The Economic Nationalist

This is lovely.

When General Motors went through bankruptcy last year, it suspended its political donations. Now that it’s owned by the U.S. government, it’s donating to lawmakers’ pet projects again.

The carmaker gave $ 41,000 to groups associated with lawmakers, the vast majority of it—$ 36,000—to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the company reported on a disclosure form last week….

The U.S. government now has a 60 percent stake in the reformed company.

Not a political analyst, I do not claim to grasp political strategy, but is this political judo on GM’s part? After all, what benefit could the Democratic party derive from so small a Mafia-like “protection” receipt to compensate for the bad press the receipt generates? (Apparently the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation is some slush fund controlled by members of the Caucus, which makes this affair even odder, in which the Caucus gets its name stuck to a corrupt-looking payment without actually putting its corrupt hands directly on the money.)

Maybe Congressional Black Caucusers (Caucasians?) like Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters don’t think that they’re getting enough attention right now. Maybe the Congressional Black Caucus wants to be sure that you and I don’t forget things like the ACORN affair. Maybe the Congressional Black Caucus is just stupid. As for GM, one looks forward to the day when it is a nongovernment-owned company again.

[The Drudge Report is acknowledged for bringing this to attention.]

Keith Preston writes,

The simple fact is that present-day liberal ideology and liberalism’s core constituent groups contain within themselves certain contradictions that will eventually prove to be fatal. There is simply no way that an agglomeration of affluent liberal whites, underclass blacks and Hispanics, affirmative-action babies, feminists, gay militants, transsexuals, Third World immigrants, atheists, Muslims, hipster youth, traditional blue collar workers, state-connected labor unions, Jewish plutocrats, environmentalists, and the left wing of the traditional WASP elite, with each of these attempting to get their pieces of the pie distributed by the managerial-therapeutic-multicultural-welfare state, can be politically durable on an indefinite basis. The only thing that unites this coalition is hostility to traditional Western culture and a desire for more freebies courtesy of the state. While this coalition will indeed continue to become more powerful and its values more deeply entrenched in institutions in the short term, over the long term it will self-cannibalize and collapse due to its own internal contradictions and fractious nature.

What a gargoyle’s roster! “[A]ffluent liberal whites, underclass blacks and Hispanics, affirmative-action babies, feminists, gay militants, transsexuals, Third World immigrants, atheists, Muslims, hipster youth, traditional blue collar workers, state-connected labor unions, Jewish plutocrats, environmentalists, and the left wing of the traditional WASP elite.”

Yes, that’s it. The gargoyle’s roster lacks but leprous gravediggers and cackling hobgoblins. Though a few of the aforementioned elements might have been pillars of the nation under other circumstances, together under present circumstances they constitute the liberal Democratic coalition we know and cordially despise.

Mr. Preston is right. So self-contradictory a rabble of a political alliance cannot indeed cohere.

Such insight, so cogently expressed, earns Mr. Preston’s words the Economic Nationalist’s recognition as Quote of the Week.

[Update, July 25: Reconsidering, I do not care for my own article. I wrote it three days ago because most of the press reports I had seen on the new finance-reform law suggested that reporters had not read the text of the law but had merely recycled what other reporters and, as I guess, what Congressional aides were saying about it. Now, neither am I a lawyer nor have I read all the law’s 848 pages; but the law is important, it interests me, and it happens that (maybe unlike the writers of some other reports you have read) I have read substantial tracts of it. Having read, my overall impression is that the law is the overambitious work of two Congressmen, Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, the penetrating intellect of the latter of whom, and the liberal arrogance of both of whom, the text of the law displays. The law’s wholly incongruous sect. 342, which I understand from press reports to be the work of the vaguely dimwitted Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, frustrates me as much as it likely will you if you happen to read it. My mistake, or one of my mistakes, was to try to treat sect. 342 in the same article in which I reviewed the rest of the law. I let my pique at sect. 342 get the better of me, and consequently I let my article’s tone veer into a frustrated, incoherent mean-spiritedness. The article has other flaws, too. Because the article does list some pertinent facts, I ought to leave it posted here in the blog’s archive; but since it does not represent a rhetorically defensible stance I ought to leave it here without further comment. I’ll try to do better next time. —Howard—]

President Obama Wednesday signed into law the 111th Congress’ 848-page H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This new law

