“The Return of Economic Nationalism,” bawled the headline on the cover, which depicted an arm thrusting out of a darkened grave, the headstones on which read, “Here Lies Protectionism,” and “R. Smoot, W. G. Hawley,” architects of the tariff act of 1930.39 “[T]he globalised economy is under threat,” exclaimed the Economist:
[T]he re-emergence of a spectre from the darkest period of modern history argues for a … strident response. Economic nationalism—the urge to keep jobs and capital at home—is both turning the economic crisis into a political one and threatening the world with depression. If it is not buried again forthwith, the consequences will be dire.40
When Germany showed a reluctance to bail out Greece, whose safety net was more generous than her own, commentators saw the end of the EU. “Berlin’s recent reluctance to rescue Greece during its financial tailspin—Chancellor Merkel resisted the bailout for months—breached the spirit of common welfare that is the hallmark of a collective Europe,” wrote Charles Kupchan, of the Council on Foreign Relations.41
The European Union is dying.… From London to Berlin to Warsaw, Europe is experiencing a renationalization of political life, with countries clawing back the sovereignty they once willingly sacrificed in the pursuit of a collective ideal.42
By 2011, the global moment had passed. The unipolar world of 1991, the new world order of George H. W. Bush, the flat world of Tom Friedman, and Francis Fukuyama’s end of history—were all history. What brought it all to an end? Nationalism. Taking different forms in different countries, a common denominator of the new nationalism was resistance to the globalist vision and the global hegemony of the United States.
When Churchill rendered his famous description of Soviet foreign policy as “a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma,” he added, “the key is Russian nationalism.”
Believing America took advantage of her after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia formed a partnership with China; began to carve out a new sphere of influence in the old Soviet republics; invaded and chastised Georgia, an American client, and strengthened ties to regimes America regards as hostile, such as Venezuela and Iran.
Chinese nationalism has taken the form of defiance of U.S. goals, from a refusal to revalue her currency to reduce the trade surpluses she has run at America’s expense, to resistance to U.S. efforts to isolate North Korea and Iran, to deepening ties to rogue states like Sudan and Myanmar.
Israel rejected U.S. demands for a halt to new settlements in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Iran defies U.S. demands to stop enriching uranium, supports Hamas and Hezbollah, and calls for the end of the Jewish state in the Middle East. Turkey has gone her own way: refused to allow the United States to use her territory to invade Iraq; established warm relations with Iran; backed the flotilla that sought to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza; and worked with Brazil to negotiate a deal with Iran to avert further UN sanctions.
Brazil, seeing herself as a hemispheric rival to the United States and a rising power in her own right, has pursued an independent line, maintaining warm relations with Venezuela, working with Turkey to end the isolation of Iran, and granting diplomatic recognition to Palestine.
Nations everywhere are putting their own interests first, which some of us predicted decades ago. For globalization’s fatal deficiency is that it does not engage the heart. It has never won over peoples for whom love and loyalty go no higher than their own country. It never will. No one will fight and die for some vague new world order.
“One cannot be a citizen of an international cosmopolitan world order. Identity is specific, rooted in soil, custom, and religious tradition,” writes Jude Dougherty, former dean of philosophy at Catholic University in his essay “National Identity.”43
One cannot be a citizen of the world. Identity is local; it is the characteristic of a people who have inhabited a land over a period of time, who have developed certain collective habits, evident in their manners, their dress, the feasts they collectively enjoy, their religious bonds, the premium they put on education.44
As Rudyard Kipling wrote,
God gave all men all earth to love,
But, since our hearts are small
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all …45
In the new post–post Cold War world, with nationalism returning and ethnonationalism surging, America needs to look beyond the ideas and institutions of globalist ideology and start looking out again, as we should have done, two decades ago, for our own country and our own people first.
11
THE LAST CHANCE
Are the good times really over for good?
—MERLE HAGGARD, 1981
During the Glenn Beck rally at Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, Sarah Palin emitted a cry from the heart. In retort to Obama’s expressed desire to be a “transformational” president, Palin told the throng, “We must not fundamentally transform America, as some would want; we must restore America.”1
Can we restore America? Or has the America we grew up in already been transformed into another country?
It is a contention of this book that America has been changed in our lifetimes, that a revolution has taken place, that though we appear to the world the same country, we are a different nation on a course far off the one our fathers set.
Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton disbelieved in “one-man, one-vote” democracy. We worship it. They believed in a Creator. We have exiled him from our schools and replaced him with evolution. They believed all men had a God-given and inalienable right to life. With Roe v. Wade we canceled that right for the unborn, fifty million of whom have since perished. For 250 years after the settlers came to Jamestown, our fathers sought to build a Protestant and British country. From the Irish immigration of the 1840s to the first Irish Catholic president in 1960, the United States sought to maintain its character and identity as a Christian and European nation. To assert that as an ideal today would constitute a hate crime.
