The Economic Nationalist

There is not much in a word, maybe, but what do these recent news headlines have in common?

Read the rest of this entry »

O, the narcissism!

… Swiss watchmaker Swatch Group Ltd. is worried that its relations with Muslim countries—an important destination for its goods—will be imperiled if [a Nov. 29 referendum to ban the construction of minarets] passes. “The brand ‘Swiss’ must continue to represent values such as openness, pluralism and freedom of religion,” said Hanspeter Rentsch, member of the executive group management board at Swatch. “Under no circumstances must it be brought in connection with hatred, animosity towards foreigners and narrow-mindedness.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Pundits are busily grinding axes today on the stone of yesterday’s off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey and upstate New York. Pundits always do. The reader can decide whether the following interpretation too grinds an axe.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Blankley is an instinctive conservative, a patriot and—one finds every reason to believe—a chivalrous, decent man. He has earned the public respect his voice is accorded, which is why it matters when he writes nonsense like this:

[Regarding] South Korean trade, … in the absence of very prompt United States policy decisions and actions, we shall incur long-term irreversible economic … harm.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Here is a dense article. Readers first encountering the Economic Nationalist might find some of the blog’s other articles more congenial to start.]

Edmund Burke, the father of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, was ever loth to enumerate his precepts. Russel Kirk and Peter J. Stanlis have each observed this of Burke. The Savior had taught in parables and Burke, many years a member of the British House of Commons, found that the events of the day served him instead of parables, furnishing ample material from which indirectly to teach, thus minimizing the risk of misunderstanding one incurs when presenting principles without context. For principles, regimented into a body, may constitute a system of thought, but systematizing them in and of itself lends them only the appearance of context. It cannot lend them context itself. The systematization of thought without suitable context might be said to be a characteristic failure of liberalism.

Explicitly rejecting the notion that it were a system of thought, Russell Kirk characterized conservatism not as a system at all but as a disposition—a disposition toward permanent things. Flattering myself a disciple of Burke and Kirk, naturally I concur unreservedly with the both of them in this.

It is an awkward prospect therefore that I should begin here to enumerate the precepts of the Economic Nationalist’s conservative system of thought. It is a dark and doubtful undertaking, and we shall see by article’s end the degree to which it succeeds or fails.

If a system of social thought were a science (it isn’t), then we should prove it by its forecasts. Caution is warranted, yet it cannot be denied that the degree is eerie to which broad events since June 2007 have conformed to the forecasts of the Economic Nationalist. Now, some of this conformity is surely blind luck, for I am most decidedly under no illusion of prophecy (it is worth observing for instance that I never forecast June 2007 when the immigration amnesty bill went down to defeat). However, the Economic Nationalist’s mode of thought has proven so fertile since June 2007 that, for my own satisfaction if for no other reason, I am moved today to try to write some of its precepts down. A footnote to the last article began the process and I should like to continue more formally here.

Let us begin to enumerate precepts of the system of thought in the following manner.

