The Economic Nationalist

[Courtesy to regular readers wants long absences explained. I have been very, very busy, which is good for me and mine but bad for the Economic Nationalist. This is the only reason for the lack of new articles. Regarding the suggested article on Aristotle, its prospects presently recede rather than advance. We shall see.]

[This particular article is more egotistical than is my wont. The purpose of the article however is to share impressions of an event my family and I attended. The necessary egotism merely acknowledges that the impressions are my own.]

My family and I attended a local Tea Party rally, our first, on Tax Day last week. It was less than I expected. About 300 attended, authentic U.S. patriots all, most between 40 and 70 years of age, all but two white, mostly but not overwhelmingly WASP. (It is regrettably advisable for me to affirm, in this mad era, that I was perfectly calm regarding the crowd’s ethnic profile: it bothered me not in the slightest. More on this below.)

I have good and bad impressions both to report. Let me start with some bad ones.

Crowds have personalities. Walking and sitting among the Tea Party crowd, one could hardly avoid the impression that the crowd as a whole were semiconsciously trying to work itself up to the manufacture of spontaneous passion. When that failed, as because spontaneity cannot be manufactured it must, the crowd turned toward the projection of an unbecoming, impudent, narrowly founded anger toward curiously unnameable elements of our political class. All in all, there seemed an unfortunate, vague phoniness to it, in certain respects.

One of the rally’s several speakers was a certain black woman, a Tea Partier from a distant corner of the same state, previously unknown to the crowd. The crowd shamed itself by lusty cheers for the woman’s first sentences, before she had even had time to say anything of substance. I wondered: why does it not occur to the members of such a crowd how disrespectful it is to express approval of someone who is prepared to earn that approval, before permitting her a chance to earn it? The crowd’s behavior was slightly creepy. White U.S. conservatives wonder why more black U.S. conservatives will not make common cause with them, but I don’t wonder. Were I black, I should not have felt comfortable in an environment like that—not especially because the crowd was white, but because the crowd refused to stop fawning on me, because the crowd refused to treat me like a normal human being.

The irony is that, once one stopped congratulating oneself for being a good antiracist, once one stopped listening to oneself cheer and started listening to the actual speaker, the black woman gave the best speech of the day.

The rally’s most coherent theme was a libertarian, Constitutionalist, anti-big government one. It was a good theme and I was for it.

What you think of it, I do not know; but one other speaker—a white-haired woman with a firm, grandmotherly manner—and the crowd’s reaction to her, just may have pushed me over the edge of prolonged indecision to tend to support the Fair Tax, which as you probably know is a proposed federal flat tax on consumption. The reason is not that I believe the Fair Tax to be necessary or even uniquely fair. It’s that the crowd was heavy with professionals and small businessmen in their 50s, husbands and wives, the sort of six-figure earners with children grown who, in a multitude of necessary but unseen ways, really make this country go. The one and only deep, authentic feeling I perceived among the crowd that day was a fierce, smoldering anger at being taxed unfairly, at being taken advantage of, at being made to support other Americans who don’t pull their weight.

If such professionals and small businessmen, our most valuable fellow Americans, so strongly desire the Fair Tax, then who am I to contradict them? In such a matter, such people deserve to have their wishes respected by me, for national morale is rather more important than are certain pedantical points of theoretical economic dispute. I now believe that I wish to associate myself with support of the Fair Tax. The smoldering passion, not logical arguments alone, has coaxed me on board.

Other than that, though, I did not get a lot out of the rally. A candidate for the council of the city in which the rally was held gave an invited speech in which he thundered incoherently against the city’s owning various pieces of public property and against the very principle of the property tax. The man had no apparent sense of humor and needed a haircut, facts which clashed with his starched collar and silk tie. If such a man wins a civic election against entrenched civic interests, to turn the expression, I’ll starch my own collar and eat it. I was not impressed.

One network television affiliate sent a boom-truck and film-crew. I saw a reporterette with enormous, er, surgically placed frontal enhancements, shall we say, wearing heavy make-up and extremely tall black shoes, get out of the truck, but oddly she and the truck did not stay long. I think that the truck at least might have left ten minutes before the two-hour event’s scheduled start. The conspiracy-minded might suppose that the news producer had meant to make the crowd look sparse by filming it before it had fully entered the site. For all I know, the conspiracy-minded might be right—but, then, I don’t watch the television news and know nothing of frontal enhancements and the like. The reader can decide; I merely tell what I saw.

