One of the subplots to the ongoing crisis in America is how various voices within official conservatism are struggling to come to terms with it. In the last years of the Obama administration, they were sure they had a good read on things. Their turn to run the system was coming up and they were busy getting their resumes ready for jobs within the next Republican administration. Then their plans took a direct hit from their own voters in 2016 and their thing has been taking on water ever since.
The neoconservatives, with their vermin-like rapacity, continue to focus on their project, regardless of what is happening. That means infiltrating the Biden administration through the foreign policy establishment and promoting the old-time religion through proxies like Liz Cheney and Lindsey Graham. It also means rooting out populists from the Republican ranks. From their perspective, the chaos is just another opportunity to warp the political process to their advantage.
The other side of official conservatism, the civic nationalist wing, finds itself a stranger in its own movement. The people they were sure they represented turned on them in the 2016 primary and remain hostile. The big stars of “right-wing” media now sound like Pat Buchanan, rather than Bill Buckley. Tucker Carlson is the biggest voice in official conservatism and he sounds like the people Conservative Inc ran out of their thing back in the 1980’s. Conservatism has an identity crisis.
Part of that identity crisis is the collapse of intellectual capital. The best minds on the Right are either in the grave or outside of official conservatism. Look around the organs of official conservatism and it is mostly kids repeating the old clichés. The rest are time servers who made their career by avoiding anything difficult. Part of the crisis is that there is no one around with the courage to question the orthodoxy or the grounding in political history to contextualize the current crisis.
The result is weird analysis like this from guys like David Brooks, arguing that the solution is to attack the people now abandoning conservatism. “Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.” Those “illiberals” he claims, will “eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.” That’s paranoid madness, not analysis..
A less deranged analysis comes from fellow Times man, Ross Duothat, who seems to have spent some time listening to the swelling ranks to his Right. He points out that conservatives don’t conserve anything. This is an old observation of dissidents, going back to before Trump ran for president. Duothat repeats many familiar claims by dissidents about how liberal democracy destroys family, tradition and community, before it then consumes the ancient liberties it is supposed to defend.
Then Duothat inadvertently reveals the nature of the crisis within conservatism by framing what he thinks is the list of currents tearing through the Right. “What are we actually conserving anymore? is the question, and the answers range from the antiquarian (the Electoral College!) to the toxic (a white-identitarian conception of America) to the crudely partisan (the right to gerrymander) to the most basic and satisfying: Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.”
You cannot help but note that the one item on the list with any intellectual and popular vigor is identified as immoral. He uses the language of the Left to describe demographic realism as off limits. Maybe it is the need to signal his obedience to the Left or a genuine embrace of progressive morality, but the default position of the modern conservative is to treat demographics as automatically immoral. They rule out the problem when discussing the solution to the crisis.
The specter haunting conservatism is the specter of demographic reality, the same specter that is haunting America and the West. So-called conservatives like Duothat refuse to acknowledge it. In fact, they say it is “toxic” to point out that America will soon be a majority nonwhite country. The reason this bit of observable reality is toxic to professional conservatives is that the Progressives say it is toxic. They have anathematized any discussion of demographics.
The conservative political theorist Russel Kirk wrote, “A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.” The only way there can be a “people’s historic continuity of experience” is if the people actually exist. At its core, conservativism has always been about preserving the people, not their stuff. Once you stop conserving the people, conservatism is just an ornament in the liberal democratic garden.
Modern conservatives, rather than defending the historic American nation, defend the liberal democratic process. No matter the ends that result from that process, conservatives believe they must defend the process. The result has been a couple of generations of politics where one side defends the process while the other side works to subvert it for short term gain. Conservatives end up defending those subversions and the perversions they create become conservative principles.
Both Brooks and Duothat wonder if conservatism can exist within liberal democracy, but neither is willing to consider both answers to that question. They just assume the answer is it can, so the project is to figure out how. That blindness shows that conservatism cannot exist within liberal democracy. It must yield to the morality of liberal democracy, which will always be controlled by those who are able to muster fifty percent plus one in favor of the morality they favor.