1. Adam and Eve fell from grace, we men have inherited our first parents’ fallen nature, and Jesus died for our sins. Now, one is wise to beware gratuitous expressions of piety but this is something different, not really an expression of piety at all but rather an item of understanding. We heritage Americans as a people are nothing if not deeply Christian at the core, and one can never grasp the Economic Nationalist’s fundamental mode of thought until one properly appreciates its thoroughly Christian foundation. The Fall matters, it is fundamental, and it is unnecessarily hard (actually futile, I suspect, with due deference to Plato, Derbyshire, etc.) to try to interpret the world without regarding it.
2. Focusing the last point, we live in a fallen world, a world in which serious attempts to achieve any semblance of societal perfection are fundamentally, implicitly doomed to catastrophic failure. Everything you have ever learned about the Fall in Sunday school is highly pertinent to interpreting the events of the day. One is, of course, allowed to doubt this relevance, but then he must fall into one of two categories: either he is no longer very interested in adopting the Economic Nationalist’s mode of thought; or he has never really learned properly about the Fall, or has learned but forgotten. To the former class of doubters I have nothing unkind to say except that I hope that they enjoy the reading and, for their own reasons, come around to my point of view someday. To the latter class, others are better qualified to teach the doctrine of the Fall than I, but in the Internet age suitable references conforming to this or that sect (Protestants differ from the orthodox on the Fall in no way that is relevant here) will not be hard to find.
3. In all of history, across all the earth, if a country to rival the United States of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years has been identified then I have not heard of it. In 1950s America (shorthand for 1953 through 1963, the actual years in question), there was indisputably discontent, injustice, naivete, poverty, unfairness, bigotry, overtaxation, arrogance, corruption, oppression, unkindness, ignorance and folly, because the United States were a large country in a fallen world and the 1950s were not a single, shining hour but actually several years in length. However, in this fallen world, between Eden and the present day, it never got any better than 1950s America. To appreciate 1950s America properly one only need stop considering her in a vacuum, and start considering her in comparison, well, to the era and country of one’s choice. Pick any. Pick any at all. The America of the 1950s handily tops them all. For vigor, good nature, uprightness, industry, harmony, opportunity, order, liberty, justice, privacy, fraternity, tolerance, faith, self-reliance and prosperity; for the beauty of her daughters and the valor of her sons; for achievements in engineering, architecture, the sciences, literature, music and the arts; even for the sublime character of her sports; a few countries may have excelled the 1950s U.S. on one or two points but, on the whole, none ever matched her.
4. The heroical narrative history of the United States is to be treasured and revered, but the mystery that the 1950s emerged from it will probably never wholly be penetrated. God has not arranged events to be so understood by us. A legacy of slavery, a War between the States, a great wave of immigration, the villainy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popular presidency, and two world wars we probably should not have fought would not have been expected to produce the brightest golden era in history, but by some alchemy they did. Or maybe it was that America’s hard-earned, frontier, can-do spirit simply overcame those other things? No, I think that it all went into the soup, so to speak, even the slavery, in some mystical way which can no longer rightly be traced or reproduced, though our English heritage, frontier spirit and bitter Civil War were always the chief ingredients. It is not important that we understand this. It is not needed that we reduce it. What we ought to do is to cherish it.
5. The 1950s are past and can never return in the same form, but many or most of their virtuous elements still live in our hearts. The memory of 1950s America is a great, granite rock, rising strong, broad and tall in the clear air behind us, its head lifted above the thundercloud and all the sordid affray. Whatever the confusions and divisions of the moment, looking back, all heritage Americans can see that same rock. It is our common point of cultural reference, our veritable standard of cultural appeal. “We did it that way in Ike’s day,” is an argument that has grown more convincing rather than less as the years slide by. The point is not that you approve of everything done in the 1950s, or that I do; the point is that the fondness of heritage Americans for the 1950s has not faded but grown with the passing of the worthless decades since, that this fondness has against the expectations of some been absorbed by the best part of the younger generation, and that it is not necessary for us to dissect the 1950s, to explain them or to judge them, but rather to rally spiritedly to them.
6. The reason the memory of the 1950s endures as brightly as it does is that the 1960s and their squalid sequels have produced virtually nothing of cultural value to displace it. Practically nothing of enduring cultural worth has entered American life since 1963. Dark days only burnish bright memories, as Europeans in the several centuries following the disappearance of Roman law could tell you.
7. It is hard to interpret Ronald Reagan, the greatest president after Washington in this writer’s view, as other than an extension or untimely revival of the 1950s. Of course, Reagan was never an extension of Eisenhower or Kennedy—Reagan was Reagan, and only a man, not an era—but Reagan exemplified the spirit of the 1950s better, probably, than any president we have ever had. Ultimately, though Reagan gave a battered America an eight-year, partial respite, it is unclear that his fine effort has had much lasting effect on the nation for the better. Maybe it has. Would that we could all be Reagans; but, in the event, Ronald Reagan came untimely, either too early or too late. Or perhaps he came just right, if his purpose was to bridge from the one era to the other, to serve as it were as a stepping stone halfway between the opposite banks of the creek. Reagan, though iconic, though honored and highly respected here, for these reasons admittedly does not much impact the system of thought under present discussion. Perhaps someday it will occur to me just how Reagan fits into the system, or one of you will explain it to me. Then I will let you know.