• establishes a federal Financial Stability Oversight Council “to identify risks to the financial stability of the United States,… to promote market discipline by eliminating expectations on the part of shareholders [and] creditors … that the Government will shield them from losses,… and to respond to emerging threats to the stability of the United States financial system, [all of which considerations] shall … require supervision by the [U.S. Federal Reserve] Board of Governors for nonbank financial companies that may pose risks to the financial stability of the United States in the event of their material financial distress or failure” (sect. 112);
• requires companies the new Council wants supervised “[to] register with the Board of Governors, on forms provided by the Board of Governors, which shall include such information as the Board of Governors, in consultation with the Council, my deem necessary or appropriate to carry out” its new responsibilities under the law (sect. 114);
• authorizes the Board of Governors “[to] restrict the ability … [of] a bank holding company with total consolidated assets of $ 50 billion or more or a [supervised] nonbank financial company … to offer a financial product or products,” and further authorizes the Board “[to] require [such a] company to terminate … [or to] impose conditions on the manner in which [such a] company conducts one or more activities” (sect. 121: the words “one or more activities” seem purposely to grant the Board much discretionary latitude);
• grants the Board of Governors a broad and seemingly vague “authority to issue regulations to implement” the foregoing (sect. 168);
• establishes and specifies the duties of an information-gathering federal Office of Financial Research (sects. 151 through 156: these seem to me perhaps the most congenial sections of the entire law);
• provides (insofar as I correctly understand the statute’s language) for the federally-enforced liquidation of “failing financial companies that pose a significant risk to the financial stability of the United States in a manner that mitigates such risk and minimizes moral hazard” (sects. 204 and 205);
• redistributes certain already existing federal regulatory and ministerial prerogatives and responsibilities among federal officials (sects. 311 through 319, 1061, 1064, and probably several others);
• renders “private adviser[s]” subject to “the Investment Advisers Act of 1940″ (sect. 403);
• imposes what appear to be relatively minor new technical requirements on the several states in their regulation of the insurance business (Title V)—though, seemingly in contrast with the sensibility and tone of rest of the law, the law seems to have surprisingly little to say about the operations of reinsurers (sects. 531 and 532); is this a loophole? maybe not, but to the extent to which I understand reinsurance it is, at least potentially, a pretty generalized form of precisely the sort of risk swap the law’s Title VII means to regulate; fortunately, the misunderstanding is probably mine, since one doubts that the law’s co-author Sen. Dodd, of all people, would make this particular mistake;
• prohibits banks from “engag[ing] in proprietary trading or [owning] a hedge fund or a private equity fund,” and requires “supervised … nonbank financial compan[ies]” that do so “[to meet] additional capital requirements” (sect. 619, a long section, elaborately written to attempt to snare anyone who might try cleverly to evade it);
• lets either of two, distinct federal agencies restrict foreign participation in the esoteric sort of “swap” transactions that famously unraveled AIG, then Wall Street generally, in 2008 (sect. 715);
• enjoins that “no Federal assistance may be provided to any … swap dealer [or] major swap participant” (sect. 716); and lets a federal “prudential regulator” (sect. 113) restrict some banks and other major financial actors in their swap dealings.
• expands the SEC’s authority to regulate “novel derivative products” (sects. 717 and 718) and swaps (sect. 723), granting it power to detain certain kinds of swaps for its prior examination and approval;
• defines and regulates swap dealers (sect. 721);
• requires swap transactions to be reported indirectly to the federal government (sects. 728 and 729);
• empowers the SEC to limit a person’s position in commodity futures (sect. 737: I don’t like the look of this worrisome section; unlike most of the rest of the law it is written in obscure language);
• regulates securities swaps somewhat similarly as securities futures are already regulated (sect. 761, et al.);
• lets the SEC “commence a rulemaking” (an odd turn of phrase to my ear, by what do I know?) “to address the standards of care for brokers, dealers, investment advisers, [etc., and to require them] to act in the best interest of the customer without regard to the [broker’s, dealer’s, etc., own] interest” (sect. 913);
• establishes a federal Office of the Investor Advocate (sect. 915);
• “enhance[s] regulation … of” ratings agencies (read: S&P and Moody’s; sects. 931 and 932);
• “establish[es] in the Federal Reserve System an independent … Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, which shall regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services….” (Title X);
• in an emergency, authorizes the FDIC with the approval of the Board of Governors “[to] create a widely available program to guarantee obligations of [banks and certain others] during times of severe economic distress, [though not to provide] equity in any form (sect. 1105);
• forbids mortgage lenders from lending to borrowers who lack “a reasonable ability to repay the loan,…” and establishes a brittle-seeming set of rules by which lenders are to judge this ability (sect. 1411: this section lacks judgment in my view; it reads as though it were written on a Friday by someone in a bad mood);
• requires mortgage lenders issuing mortgages with nonstandard repayment schemes to explain those schemes and their financial consequences to their borrowers in a certain way (sect. 1418: have you ever signed your way through the thick stack of papers a mortgage lender gives you at closing time? do the law’s authors believe that adding another page to the stack will help? I wonder);
• requires the same lenders to advise their borrowers six months before adjusting a mortgage’s interest rate (sect. 1418 again: this section is technical and I have not carefully read it, so if this part of the law interests you then you might read the section yourself);
• establishes a federal Office of Housing Counseling (sect. 1442);

and so on and on and on. In its sect. 342, the law also brings some depressing and pretty ferocious anti-white-male—which is to say, anti-traditional-American-family—language apparently designed to ensure that every loan application and other financial document you might need action on gets lost on the desk of some incompetent black woman with a perpetual headache.