The crisis of modern conservatism is that conservatism must begin and end with the conservation of the people. What conservatism has become is a conservation of a system that is literally destroying the people who created it. Worse yet, it has become a defense of a moral framework that is the enemy of the fundamental conservative tenet that there is an enduring moral order. Conservatism is either the opponent of liberal democracy as practiced, or it is the tool of it.
The death of modern conservatism, and its morally ambiguous traveling partner libertarianism, is a necessary step toward a genuine alternative. It is only when the fight steps out from the prevailing moral framework of egalitarianism and the blank slate that politics can return to a debate about what is in the best interest of the people. At that point, liberal democracy recedes, and the role of leaders is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
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To think I used to get excited in college when David “Baruch”Brooks would be a guest on the Charlie Rose show. I progressively became less impressed with him as I became more politically aware. By the time he wrote a scathing article around 2016 about the state of the conservatives and “white America” I was finished with him. He of course condemned the “tribalism” he observed and warned of the dangers which comes from tribal warfare.
How rich. A proud member of “the Tribe” condemning that very behavior in others.
If it wasn’t so typical and tragic, it would be hilarious.
11
To give Brooks the credit he’s due, “Bobos in Paradise” is worth reading, in the same way Marx is worth reading – his diagnosis of the disease is spot on. You’ll never find a better description of the Cloud People (that he thinks he’s writing as some kind of outsider is ironic enough to give Alanis a chubby, but that’s neither here nor there).
6
I’ll take your word for it, and order it now. I’ve never been steered wrong regarding recommendations from this comment section. I just finished a book the other day suggested by one of the commenters here.
4
I read that book the summer it came out and I thought it was great, but the lack of self-awareness was breathtaking. I kept putting it down and wondering if I was just not getting some inside joke. Then it occurred to me that not matter how accepted he was in that world, he felt like an outsider. This sense of being a perpetual outsider drives a lot of Cloud People thinking.
8
Yeah it was surreal. I guess I didn’t mind as much back when I read it, as I was in the academy at the time, which is an experience I can only describe as “feeling like you’re mildly stoned on bad dope, but all the time.”
It’s the little details that make it great. Like the pause, and the almost apologetic uptalk, when they tell you where they went to school. “Ummm….Harvard?” They can’t wait to tell you — Harvard men are like vegans or CrossFit people, they can’t not bring it up within five minutes — but they’re kinda…you know… apologetic about it?
[I should’ve done back then what I recommend doing now: If you encounter an uptalker, beat him — he’ll know the reason why].
The Ivies are an interesting microcosm of the problem plaguing out elites. The number of mediocrities coming out with Ivy degrees is stunning. Even those in STEM are jarringly narrow. Sailer thinks their selection process is geared toward future earners, so they have a heavy bias for the sort who ends up in the managerial class. If you are curious or heterodox, the Ivies are not interested as you most likely end up in a cabin writing a manifesto.
1
Cross-fit is the polar opposite of Fight Club b/c the first rule of Cross-Fit is never shut up about Cross-Fit. Same goes for Ivy League attendance, at least among the middle class-strivers. That was (is?) my ex-wife, who went to Cornell and couldn’t shut up about it, she managed to fit that little detail into every conversation, no matter how routine. And that schtick fails to impress the truly elite, and alienates everyone else. My ex-wife so wanted to be in that elite world, and she could ape their mannerisms and their cadence, but they knew an imposter when they saw one, so she was and always will be an outsider. Best book on Class distinctions in America: https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 Went a long way to explain to my CivNat former self why my high school friends in CT got summer jobs at Pfizer and I worked at McDonalds.
“” Those “illiberals” he claims, will “eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.”
The guy that wrote this is a notable journalist and author?
Read it way back when. I have to admit some of his insights into these people was enlightening or spot on from my experience. I just couldn’t figure how he placed himself outside of all that then realized , oh yeah, one of the tribe.
1
I often find myself thunderstruck by what appears to be pathological hypocrisy and extreme lack of self-awareness in Brooks’ ilk. Like Z-man I wonder if I’m out of the loop of some inside joke, or some esoteric wink or nod to others “in the know.”