The event’s host spoke in a T-shirt, old jeans and a blazer, an odd combination to my eye. He told an appropriate number of lame jokes between speakers, though, and the jokes were all clean, and he maintained a sunny disposition throughout, which is more or less exactly what the host at such an event ought to do.

The flowers were in bloom. The grass was green. The air was pleasantly warm. The theme-music was that of John Philip Sousa, and one woman between speakers sang an original, patriotic country song she had written herself. Not bad. There are worse ways one could have spent an evening in the park.

Nonetheless, my wife said that, if she were a Congressman attending this event, contrary to the dramatic image reputedly projected on television, she would not have come away with any particular fear of the Tea Party’s passion. I would say that that assessment were about right. The Tea Party just did not feel all that formidable to us. We were surprised. We had been expecting more.

On a personal note, I learned to my disappointment that, while I do approve of the Tea Party and am glad that it exists, I am no Tea Partier. The Tea Party I experienced was a right-wing libertarian movement rather than an authentically conservative one—and, as right-wing libertarians go, rather less impressive than the younger, far more energetic movement backing Ron Paul in 2008. But, still, in the United States, right-wing libertarians are on balance a good thing. We can always use a few more. Regrettably not a Tea Partier myself, I am for the Tea Party nevertheless.

A hand-printed sign carried by a member of the crowd: “Dear Congress: we elected you, but we can learn from our mistakes.”

I cannot think of any particular point on which to wind this article up; but, then, this seems appropriate, because the Tea Party itself could not think of any particular point, either. Be that as it may, let me leave the matter there, except to the extent to which readers might or might not wish to comment below.

HJH

[P.S. To the extent to which readers care I will briefly note for the record—and state not as an attitude but merely as a bare fact—that my family and I happen to be non-WASP but white. Readers who extrapolate from this information that my family and I did not identify properly with WASP culture probably misunderstand us, but in this mad era the misunderstanding is, well, understandable. Not liking to talk about myself, I would rather not discuss the matter further; but the reader, hereby duly informed, can judge for himself.]

I do not know what to make of this, but to an American vaguely inclined to sympathize with the British National Party, well, it does not look too good. Context is lacking but it looks, more or less, as though hot-tempered BNP stormtroopers had gratuitously roughed up an invited guest at a BNP event—and then as though the party, rather than to apologize and graciously to make amends, had pugnaciously defended the act.

Read the article and watch the video here.

Note the siege mentality evident in this highly placed BNP response.

The guest’s name is Dominic Kennedy, a reporter for the Times of London.

The mainstream English media have “covered” the BNP for so many years with so flagrant a disregard for objectivity that it grows hard to sift the competent reporting from the adolescent preening masquerading as reporting. Persistently bad news coverage of a political party however does not in itself make the party good. However many party-meetings anarchists might in the past have disrupted, you don’t invite a reporter from a leading newspaper and then rough him up after he arrives. You just don’t. Not even if he stalls a bit when you ask him to leave.

The BNP’s Fuehrer Nick Griffin naturally accuses the Times of lying. (Fuehrer is a loaded term, is it not? Can’t help that. The term here is not actually an insult but an informed description.) Nick Griffin does that. A lot. If among the past ten years you can identify a single month during which Mr. Griffin did not loudly accuse at least three perceived political foes of lying about him and his party, well, Mr. Griffin was probably on vacation that month. You might not identify so much as a single week. I don’t know about you, but for my own part I tend not to trust folks so ready to accuse others of lying, even if the accused are liars. Mr. Griffin need not worry about me, of course, but the principle at stake does seem to be something Mr. Griffin does not understand.

Taki Theodoracopoulos has described the relationship between Nick Griffin and the English media as an encounter respectively of the unsuitable and the inappropriate. It seems that Taki may be right. Too bad.

We Americans naturally will not worry much about this, one way or the other, for the most excellent and fortunate reason that it is not our problem to worry about. I have often thought however that I would cheerfully vote BNP if I were English. This particular event stands in another light.

Considering not Messrs. Griffin and Kennedy in particular, incidentally, but Englishmen generally, have you not observed that that most famous of English modes of expression, understatement, seems to have become a thing of the past? It is hardly to be believed that Americans do it better now, but do it better we do.

It is a bad time to be English, a good time to be an American.

HJH

Barack Obama and his motley Congressional Democratic majority of resentful nonwhite ethnics and graying, 1968-style liberals have met such political troubles as few Republicans would have dreamed one year ago, though the Economic Nationalist is pleased not to be surprised. Events are now in the saddle, so to speak, as foretold here. The horse has the bit in its teeth.