8. One should respect and promote good behavior and, at all costs, avoid obscure misexplanations to excuse blatant bad behavior. Justice and mercy, yoked together by prudence, governed by honor and duty, shielded by discretion, constitute the only right response to bad behavior. Regarding mercy, she is indeed the full equal of justice in the Christian understanding of things, but this is exactly why the greater mercy must be shown to the unknown innocent who, if the reprobate be unloosed, is likely to come to harm.
9. Racial equality, sexual equality, physical equality, mental equality, social equality, individual equality and the like simply do not exist. It is no use getting upset about this.
10. Events are seldom governed by conspiracy but rather by mundane human nature. A corollary is that emergent behavior is real, which is to say that large groups behave fundamentally differently than small ones do; and it is utterly useless, contrary to all experience, and maybe dangerous to imagine otherwise.
11. Many men, as opposed usually to women, fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and benefits of planning. Health and good fortune permitting, life will bring a series of opportunities of which, when they arrive, as Benjamin Disraeli observed, one is either prepared or unprepared to take advantage. The selection and timing of opportunities tend to lie beyond our control. Planning, therefore, is to position us to embark when the oar-ship of opportunity emerges as it were from the sea-mist; and then to row vigorously at a proper pace once embarked. It follows that one ought to develop a faculty to tolerate ambiguity. Men tend to confuse such tolerance with aimlessness; but options, representing the keeping open of future choices, have inherent value; and one should tend to regard the foreclosure of an option as a loss unless offset by some suitable benefit.
12. As Jeff Martin has taught, socialism is bad, very bad, but it is folly to oppose socialism in its current form without first properly appreciating socialism’s malignant appeal. Contemporary socialism peddles a peculiar illusion of security; and it is the illusion, not the thing it mocks, which is execrable. Security is a fundamental human need, more strongly felt among women than men; and taunting folks out of context with the likes of Benjamin Franklin’s famous aphorism on liberty and security (that those who would sacrifice the former for the latter deserve neither) may be good tonic for young men in a platoon or on a football team but only drives the mature and the female into formidable, implacable opposition. You can’t beat those odds. You couldn’t beat them even if you revoked women’s suffrage. You’re up against human nature, immutable down the ages. You must judge for yourself, but for my part I believe that the effort to dismiss the human drive for security is doomed ere it begins, like boxing the rock of Gibraltar. This is why radical libertarianism is no practical antidote to socialism, a fact about which G.K. Chesterton had much to say. The practical antidote, rather, is likely to be found in the softening and restraint of the multitudinous forces that unknit, alienate or dissolve family, congregation and the old-fashioned neighborhood—corporations which used in fact, organically though imperfectly, to provide the very material and spiritual security socialism so grotesquely apes.
13. Related to the last point, capitalism is a wonderful system, really a miracle. Nothing else in human history has produced anything like capitalism’s material cornucopia. We know of nothing else that ever could. At the same time, however, capitalism is fickle, greedy, disloyal, uncaring, crass, cold-blooded and cruel. Capitalism is incredibly disruptive, and this in itself is not a good thing. Is capitalism flawed, then? No, it is not flawed, not as such. Capitalism is what it is, just as a knife is what it is, and you can cut your hand with it. Understanding capitalism not as a revelation but as an excellent economic paradigm, we ought to support society in gradual, prudent, preferably locally implemented measures to restrain, bound and channel it. For instance, the tuition-subsidized state university per se is not necessarily a bad thing, though it charge the student a price below market to attend. Publicly maintained roads are likewise not bad, either, though their routes and maintenance schedules be chosen by legislators and government officials not markets and though they serve some citizens inequitably at higher cost than others. To define and discourage monopoly is fiendishly difficult but this should not stop the state from trying. And so on.
14. In contrast to the last point, what is bad—indeed, what is an unmitigated, unadulterated evil—is state “welfare” benefits to the needy. To the inexperienced, untutored and naive, to those living in some cave lo these past forty years, state “welfare” might sound like a fine idea, but all experience with it is bad. We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that “welfare” promotes sloth, fatherlessness and violent crime on a vast scale. For every child pulled out of genuine poverty by “welfare” several children are robbed of their fathers (even when the missing fathers are not out robbing others). Are we filled with public pity for the one child and coldly heartless toward the others, half-orphaned through our simpering pride? Even if “welfare” benefits cost us not a dime, we should be wrong to impose them—and they cost us many, many dimes. We know that “welfare” empowers a state bureaucracy to snoop. No excuse remains to us. Every last iota, every jot and tittle of state “welfare” ought to be tossed on the junk-heap, for there is no good in it; and the sooner, the better.