I followed the same path as you in regard to David Brooks. (But then I used to get amped about watching The Firing Line.) Around the time of Brooks’ article you mentioned, my friend, now at home (in many ways) in San Francisco, remarked to me during one of our conversations that he admired Brooks’ analysis and balance in covering social issues. My friend has continued to admire other high priests of progressivism like in this article by Jonathan Franzen that he recommended to me recently, saying it’s the best article he’s read on the subject. A mind (and a friend) is a terrible thing to waste.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Daily_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_123119_TopTen&utm_medium=email&bxid=5dc32426fbd2976d7a1a2842&cndid=59107284&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
1
Oh crap, Johnathon Franzen. There’s a name I haven’t thought about since college. I used to get excited about the New Yorker as well, but just reading the title of this article gets my blood boiling. I’m not sure I can stomach it haha
I you were a Conservative, this could be titled, “The Conservative Case for Jailing Conservatives”.
4
It might well be there is nothing left to conserve. Once a culture is gone, how do you get it back? Trying to revitalize Western Civilization might be like trying to revive pharonic Egypt.
Best case, we’re the Soviet Bloc. Whatever made, say, a Romanian had been stamped out, replaced by the loosest collective identity: “we are mutual sufferers of state repression.” Worst case — and I fear we’re worst case — we are the Ik, brutal individualists with no culture to speak of.
How does one pull a culture together after that? That’s where goofs like Brooks are right, albeit for the wrong reasons – the Strongman provides those temporary pseudo-social bonds. I know I don’t have to tell *you* this, Z, but for those who haven’t studied it, this wad THE primary purpose of Fascism — to provide those bonds, thus avoiding the “alienation” of industrial society that led to Marxist revolution. (Fascism always accepted Marxist analysis as correct… largely because it IS correct, at least in it’s very narrow lane).
13
“How does one pull a culture together after that?”
That’s the tragedy of this whole thing. Its this fact about immigration which the normie needs to understand. Once it happens, that’s it, there’s no going back. Things have changed now, forever, irrevocably. Whatever you had is gone and its not coming back. The cat’s outta the bag…
One of the epiphanies I had while reading Marx– the economy/exchange system of a society will effect the way people interact with eachother. We live in an international exchange system. We buy cheap products which are disposable as opposed to durable. We don’t buy a toaster which we intend to keep for the rest of our lives. We will buy 3,4 toasters at least. If it breaks we don’t fix it– that would be ludicrous. We throw it away and replace it with a new one.
This is how people interact with eachother now. This is how people understand the world, and politics (on a subconscious level at least).
Meh. My neighbor moved and is replace with a new one. My culture is dead. Meh.
7
PS before anyone jumps down my throat for saying anything nice about Karl Marx, the best description I’ve read of Fascism — as it existed in the minds of reflective kids back when it was a going concern — was a war memoir called Black Edelweiss. It might be tough to find, as it was written by a member of the Waffen-SS and…well… you know. Anyway, he wrote it in prison in 1946, and he talks about the idealism of him and his comrades. Not for some glorious monochromatic future, but for a society absent the constant “class struggle” of Marxism, which he takes as a given. Worth a look if you can grab it, though I can understand you might not want it showing up in your Amazon search history.*
*I got a pass, as back in my teaching days I could always more or less plausibly claim my terrible, horrible, no good very bad reading habits were for “research.”
11
But how do you define the people? I have a couple of friends who are Mayflower descendants yet are social justice warriors through and through. And a Latino acquaintance who very much believes in a moral order akin to the one you suggest.
Demographics, too, are malleable.
4
8
Back in the day we used to call them “Americans”. Nowadays they are split and divided along the lines of the frooty coloured rainbow. I would start with them, and of those, I’d start with the blacks. Any black person that thinks George Floyd is a saint gets a free ride back to Africa. And to prove I’m not racist – any whites thinking that way can go to. After that, the Jews. Those that foment race tensions get sent back to Israel. Whites afflicted with white guilt can be shipped back to their neoliberal peers in Europe. Germany would be my suggestion, Angela Merkel has created the world’s first multicultural Utopia they would be right at home with. The queers and other perverts could be worked to death in the camps.
7
“Any black person that thinks George Floyd is a saint gets a free ride back to Africa.”
What are you going to do, drop them off on the beaches of Sierra Leone? Africa doesn’t want our shiftless, uneducated, entitled, psychotic blacks any more than we do.
