Obstacle
#1: Corrupt Political Elite
Some days it
is difficult not to despair over the direction of the US, as the moral
corruption of our political leaders crashes over us in wave after wave:
A
US House hearing nearly becomes a scene out of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling
Two
other House members are caught having an affair
Sec
of State Blinken does a lame cover of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ while he’s in
Kiev
A former
Nixon advisor, Kevin Phillips, explains how we have gotten to
such a low point, and Republicans don’t fare too well in the telling:
The author of The Emerging Republican Majority
contended that elites abandoned Middle American values, leaving their
cultivation to the disadvantaged by post-industrial society. During the
neoliberal transformation of the 1980s, the gains of the post-war “Great
Compression” were largely erased. Those who feared that the American Dream was
slipping away from them were left without any voice.
In Phillips’s
perspective, the GOP bears the brunt of responsibility for this evolution.
Instead of representing Middle America, it has degenerated into an incoherent,
individualistic synthesis that advocates for the interests of the top 1
percent. Reagan did not bring about a renewal but rather a nostalgic
restoration, with his greatest fault being the creation of a “new plutocracy.”
In the 1980’s the Republican Party was in the hands of an elite whose attitude
to the middle-class decline fluctuated between “it isn’t happening” and “we
can’t do anything about it.” By accelerating financialization, Reagan, as
Phillips contends, paved the way for Clinton and the triumph of neoliberalism.
This shift ultimately completed the process of deindustrialization and wrecked
the material base upon which Middle America stood.
This
hyper-financialized, under-industrialized, under-farmed economic system remains
firmly in place because of the entrenchment and insulation from outside influences
of the globalist, Uniparty elite:
The
U.S. has known periods of intense financialization, such as the Gilded Age or
the Roaring Twenties. The boom was always inevitably followed by a bust, as
speculation faded and a return to the real economy ensued. This self-correcting
mechanism stopped working in the 1980s, and with it American capitalism lost
much of its vitality. Phillips argues that “financial mercantilism,” the
collaboration between financial elites and Washington policymakers, has stifled
market forces to a previously inconceivable scope.
The same process
of cyclical self-renewal ceased to function in American politics. It has
expressed itself through critical elections recomposing political cleavages and
elites. Phillips mentions 1800, when Jefferson broke the Federalist consensus;
1828, with the election of Andrew Jackson as president; 1860 with Lincoln’s
victory, which introduced a new type of polarization; and 1896, with the
presidency of McKinley, which finally overcame the divisions of the Civil War.
The election of Roosevelt in 1932 was the last in a series of great
realignments that reinvented American politics. Each of these critical
elections represented a bloodless revolution.
“During the
period from 1800 to 1932,” claims Phillips, “the American people did something
no other nation’s population has ever done—they directed, roughly once a
generation, revolutionary changes in the nation’s political culture and
economic development through a series of critical presidential elections.” Each
of these revolutions was aimed at elites who no longer served the nation and
turned into selfish oligarchy.
The political
cycle of renewal came to a halt with the election of Richard Nixon. The elites
in the capital had swelled to such an extent that they could not accept an
outcome that did not suit their interests. Over the past 60 years, Phillips
argues in his 1994 diatribe Arrogant
Capital, Washington has become a fortress of an elite disconnected
from the rest of the nation, “a capital city so enlarged, so incestuous in its
dealings, so caught up in its own privilege, that it no longer seems
controllable by the general public.” Both parties merged into “venal center”;
the elite replacement mechanism was effectively disabled by “the permanent
Washington.”
Republicans,
who were supposedly conservative reformers, did little to change things for the
better:
According to
Phillips, it was the GOP that governed the country during the most decisive
moments of national decline in recent decades. Reagan initiated the process of
financialization of the economy, which led to the decimation of the industrial
base and ultimately undermined the middle-class. The victory of Bush 41
symbolized the triumph of an establishment of privilege and connections,
while his son's victory drove financialization to the extreme, fostering
the “reckless credit-feeding financial complex” that would be responsible for
the 2008 crisis.
The America of
Bush 43 displayed two additional signs of decadence in full: imperial
overstretch and a messianic fever that supported strategic blunders in the
Middle East. “What kind of politics or crisis”, asked Phillips in American Theocracy, “could
overcome the combination of Bush administration strategic neglect, Washington
interest-group entrenchment, and parochial Republican constituency pressures no
one quite knew.”