That last, of course, is a “racist” remark, and since I had the bad taste to make it we shall now have to talk about it, shan’t we? (If you already understand why I made it then you can skip straight to the next paragraph.) See: you’re not to worry about the lost paperwork or the perpetual headache, but only about the threat the present writer—the presumably assault-weapon-toting, flag-saluting, militia-joining, border-patrolling, SUV-driving, wife-suppressing, Bible-thumping, goose-stepping, stop-sign-shooting, food-and-ammo-storing, Ronald-Reagan-voting, pet-not-neutering-nor-spaying, blue-eyed-children-fathering, Nazi, KKK, Attila-the-Hun writer—poses to—well, to what, exactly? Look: if you fall for such Marxist bait, I can’t help you. However, for the benefit of readers new to the Economic Nationalist I will explain it again as in earlier articles. Literally hundreds of thousands of black American women are far too intelligent and decent ever purposely to lose your paperwork (being intelligent and decent, maybe they store food, ammo and Bibles, too, for all I know; though they probably never voted for Reagan and their children’s eyes are not blue). The trouble is that, precisely because of idiocies like the aforementioned sect. 342, your paperwork is unlikely to land on the desk of an intelligent, decent black woman—for she will have been promoted upward away from that desk iteratively until stranded in some job so high that even she cannot handle it, leaving an empty affirmative-action seat at the desk on which your paperwork still sits, gathering dust. Because of sect. 342 and because all the good black women will already have been promoted into higher jobs, the empty seat will have to be filled by some overweight African-American wench with a perpetual headache. Now do you get it? If and when Congress finally should repeal the tangled complex of wicked laws which constitute the federal Civil Rights regime, such problems would soon solve themselves. So don’t blame me. I didn’t write sect. 342.

Setting the inexcusable sect. 342 aside, the law is both interesting and revealing. The law is interesting in that, if you accept the nonlibertarian premise that banks, stock brokers and the like should be subject to some sort of licensing and regulatory regime—or even if you only accept the lesser premise that licensing and regulation are so deeply embedded in the actually existing U.S. financial system that the prospect of an unlicensed, unregulated regime is merely a theoretical one—then one has to admit that most of the law is artfully written with style, wit, discernment and care. The law distinguishes actors that bring $ 50 billion to financial markets from everybody smaller which, in view of the way the Panic of 2008 unfolded, seems to me a reasonably prudent thing to do. The famous Congressional homosexual Barney Frank may be a perennial, favorite target of Republican abuse (and, I must say, any out-of-the-closet fag with the nerve to run for Congress, having forfeited the otherwise rightful privacy of an indecent obscurity, has little cause to complain of political abuse of this kind); but Mr. Frank is also a very smart and fairly judicious man, as Democrats go one of the ones better liked by me. His experienced touch shows in the text of the law.

The law is revealing in its sheer ambition. Its authors seem to lack the sense that a complex regulatory regime, even were it desirable, ought to be built up one small piece at a time. Instead, with the House’s, the Senate’s and the president’s approval, Messrs. Dodd and Frank have just given eight hundred pages of speculative, untested notions the full force of federal law, turning the notions loose on the disordered but nonetheless globally preëminent national financial system of the United States. Evidently like most Republicans, I cannot persuade myself that such a law—passed more or less by the same Democrats who gave us the ridiculous Stimulus of 2009—is likely to work approximately as its authors expect.

HJH

Let us speak of race in America. We live in an interesting time.

The grave troubles black America has long inflicted upon herself, and secondarily inflicted upon the rest of us, are of course drearily familiar to us all—pervasive violence, omnipresent vandalism, rampant illegitimacy, illegal drugs, a culture of deliberate career failure and so on. Though in some ways worse than they used to be, black America’s troubles are hardly new. What is new is white America’s emerging attitude toward them.

White America has ceased to believe that she were responsible for black America’s troubles. She has ceased gradually but nonetheless, for a time was when she did believe. Another, middle time followed, during the late 1970s and through the 1980s, when she began to doubt, and thus when she obstinately erected a first-class taboo against the doubt. Today the taboo remains. The belief is quite dead.

The taboo indeed remains—a tall, forbidding totem pole, casting a threatening shadow, painted in garish colors, carved in hideous faces; yet the paint fades and peels. The totem pole is now feared rather than venerated. Each rain washes away a little more of the earth at its foot which holds the pole upright. Each sun further blanches the pole’s paint. Perversely, we still demand that our fellow white Americas give obeisance, genuflecting habitually to the terror of the pole as they pass—for, so long as they genuflect as cravenly as we do, so long as they will not insult the vain dignity of the hated pole, we will leave our fellows free to go peaceably about their business. Yet even as we enforce the pole’s vain dignity we also watch, furtively, expectantly, for the pole to topple and fall.

