The Economic Nationalist

L. Gordon Crovitz, former executive vice president of Dow Jones and past publisher of the Wall Street Journal, opines in the newspaper he once published,

At the dawn of the Industrial Age, in 1719, the British Parliament passed a law banning craftsmen from emigrating to France or other rival countries…. “At that time the chief concern was the loss of iron founders and watchmakers,” Gavin Weightman writes…. Spies from around the world tried to uncover the secrets of British engineering…. This attempted protectionism of ideas was doomed by easier travel and communication.

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The Economic Nationalist is pleased to learn that, in one of his final acts as president, George W. Bush has commuted the terribly excessive sentences of U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. Readers who do not recall the case will find a brief review of it by following the hyperlink. It remains to a future president to pardon the men of felony, but at least Messrs. Ramos and Compean will now be returned to their suffering families.

HJH

Let us be at peace. We have dodged a great disaster. John McCain has lost.

Lift your heads up, conservatives! The sun has set on a dark day. The clouds break. The stars gleam out. Barack Obama may be a wolf in the night, but, even if he is, too many of us still ring the fire. This wolf cannot well strike our camp.

We have no need now to devise intricate solutions to our nation’s problems. Let the Democrats bear that burden a while. Opposition is liberating. We can oppose.

We mean to survive. We will not let our children be dispossessed by gradual decay of demography. Surely we can unite our people, the traditional American people, behind this simple proposition.

How, exactly, do we mean to survive? Never mind that! We do not yet agree on that point. That discussion is poisonous. Worse, under the present circumstance, it is pointless. In opposition, we are not required to propose. We need only oppose.

Opposition is liberating.

Our cause is just. By standing our honest ground about our campfire, we shall compel our foes to show their bodies in the firelight, or to hang back slinking impotently in the darkness, or to confess the plain justice of our cause and to join our side.

The left have made a fateful blunder this week. They have accepted the staff of power too soon, before their numbers were adequate, before their plans were ripe. Let us not by foolish squabbling among ourselves permit them to escape the consequences of their mistake.

Make them own it. Make them rue the day.

For the day comes.

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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An unnamed Seattle reader of The Economist succintly remarks,

Sir — A nation has a history, a culture, an identity. Britain is not France, Spain is not Germany, and none of these are Bangladesh or Morocco. Nor do their citizens want them to become so. People do not want to be overrun by foreigners of a strange religion, a different race, or exotic (and sometimes repulsive) customs, even if it means a 1% rise in economic growth. No amount of lecturing will change these attitudes.

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“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” observed Adam Smith. Despairing nationalists can take heart. Though we the old American people stand indeed in grave danger of losing the United States as our own, peculiar nation-state, we have not nearly lost her yet. Economic thunderclouds threaten, but we are fabulously wealthy and can afford some belt-tightening, as it were, even when we don’t like it. It is entirely true that we should never have let the nation decline as we have done, that we should have restricted rather than liberalized immigration in 1965, that we should have restrained our federal judges, that we should have approached racial desegregation more circumspectly, and that we should gradually have restored a traditionally American tariff during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years. It is also true that we should never have surrendered the Panama Canal or the fruits of our 1973 military victory in Vietnam. All that however is the flood of history under the bridge of the present. Water flown does not return. The question is: what now?

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Lawyers make law for the benefit of other lawyers, computer programmers write software for other programmers, and professors train their best students to be professors. The fictional protagonists writers create in literature are often writers; the press’ favorite topic seems to be the press. To follow the pattern, The Economic Nationalist would blog about blogging and bloggers—which would be boring. As editor, I try to avoid that trap.

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The American nation seems to begin to stir from her long paralysis regarding ethnicity, culture, race and immigration. If candid, American traditionalists will admit that the odds run against them—that the stirring comes late and remains weak—but much cause for hope with courage persists.

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[Oliver Woods’ recent dissent here is such a model of civility and reason that it seems to me that it deserves to head its own article. Let me yield the floor to Oliver, whose words follow. One doubts that many of this blog’s readers would repay Oliver’s chivalry with abuse, for he does us the amicable courtesy of open disagreement, in the broad light of day, and on this blog’s very doorstep, no less. Let us remember how to treat a guest. —HJH]

Hi Howard,

You have a very intriguing and interesting blog. I’m a New Zealander myself (living in New Zealand), and I’d call myself an economic nationalist.

However what I don’t really understand is what I perceive to be your hostility toward other races, or at least immigration. I’m not saying this in a way of attacking you, as I may be misunderstanding your views after only reading several of your post (please correct me if I’m wrong I am!), but I am more saying it out of sadness as I think that there are many people like recent Muslim or Chinese migrants to the United States who would wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of your economic and social opinions, but would be isolated by views that seemingly endorse, or at least have a neutral stance, on racism.

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[This article deprecates antiracism. As such, it is a literal fact that the article inescapably promotes racism, or something akin to it. All Americans have been conditioned to recoil reflexively from any hint of the promotion of racism, and indeed there are some good reasons why this should have been so; but at present the reflex is tearing the country apart. Whatever your race, I can only ask that you read the whole article, or some significant fraction of it, before jumping to socially mandatory negative conclusions which, I suggest, are neither warranted nor helpful. Race matters. Unless you are absolutely sure that you disbelieve the proposition that race matters—in which case I cannot yet reach you, because such disbelief broadly contradicts the life experiences not only of tens of millions of Americans but very likely of your own—then you might learn something worth learning here. Our country must find a way to shift into a stance from which we can discuss race issues forthrightly. I know of no way to do this, except to start discussing the issues forthrightly. Thus this article. —HJH]

We live in an antiracist age. The age has not turned out as we had hoped. Our generation in the United States and across the broader West has conventionalized an ill conceived, trendy prejudice against sensible racism, a prejudice born in the 1960s with bright hopes and noble aims but which has in the ensuing forty years gradually, by fits and turns, rotted right through to the core. Maybe like you, I was a dutiful antiracist for decades. I am not proud to admit it. I can however report that I have finally given up the bad habit. If you can surmount the admittedly rational fear of being labeled a racist, then you can give up the habit, too.

What is a racist, really? Webster defines the racist as one who believes “that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Let us give Webster credit: that is about as neutral, objective a definition of the word as one could ask for. Whether the word conveys any useful, practical meaning in the social context of the opening decade of the 21st century is another question, but that is not Webster’s fault. Let us accept Webster’s skillful definition without further dispute.

The trouble does not lie in the word itself. It is an honest word. The trouble lies in that the society in which we live does not presently understand the word to mean anything coherent. Fashion has so extremely overloaded the descriptive word racist with heavy negative connotation that the plain word has grown almost useless as a plain description. In place of the actual racist comes an Aryan villain of mythical proportions, a debonair white demon of incalculable power and incomparable slyness, burning crosses before churches and lynching innocent blacks in the night. Indeed, if ever a mere word could have been possessed by the Devil, the word racist has been—for once so possessed, the word racist emerges as a dazzlingly suave, clever word. Indeed so dazzled by its suave cleverness are we, that we neglect Western civilization’s death pangs for its sake.

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