In my office building today, I passed by a television playing Obama’s victory celebrations. Watching it was an African immigrant, who said in my hearing: ‘I’m glad Obama won because he’s black… Yay!’. Standing up for Obama is a question of racial solidarity. It doesn’t matter that Afro-Americans have been suffering record unemployment under Obama: they’ll still vote for him over the white guy, what matters is that he’s one of them. It’s a tribal politics of redistribution. The state of the economy doesn’t matter in such a set-up, and indeed, Zimbabwe, South Africa and other African countries are run on such a basis. It’s paradoxical because this African immigrant would have emigrated to Australia simply because of the African political system (African immigrants are ‘refugees’ from that system).
But, alas, tribal politics doesn’t apply equally to everyone. If Americans did live in a period of racialised politics, in which they voted for the candidate who represents their ethnic interest group the best – then white Americans could, with a feeling of legitimacy, vote for a candidate who looks like themselves, i.e., they could vote for a white – because he’s white – with a good conscience. But the liberal media tells us: Afro-Americans will and should vote for Obama, because he’s Afro-American, and whites should vote for Obama – because he’s… The liberal mindset is that whites have a moral obligation to support Obama. I can’t retort, to that African immigrant, ‘I’m glad for Romney to win, because he’s white’.
Obama didn’t look happy on election night – or enthusiastic about another four more years on the job. And why would he be: America has 23 million unemployed, an enormous deficit, weak growth, a declining currency (which leads to higher food and energy prices, especially oil prices), and a declining geopolitical profile… He can’t solve this problem using the Keynesian economic panaceas of the last four years: trillion dollar deficit spending on ‘stimulus’ and a monetary policy of ‘quantitative easing’ (namely, devaluing the US dollar) – these have been tried, to no avail. The US presidency in 2012 is a poisoned chalice, a poisoned pill. It’s four more years of hopelessness. Keynesian economics has failed. Obama’s a man ill-equipped to do the job – a job he never really wanted, and shows no signs of continuing to want. And, unlike Kennedy or Bill Clinton – both of whom had first terms which were mediocre in terms of economic growth – he shows no signs of wanting to change course in a second term. He’s a man of limited options, and narrow point of view.
An inflexible man like that shouldn’t be president, so the question is how he got there. That answer is the horse in the bathroom. It’s implied, by American racialists and conservatives on the Far Right, that Obama has been, and always will be, a mediocrity as a politician, but who was thrust to the forefront of the Democratic party machine because of his race. To put it simply, liberal whites liked voting for him, it made them feel good. He would never had gotten the nomination, in 2008, had he been white, or Hispanic, or Asian. Which is why, they’ll say, that Obama had the look of a rabbit trapped in someone’s headlights on election night. It’s like some sardonic film by Danish director Lars von Trier: a deceased Southern plantation owner, with a strange sense of humour, leaves the ownership of his plantation to one of his slaves. (Lars von Trier did do a film – Manderlay (2005) – with a similar plot). The slave experiences a mental meltdown when he quickly realises he’s unable to do the job. He desperately tries to hand over ownership to someone else, and, failing that, runs away. But, for Obama in 2012, there is no running away. He will end his presidency with the economy, and America, more or less in the same position as when he started – or worse. Which is, in my view, a fitting end for the man.
Was the US electorate right to vote Obama in again? The great journalist and publicist of supply-side economics, Jude Wanniski (1936-2005), believed in the wisdom of the electorate. That is, the masses have a wisdom which is greater in a whole than in the sum of its parts, and, in a liberal democracy, the electorate always makes the best choice, given the alternatives, even when the choices on offer are mediocre (as they were in 2008 and 2012). The electorate, this time around, has arranged things so that they are, more or less, like 2010: a Democratic president, and a Republican-controlled House and a Democrat-controlled Senate. Neither side will be able to do much damage.
What’s the damage, in this case? It’s damage to the economy. Wanniski’s thesis regarding the ‘wisdom of crowds’ wasn’t particularly controversial or new. What was new – and controversial – was Wanniski’s contention that not only did the electorate understand politics perfectly, it understood economics perfectly as well. What the electorate wanted was supply-side economics, if it couldn’t have that, it’d go for something else – more often than not, welfarism, the social safety net and wealth redistribution.