Does it not grow obvious to every white American?

• That the specter of white racism is an insubstantial phantasm; while incredibly, after all these years, there still exists no commonly accepted definition of the boo-word racist—not that it would matter now if there did.
• That white Americans are substantially unlike black Americans, that black Americans have largely ceased to seek a common future with the rest of us, and that there is nothing especially wrong with either of these broadly observable facts.
• That the American black is the greatest athlete and, from a certain perspective, the most creative musician in the world; but that he has made it increasingly unpleasant, ever more disheartening, to appreciate his evident natural excellence in either respect.
• That normal white Americans have essentially nothing in common with the black kid—you know the one—prowling the streets near you in his car, the windows down, the stereo up, the spotless baseball cap turned sideways on his head.
• That the black kid who does that is too obviously up to no good to be allowed to do it near us. (A note to any black kid who might read these words: If it is not your intent to upset white people, if you are going to be mixing among them, then press yourself a casual, light-colored button-down shirt and a pair of slacks—no suits, please—and add to it a clean, brown pair of business-casual shoes with dark socks and an unelaborated short haircut; then subtract jewelry, abolish sports-team logos, hide tattoos, kill the hip-hop—pre-1964 music of any kind is probably safe—stow the big-bad attitude; and you’ll be surprised how relaxedly acceptable such a uniform and manner will render you in white precincts. This is not hard. Moderately used clothes will suffice if they fit, but clothes which make a personal statement of any kind are out. President Obama understands this; so should you. I have no idea how many or few of you care, but that’s the advice. As you know, whites will lend you a certain social allowance to overdress them so long as you don’t look as though you meant to sound a trumpet to announce your departure for Bible study. My counsel, were it asked, would be to take advantage of the allowance. Don’t analyze it. Just try it, and be consistent about it. How fellow blacks react is neither my problem nor something I especially wish to understand, but normal white people are not displeased when you “act white,” so long as you don’t overdo it to the point of affectation and so long as you keep your hands off their women—for if you are after a white woman then you are playing a treacherous game according to very different rules. Otherwise, to the extent to which you will mix among whites, to the extent to which you wish to get along with them when you do, you’ll be glad that you tried the advice. Now, until digressing here, I was mostly addressing nonblack Americans, so let me return attention hence to the intended audience. By the way, I am in favor of Bible study.)
• That the only obvious reason the state does not publicly beat convicted thieves and vandals (of whichever race but disproportionately of the black) with a cane Saturday mornings in the city square is that so essentially harmless a chastisement might prove too simple, too effective and too inexpensive for contemptible, self-loathing white liberals to bear.
• That the fevered notion that black America were “vulnerable” to white America—the same black America which incessantly escalates her attempted physical intimidation of the rest of us; which vandalizes our public property, steals our private possessions, and rapes our beloved daughters in the normal course of a day’s unreciprocated enmity—is exactly as contemptible and precisely as absurd as it would have seemed to our grandparents’ grandparents.
• That America’s increasingly remote legacy of slavery interests a rapidly dwindling number of Americans who are not black.
• That, by white standards, an awful lot of blacks are regrettably but nonetheless impenetrably dimwitted, and that this unfortunate fact has pervasive consequences to racial relations.
• That black women have been promoted comically beyond their competence almost wherever they work.
• That there is hardly a sign to be discerned, anywhere you look, in the United States or elsewhere (possibly with the interesting, but lonely, exception of the isle of Barbados) that blacks can handle democracy or maintain a civil society.
• That there is little more than she has already done that white America can do to lift black America up; that talk is cheap; that whether black America is honorable or contemptible is not for white Americans by their attitudes but for black Americans by their acts to prove.

It remains taboo for whites to speak of such things in public. Taboos demand respect; this writer will not deny it. Yet has the time not come to accelerate this taboo into a dishonorable retirement? Has the time not come to topple the totem pole?

I suspect that it has.

The Civil Rights era is over. The era is dead. The era is done. The era began that overcelebrated day in 1955 on which Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. The era ended that confused day in 2009 on which Barack Obama took his oath. The era is gone beyond recall now. Except as a zombie, except as a ghoul, it shall not again be revived.

Despite the incomprehensibly dense insistence of leading, white U.S. Republicans to the contrary, black Americans simply do not wish to be honorary whites. Even did they wish, there is little reason to believe that they ever could be. Black Americans are who they are. We ought to have the decency to accept this.