Lincoln or rather the post-Civil War USG missed its opportunity to remove blacks from the US after the 13th Amendment – repatriation was actually considered at the time. There were plenty of colonies in Africa and Central and South America that were still controlled by Europeans and we could have probably made a deal with someone somewhere to resettle our obsolete farm implements back in 1865. But there’s nowhere outside the US to send them to now. We are either going to have to ruthlessly reassert White control of this country (unlikely), or set aside a geographical area in our borders for blacks and call it Wakanda West.
3
“Demographic, too, are malleable.”
Two things.
Thing one. Demographic are malleable, but within limits. Genetic distance place limits on cultural malleability.
Thing two. Propaganda works. The media, the university, the government lies and propagandizes prodigiously. How resistant one is to these assaults on rationality depends on how strong your cognitive equipment is and how much exposure to the propaganda you suffer.
5
Repetition is a key hallmark of effective propaganda.
Let me repeat that: repetition is a key hallmark of effective propaganda.
Now watch TV/movies/news media…the anti-white, anti-hetero, anti-male messaging has been amped up to 11 for at least a decade.
It’s having it’s intended effect.
Because repetition is a key hallmark of effective propaganda.
1
Nice try, fifth columnist. But your childish colorblind CivNat platitudes – which I don’t actually think you believe but just use a tool to undermine and divert – have long been destroyed around here and are now simply laughed at.
I’m surprised that you didn’t start with “Italians and Irish weren’t considered white 150 years ago.” I guess that no longer works so you guys are going with “my conservative pretty-white looking Latino friend” these days.
But for the record, for many thousands of years, countless races and ethnicities have managed to figure out who are their people and who are not, even if things get a bit frayed at the edges. I’m pretty sure that we can work it out as well.
Idiot.
2
“But how do you define the people?”
Needlessly splitting hairs, trying to get lost in the minutia. This is similar to the Left’s attempts to undermine genetics by claiming that “race doesn’t exist!” Oh really? Can me and my wife perform coitus and expect a little Asian baby to pop out 9 months later?
Don’t try to complicate something that is extremely obvious and simple. (The Left seems to think that convolution is necessarily intelligent) Consider a healthy fit person who exercises daily, has a steady diet, a few reasonable vices, compared to a generally unhealthy person who leads a sedentary life, eats garbage and has degenerate vices. Then one day, you inject the healthy person with a fatal poison. “What even IS healthy anyway? I mean this “healthy” person is at death’s door, while this unhealthy person is still chugging along just fine!”
2
Vermin-like rapacity
Just when you think Z can’t outdo himself, he does.
Thank you for your verbal acuity. It makes your posts that much more enjoyable.
7
Just for the record, and perhaps to get a cheap ‘like’ from Zman, I never EVER think Zman can’t outdo himself.
1
ZMan is totally wrong here. Ben Shapiro is about to point out that Chauvin voted for Obama. Twice!
Wait until that “sick burn” comes out and shows how hypocritical the left is and they’ll surrender on the spot.
11
One of my buddies knew Douthat in college, and apparently he was significantly more based than the pudgy piece of soy he is now. Apparently he was even part of a mildly-edgy newspaper. Rest assured, his views now are carefully calculated to be on the surface mildly provocative, but ultimately toothless. He’s the quintessential charlatan who goes with the wind of those in power because he likes the prestige, like most journalists and professors. If we had the strongman they pretend to fear and that strongman did the first obvious thing and turned Harvard to glass, he would be one of the first foot-soldiers to sing the praises of the new order.
5
“the pudgy piece of soy he is now” “quintessential charlatan”
Pure poetry. I know exactly who you are talking about, and can picture him perfectly.
