Some of my posts, of late, have elicited shock and horror from people, who probably think I am a fellow traveler. The post on inequality is the most obvious example. As I mentioned at the start of that post, people outside the Progressive fever swamps have been trained for generations to run screaming from the room whenever the topic of inequality is raised. After all, that’s what commies talk about and being conservative has always meant not being a commie.
The interesting bit from my perspective is the assumption that when it comes to inequality, there can only be two positions. One is the Randian view that the high achievers should get everything and the low achievers should die. Concerns about merit and social comity are for losers. The other view is that a dictatorship of the proletariat should rise up and murder the rich and turn the country into a version of Harrison Bergeron. In other words, equality is a stalking horse for communism.
In my post, I offered no policy proposals. I just pointed out that concentrations of wealth are lethal to self-government and social stability. That’s the lesson of history. The New Right or whatever we’re calling it these days, should be willing to discuss this reality. Otherwise, you cede the field to retrograde loons, who simultaneously demand higher wages and the importation of cheap helot labor from cultures antithetical to Western values. In other words, the game has changed.
You see it in the recent election in Hitler Land. The loser is described as “far extreme right” while the winner is described as a lovable teddy bear. OK, I made up that last part, but that’s not the point. The “right” in this case is simply the guy who wants to keep Austria an on-going concern as a separate country. His economic and social positions are irrelevant. What brought him and his party to prominence was opposition to immigration and globalism.
Similarly, his opponent is best known for wanting to liquidate the country’s borders and dissolving it into the amorphous blob that is Europe. Alexander Van der Bellen was the head of the Green Party for a long time and once said, “Anyone who loves Austria must be shit.” His positions on economics and other matters are a muddle, but no one really cares. He’s not a Nazi and he is a globalist. That’s all that matters and it is the reason he was able to squeak out a victory.
In America, the old Left-Right paradigm no longer makes any sense. The Buckley Conservatives have no meaningful proposals to roll back the welfare state. The Left has no plans to level the playing field by seizing the wealth of the rich and distributing it to the poor. Both sides wave their hands around for old times sake, but they are both open-borders globalists, funded by the buccaneer class of donors.
Calling Ted Cruz a right-winger, for example, misses the point. Sure, he would like to tinker with the tax code in a slightly different way than Hillary Clinton and he has slightly different views on how to bomb the muzzies, but on the defining issues of our age, they are pretty much in agreement. Both the Buckley Right and the Left embrace globalism, open borders and the ceding of popular sovereignty to un-elected international bodies controlled by global corporations.
The New Right that is emerging is not defined by tax policy, endless yapping about the constitution or its principled losing. It’s a cultural movement, first and foremost. The technocratic managerialism that defines the Modern Left and Buckley Conservatives is not a part of the New Right. Instead, it is opposition to open borders and globalism based on citizenism. Being a citizen is not just location. It is language, customs and historical perspective.
The striking difference between my view on equality, for example, and some of my critics is that I place great value on social stability. I’m willing to use the power of the state, if necessary, to prevent global buccaneers from destroying national culture. Libertarians and Buckley Conservatives faint when hearing those words because they place theoretical limits on government, and their symbolic loyalty to those limits, above all else.
There’s the great new dividing line in politics. One side is concerned solely with stability and comity at the top. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times argue endlessly about how best to organize global governance, because that’s what matters to them. They are not just indifferent to what happens in your neighborhood. They see such concern as a fault, a mental defect that should exclude you from the halls of power. As far as they’re concerned, you are no more important than the Malaysian sweatshop worker. You’re just an economic unit.
On the other side of the dividing line are the localists, the people who focus their attention on their neighborhood, their town, their city and their country. The Super Duper Global Trade Pact may be great for Mega Corp, but if it means all the jobs in your town get shipped to Malaysia, then it is not good for you. Cheap stuff at Walmart is not much good to a man without a job. Generous welfare benefits are not much good when everyone spends it on liquor and meth.
That’s the new line in politics. Are you concerned about what you see out of your window or are you concerned about what you see through your telescope. Hillary Clinton thinks of the US government as the local interface of the emerging global state. It’s one facet of the managerial class. You, as a “citizen” have no control of it, you interact with it like an ATM machine. That’s exactly the way they see national governments. They’re just nodes on the network. All of the company approved GOP options held the same views until Trump came calling.
Left and Right are dead. It’s globalist versus localist and everyone is going to have to pick sides, even the libertarians for a change. The #nevertrump loons are picking sides, even if they don’t fully understand it. They are the toadies and rumpswabs that are in the baggage train of every ruling elite. They are the folks who rush into the street to greet the invaders. They don’t understand any of this, but they are men who believe in nothing but self-preservation so it really doesn’t matter. Everyone else will pick sides, based on their perceived self-interest.
I’m a citizen