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.
They have declared men and women to be basically the same, that all voluntary sexual relations are morally equal, that the traditional family is but one social option, that men can marry men and women can marry women, that race is a social construct invented by bigots bent on repressing others, that all are endowed with the intelligence and ability to succeed in the most competitive society on earth. All religions and all “lifestyles” are equal and all are to be equally respected. These elites will fight to ensure that a mosque is built at Ground Zero with the same ferocity as they will to ensure that no Nativity scene ever appears on the National Mall. If there is an inequality of rewards in society, they believe, this is the residue of a reactionary America, the fruit of societal injustice, and it is the moral duty of our modern state to rectify that injustice and mandate equality. Those who reject these truths are benighted or bigoted.
Our secular elites believe in this revolution. The people never did. Middle America detests it. Thus it has had to be imposed from above, by judges, bureaucrats, professors, and those who control the content of our culture. One part of America believes we are headed for a wonderful new age. The silent majority thinks the country has lost its mind. For, as Professor Williams, author of Trousered Apes, wrote, at the beginning of the great experiment:
[V]arious practical attempts (in the Soviet Union and China for example) have been made to establish [equality] as a basis for society. All such efforts either have failed or must fail because no stable society can be built upon a theory which runs
counter to reality. The harsh but unavoidable fact is that men are unequal in terms of hereditary abilities. Some are born with a greater degree of intelligence, a greater capacity for sympathy, a greater ability to succeed than others.
“The persistence of this myth” of equality, wrote Williams, “and the frustrations which its advocates experience … constitute a grave psychological and political problem.”2 This is what they call an understatement.
The experiment is failing and will continue to fail. For it is based on a “theory which runs counter to reality,” an ideology whose tenets are at war with the laws of nature. Like the Marxists who were going to create a new man and a new society, our establishment is attempting the impossible.
“To create a concept is to leave reality behind,” wrote the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset.3 Our elites have created a concept of the ideal nation—the most egalitarian, diverse, democratic, and liberated that ever existed. And they have mobilized the vast power of government and law to force America to conform to that concept. They will fail, and this great and good country will die of their experiment.
“Some men see things as they are and say, why. I dream things that never were and say, why not,” said Robert F. Kennedy in the campaign that cost him his life.4 But there is a reason why things are as they are, and why some dreams never come true: unalterable human nature, the unconquerable and eternal enemy of all utopians.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote the idealist of 1776, Thomas Paine, who would barely escape the guillotine in the Revolution of 1789 that arose on the promise to begin the world over again.
In 1991, author Claes Ryn called this messianic compulsion to reshape America and the world The New Jacobinism, as it recalled the intellectuals who worshipped Rousseau, made the French revolution, and sought to force France and Europe, at a legendary cost in blood, to conform to their ideals.5
Republicans, as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen said, also manage to believe “six impossible things before breakfast.” They have declared that “deficits don’t matter,” that America grew into a mighty industrial power through free trade, that it is within our power to democratize mankind and “end tyranny in our world.”
As the melting pot turned millions of children and grandchildren of European immigrants into Americans, Republicans assert, we can bring in countless millions more from every country and culture and create a stronger, better, happier, more united nation than the America of 1960. But where in history has such diversity led to anything but cacophony and chaos?
Racially, culturally, ethnically, politically, America is disintegrating. For the third consecutive year the deficit is at a peacetime record of 10 percent of GDP. The trade deficit is returning to the heights of 2007–08. U.S. dependence on foreign nations for the needs of our national life and the loans to pay for them has never been greater. We are mired in two wars with no end in sight. If America is not to end up with all the other great nations and empires on the ash heap of history, we need to shed our illusions and to see the world as it is.
Among the leaders of the twentieth century, Deng Xiaoping is regarded as a wise man. For he saw that Marxism and Maoism were at war with human nature, that a great nation could not be built to endure on such principles, that China was in danger of going down. And he acted on those convictions. Without renouncing Marx or Mao, Deng put the world revolution on a shelf and embraced state capitalism. What difference does it make if the cat is black or white, Deng said, as long as it catches mice. Ideology was the poison, reason the antidote. So Deng did what Lenin did with his New Economic Policy; he adopted the enemy’s ideas to save his regime.
But, astonishingly, even as the Marxists were abandoning Communism as a failed experiment, the pragmatic Americans who won the Cold War were being converted to a utopian ideology. We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures, and creeds of Earth, in which all are equal. In pursuit of the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the country we inherited—the best and greatest on earth.
