The Economic Nationalist

Lawrence Auster’s blog format, which Laura Wood, the Thinking Housewife, has adopted, happens not to be my favorite format. Among readers’ comments, the format leaves a vague, probably unintentional, nevertheless fairly heavy impression of sycophancy. Many readers evidently like the format, which naturally is fine with me; but, as the saying goes, it’s just not my cup of tea.

But don’t let the format bother you today. Go and read this.

(Incidentally, one suspects that the best blog format just might be the format which existed long before blogs, or the Internet, ever arrived on the scene—the standard periodical format with the familiar, stuffy, stodgy, “Dear Sir”-addressed column of “Letters to the editor.” Not, mind you, that “Dear Sir” actually works in a medium in which readers will identify themselves by handles like “Sgt. Joe Friday” and “Axe Head”! Can you imagine? “Dear Mr. Head: Your point is well taken. We can understand why you and your neighbors in Location Undisclosed might feel as you do, but for the reasons stated in the article we believe otherwise. Respectfully yours, The Editors.” It does not quite work, does it? But, anyway, you get my drift.)

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

I wish that I had Peter Hitchens’ talent to state it so well:

[British] schools are terrible, and have been for years—so terrible that even the authorities are beginning to admit it. But the teachers are right when they say that the real problem is in the home. And the problem of the home is actually the problem of an unhinged society that decided to try to change human nature. Women, it said, had to work outside the home to be fulfilled. Raising children was something that would just get done in the intervals between work and sleep.

This idea came from a wild, Leftist coven whose members long ago grew up and got rich. But it just happened to suit a lot of businesses which find women cheaper and more reliable than men, and so it took off. And it has done limitless damage. And it is time that it was reversed. And nobody will do anything.

Such pointed prose earns the Economic Nationalist’s recognition as Quote of the Week. As troubled as too many American schools are, we would nonetheless seem to have it rather better over here; but Mr. Hitchens’ point regarding the institution of a feminized work force applies equally here in the United States, word for word.

You can read Mr. Hitchens’ entire article here.

(It is interesting to observe that the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s 2009 gubernatorial race seems to be running hard against his conservative Republican opponent’s old master’s thesis, in which the Republican had tried to make the very same point Mr. Hitchens is making here.)

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.

No, no, no, Ross! Ross Douthat writes,

If anything, I think the way the McCain campaign has finished up—and the way the media has covered it—works to [Louisiana Governor Bobby] Jindal’s advantage in 2012: Conservatives are going to be extremely eager to prove that they only hate Obama because he’s a radical, not because they’re racist, and what better way to demonstrate that than to nominate a dark-skinned conservative with a funny-sounding name? Indeed, much of the current affection for Jindal among movement conservatives—and especially in talk-radio land—can be traced to precisely such a yearning for a conservative Obama: A multicultural prince who channels Ronald Reagan, and whose nomination would at least reduce the taint of racism that clings to the American Right.

Does Ross not see? The American Right could not conceivably have done more than it has done to cleanse itself of the taint of racism, whereas Democrats like John Murtha and Joe Biden remind us recently again of which party alas is the actually racist one. The problem is not in the imaginary, nonexistent, illusory Republican taint. The problem is in that U.S. minorities often do not want antiracism and indeed are insulted by it. The bigger problem is that U.S. whites are sick and tired of being so persistently labeled as morally defective racists by their own, white, Republican leaders.

American blacks in particular continue to show bafflement at incessantly disrespectful Republican attempts to convert them into honorary whites. They actually like being black. Why can we not understand this? Why won’t we listen to them?

The Democrats get it. We do not.

Bobby Jindal is a fine fellow and he may very well become president of the United States one day, but he is not going to solve Republicans’ problems with the minority vote. The spectacular rise of Clarence Thomas has in seventeen years shifted hardly a single black vote to the Republican column. Michael Steele has failed to win the black vote in Maryland. Vernon Robinson has failed likewise in North Carolina, as has Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania. Messrs. Thomas, Steele, Robinson and Swann are good men and valued Republican compatriots, but they very clearly do not speak for their fellow American blacks. What is it with us on the American Right that we cannot seem to learn the lesson in this?

HJH

Wisely said Euripides 2400 years ago, “The darkest hour is that before the dawn.”

In view of the broad, manifest failure of the George W. Bush administration and—more excusably but no less disappointingly—of the Republican Revolution of 1994, a growing number of conservative American traditionalists have begun to despair for the future of Western civilization. White people of European extraction, 28 percent of the world’s population as recently as 1950, are on course to fall to fewer than 10 percent by 2060. The populations of black Africa and of the Muslim world are booming; and, increasingly, those people not only populate their own ancestral lands but also colonize ours.

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