4
The problem is that there are no leaders anywhere on the Right. Even Trump. Trump got a big pass because he was willing to say directly that we (i.e. his supporters) do not want more (illegal) immigration from Latin America. That is pretty much what was driving most of his support. The other stuff that Chamber of Commerce or Religious Republicans try to throw into the conversation never really had an audience. Most people don’t really care about the Capital Gains Tax or Religion at all. The only thing the Republican Party is good for now is providing a platform for Transexuals like Caitlyn Jenner or non-white people like Tim Scott or flaming homosexuals like Lindsey Graham. A kind of “Off-Broadway” version of politics where third rate performers can still get a little bit of airtime on the nightly news. Ultimately, politics is a dead end. I think the only thing really making politics seem attractive is that non-white people, illegal immigrants, and race baiting shills seem to be using it effectively. But in reality they aren’t getting hardly anything done. It’s all just a lot of talk. If it hadn’t been for the truly egregious power grab we witnessed during the Covid attack, which in my opinion should be considered a biological attack and an act of war that was abetted by the Democrats, we would all just be working and doing normal things like always. Nothing really changed except the way they talk about things on TV. Yet, it feels like we lost already. That’s how psychological warfare works. The mere fact that we have been subjected to biological and psychological warfare should be talked about more. Like… stop talking about what people on TV are saying and instead talk about how these 5th generation warfare techniques are in fact being used against us. It’s a war crime. What’s even worse is that now that we have seen it done to our own political system, it’s truly horrifying that the US government has been doing this same stuff to other countries for decades. The US government is the problem.
12
Unfortunately, the population in this (former) country is now so polluted with various shades of pox and various forms of degeneracy, getting a majority to step away from the prevailing morality is going to be tough. The powers that be and the social media mobs won’t allow it – even at a local level.
No one with any fame or gravitas has the stones to call out the demographic reality and further, lead the charge. Perhaps Carlson, sort of, but it’s the toxic third rail of everything these days.
I still think the only chance is some sort of existential crisis that absolutely forces these things to be confronted and dealt with once and for all. And it had better happen pretty soon – the hour is very late.
9
The only solution right now is to balkanize. We need to separate ourselves from the system as much as possible and coordinate with like-minded people in silence. If some dissident group disagrees with another, who cares, just don’t bother them and work on your own tribe. Once some of these groups gains enough power outside normal politics, we can talk about how we can live with each other.
6
The toxic third rail is failing. Witness Buchanan, Carlson and the entire emerging dissident right. Reality always intrudes. Eventually. So it’s happening now as demographic replacement becomes ever more obvious.
3
Tucker went about as far as he could go on MSM TV in terms of naming the unnamed people without having the screen immediately cut to a test pattern until a Slap Chop infomercial could be cued up to fill the remainder of his airtime.
4
“The crisis of modern conservatism is that conservatism must begin and end with the conservation of the people.”
That along with the rest of the penultimate paragraph nails it. Conservation of a nation’s people make it a nation. Failure to do so makes it a factory farm with overwhelmed slaughter houses.
I have taken to listening to conservative talk radio since the election. You detect both an unvoiced acknowledgement there is ongoing genocide along with fear to admit such. The hosts go up to the bell, refuse to ring it, and then fall back on clichés and fantasies such as MLK quotes. Tucker Carlson is considered edgy only because he will, on very rare occasions, tepidly voice a well-edited slight admission of what is happening.
Tomalj radio is a lagging indicator, I suspect. Conservatives probably are a step or two ahead, at least in their thought processes. Individuals don’t have to rely on My Pillow commercials.
We should not alienate these people but help them along by pointing out empirical and undeniable facts and also the steady stream of lies they are fed. It is more affirmation than conversion now. I always have been a nationalist of the Right but most people arrive here from conservatism. If we prevail, it will be by first reaching those who listen to Hannity and fibd something a little off these days
3
The short answer to what is killing conservatism in America is “America.” But you cannot tell that to people who spent most of their lives in the twentieth century, even if they’re conservative. They’ve been bred to believe “America” is great, and the solution to all problems. America is a staggering zombie, a reanimated version of a loved one. It looks like your dead grandma, and as it lumbers toward you it plays on your heart strings, but if you get too close, you get bit and and you’re toast, too. How do we get normies to accept that America is killing them, and that the only hope for White America is to withdraw, and use their skills and spiritual endowments to recreate what did actually make America great, for the time that it was great? It’s true that the black and Hispanics on the right half of the Bell Curve know they have a good thing (or a had good thing) in a functioning America, but our elite hates bourgeois blacks and Hispanics, and only rewards and emboldens those dumb, psychopathic, or desperate enough to be used against what’s left of civil society in America. I feel bad for blacks and Hispanics who know this is crazy, but they’re on their own, as are the Jews who are not insane or evil, like Jim Kunstler/ Steven Miller types. We need to start over, and advocate for it peacefully and reasonably. If they hate us and we’re the only thing keeping post-racial America from being a utopia, they should be happy to see us go.
