The Democrats’ rhetoric on immigration — and, especially, on illegal immigration — has changed radically since 2016 in reaction to the election of Donald Trump. The corporate partisan conversion to the latitudinarian creed on illegal immigration probably is an error for Democrats, because blue-collar voters, whom the Democrats need need to supplement their pathetic coalition of blubbering grievance artists and the thumb-sucking bedwetters who fall in line behind them, are much closer to Donald Trump than to the editors of the Wall Street Journal on that question. But if President Trump were this morning to issue a proclamation praising mom and apple pie, you can be sure that black-clad misfits would gather in the public squares of Portland to hurl profanity and illiteracy at mom and her wicked white-supremacist pastries.

That is stupidity, if tediously predictable stupidity. Senator Sanders and President Trump have substantially similar instincts when it comes to immigration even if the politically plastic gentleman from Vermont has been scolded into pretending otherwise. If you have convinced yourself that Senator Sanders’s views simply must be rooted in solidarity and that President Trump’s views simply must be rooted in viciousness, then you might want to consider the possibility that you have become a brain-dead partisan, a very cheap date indeed — and that you have not given sufficient consideration to the ways in which appeals to in-group solidarity are related to ordinary viciousness.