15. Our countrymen, and particularly our womenfolk, are not going to condone the dismantling of what they see as an economic safety net, so to speak. I do not know exactly how we reconcile this point with the last one but, thinking of one particular “welfare” program, “food stamps,” I have a question: why are “food stamps” only for the needy? If the state provides “food stamps,” and noted billionaire Warren Buffett asks for his ration of them, why should he be denied? Because he does not need them? But that is the wrong way to think of it. Warren Buffett should be the very first person granted “food stamps.” His taxes, after all, pay not only for his own “food stamps” but also for those of thousands of others. Mr. Buffett’s claim is at least as strong. The objection comes, “But we cannot afford ‘food stamps’ for all, only for the poor.” But don’t you see? That’s just it. We seem to afford Social Security for everyone that has paid into the system, fair and square, including Mr. Buffett. What we cannot afford is the social havoc wreaked by harmful “welfare” programs like “food stamps.” A government ought never to pay people explicitly for being poor. If we can afford “food stamps” for everybody, then fine, maybe, I guess; but, if we cannot, then we simply cannot afford them, and ought to be mature enough to realize this without throwing a tantrum over it.
16. Almsgiving is an individual Christian duty. Our government should back off and let us do the right thing. Our government should let us give the alms. (But what if we don’t give them? But this is entirely the wrong question, as Jefferson and Reagan would tell you at once. It is not for government to keep a wary eye on us but for us to keep a wary eye on government.) Death, poverty and suffering will always be with us in this mortal life. The Christian is to relieve such ills where he can, not to play god, imagining that he could relieve them everywhere. Regarding the nonsensical proposition that state “welfare” represented Christian almsgiving by the people collectively, please review the last several points.
17. As Robert Spencer and Serge Trifkovic have revealed, Islam is inherently incompatible with Western civilization. Not radical Islam, but Islam, plain and simple. If we had the courage of our own faith and took the trouble to learn about theirs, we would understand this and arrange gradually to restore an amicable, geographical separation between us and them.
18. Economic theory is essential to understanding the present world in motion but is not to be believed or trusted. Its predictions are wrong, often slightly so, sometimes ridiculously so. The economist who has got this fact in his bones is likely to prove useful and merit respect. The economist who has not is likely to prove an erudite fool.
19. Steve Sailer is right: a race fundamentally is a partly inbred, extended family. (Actually, Sailer is right about a lot of things, not only this.) Thus, considerations that apply to one’s family may properly extend to one’s race—a fact that people in a more sensible era used to understand implicitly, without especial rancor, until the silly word racism popped up and scrambled their brains. (Intriguingly though not entirely unexpectedly, the heady symbolism of a black man in the presidency does seem to be putting a halt to some of the scrambling.)
20. In combat are found comradeship and valor. In competition are found industry and ingenuity. This does not mean that competition or combat in and of themselves were good. They are necessary evils which, stressing the virtues in them, we rightly prepare our sons rigorously to surmount.
21. That white American men, whose forefathers were fell warriors, should together meekly acquiesce in the rape of a white American woman by a black American man every fifteen minutes is not a sign of generous racial amity but an unutterable source of shame.
22. If you say, “A triangle has three sides”; and I reply, “This statement discriminates against squares, which suggests that you don’t care about squares, that you wish squares to die, that you’re a racist, and that your right to free speech ends where my geometry begins”; then besides being unwitty I am barking mad. There really is no point in continuing the conversation, is there? But, then, how many shades of a degree less mad am I than the liberal elite which dominate our institutions today? I used to think it right to keep an open mind, to hear both sides of a debate, left and right, before making up my mind, and undoubtedly in the abstract there is merit to such a stance. The utter bankruptcy of leftist thought however has never been more obvious, and the fact that we still have leftists in high places is a testament to pride and sheer lunacy (see the first point above, regarding the Fall). At some point in one’s education it is probably profitable to read some Locke, Paine, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Marx, if only to appreciate how badly the movement such thoughtful men spawned went wrong, but once one confirms his tentative conclusion that these thinkers were mining the wrong philosophical vein, the time has come to turn to the earthier likes of Bolingbroke and Burke.
23. Rather than to spend too much time studying the forerunners of the leftists, it might be more profitable to study the actual progress of the French Revolution, 1789 to 1804. Or, rather, 1789 through the present day and onward into the future, since the French Revolution, the wheel on which the Western world is broken, has never yet really ceased to turn.
24. Francis Fukuyama will be remembered by his generation for proposing that the momentous, 1989-92 collapse of Soviet communism marked the end of history, the final triumph of liberal democracy. It was a bold forecast which captured the imagination of the day. Subsequent events naturally have proved the forecast utterly wrong, for the Soviet collapse was not even the end of a proper epoch in the West, much less the end of history. This is easy enough even for the ingenious Fukuyama to see in retrospect, but why was his forecast wrong? I would suggest that it was wrong for the same reason findings of intellectual giants like Locke and Montesquieu were wrong, that the forecast gave insufficient attention to the pervasive consequences of the Fall.
25. Contra Goldwater and Limbaugh, a proper conservative abhors extremism and honors moderation (a useful word the sometimes brilliant Limbaugh has grotesquely misdefined). Aristotle taught of the Golden Mean: that virtue is usually found at some point between opposing vices. To heed Aristotle has stood us two thousand years in good stead; we should heed him again. Observe however that moderation has never consisted of finding some point between wisdom and folly and arbitrarily labeling this point “truth.” In this sense, the conventional left-right spectrum of politics is unhelpful, since the Golden Mean usually seems in our day to lie on the extreme political right. Put another way, seeking political wisdom midway between Left and Right resembles taking a bath midway between the kitchen sink and the bathtub, at attempt which would not ordinarily be described by the adjective “moderate.”
26. It almost always pays to maintain good humor and to be patient.
27. Pride goeth before a fall.

