The Economic Nationalist

I have never been a big promoter of the curmudgeonly premise that fellow Americans were too ignorant to appreciate authentic conservatism (maybe that’s because I’m one of the ignorant? the reader must judge). It seems to me that the premise stems from the frequent absurdity of our democracy—the premise assuming that it were somehow possible for a democracy not to be absurd, if only its voters knew more. Personally, I tend to doubt that nonabsurd democracy is even possible in the long term, and so am inclined to a more charitable view of my fellow voters. I tend against the premise.

John Derbyshire however quotes Prof. Paul Gottfried a beaut:

Gottried tells us that only three of 30 students in one of his Western Civ. classes had heard of Julius Caesar. None of the 30 had read a historical narrative “before having been forced to take my course.” But then: “I asked whether my students knew which group had been the most persecuted: women, gays, or blacks. A lively debate followed full of varied claims to victimhood.”

HJH

If you close your eyes, can you not hear the tide of history rush? Can you not feel it swirl, even about your knees? The tide of history rises.

The tide washes away features that have dominated our national landscape so many years that we had begun to think them permanent. Do you realize, for example, that after fifty years the Civil Rights era is over? Actually over. Done. Finished. Animated still, ghoulishly, in the practiced misdirection and tired schemes of an emaciated class of professional race hustlers, perhaps, but stone-cold dead in the hearts of a resentful people who have ceased to feel white guilt.

Do you realize that, following a last, brief Indian summer, dated January through July, 2009, the awful spirit of the seemingly never-ending year 1968 passes away at long last? Liberalism—which one can describe as imagination untethered from the post of prudence—we will always meet again in this fallen world, but what a shock it is to contemplate that the 1968-style liberalism which had usurped the last four decades of your nation’s life had spent its last strength! A dead weight 1968 remains, perhaps, like a great, hulking, blackened tree holding its broken crown yet above the flood, but a hollow tree that will never flower again, even whose roots the flood erodes.

Or maybe 1968 is as a leaking boat. The sudden, August 2009 panic of her narcissistic crew, the children of 1968 gone gray, is palpable. The boat’s nets, having been cast with fervent hope this one last time, come up unexpectedly empty. And still the tide rises—a tide of which Barack Obama, the last captain of 1968, is not the master.

Outliving those that might have mourned its passing, the year 1968 dies at long, long last. Alas that 1954 cannot return to take its place, but hope dawns nonetheless—a new hope, a very old hope—for we live in interesting times.

The Economic Nationalist is in the throes of an economic exercise. Its editor is making money overtime.

That is the good news. The bad news is that it leaves one little time to write articles until—well, I’m not sure when. Maybe, if fortune holds, January 2010; but the work in question is unrelated to economic nationalism.

In the teeth of the present recession one must earn the living one can, accepting bounty with gratitude against the prospect of future lean times. In the meantime, to offer some edifying reading, here is a link to a thought-provoking economic article by the formidable Edwin S. Rubenstein.