As from the enemy’s lines
The eminent Paul Gottfried calls us the alternative Right. We are disciples of Bob Taft, Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. Our time has come.
Our time has come, I say, though you may doubt it, so let us view the battle as from the enemy’s lines. The enemy, the liberal, commands the field, but his forces blunder blindly, distraught, in disarray. His morale is in catastrophic collapse. His victory is empty, his triumph bitter on the tongue. The mirage he has long imagined to be truth is revealed in his own eyes as hubris, or less, as mere vanity. He does not admit his error. No, never that. But the bright liberal dawn of 1968 has turned to a blackening eve of wrack and ruin. Like Tolkien’s Gollum, he hates us. He hates us forever, but he hates himself the more. Love to him now is hardly known.
A strong enemy is never weaker than when he has ceased to believe in the justice of his own cause. You and I will learn to recognize a morally hollow foe. It is said that our foe finds willing recruits today among the younger generation, to fill his hollowness, and indeed this is true; but these young recruits are not the eager spirits of 1968, in foolish rebellion against an older, more conservative world. These young recruits rather are the wary youth of a world gone mad, trying to find their way.
Despair is a sin, but we need not despair. Truth is a powerful ally: she stands on our side. We lack vigorous, seasoned leaders, for Buchanan and Paul have already grown old, and Taft and Helms are gone; but chance will supply leaders in time as we persist in harassing our hollow foe.
The year 1954 will never come again, and this is a real loss; but Western civilization is twenty-seven centuries older than 1954. Western civilization is not so easily killed. The West, that great Oak, will flower again. The strident divisions we find today among ourselves on the alternative Right bespeak the passion of our commitment, a passion our enemy can no longer match.
The long age turns at last. Our time has come.
Howard J. Harrison
The Economic Nationalist
November 17th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
“His victory is empty, his triumph bitter on the tongue. The mirage he has long imagined to be truth is revealed in his own eyes as hubris, or less, as mere vanity.”
I live the in the upper mid-west, Iowa to be specific, and the liberals here are a bit different from east/west coast liberals. They are not quite as “theoretical” in the sense of having a very academic marxist view of the world, but they are very, very strongly socialist. They believe in labor unions just like motherhood and apple pie. The idea of holding your job because you are competent, even really good at it, and being able to go find another one if you don’t like this one, just never ever enters their minds. They simply cannot imagine not being a part of the union, having the union to “protect” them, just like little children needing protection.
There is a retired man that I often visit with, and we get along very well as long as we stay well away from politics. He is a pretty intelligent fellow, a former court reporter. Of course, the need to avoid politics severely limits the conversation! Just today, in talking to Robert, I mentioned some of Obama’s recent blunders, and I saw him simply freeze. He was struggling to maintain self control, which he did. But I mention all of this to say, for these folks, as bad as it is, they don’t see a problem yet. He is still their messiah, they are going to support him right down to the end of the country. I don’t thing it is “bitter on the tongue” at all to Robert; it is just the socialism he and the rest of them have always dreamed about.
November 18th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Dr.D:
It is a privilege to enjoy the benefit of your regular commentary here. A full generation my senior, you bring a perspective I should not otherwise have seen.
I am willing to admit that I have for some years been that unfortunately unusual combination: a pro-labor Republican. Though I have no patience for public-employee unions, I have come generally to support organized industrial and construction labor. I have never held a union card of my own, and my father held one only briefly when I was very young—in fact I even worked as a strike-breaker once, where I witnessed at first hand the dark side of union thuggery—but later experience working daily, as management, with the foremen and the shop stewards taught me to see the matter in rather another light.
I do not know your friend Robert. He sounds like a decent fellow, though it does not sound as though he were a potential convert to our side. I think that you are right to distinguish Robert from the east/west coast liberals, and moreover I do not doubt that Robert will prove impossible to detach from the Democratic party the coastal liberals control. But people who believe in labor unions just like motherhood and apple pie may be reacting in a conservative way to their own lives’ experiences. These are no liberals of the heart.
I speak rather of the fundamental crisis of confidence among the liberal American elite. This is new. Ronald Reagan ruffled their feathers, so to speak, but they still believed in the justice of their own cause in those days. Do they, any longer?
I don’t see it.
Incidentally, the liberal elite hold almost no feeling but loathing and contempt for industrial organized labor. This unnatural alliance between 1960s-style liberaldom and white, Christian, American organized labor simply cannot last.