What white America should not accept is incompetence on the part of overpromoted black women, intimidation on the part of threatening black men and harassment on the part of self-loathing white liberals. What black America should not accept, at a minimum, is continued white patronization. Gradually, white America is ceasing to accept such things, and maybe black America is, too; though the jackals who feed on the corpse of Civil Rights will likely snarl and snap at us for ceasing during the decades to come. The effects of such a change are unpredictable by me. We live in an interesting time.

There will be those readers who ask, “If you’re so smart, Harrison, then how do you propose to solve such problems?”

But I have not proposed how to solve them, have I? Not really. Not other than to begin in the obvious way by ceasing to deny that problems exist. No, my critics shall have to do better than that. Times are changing, and mere abuse no longer suffices to distract. The critics are going to have to keep up.

Howard J. Harrison
The Economic Nationalist

[Courtesy to regular readers wants long absences explained. I have been very, very busy, which is good for me and mine but bad for the Economic Nationalist. This is the only reason for the lack of new articles. Regarding the suggested article on Aristotle, its prospects presently recede rather than advance. We shall see.]

[This particular article is more egotistical than is my wont. The purpose of the article however is to share impressions of an event my family and I attended. The necessary egotism merely acknowledges that the impressions are my own.]

My family and I attended a local Tea Party rally, our first, on Tax Day last week. It was less than I expected. About 300 attended, authentic U.S. patriots all, most between 40 and 70 years of age, all but two white, mostly but not overwhelmingly WASP. (It is regrettably advisable for me to affirm, in this mad era, that I was perfectly calm regarding the crowd’s ethnic profile: it bothered me not in the slightest. More on this below.)

I have good and bad impressions both to report. Let me start with some bad ones.

Crowds have personalities. Walking and sitting among the Tea Party crowd, one could hardly avoid the impression that the crowd as a whole were semiconsciously trying to work itself up to the manufacture of spontaneous passion. When that failed, as because spontaneity cannot be manufactured it must, the crowd turned toward the projection of an unbecoming, impudent, narrowly founded anger toward curiously unnameable elements of our political class. All in all, there seemed an unfortunate, vague phoniness to it, in certain respects.

One of the rally’s several speakers was a certain black woman, a Tea Partier from a distant corner of the same state, previously unknown to the crowd. The crowd shamed itself by lusty cheers for the woman’s first sentences, before she had even had time to say anything of substance. I wondered: why does it not occur to the members of such a crowd how disrespectful it is to express approval of someone who is prepared to earn that approval, before permitting her a chance to earn it? The crowd’s behavior was slightly creepy. White U.S. conservatives wonder why more black U.S. conservatives will not make common cause with them, but I don’t wonder. Were I black, I should not have felt comfortable in an environment like that—not especially because the crowd was white, but because the crowd refused to stop fawning on me, because the crowd refused to treat me like a normal human being.

The irony is that, once one stopped congratulating oneself for being a good antiracist, once one stopped listening to oneself cheer and started listening to the actual speaker, the black woman gave the best speech of the day.

The rally’s most coherent theme was a libertarian, Constitutionalist, anti-big government one. It was a good theme and I was for it.

What you think of it, I do not know; but one other speaker—a white-haired woman with a firm, grandmotherly manner—and the crowd’s reaction to her, just may have pushed me over the edge of prolonged indecision to tend to support the Fair Tax, which as you probably know is a proposed federal flat tax on consumption. The reason is not that I believe the Fair Tax to be necessary or even uniquely fair. It’s that the crowd was heavy with professionals and small businessmen in their 50s, husbands and wives, the sort of six-figure earners with children grown who, in a multitude of necessary but unseen ways, really make this country go. The one and only deep, authentic feeling I perceived among the crowd that day was a fierce, smoldering anger at being taxed unfairly, at being taken advantage of, at being made to support other Americans who don’t pull their weight.

If such professionals and small businessmen, our most valuable fellow Americans, so strongly desire the Fair Tax, then who am I to contradict them? In such a matter, such people deserve to have their wishes respected by me, for national morale is rather more important than are certain pedantical points of theoretical economic dispute. I now believe that I wish to associate myself with support of the Fair Tax. The smoldering passion, not logical arguments alone, has coaxed me on board.

Other than that, though, I did not get a lot out of the rally. A candidate for the council of the city in which the rally was held gave an invited speech in which he thundered incoherently against the city’s owning various pieces of public property and against the very principle of the property tax. The man had no apparent sense of humor and needed a haircut, facts which clashed with his starched collar and silk tie. If such a man wins a civic election against entrenched civic interests, to turn the expression, I’ll starch my own collar and eat it. I was not impressed.

