Our Elites Care Less about Economics than Allegiance to Our Glorious Multicultural Future
For all the talk of the middle class, the working class, the elite, fair shares, and globalization, this year’s election has shown how little economics matters. Partisans of each school of economic thought have stopped quibbling with one another and suddenly have come to agree with about one thing: stopping Donald Trump. A sort of circling of the wagons has occurred in which the Keynesians, the supply-siders, the Marxists, and the socialists have taken a rest from shooting at one another in order to eviscerate the Donald. As it turns out, they all don’t hate each other nearly as much as one would’ve guessed a year ago.
Paul Krugman, the welfare-state advocating court economist of the New York Times seems to have gotten the ball rolling last fall when he wrote a column called “Trump is Right on Economics.” Therein, Dr. Krugman ridiculed Jeb Bush (remember him?) for having attacked Mr. Trump for advocating higher taxes on the wealthy instead of attacking his racism. Dr. Krugman wrote in his typical acerbic tone:
Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil. Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong.
The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren made similar comments a few days later. She applauded Mr. Trump’s stance on higher taxes for the rich, but quickly followed her comment up by saying his stance on immigration made it impossible for her to support him. Indeed, it isn’t just that liberals won’t vote for him either, they are absolutely apoplectic about his very existence. An editor at Vox, Emmett Rensin, openly advocated violence against Trump supporters. Vox is even relatively centrist in comparison to the fashionable Marxist publications out there like Jacobin Magazine, which regularly attacks Vox from the left, and declared the shutdown of a Chicago Trump rally to be a defense of “democracy.”
But just as the hate for Mr. Trump increases as one heads further and further left, so does the natural alignment with his economic policies. Leftist economists have often attacked what they view as corporate, anti-worker, free trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP for twenty-five years. But if the man who opposes those deals and promises to overturn them doesn’t pledge allegiance to our glorious multicultural future and Gang-of-Eight-type comprehensive immigration reform, they will vote for the wife of the man who brought us NAFTA, and spew as much hate and bile at her opponent as they can.
Take Tom Hayden for example, a hero of the New Left (once married to Jane Fonda, no less) and professional hard-left activist and author. He put together the Zapatista Reader, a collection of essays admiring and explaining the Zapatista rebels in southern Mexico who are the darlings of leftist academics. The Zapatistas exploded onto the global scene in 1994 because of their opposition to NAFTA, declaring the trade bill to be “death.” But today, he writes essays for the Nation about why he is voting for Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders — to create a united left against Mr. Trump. Plenty of other leftist intellectuals share this contradiction. Thomas Frank is still a frequent critic of NAFTA, even a dozen years after its passage, but calls Mr. Trump a “bigot of… pungent vileness.” Chris Hedges is the same way. He hates the Clintons and he hates NAFTA, but he hates Mr. Trump even more.
But leftists aren’t the only ones in a contradictory bind over their hatred for Mr. Trump. Numerous Republicans have now not only declared themselves “#NeverTrump” but have also declared their intention to vote for, or at least hope for the victory of, Hillary Clinton come November. Why?
Let’s take a look first at Bret Stephens, the fanatically pro-Israel op-ed columnist for the Wall Street Journal whose main problems with Trump are his use of the phrase “America First,” “the Republican descent into populism,” and especially Trump’s failure to vigorously defend the anti-White status quo (Trump’s “conservatism of blood and soil, of ethnic polarization and bullying nationalism.”). But it’s always good strategy to dress up these fears with other criticisms so that the ethnic agenda remains a bit submerged. In his column “Hillary: The Conservative Hope,” he says:
Where’s the evidence that, as president, Mr. Trump will endorse conservative ideas on tax, trade, regulation, welfare, social, judicial or foreign policy, much less personal comportment?