You are entirely right, of course, about the socialism. I stand with you against that, too, though not quite for the reasons, say, a Sen. Jim DeMint is against it. I agree rather with Jeff Martin.
You and I oppose Robert’s socialism, yet there is a real, fundamental, inherent problem with the corporate leviathans Robert and his union comrades must face. They have got to organize, don’t they? and to stay organized, or their wages and standard of living will fall in the tank. Whether industrialization as such is a friend of liberty, I do not know (Thomas Jefferson never thought so), but it seems to me that the greatest, most enduring liberty we can approximate in an industrialized society depends on a balance of power between capital and labor. Each side ought vigorously to hold its own. Robert is part of this economy.
Question, please: if the Republican party (with admirable exceptions like Buchanan and Reagan) had not been so reflexively hostile to organized industrial labor over the decades, then is it possible that Robert and his sort would be less firmly attached to Obama today? If so, then are Robert and his sort wholly to blame?
Howard
November 18th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Howard, you are much more kindly inclined towards the unions that I am. All of my dealings with the unions, throughout my life, have been very bad or much worse. Throughout my working life as an engineer, I have had numerous conflicts with unions, had union grievances filed against me, and come to have a deep disgust for unions and all that they represent. I did not start out that way; as a teenager, I thought unions were probably a useful concept. Let me just tell you one typical story.
In 1974, I was working for Bethlehem Steel Corp, in the research lab in Bethlehem. We had a project on a cold rolling mill down at the mill in Sparrows Point, MD, just on the south side of Baltimore, MD. We were trying to implement a guage control scheme for dynamic control of the process as the cold rolling operation was underway. The current US technology at that time was essentially hit or miss — the head roller set the tensions on the mill before bringing the mill up to operating speed, and you made what you made. You hoped it was what the order called for. The Japanese were doing automatic process control and we were way behind the curve. Of course, naturally the mill we were working on was an antique, brought from Germany as reparations after WW I, so it was just a little bit out of date.
In the steel mill, all the trades wore different colored hard hats. Management wore white hard hats, and as an engineer, I had to wear a white hard hat. It was just like painting a bulls eye on your back to walk out in the mill with a white hard hat; we were must unpopular with the workmen. If everything was going OK, they would treat us OK, but if they had an accident, like a cobble on the mill, then the mood got bitter and they were nasty.
At one point, I was assigned the job of calibrating the tensionmeters, the devices that are intended to measure the tension in the steel sheet between the roll stands as it passes through on the fly. I worked out a calibration procedure, but I could not do it myself, I had to have a mill electrician do the actual work. I could not touch the tensiometers at all, not lay a finger on them. The only time this could be done was during the one down shift of the week, Sunday evening 11 pm - Monday 7 am. Otherwise, the mill was working around the clock, 7 days a week. So I called ahead and made arrangements to have an electrician meet me at the mill at the beginning of the down turn as it was called. I told them what we were going to do.
I dreaded going into the property of the Sparrows Point mill late at night by myself. I was not at all sure I would come out alive. After I passed the guard shack, it was mostly dark alleys between huge steel buildings until I got to the building where the cold mill was located. Inside, there was only one bulb burning in this immense building, so everything was shadows. The steel mill is a dangerous place to walk around in the daytime with lots of holes in the floor, things where you can bump your head, etc., so I went to the cold mill and waited. About 1:30 am, the electrician finally showed up (union guy), empty handed. When I asked him to open the electrical panel, he said he had no tools; he did not know he would need any. He would go get them; that took another hour. We got the panel open, and started the calibration. I asked him to insert the 5 mil feeler guage to simulate a displacement. Oh, he did not have any feeler guages. he would have to go get them. He packed up his tools and went to get the feeler guages. I waited another hour and a half and then I left, in the wee hours of Monday morning, having accomplished absolutely nothing.
In my experience, this is 100% typical union “work” response. I have never seen a union worker really work if there was any way possible to get out of it, and there usually is.
I am all for union busting, and I am for recognizing merit and firing the worthless, right now! The unions are opposed to recognizing merit, and they think the worthless are more important than the productive.
You speak of the corporate leviathans that Robert and the other little people face. I don’t have a lot of sympathy there. I think the answer is, “If you don’t like what they offer, don’t work for them. Go start your own business.” I know lots of people think they can’t do that, but that is just because they are unwilling to stand the risk. It is the willingness to stand the risk that gives the owner the right to call the tune. I would be very happy to see GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc. not grow so large because there are lots of small businesses running their own shows. But this requires the courage to take responsibility.