As to what supply-side economics is: it’s, in the words of the supply-side economist and commentator Nathan Lewis, ‘Low taxes and stable money’. By ‘stable money’, the supply-siders mean the gold standard and fixed exchange rates.
Obama and Bernanke don’t stand for gold or fixed exchange rates: they’ve been devaluing the US dollar for years against gold for years – just like Roosevelt did in 1934, when he devalued the US dollar from $USD20 an ounce to $US35 an ounce, in the mistaken belief that this would ‘boost exports’ and ‘create jobs’. (Gold is the constant, the dollar is a variable. Dollars have no intrinsic value, gold does. When you see the gold price going up and down in terms of dollars, it’s the dollar in changing in terms of gold, not the other way around. So when Roosevelt devalued the dollar, he made so that it would take more dollars to buy an ounce of gold. That is, the dollar lost value. Because the dollar is worth less after a devaluation, it costs more dollars to buy things – and so dollar prices will go up. This is inflation). What about taxes? We know about Obama’s tax plans: he wants to raise the top rate of income tax from 35% to 39.6%, the top rate on dividends from 15% to 43.4% (!), the capital gains tax from 15% to 30%, and the estate tax from 35% to 45%. Jude Wanniski would be rolling in his grave: in fact, the supply-side economic model would predict an economic calamity – a recession, if not a depression – if Obama gets his way. But, and here’s the but, he most likely won’t. The electorate has arranged things so that Obama and the Democrats haven’t gotten a majority in the House. So, fiscally, the electorate has opted for a supply-side solution (and as for monetary policy, the electorate can’t do anything about it – but Bernanke will most likely quit in 2014).
Obama has fought like a pit-bull terrier for his tax hikes – on the grounds of ‘fairness’, i.e., wealth redistribution – and in this, he has proved to be somewhat unusual among the Democrat presidents, at least since the time of Truman. John F. Kennedy devised a supply-side policy of huge cuts on income and corporate tax, before he died (he was inspired by the German government’s post-war series of tax cuts), and, ironically, was prevented, by Congress, from introducing them. Lyndon Johnson – who Noam Chomsky called the most ‘liberal’ of US presidents – pushed them through, after Kennedy’s death, in 1964. Jimmy Carter cut the top rate of capital gains from 35% to 28% in 1978. Bill Clinton cut it from 28% to 20% in 1997, in a bipartisan piece of legislation, and the rates on ‘Roth-IRAs’ (the American equivalent of tax-sheltered superannuation accounts). As we can see, the overall trend, among US Democrat post-war presidents, is for fiscal supply-sideism. So why is Obama different?
The answer is, he’s a third-rate liberal hack – someone on the Far Left of the party, not the Center, who wouldn’t have gotten there normally. He’s more interested in wealth redistribution – and tribal politics – than anything else. His Democrat predecessors, on the other hand, were consensus men, who were prepared to listen to the supply-side voices.
At any rate, Obama was bailed out by white voters – who are still the numerical majority in US elections – and, in particular, white voters in the northern states. The southern voters went for Romney. Obama and the whites (and Jewish-Americans) have been at war, in a Kulturkampf, against the ‘conservative’ and white South for years: the US government is suing, for instance, the state of Arizona for its tough anti-illegal immigrant laws. (Obama wants to naturalise the 11.5 million or so Mestizo immigrants in the US, the Southern border states don’t, naturally, and want to keep out as many illegals from Mexico, Guatemala, etc., as possible. Illegal immigration is a real problem in the US, because, among other things, immigrants take jobs from native-born US citizens – including Afro-Americans. The US nativist website VDare.Com has been running a series, by Edward S. Rubenstein, using the Household Employment Survey, showing that immigrants have been taking most of the jobs created since 2009. For years, the Left, and the liberal establishment, have derided the thesis that ‘Immigrants take jobs’ as a myth: but the cold hard facts bear this thesis out. Rubenstein has speculated that the recent (small) increase in job numbers is due to the fact that, because of Obama’s recent amnesty of the children of illegal immigrants, more and more illegal immigrants are feeling emboldened enough to declare themselves employed in government employment surveys).
Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDare, writes:
CNN is estimating that Latinos, about whom we will be hearing so much, cast just 10% (probably high) of the vote in 2012—vs. 72% for whites. Romney reportedly got 27% of Hispanics, which is at the low end of the long-established traditional GOP range. But note the high end is only 40% i.e. the difference is just over one percent of the overall votes cast. The MSM fixation on the Hispanic vote makes no sense, except as deliberate disinformation. The real target in American politics: the white vote, especially the Northern working class. ['Romney's White Share Fell Short of 2010, So He Lost'].Romney would have won, had he campaigned on an anti-illegal immigrant platform: the white votes would have pushed him over the line. That’s the thesis of Brimelow, and Steve Sailer, the nativist conservative blogger (and frequent contributor to VDare): Sailer calls it ‘The Sailer Strategy’ (Sailer has written a biography of Obama, and is one of the best authorities on the man). Romney, during the campaign, didn’t mention illegals, and he vaguely hinted that he’d be open to an Obama-esque policy of amnesty and that he’d like to see more ‘skilled immigration’ (that is, Indian and Chinese immigration) into the US.
To me, this doesn’t entirely make sense. Northern working-class whites don’t like illegal immigration, so they vote for a candidate who has given some amnesty to some illegals (by executive fiat) and who is absolutely determined to amnesty all. (It could be said, in Romney’s favour, that at least he would have dropped the lawsuits against the southern states and allowed them to enforce their border laws. There is a slim chance that Romney could have put forward some mass amnesty bill, but he would have encountered the resistance of his party).
No, what I see here is a growing north-south divide between whites in the US: there is no homogeneous white race with the same political and ethnic group interest. While Afro-Americans may vote for an Afro-American candidate because he’s their man, white Americans won’t. That’s their curse.
That’s the thesis of Hunter Wallace and the other Southern secessionists within the American Far Right, and I’m inclined to agree with it. I’m sure that many Southerners want to find those northern whites who voted for Obama and punch them on the nose: ‘That’s for voting for Obama’. Growing hostility between the north and south, rising inflation, a depreciating currency… Hmm, sounds like a repeat of the circumstances leading up to the American Civil War…
Many nationalist commentators – American and non-American – in the days before the election wrote along the lines of, ‘This election doesn’t matter, the white race is doomed, doomed, in America. All political effort is futile’. That is, while the Afro-American and Hispanic person plays identity politics – and votes for the candidate who looks like him – the white American shouldn’t. That is (according to these commentators) white Americans shouldn’t get off their behinds and agitate and vote for Romney, because ‘Voting changes nothing’.
Perhaps life (for whites) would have improved a little under Romney, perhaps it wouldn’t: but do you see Afro-Americans vote for Obama because he improves their lives? No: they vote for Obama despite the fact that they are suffering high unemployment as a result of Obama’s (and Bernanke’s) policies, and despite the fact that they are competing, for jobs, against the illegal immigrants Obama wants to stay in the country, and despite the fact that they know that Obama’s foreign and domestic policies are scripted for him by a small coterie of elite Jewish-Americans (when will we see a black man appointed to the head of the Federal Reserve? Or made Treasury Secretary?).
Romney – a white man with a large white family (which is a virtue, in the eyes of white nationalists) and a clean-living lifestyle – was one of the most conventionally WASP and conservative candidates we’ve seen in a US presidential election for a long time; ditto Ryan. But that wasn’t enough for the movement stalwarts and purists. Romney was a ‘Massachusetts liberal’, so the white nationalists say: so don’t vote for him. (Since when, however, is liberalism not white?). Maybe, had the so-called white nationalists and nativists done a little more activism for the white man of this election, instead of being smug and pessimistic, America wouldn’t have had to put up with four more years of this incompetent, aloof and arrogant president. But, as it stands…
Hunter Wallace has written a superb article on this (‘The 2012 Election: A Verdict on White Nationalism’), which I wish I could reproduce in full. Here are a few pertinent parts:
White Nationalists claim that the problem is the “System.” They claim that “Jews control the media.” For some reason, White people in Massachusetts voted for Barack Obama twice while White people in Tennessee voted against Barack Obama twice. Roughly 60% of people in Massachusetts and Tennessee participated in the “System” and voted for exactly the opposite candidates for president.Ditto, ditto. Southern secessionism is, at least, a real ideology, with a historical precedent: unlike white nationalism, it actually existed at some point, and is based – or was based – on very real, immediate political and ethnic realities. White racial solidarity has never really existed in political form: the ‘white race’ has never existed politically, only the nations of Germany, Russia, New Zealand, Belgium, Canada, etc., which have just happened to be white. (White racial solidarity only ever occurred when different representatives of white nations happened to encounter one another in a desert, or a jungle, of some distant colonial land…).
