criticized for dog-whistling to the far right. Now she’s taking aim at the left – can progressives learn anything from their sworn enemy?
by J Oliver Conroy Wed 17 Oct 2018 05.00 EDT
“Immigrants are great if you’re rich,” Coulter tells me. “You live in New York or LA, you get your pool cleaned. Rosa the maid cleans everything, serves, picks up the kids, makes the beds. Life is grand. But I go out to America. And I knew that immigration was an enormous effing issue that our political class – Republicans for the donor money, Democrats for the votes – was ignoring.”
In June 2015 Coulter published Adios America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. The book argued that unchecked immigration, both legal and illegal, was increasing crime, straining the welfare state, and depressing blue-collar wages, and that the media, because of political correctness, and big business, for cheap labor, were preventing honest debate.
The book’s most serious charge has since become a mainstream allegation by conservatives: if Democrats have their way, Coulter claimed, they will add up to 30 million new voters to the rolls – overwhelmingly dependent on big government and loyal to the Democratic party. In other words, liberal elites support mass immigration because they are thumbing the scale of democracy itself.
In the Atlantic, in December 2015, the former Bush speechwriter David Frumdescribed Coulter’s book as the “political book of the year”. “Perhaps no single writer has had such immediate impact on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe,” he added, in a sentence that might cause consternation to the author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Frum argued that rosy liberal claims about immigration are not borne out in statistics. Although some immigrants have assimilated well – he cited Nigerian Americans – other immigrant communities suffer from high unemployment, welfare dependency, and educational failure, he said.
In an incisive recent piece in Current Affairs, a left-leaning journal, writer Brianna Rennix acknowledged that Coulter was probably correct about Democrats (and Republicans) exploiting immigration for cheap labor and votes. But Adios America! is a “vicious, dehumanizing” book, the review said, and one with eugenic undertones.