Mr Phillips
offers as solutions to these problems a populist platform of referendum, term
limits, early elections (in case of paralyzing gridlock), and
re-industrialization. It may sound
counter-intuitive, but implementing a populist agenda would likely be helped
along by a Christian king, as we have said in the past; the pincer maneuver of
the working class from below and the king from above was very effective at
neutering the destructive power of a sordid oligarchy in previous ages (see,
e.g., Henry Myers discussing the late Middle Ages in Medieval Kingship,
Nelson-Hall, Chicago, 1982, pgs. 322-3).
However,
populist victories, should they materialize through these measures or others,
can be easily undone by foreign adventurism.
Obstacle
#2: Unnecessary Wars
The case of
Emperor Louis Napoleon III in France, la Louisiane’s mother country, is
very instructive. He helped raise France
out of the dire straits she had been stuck in since the outbreak of the French
Revolution:
Imagine what it
must have been like to be a Frenchman during this Republic. For the better part
of a half-century, your country had undertaken every political lurch and
foreign escapade that its leaders deigned to try. You had seen your country
invaded and your Churches desecrated. While all this is going on, your standard
of living had essentially not changed since the 1780s, with every step forward
(removal of forced labor) being coupled with two steps back (hyperinflation,
conscription, and stagnation). In the late 1840s and early 1850s, you had
suffered through all of that, and what are your leaders now arguing over?
Whether to have a “social and
democratic” or “liberal”
Republic. Politics, the machinations of which politicians got which powers, and
not economics, the material well-being of the citizenry, were once again the
order of the day.
It is perhaps
then no wonder that Emperor Louis Napoleon III (or just Louis Napoleon at this
point) won his election to the Presidency in 1848 with almost three quarters of
the vote. He ran on a platform of preventing a proto-communist revolution and
suppressing the ongoing riots that had been a common feature in France for
decades (particularly at the end of the July Monarchy), coupled with his
support for mass industrialization and economic development. In so doing, he
won the votes of members of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one hand and
the working class on the other. It would appear that the law and order, plus
economic development, platform used by so many populists was written early.
. . . The results of this effort speak for
themselves. In 1851 France had 2200 miles of railway (a quarter of the length
of England’s rail system, and not much larger than Belgium’s, a country twenty
times smaller than France). By 1870, France had 12,500 miles, transporting 100
million passengers per year. The maritime trading fleet grew to the second
largest in the world (after England). Industrial production doubled. Foreign
trade tripled. Workers, who now found their wages growing for the first time
ever (for some this might have been the first period of stable income ever)
were quick to spend their hard-earned wages in newly opened department stores,
with the first such store, Bon
Marche, being opened in Paris in 1852. Quality of life massively
improved for the average citizen as capital flooded into the economy, providing
work and wage for laborers. France was transformed from a country of peasant
and lord akin to Russia to one of worker and business akin to Britain.
Politically too,
he finally liberalized France. He welcomed back political exiles, eased freedom
of the press, and gave more powers to the legislature. Culture too flourished,
with Offenbach’s works being played the world over. By every stretch of the imagination,
the Second French Empire was more successful than the first, and more
successful than any political administration in France up to that point. An
Empire focused on domestic order and growth had finally brought the liberty and
prosperity that Republics and Monarchies had failed to achieve. How on earth
could such a successful regime collapse?
The answer
to that last question is one the States need to pay very close attention to:
Sadly, Louis Napoleon forgot the other
tenet of the populist playbook: no foreign wars. After squandering his hard-won
goodwill in Crimea, Italy, Mexico, and, finally, Prussia, defeat at the Battle
of Sedan secured the rise of an Imperial Germany, setting the stage for the
many conflicts of the twentieth century, and the end of the most successful
regime in the long and proud history of France.
Unnecessary
foreign wars over the last two decades have destroyed thousands of lives and
trillions of dollars of wealth in the US alone.
No amount of populist reform will enable the US to overcome that kind of
carnage. DC’s interventionist foreign
wars must quickly come to an end.
Obstacle
#3: The Triumph of Money-Chasing and Ugliness
Pressing
practical matters are essential to deal with, but something more transcendental
is also needed. Joseph Robertson, a
writer for The European Conservative, provides some
details:
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2024/05/garlington-obstacles-to-an-american-renewal/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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