I do think that the giant industries we have developed have not been healthy for our society. Jefferson was right about that. The problem is they feed on dependent people, people who want to be handed a job, rather than people who want to be independent. The sort of people who built this country did not want a job, they wanted freedom, they wanted to be their own boss, to have their own life. The ones who came later to supply these large industries were a lesser breed.
Let me brag for a minute or two, please. I was reading a family history book earlier today, picking out some information to send to a friend. I was reading about some of my family who settled the town of Rockport, TX. Several of them were born in the early 19th century on the east coast, in the Carolinas. They traveled to the frontier, they went through the Civil War, most of them fought in it, they established businesses, stock yard, fishing piers, etc. in the late 1860 there on the Texas coast. The bought land, they made deals, they killed indians, they chased wild horses, etc. They were not looking for a job.
Howard, to your question. I really cannot answer. As you have no doubt come to see by now, I am one of those who is reflexively hostile to organized industrial labor, to the point where I can hardly be civil about it. I would only say, however, that the Republican party today is only distantly related to the Republican party of even a few years ago, so anyone who makes a choice today based on what Republicans did in the past is using data no longer valid. Many will not see that, of course.
I hope I don’t sound too arrogant in what I have written above. I am trying to present a point of view that I think is almost lost in our society today, but one I think is very important.
November 20th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Dr.D:
Yours is one of the more effective stories I have heard to illustrate exactly what is wrong with American organized labor. I mean to save your story for future use, against the next time some unionized acquaintance accuses me of merely tepid pro-unionism.
There is no question about it: the labor unions are their own worst enemies. You weren’t arrogant; that electrician was. That electrician should have been thrown bodily out of the plant, told never to return, by his own union brothers. That he was not, speaks volumes.
By the way, I have worn the same, white hard hat. I know exactly what you mean. At my site, I had the advantage that, if I was willing to let myself in on an unpaid Sunday, I could work on the hardware with my own tools. This was technically forbidden, of course, but upper management winked at the practice, stoutly denying to the shop stewards that such a thing had happened. The tradeoff was that upper management expected us in the white hats to maintain amicable relations with the foremen and stewards at all times, no matter how big a fit the steward might throw. Upper management did not wink at failure in the latter area. We had an assistant superintendent, himself a union brother from a distant local, whose all-but-explicit, presumably well paid job it was to cajole, upset and bedevil the stewards; the rest of us white-hats were expected more or less to stay out of the stewards’ way. Anyway, at my site, the system worked surprisingly smoothly on the whole.
But, then, I have never worked with the unions in a heavily unionized state like Iowa. I have worked with them only in the more moderately unionized states, except when I worked on the other side, to break a strike, and then parts of my experience were most unpleasant (though we won; we broke them: it was fun, I must admit). A strike has two sides to it. Both sides will fight, and should fight, and sometimes as you know the fighting gets messy.
None of this invalidates your point, of course. It seems to me that you are right. If what happened to you that Sunday had happened to me, I’d have been so angry, the steam would have shot from my red ears continuously for a month. One supposes, to add insult to injury, that that electrician got (a) regular pay, (b) overtime pay, (c) Sunday pay and (d) foreman’s pay—the last because he was taking direction from you in a white hat. All that pay, for doing nothing, for wasting the precious maintenance shift, and for wasting your time? Shame, shame.
I know the IBEW. They can do better than that.
Howard
November 25th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I won’t be part of any “Alternative” Right, especially one led by Paul Gottfried and honeycombed with Nietzschean pagans.
December 12th, 2009 at 5:07 am
The fact that the IA Left is oriented towards productive labour and people maintaining their jobs is precisely what makes it relatively conservative and a relative good “Left”, as opposed to what you find in California or Massachusetts.
You might want to fire all worthless employees immediately, but that is only slightly better than saying that we can solve petty crime by sending everyone convicted of a misdemeanour to internment camps. Sure, there seems to be some justice in the proposal on some level, and the remaining part of the workplace or society may operate more productively or smoothly, but there is no justice to the situation. So you hate laziness. But is it right to eliminate it by forcing people to slave away at a menial job for low wages and no protection to survive? What are the social costs of this?
Indeed on a social/sociological level, I would rather live in a random town in Iowa than in a random place in de-industrialised California or de-unionised Mississippi. Areas that are focused on stable, permanent employment in productive labour are places with high amounts of economic and social equality without the need for high taxes/redistribution.