One network television affiliate sent a boom-truck and film-crew. I saw a reporterette with enormous, er, surgically placed frontal enhancements, shall we say, wearing heavy make-up and extremely tall black shoes, get out of the truck, but oddly she and the truck did not stay long. I think that the truck at least might have left ten minutes before the two-hour event’s scheduled start. The conspiracy-minded might suppose that the news producer had meant to make the crowd look sparse by filming it before it had fully entered the site. For all I know, the conspiracy-minded might be right—but, then, I don’t watch the television news and know nothing of frontal enhancements and the like. The reader can decide; I merely tell what I saw.

The event’s host spoke in a T-shirt, old jeans and a blazer, an odd combination to my eye. He told an appropriate number of lame jokes between speakers, though, and the jokes were all clean, and he maintained a sunny disposition throughout, which is more or less exactly what the host at such an event ought to do.

The flowers were in bloom. The grass was green. The air was pleasantly warm. The theme-music was that of John Philip Sousa, and one woman between speakers sang an original, patriotic country song she had written herself. Not bad. There are worse ways one could have spent an evening in the park.

Nonetheless, my wife said that, if she were a Congressman attending this event, contrary to the dramatic image reputedly projected on television, she would not have come away with any particular fear of the Tea Party’s passion. I would say that that assessment were about right. The Tea Party just did not feel all that formidable to us. We were surprised. We had been expecting more.

On a personal note, I learned to my disappointment that, while I do approve of the Tea Party and am glad that it exists, I am no Tea Partier. The Tea Party I experienced was a right-wing libertarian movement rather than an authentically conservative one—and, as right-wing libertarians go, rather less impressive than the younger, far more energetic movement backing Ron Paul in 2008. But, still, in the United States, right-wing libertarians are on balance a good thing. We can always use a few more. Regrettably not a Tea Partier myself, I am for the Tea Party nevertheless.

A hand-printed sign carried by a member of the crowd: “Dear Congress: we elected you, but we can learn from our mistakes.”

I cannot think of any particular point on which to wind this article up; but, then, this seems appropriate, because the Tea Party itself could not think of any particular point, either. Be that as it may, let me leave the matter there, except to the extent to which readers might or might not wish to comment below.

HJH

[P.S. To the extent to which readers care I will briefly note for the record—and state not as an attitude but merely as a bare fact—that my family and I happen to be non-WASP but white. Readers who extrapolate from this information that my family and I did not identify properly with WASP culture probably misunderstand us, but in this mad era the misunderstanding is, well, understandable. Not liking to talk about myself, I would rather not discuss the matter further; but the reader, hereby duly informed, can judge for himself.]

I do not know what to make of this, but to an American vaguely inclined to sympathize with the British National Party, well, it does not look too good. Context is lacking but it looks, more or less, as though hot-tempered BNP stormtroopers had gratuitously roughed up an invited guest at a BNP event—and then as though the party, rather than to apologize and graciously to make amends, had pugnaciously defended the act.

Read the article and watch the video here.

Note the siege mentality evident in this highly placed BNP response.

The guest’s name is Dominic Kennedy, a reporter for the Times of London.

The mainstream English media have “covered” the BNP for so many years with so flagrant a disregard for objectivity that it grows hard to sift the competent reporting from the adolescent preening masquerading as reporting. Persistently bad news coverage of a political party however does not in itself make the party good. However many party-meetings anarchists might in the past have disrupted, you don’t invite a reporter from a leading newspaper and then rough him up after he arrives. You just don’t. Not even if he stalls a bit when you ask him to leave.

The BNP’s Fuehrer Nick Griffin naturally accuses the Times of lying. (Fuehrer is a loaded term, is it not? Can’t help that. The term here is not actually an insult but an informed description.) Nick Griffin does that. A lot. If among the past ten years you can identify a single month during which Mr. Griffin did not loudly accuse at least three perceived political foes of lying about him and his party, well, Mr. Griffin was probably on vacation that month. You might not identify so much as a single week. I don’t know about you, but for my own part I tend not to trust folks so ready to accuse others of lying, even if the accused are liars. Mr. Griffin need not worry about me, of course, but the principle at stake does seem to be something Mr. Griffin does not understand.

Taki Theodoracopoulos has described the relationship between Nick Griffin and the English media as an encounter respectively of the unsuitable and the inappropriate. It seems that Taki may be right. Too bad.

We Americans naturally will not worry much about this, one way or the other, for the most excellent and fortunate reason that it is not our problem to worry about. I have often thought however that I would cheerfully vote BNP if I were English. This particular event stands in another light.

Considering not Messrs. Griffin and Kennedy in particular, incidentally, but Englishmen generally, have you not observed that that most famous of English modes of expression, understatement, seems to have become a thing of the past? It is hardly to be believed that Americans do it better now, but do it better we do.

It is a bad time to be English, a good time to be an American.

HJH

The pseudonymous Dr.D, well known to the Economic Nationalist’s regular readers, poses an important question when he writes,

You stopped a little too soon, Howard. “… especially in a cycle in which the chief Republican alternatives to her are relatively so strong.” Could you give me three names that excite as much enthusiasm among the grass roots as Sarah Palin does?

