Predictions fulfilled
Events proceed almost too regularly to be believed. Pat Buchanan writes,
By misinterpreting his mandate, [Barack] Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not—unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party—that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.
Mr. Buchanan correctly perceives what the Economic Nationalist forecast four months earlier, that the principal obstacle to Republican coherence had been dogged, misplaced party loyalty to unworthy leaders George W. Bush and John McCain, that the Republican party badly needed a spell in opposition to rest and refit.
And now regarding the Detroit auto-industry bailout Monica Langley and Neal E. Boudette of the Wall Street Journal report,
On Sunday, the Obama administration lined up conference calls with key lawmakers. Mr. Obama made one call himself to some of the Michigan delegation, including U.S. Sen. Carl Levin and his brother, Rep. Sander Levin, and Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow. He told them that he planned to put some administration staff into the Detroit companies, according to one person familiar with the situation.
If this means what it seems to mean, that the Obama administration means effectively to start managing U.S. auto companies, then it represents asinine, old-style industrial socialism of the stripe even few doctrinaire leftists have credited since 1978 or so. But it was also predictable. In fact, regular readers will be aware that we predicted it right here before Mr. Obama ever became president.
Mrs. Langley and Mr. Boudette also write,
With GM, the Obama administration is interested not just in preserving jobs, but in pushing other policy prescriptions, in particular creating a “company of the future” with clean and energy-efficient vehicles, a frequent campaign theme during Mr. Obama’s quest for the presidency.
So, indeed, it would tend to appear that the Obama administration meant effectively to start managing at least one U.S. auto company.
The administration naturally is incompetent to run an auto manufacturer and, on some level, Mr. Obama himself is probably smart enough partly to realize this, though maybe not fortitudinous enough to restrain his administration (which is not smart enough) from doing it anyway. However, the result of the administration’s trying for four years to run an auto manufacturer is likely to be that we then still have an auto manufacturer, which we would otherwise have lost, which a future Republican administration can and very likely will reprivatize, for although Mr. Obama is wrong about many things he is right when he says, “We cannot, we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish.”
* * *
The year 2009 is the Indian summer of 1968. For aging hippie leftists, why, the weather today is fine. The Obama presidency at the moment looks pretty stable, fairly strong; and although the Economic Nationalist cannot predict exactly when this presidency’s fortunes will begin to flag the next several months at least promise smooth Democratic sailing. Were this writer to hazard a hazy guess he might project another twelve months of good Obama fortune from the time of this writing. After that, it starts to get interesting.
It is significant to realize that none of this has really been very hard to predict so long as one retains a sense of history, believes and correctly understands that mankind is fallen in the Biblical sense, and appreciates that Americans are a distinct race with a distinctive character which most of the world’s people do not share.
And, if any reader is asking, “Why did Harrison bring race into this?” then he is far too sensitive in the matter and still doesn’t get it. This article has not been principally about race, but anyone who has visited, say, Detroit in the past thirty years and does not grasp the ethnic connection there and its general importance in our society—anyone who really believes that one could turn Mozambique into Minnesota by extending to Mozambique our Bill of Rights and teaching Mozambique’s children the proper things in school—is going to have an awfully difficult time understanding just about anything that happens in America in our day, including but hardly limited to the matters the present article treats. The U.S. auto industry is in trouble today indirectly but precisely because of the universalist, egalitarian beliefs of our elites, beliefs which a clear view of race would render untenable. As for the Obama administration, the 1968 ethic the administration represents is suspended by a fraying rope whose brittle threads consist largely of willful misperceptions of human nature.
If you don’t get the race thing, then you’re just not going to get much of anything else, either, and events that should have been easy to predict will continue to come as a surprise. But that’s all right. It’s easy to have been confused, these days. Keep reading, and we’ll bring even the confused reader around, sooner or later.
HJH
P.S. The good news is that the Republican presidential crop of 2012 looks remarkably strong. There do not seem to be any Washingtons or Reagans in there, but Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and even Newt Gingrich each represent a large improvement over anything we’ve seen since Reagan’s day—except of course Pat Buchanan who did not win. (Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford are interesting, too, but for reasons we have earlier discussed are probably not viable candidates until 2016. None of this is to overshadow the politically heroical Ron Paul but, if you ask me whether the Republican party will ever nominate Dr. Paul for the presidency, then I cannot tell you with a straight face that I really believe that it will, nor that I would not feel a little skittish if somehow it came to pass that it did—as fond as I am of Dr. Paul. In any event, it seems to me that the only likely way the Republican nominee of 2012 would not be one of the four named is if all four chose not to run. But we shall see.) —HJH—