THE REVOLUTION WAS
In the depth of the Depression, in his first inaugural address, FDR said, “our common difficulties.… concern, thank God, only material things.”
Our generation is not so fortunate. For our difficulties go not just to the material but to the moral, to clashing beliefs about the most fundamental and critical of questions. Who are we? What constitutes a good society? What is good and what is evil? What kind of country should America be?
What took place in our recent past was a true revolution, a series of allied rebellions to overthrow the old order that came together to reach critical mass in the 1960s.
First was the sexual revolution, an in-your-face rejection of the moral code of Christianity on matters from promiscuity to fidelity to homosexuality to abortion. Your God is dead, said the rebels, take your morality and shove it.
The feminist movement, with its mockery of marriage and demands for absolute sexual freedom for women, unrestricted abortion rights, no-fault divorce, gender preferences, and mandated equality of men and women, was a frontal assault on the meritocracy and the traditional family.
The gay rights movement, beginning with the Stonewall riot in 1969, sought repudiation of the Judeo-Christian moral order and the overturning, by judicial decree, of all laws rooted in that moral order. After thirty years, the Supreme Court imposed the movement’s agenda on America by striking down state laws punishing homosexuality and declaring homosexual acts to be the exercise of a constitutional right.
The sexual revolution is but one Supreme Court ruling away from a judicial mandate that same-sex marriages must be recognized in law as fully equal to traditional marriages, with all the same rights and privileges.
That voters in thirty-one states have rejected same-sex marriage makes no difference to our courts. For, in America today, we do not have government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We often have government against the people. The state is at war with the nation.
Second was an antiwar movement that was more than a protest of Vietnam. At its heart lay the rejection of an anticommunist foreign policy and of the idea that America was a good country and beneficent force in the world. Many of the militants in the antiwar movement accepted the Third World’s indictment of the West for five hundred years of slavery, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism.
Third was a civil rights revolution that began with a legitimate demand for equality of rights and an end to state-imposed segregation but became a vehicle for assailing America as irredeemably racist. The year he received his Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King declared in Berlin that the Goldwater campaign bore “dangerous signs of Hitlerism.”6 Three years later, King charged his country with killing a million Vietnamese, “mostly children,” and being the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”7
America forgets. It was JFK who ordered the wiretaps on King, because of his association with Communists, his brother Robert Kennedy who saw to it that the FBI carried out the order, and Lyndon Johnson’s White House that distributed the fruits of the FBI surveillance to the press to discredit and destroy King. Conservatives may claim him, but the Martin Luther King some of us knew was no conservative.
In the middle of these allied rebellions, LBJ made a great leap forward, joined the revolution, and declared that America’s goal was no longer equality of rights but equality of results. Over half a century, an immense edifice of state power has been erected to bring about that egalitarian socialist ideal. While the nation will never attain that ideal, the old republic will die from the experiment.
The revolution was. It cannot be undone. While routed in its first national political expression, the McGovern presidential campaign, and in its second, the feminist campaign to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, that revolution has sunk permanent roots. It is dominant in the culture, the arts, the academy, and the media. The Fifth Col
umn of the cultural revolution is entrenched in the courts where judges and justices routinely discover that the constitutions they are sworn to uphold mandate the revolution they seek to bring about. As legal scholar Raoul Berger wrote of the legendary liberal activist Justice William Brennan, he had a “penchant for identifying his personal predilections with constitutional dogma.”8
The avatar of this revolution is Obama. Pro-gay rights, pro-choice, pro-amnesty, pro–affirmative action, one foot firmly planted in the Third World, he campaigned on raising taxes on the rich and redistributing the wealth.
The ideals embraced in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance are those of Barack Hussein Obama Sr., an Afro-nationalist. The Christianity Obama embraced for twenty years was that of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who preached liberation theology and ranted against America. Obama was at home at Trinity United and had Rev. Wright marry him and Michelle and baptize his daughters, Sasha and Malia. Obama does not hate white people. But he does believe they have much to answer for, and in his reaction in the Sergeant Crowley–Professor Gates affair he revealed his race consciousness and reflexive bias.
The real Obama was captured at that closed-door gathering in San Francisco when he explained to the bien-pensants why he was failing to connect with Pennsylvanians in the industrial cities and small towns.
History has passed these people by, Barack explained:
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”9 Middle Pennsylvanians do not reason, Obama was saying; they react according to their biblical beliefs, backward culture, and the bigotries they imbibed with their mother’s milk.
They can’t really help themselves, Barack was saying. Thus, they recoil from the progressive change that has come and is yet to come via globalization and immigration. In the passage below from his Philadelphia speech on Rev. Wright and civil rights, Obama reveals how he views the grievances of black Americans and white Americans in a different light:
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