3
What is the shape of a plausible future configuration of human organization? One perspective I take on things is recognizing there is some finite carrying capacity of the planet for its human population. Coupled with the true “dismal science” of HBD and what it reveals about the potential and capabilities of genetic populations a lot of policies being pursued do have a certain consistency and logic. The material wealth generated through advances in technology has enabled the explosive growth of populations that could never have generated it nor could they sustain it. Obviously you can’t have representative government working with that raw material either but the longer you as the ruler can maintain the charade of one, avoiding directly confronting a population that has been raised to believe it is their birthright, the longer you can avoid resorting to force directly. White privilege is the concept our rulers have come up with to disabuse whites of idea that they are entitled to representative government whose primary task is to serve their interests. Whites could have that but only in the context of something like a south african model coupled with genetic engineering and ruthless population control measures on the genetic have-nots. Our elites see whites in the same way. They are composed partly of outsider “white presenting” hostile aliens to European civilization and partly by collaborating race-traitors cementing their high status within the ruling class by collaborating in the white “genocide by a thousand cuts.” They have the strength of the reigns of power and unity of purpose, whites have the strength of numbers and that is exactly why the greatest crime in the moral framework of our rulers is any encouragement of white identity awareness. I think our biggest challenge is overcoming this and producing political leaders for the movement. Trump’s greatest crime was presenting as political leader that owed his office to that white constituency. Never mind that he wasn’t really that leader, he had to be undermined, vilified, and destroyed if possible because we thought he might work for our interests.
3
Here’s to a new column entitled ‘The Conservative Case for Embracing White Identity’.
4
All across the West, Elite Inc. & its lapdog politicians are pushing as hard as they can to force a violent explosion within their nation’s ancestral population. Yes, this is madness, but it is reality nonetheless. Why they do this is beside the point. They have become the root problem. And at some point that will become obvious to a critical mass of the public. They fear the pitchfork mob storming the gates of the citadel, but what if a different remedy occurs? One that exploits their greatest weaknesses and is extremely difficult to defend against. What if the antibodies are smart, elusive, and novel? What if infiltration works both ways and the guard at the door is not what it seems? What if the manufactured desperation yields primal cunning rather than cowering subservience? We have no fate but what we make.
4
More true now than when it was written ten years ago.
https://www.amazon.com/Are-Doomed-Reclaiming-Conservative-Pessimism/dp/0307409597
Though he sometimes makes a case for his “Ice People” (Whites + Asians) alliance against the coming black and brown demographic tsunami, Derb knows the West is doomed. It’s not coming back. The numbers are too overwhelming and White people can’t even get it up to reproduce themselves, much less reclaim their cultures and lands.
Brooks isn’t a conservative, never was. Well, he’s a conservative in that he wants to conserve his people, and he’s noticing that the destruction of whites – both demographically and politically – might not be reaching a point of diminishing returns, if not turning negative, i.e. “Not good for the Jews.”
Douthat seems to be recognizing that the conservative whites were the only thing holding back the Dictatorship of Democracy, a particularly terrifying thought when you realize that the voters are blacks and browns who just don’t seem to be picking up the Anglo-Saxon love of the rule of law.
Brooks is worried about his people. Douthat is worried that if whites withdraw, the center won’t hold. They’re both correct to be worried.
1
” It is only when the fight steps out from the prevailing moral framework of egalitarianism and the blank slate that politics can return to a debate about what is in the best interest of the people.”
The best interest of the people, in collective terms, is the continued health and prosperity of the banking industry, just as it has been for a very long time. A few years ago then Fed head Janet Yellen expressed public dismay over low oil prices which were, according to her, idling thousands of oil field trash. Of course her real concern was that fracking companies that had never made a profit (and have since gone bankrupt) wouldn’t be able to repay loans from US banks. To her, the head of US banking, high oil prices for American drivers were the price for a dynamic banking sector. This was little commented upon and not publicly debated by either the so-called conservatives or the progressives.