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When Sarah Palin takes offense at Rahm Emanuel’s use of the adjective “retarded,” one is tempted to retort, but the discussion which would follow the retort would be, well, too retarded to bear. The word “retarded” itself is etymologically somewhat retarded, but the word is a jewel of clarity next to the positively gay adjective “developmentally challenged,” or whatever the latest euphemism is supposed to be.

For my part, I think that I will henceforth insist on reviving the adjective “imbecilic,” a word which an earlier generation of easily offended parents of imbeciles apparently shamed out of use, that generation replacing it with the then supposedly inoffensive “retarded.” At least “imbecilic,” unlike “retarded,” is directly, properly and unambiguously derived from its Latin root. (Regarding “developmentally challenged,” one wonders whether the philological vandals pushing the word had so much as heard of Latin.)

The trouble with the word “retarded” resembles the trouble with the word “gay” (as in homosexual) and, unfortunately, also resembles the trouble with the word “black” (as in Negro). The trouble lies not in the word but in the characteristics or behavior of the thing to which the word refers. Were it not so, each generation of semiëducated scolds would not be pushing on us yet another retarded euphemism for the thing. One hesitates to introduce examples regarding variously humorous or private parts of the human body, but such examples would if introduced illustrate the same linguistic principle and are not hard to call to mind.

To anyone who thinks it possible to introduce a safe word to identify imbeciles, a word which would not soon become universal grist for schoolyard taunts: good luck. The English language is still going to need some suitable word to refer to imbeciles, even so. Rotating the existing word out for a new euphemism once per generation really does not help.

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The quiet respect one naturally feels for a neighbor who, with dignity, bears an unfair burden or an unearned infirmity evaporates when he abandons his dignity, when he starts whining that you and I weren’t showing servile enough a deference to his problems. Some folks will never understand this.

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Like other conservative U.S. traditionalists, I feel strongly inclined at first encounter to like Sarah Palin. She seems at first blush somehow to exemplify the American frontier spirit. However, could the authentic American frontiersman, at his best, not exhibit ruggedness or polish alternately, as the occasion demanded? Think of the fictional Benjamin Cartwright; or recall the redheaded men of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, quoting and singing their Tacitus. Or, if fictional characters don’t suit, how about Abraham Lincoln?

Regrettably, one finds it hard to suppose that Mrs. Palin knew who Tacitus was. It does not seem safe to suppose that she knew much even about Lincoln.

Have you noticed incidentally that, in her heat to slam Mr. Emanuel for his locker-room vernacular, Mrs. Palin practically passes over his blankin’ adverb? Oy!

Mrs. Palin is a hugely entertaining national figure, and I am glad that she’s out there, so to speak; but here is yet more reluctant evidence against nominating the woman to the U.S. presidency—especially in a cycle in which the chief Republican alternatives to her are relatively so strong.

HJH

[This week’s special election in Massachusetts is a significant event about which Howard J. Harrison regrettably finds little original to say. With the following remarks, the pseudonymous Dr.D fills the gap.]

Well, Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts seems to have struck a possibly mortal blow to the ambitions of the Democrats. The are recoiling as though they have been seriously wounded, although I really do not see why. They still have 59 votes in the Senate rather than 60, so if they believe what they have been telling us, why do they not plow ahead and pass all of their foolishness?

It appears that the answer lies in the instinct for self preservation. Even more than bringing about their communist utopia, they want to keep themselves in their sine cures. Brown’s win seems to have shaken them into realizing that they might have to get JOBS, jobs for goodness sakes. Now we all know that simply means that they would become lobbyists, but in the coming days, the way the mood is turning, lobbyists may not be viewed with the greatest favor either. That could mean having to get real jobs and work for Pete’s sake. Perish the thought! Thus the IPP (Incumbent Protection Plan) of both parties swings into high gear now, with a dive towards the center. Everybody becomes a moderate, even Uncle Harry Reid, that nice old gentlement who always smiles at everyone (you do remember him, don’t you?). And sweet old Aunt Pelosi, who would not stuff anything down the throat of a fly, why she is up for re-election too, I do believe! Wonder of wonders, what that one ballot in Massachusetts did!

Barack Obama and his motley Congressional Democratic majority of resentful nonwhite ethnics and graying, 1968-style liberals have met such political troubles as few Republicans would have dreamed one year ago, though the Economic Nationalist is pleased not to be surprised. Events are now in the saddle, so to speak, as foretold here. The horse has the bit in its teeth.

Joe Guzzardi said from the start that the 111th Congress would never be able to pass a major immigration amnesty. Mr. Guzzardi’s forecast looks righter and righter. If so, this is very good news.