Joe Guzzardi said from the start that the 111th Congress would never be able to pass a major immigration amnesty. Mr. Guzzardi’s forecast looks righter and righter. If so, this is very good news.

Things are looking up. Rested and tanned after a blessedly enforced political vacation, the Republican party is back in a semblance of fighting trim, and its members in Congress, though not yet exactly receptive to a Buchananite, neoconservative, alternative Right world view, do seem less actively hostile to such a world view than in recent memory. This is especially true of younger members who, though variously flawed, represent a significant improvement over the older generation of Republican Congressmen they will gradually supplant. The bad news is that, though the Republican party is better, the Democratic is much worse, whereas our Republic is safe when she enjoys two good, patriotic national parties. One such party however is preferable to none.

(There remain those conservatives, among them friends of this blog, who believe that even the Republican party is good for nothing. I have already explained how strongly I feel that their belief stands on a fundamental misconception of the kind of thing a national party is but, for readers new to the Economic Nationalist, consider: a good dog barks at visitors after nightfall, runs on and tears up the lawn, and slobbers on its water dish, even when such caninity is inconvenient to the dog’s master. A good dog behaves as a dog, just as a good national party behaves as a national party. It is no use to wish a national party to be something it was never meant to be, something no national party ever has been; and it is even less use to compare a national party, by its very nature a power-seeking coalition of significantly divergent interests, against a boutique party like the Constitution party which, though honorable and worthy of respect, simply is not the same kind of thing a national party is. A survey of the center-right national parties of the Western world reveals how fundamentally sound, how relatively good our Republican party truly is, now that Republicans are rid of the bad leadership of George W. Bush and John McCain. That political parties in a democratic republic are, by their very nature, generally somewhat wretched hardly indicts America’s specific, fairly excellent Republican party. It tends to indict the very principle of democracy, rather—a principle the United States, being what they are, probably cannot escape. We work with what we have. But I digress.)

What nervous Republicans misunderstood in 2008, and indeed what this writer misunderstood as recently as 2004, was that the only way out was through, so to speak. The Republican revolution of 1994 having failed, Democrats were bound to get their shot at mismanaging the Republic. Democratic mismanagement is bad for the United States, of course, but if inevitable then sooner was better than later. Either John Kerry or Barack Obama would have sufficed to lead the inevitable Democratic mismanagement, putting an end to the all-too evitable Republican mismanagement under the well meaning but inflexible, incompetent George W. Bush. The only way out was through.

The real danger is that, when we Republicans return a Republican to the White House, we might choose the wrong Republican again. Traditional America might not survive another such mistake; we have run out of room for error. Fortunately, the clearly leading Republicans, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee (and even Sarah Palin if you like) are each much preferable to any candidate the party has nominated to the presidency since Reagan. A return to Reagan would be ideal, but Reagan is dead, Romney is rock-solid (I should explain why in a later article) and Huckabee, though sometimes worrisome, is at least an intelligent, perceptive man who actually grasps the issue of economic nationalism. We stand well going into 2010 and 2012. And, indeed, who would have thought it? The year 2010 has arrived already.

In the meantime, given the sorry circumstance of 2008, the Obama administration is working out beautifully thus far for American patriots, better than even this writer had hoped. The danger was that Mr. Obama would swamp us with an immigration amnesty but he seems barely interested in immigration. Mr. Obama seems interested rather in doing every other stupid political thing he can think of to do. How he and his Democrats have turned the health-care issue, a sure winner for 2009 Democrats, into a political loser will remain a textbook-example of political incompetence for years to come, but turn it into a loser they seem indeed to have done.

Ironically, voters seem inclined to punish rather than to reward Mr. Obama even for the one important thing he has done right, namely, to save General Motors. Remarkably few Republicans seem to grasp the fundamental importance of having saved General Motors, which is why when their party returns to power it will, obliviously, do the right thing at the right time for entirely the wrong reason: it will privatize General Motors again, and America will be strong back in the auto business.

There is still a God in heaven Who blesseth the United States of America, undeserving though they have become. The signs are there to see for those who will. The story of America is not over, yet.

*  *  *

Few readers will wonder why the Economic Nationalist has published little lately, but a brief account might be given those few. There are at least three reasons for the relative quiet. First, the Economic Nationalist’s eponymous issue, economic nationalism, has slumbered; the issue will stir again, but maybe not this year. Second, national media now echo themes the Economic Nationalist discovered a year or two ago: it seems thus unnecessary to belabor such themes at the moment. Third, the major issue of the moment, Democratic health-care reform, is a subject of broad, vigorous debate across the news media, a debate to which I lack the knowledge meaningfully to add, except to state that I am fairly persuaded by that which has become the conventional Republican position on the issue. When events provoke it, the Economic Nationalist will wake again.