I believe that the Western world stands at the cusp of an epoch. The years 1914 through 1963 delimited one epoch; 1963 through 2009, as I propose, another, which I would close July 31, 2009. The epoch in which we will all likely live the rest of our lives dawned about August 1 of this very year. It is a solemn moment. As Disraeli once said, you have a new world.

I believe that the dawning epoch will be lengthier than the one past, tumultuous in a different way and, ultimately, far less predictable in its results. The nearest model in Western history for the dawning epoch is the tumultuous 89-year period from 1559 (when Henry II of France died accidentally in a tournament, leaving his country to descend into civil and religious wars) through 1648 (the year of the peace of Westphalia). In a maybe meaningless twist, the roles of Protestants and Catholics are vaguely reversed this time, at least in the U.S. (Europe is another story), only it’s not about Protestants and Catholics this time but about—well, let us leave it to future historians to sort out and aptly to name the two or several sides; for now, labels like “liberal” and “conservative” will have to do.

So is it a system of thought, after all? In retrospect I am not sure that it is. Burke and Kirk were probably right: you cannot systematize it. At least, I cannot systematize it. If you can internalize the precepts like those expressed and implied above, however, then many of the puzzling things that go on in the wide world are likely to begin to make rather more sense to you. Certain developments will not come as such a surprise. The relevant faculty thus developed becomes a component it what is, ultimately, known as wisdom.

Howard J. Harrison
The Economic Nationalist

What does this CBS News report say to you?

The stock market’s mood darkened after the Institute for Supply Management said its index of [U.S.] manufacturing activity in September slipped to 52.6 from 52.9 in August. The number fell short of analysts’ expectations.

It seems to me to say that U.S. manufacturing had weakened.

CBS’s hourly radio news bulletin reported the development Thursday evening in nearly these words, undoubtedly derived from the same CBS copy quoted above. What CBS did not explain on the air, and indeed what CBS does not explain even in the extended report linked above, is that the index in question of the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) reports not U.S. manufacturing activity but rather change in U.S. manufacturing activity.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.)

I have recently been reading the book Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s U.S. secretary of state. The reading occasions some comment on the book’s conception of international trade. First, however, follow some general observations on this interesting book.

Read the rest of this entry »

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