Things are looking up. Rested and tanned after a blessedly enforced political vacation, the Republican party is back in a semblance of fighting trim, and its members in Congress, though not yet exactly receptive to a Buchananite, neoconservative, alternative Right world view, do seem less actively hostile to such a world view than in recent memory. This is especially true of younger members who, though variously flawed, represent a significant improvement over the older generation of Republican Congressmen they will gradually supplant. The bad news is that, though the Republican party is better, the Democratic is much worse, whereas our Republic is safe when she enjoys two good, patriotic national parties. One such party however is preferable to none.

(There remain those conservatives, among them friends of this blog, who believe that even the Republican party is good for nothing. I have already explained how strongly I feel that their belief stands on a fundamental misconception of the kind of thing a national party is but, for readers new to the Economic Nationalist, consider: a good dog barks at visitors after nightfall, runs on and tears up the lawn, and slobbers on its water dish, even when such caninity is inconvenient to the dog’s master. A good dog behaves as a dog, just as a good national party behaves as a national party. It is no use to wish a national party to be something it was never meant to be, something no national party ever has been; and it is even less use to compare a national party, by its very nature a power-seeking coalition of significantly divergent interests, against a boutique party like the Constitution party which, though honorable and worthy of respect, simply is not the same kind of thing a national party is. A survey of the center-right national parties of the Western world reveals how fundamentally sound, how relatively good our Republican party truly is, now that Republicans are rid of the bad leadership of George W. Bush and John McCain. That political parties in a democratic republic are, by their very nature, generally somewhat wretched hardly indicts America’s specific, fairly excellent Republican party. It tends to indict the very principle of democracy, rather—a principle the United States, being what they are, probably cannot escape. We work with what we have. But I digress.)

What nervous Republicans misunderstood in 2008, and indeed what this writer misunderstood as recently as 2004, was that the only way out was through, so to speak. The Republican revolution of 1994 having failed, Democrats were bound to get their shot at mismanaging the Republic. Democratic mismanagement is bad for the United States, of course, but if inevitable then sooner was better than later. Either John Kerry or Barack Obama would have sufficed to lead the inevitable Democratic mismanagement, putting an end to the all-too evitable Republican mismanagement under the well meaning but inflexible, incompetent George W. Bush. The only way out was through.

The real danger is that, when we Republicans return a Republican to the White House, we might choose the wrong Republican again. Traditional America might not survive another such mistake; we have run out of room for error. Fortunately, the clearly leading Republicans, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee (and even Sarah Palin if you like) are each much preferable to any candidate the party has nominated to the presidency since Reagan. A return to Reagan would be ideal, but Reagan is dead, Romney is rock-solid (I should explain why in a later article) and Huckabee, though sometimes worrisome, is at least an intelligent, perceptive man who actually grasps the issue of economic nationalism. We stand well going into 2010 and 2012. And, indeed, who would have thought it? The year 2010 has arrived already.

In the meantime, given the sorry circumstance of 2008, the Obama administration is working out beautifully thus far for American patriots, better than even this writer had hoped. The danger was that Mr. Obama would swamp us with an immigration amnesty but he seems barely interested in immigration. Mr. Obama seems interested rather in doing every other stupid political thing he can think of to do. How he and his Democrats have turned the health-care issue, a sure winner for 2009 Democrats, into a political loser will remain a textbook-example of political incompetence for years to come, but turn it into a loser they seem indeed to have done.

Ironically, voters seem inclined to punish rather than to reward Mr. Obama even for the one important thing he has done right, namely, to save General Motors. Remarkably few Republicans seem to grasp the fundamental importance of having saved General Motors, which is why when their party returns to power it will, obliviously, do the right thing at the right time for entirely the wrong reason: it will privatize General Motors again, and America will be strong back in the auto business.

There is still a God in heaven Who blesseth the United States of America, undeserving though they have become. The signs are there to see for those who will. The story of America is not over, yet.

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Few readers will wonder why the Economic Nationalist has published little lately, but a brief account might be given those few. There are at least three reasons for the relative quiet. First, the Economic Nationalist’s eponymous issue, economic nationalism, has slumbered; the issue will stir again, but maybe not this year. Second, national media now echo themes the Economic Nationalist discovered a year or two ago: it seems thus unnecessary to belabor such themes at the moment. Third, the major issue of the moment, Democratic health-care reform, is a subject of broad, vigorous debate across the news media, a debate to which I lack the knowledge meaningfully to add, except to state that I am fairly persuaded by that which has become the conventional Republican position on the issue. When events provoke it, the Economic Nationalist will wake again.

In the meantime, for something completely different but maybe of even deeper importance in the long term, I have turned to writing a slow article or two on Aristotle. If I can only work the article or articles into pleasing forms it or they should prove edifying, but the articles’ publication lies days, weeks or months away, if indeed ever. We shall see.

More later.

HJH