In the meantime, for something completely different but maybe of even deeper importance in the long term, I have turned to writing a slow article or two on Aristotle. If I can only work the article or articles into pleasing forms it or they should prove edifying, but the articles’ publication lies days, weeks or months away, if indeed ever. We shall see.

More later.

HJH

Vaguely philo-Semitic but mostly uninterested in Jews as such, I seldom care to write on Jewish topics. This however is a U.S. nationalist blog and, well, if you have not heard why a U.S. nationalist should be interested in Jews then you can just skip this article. I would.

For those of you still reading, it is supposed by some that American Jewry persistently, actively undermined the American nation. This notion has been advanced by one Kevin MacDonald, a courageous man and a careful scholar, as far as I am aware America’s leading exponent of suspicion of Jewish activity as such.

(more…)

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.

Here is an unexpected thing. According to analysis of the Web server’s logs by the software Awstats, one of the Economic Nationalist’s most assiduous readers is located in Moldova.

Moldova!

One wonders if Awstats were not somehow confused.

Though the Economic Nationalist, specifically a U.S. blog, seeks no international audience, all the big people of little Moldova are welcome to read if they wish, for their own, inscrutable reasons. One hopes that they find the reading edifying.

The anti-American, left-wing wench Joan Walsh writes recently in Salon,

I was on “Hardball” today talking about the climate of extreme right-wing rhetoric today, and whether it had anything to do with Wednesday’s tragic shooting at Washington’s Holocaust Museum, or the May 31 murder of Dr. George Tiller by an antiabortion crackpot.

Let’s get this straight. The psychopathic Dr. Tiller was a cold-blooded serial murderer who delighted in full-term abortions so gruesome that even his colleagues in the abortion trade found themselves too squeamish to execute the infernal procedure. It is thankfully not given to this writer to judge whether a radical abortionist deserves to die but, if Miss Walsh came to the Economic Nationalist for affirmation that the likes of Dr. Tiller deserved to live, then she would have come to the wrong place. If Dr. Tiller was not a very monster, distinguishable from Stalin principally only in the scale of his opportunity to spill innocent blood, then this writer does not know what a monster is.

As Ann Coulter has observed, the U.S. abortion profession has aborted 49 million since Roe v. Wade, 1973, whereas antiabortion zealots have claimed the lives of precisely five abortionists during that time. It seems rather fair to observe that the abortionists have had the upper hand.

Now, a disastrously but honestly mistaken case can be made for abortion, and this writer does not advocate vigilante slayings of abortionists. (Does he condemn vigilante slayings of abortionists, therefore? Answer: no comment. By refusing to answer such mischief this writer will cordially decline to dance to the puppet-strings of the liberal left. The leftist who asks such a sordid question, which does not merit the dignity of a reply, can go carry his own filthy water, as it were, for this writer will not do it for him. Let the leftist condemn, if that’s what he wants. What this writer wants to know is why the left is so fond of killing babies.) To use the exceedingly rare but maybe well deserved fate of the monster Dr. Tiller as an excuse to implicate a nonexistent, extreme right-wing cabal however is a bit rich.

(more…)

If readers would indulge the writer in a self-referential blog post about the blog, the Economic Nationalist would like to acknowledge the valuable contribution the pseudonymous reader “Dr.D” has persistently, generously lent. His running series of remarks demostrate an insight that, one suspects, only long years of experience can bring. Where Dr.D and this writer have disagreed, the disagreement has always been civil, but indeed our profitable discourse has gone beyond mere disagreement, both on- and off-line. I have learned from him, and indeed his constructively provocative remarks have provided the germ for new articles here.

Readers working their way through the archives below are commended not to skip past Dr.D’s remarks but rather to read them, for they are invariably worth the reading. It is virtual friends like Dr.D that have made the blog enjoyable to write.

HJH

News breaks in Europe. The quinquennial election returns to the European Parliament roll in by the minute, when the mildly fascist British National party (BNP) looks set to capture not one but two of Britain’s 72 seats. Party leader Nick Griffin is in for Manchester. For the first time, the BNP is going to Brussels.

(more…)

If one enjoys writing as I do, then part of the fun in blogging lies in building up a regular readership. According to the Web server’s logs the Economic Nationalist now enjoys a readership of a thousand distinct readers a month. Not bad, as such things go, I think. Naturally I appreciate your reading, and believe and hope that you will have found the reading edifying.

(more…)