In a void, Mr. Stephens might have a point. But just a cursory glance at the records of the last two Republican nominees for president make it much harder to take Mr. Stephens seriously. Mitt Romney was openly and proudly pro-choice when he was still stuck in Massachusetts, but of course became pro-life come his run for the nomination. Likewise, when he was governor of liberal Massachusetts, he favored single-payer healthcare, before going on to rail against “Obamacare” in 2012. But then after he lost that election, he has said the program under his governorship was the model for Obamacare. In the last six years, Conservatism Inc. has talked endlessly about the evils of Obamacare, with its taxes, regulations, overreach, etc., and the GOP still nominated the bill’s godfather.
Pedaling back another four years, we get John McCain. Social conservatives have never been able to stand him, having seen him as a sell out since the 1990s, and they’re still attacking his lukewarm pro-life stances these days. On economics, Senator McCain supported the enormous 2008 bailout, the Toxic Asset Relief Program, and campaign finance reform. The last Republican president, George W. Bush, of course supported all the same 2008 government interventions in the economy as well — he oversaw them. He also raised tariffs on steel, expanded medicare, and increased the size of the Department of Education.
For all the chatter of FOX News hosts and all the data of Heritage Foundation policy papers, Republican electoral figures rarely achieve, and often don’t even bother advocating for, shrinking government, lowering taxes, or abolishing abortion. Mr. Trump is nothing new in this regard. Just like any and every other Republican, aside from outliers like Ron Paul, there is no reason to believe that as president he’d make the federal government go back down to pre-FDR levels, or even pre-Ronald Reagan levels. It is hard to believe that GOP-supporting pundits and journalists, like Bret Stephens, are completely blind to this—indeed, Stephens’ ethnic commitments appear to be a far better explanation of his views on Trump than his commitment to “conservative values.” Yet there are plenty of Republican partisans like Mr. Stephens who cannot and will not play ball with the nominee; George Will and Erick Erickson being among the most prominent.
So if Republican intellectuals are always compromising their free market and small government ideology to support electable candidates, and leftists have plenty to admire in Mr. Trump’s positions, why do both sides hate him so?
Because Donald Trump represents hope for White people, for Middle American Radicals, for the historic American nation. Because he gives Whites something to believe in, because he thinks that Whites should be proud of who they are and of who their ancestors were. Mr. Trump thinks America’s a fine place and as such, he thinks its borders should be well-defined and protected.
Those beliefs are the opposites of our cultural elite, the purveyors and upholders of our culture of critique. Their world view isn’t so much a different one to Mr. Trump’s. It is the foil to it. Our sociologists and TV talking heads are fueled much more by their drive to deconstruct a tangible world they loathe than any constructive impulse to build a utopia, or even a castle in the sky. Marxists don’t love the labor theory of value more than they hate the traditional people and culture of the United States. Gender theorists and the feminist left don’t love LGBTQ people more than they hate White people who are opposed to yet more Muslim immigration and all that goes along with that (rape, terrorism, female genital mutilation, oppression of women, murder of homosexuals). Union organizers and liberal pundits don’t love the working class more than they hate White people (if they did, they would oppose immigration of cheap non-White labor). As Gregory Hood once said, “the war on Whites is all they have.” Despite all the obfuscation, it’s really all about race.
Meanwhile, our Republican-leaning economic elite knows Mr. Trump to be bad for business. Stock traders and capital investors are safer in a world where people are content to do nothing more than watch Game of Thrones after a double shift at Wal-Mart. The boys on Wall Street can get rich with trade deals that bankrupt the country while creating enormous demands for social services for the losers in this game. But they’ll keep playing the game as long as most people are reasonably content and distracted — and that was exactly the plan until Trump entered the race and exposed the raw anger of so many White Americans. Contentment and distraction meant not having a sense of history or pride, but Trump, with his “America First” campaign has ended all that. Whites who want to be yeomen or pioneers like their ancestors instead of clerks and cubicle rats — cogs in the system — are just as dangerous to the economic order of Davos Man as Black Panthers — so the GOP slanders them both.
Karl Marx didn’t hold the interests of Whites first and foremost anymore than Milton Friedman did. Or John Maynard Keynes for that matter. Thomas Carlyle claimed economics to be a “dismal science” unworthy of serious consideration, and it is no coincidence that the man who said that was a White advocate. So forget the numbers, and remember the genes.
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