Are the Jews who control the media emitting some kind of secret signal via MSNBC to vote for Barack Obama that can only be intercepted and deciphered by White Yankees? If the “System” itself is the problem, why does the very same “System” produce such strikingly different and predictable results along the same regional and cultural lines?
I’m ready to propose an alternative theory: the real problem is neither the “System” or “Jews control the media.” White Southerners ignored the Mainstream Media and were convinced that Romney would win in a landslide right up until his defeat. They also ignored the Mainstream Media, which most of them dislike anyway, and overwhelmingly voted a second time to remove Barack Obama from office.
The real problem is that there is … NO SUCH THING AS “WHITE PEOPLE!”
The majority of White Northerners do not identify with their race. They don’t think in terms of “white interests” or “white identity.” They don’t see “the Jews” or changing racial demographics as a threat to their identity. On the contrary, these demographic changes in the South and West are exciting to them because the growth in the non-White population works to their immediate short term political advantage.
It is easier to make excuses like “the Jews are controlling our minds” or “the System is hopelessly broken” than to admit that the truth: the majority of White people in the North support Barack Obama because they approve of his policies, and they consider blacks, Jews, and Hispanics to be their political allies, and White Southerners to be their biggest political enemies.
The South is almost monolithically Republican now because Dixie is a nation that is increasingly alienated from the rest of the United States. White Southerners are a distinct ethnic group. We share a common ancestry, a common culture, a common history, and a common destiny. There are various other alien racial and ethnic groups living within our national territory. The exact borders of our ethnic group do not neatly correspond to the borders of our states.
We saw that again tonight.
Just as most of the Northeastern states were called within moments of each other, the same was true of most of the Southern states. White Southerners voted against Barack Obama virtually everywhere we are numerically predominant. There is no need to invent a fictitious bond of “whiteness” because there is a natural sympathy among our co-ethnics in different states.
Moving forward we need to nurture those organic bonds of blood, culture, and interest and eschew abstract ideological bonds which are no substitute for kinship. We need to quit thinking of ourselves as “White Americans.” We need to quit believing that our ethnic group is co-extensive with “America.” We need to quit pretending that this Union is anything but a a curse and a prison for our nation.
Hopefully, the rejection of the South tonight by the rest of “White America” shattered some of these illusions, and reminded millions of people that we are the permanent minority in this country. I also hope this latest display of affection and solidarity between African-Americans and Yankees comes to be see as a verdict on the distraction that is White Nationalism.
Likewise, American ‘conservatism’ is an abstraction: America is not a ‘proposition nation’, and never will be: it was a nation devised, colonised, by the British, plus some Germans, Scandinavians and French. The problem with Obama isn’t ‘socialised medicine’, it’s that he – and the liberal establishment that supports him – have a deep-rooted hatred of white Americans and wants to turn America into a new Brazil – a country with a pyramidal racial and ethnic structure of Africans and indigenous peoples on the bottom, Mestizos in the middle, and a small minority of whites and Jewish-Brazilians on the top. That’s Obama’s vision for America, and ‘socialised medicine’ doesn’t have much relevance to it. The American tragedy (and the tragedy of the Western peoples) is that so many of our fellow (non-Jewish) whites believe in this vision, along with Obama, and are doing everything in their power to bring it about.
Bert Cooper, an advertising executive in the American TV series Mad Men (2007-2012), comments, on the eve of the 1960 presidential election that ‘The Eisenhower years have been good to us’. Apropos of us nationalists – outside America – I’ll say that the Bush Jr. and Obama years have been good to us, very good to us. America and Israel have declined to the extent that they are shadows of their former selves: they have fallen from the lofty heights of their power (which were attained probably in the late 1990s). As a result, nationalism and racialism in the white Western world have grown and grown: the American model no longer really exists as an alternative to Far Right nationalism – how can one say that America today is a model which should be emulated by France or Germany? But, in 1990 or 2000, it was the only model worth emulating, and even Russia and China had to pay heed to it. Now, though, the white peoples of the West have grown restive, and are seeking alternatives – nationalist alternatives.
I’m still enough of a white nationalist to feel a sense of kinship with my white brothers and sisters in America. Let’s hope that they can find a way out of their predicament.
