Jeffrey Tucker explains that the Trump Nationalist agenda is just another version of Socialism, and that the world has seen the rise of precisely this kind of nationalist socialism before.
The rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period,†wrote Hayek, “but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.†In Hayek’s reading, the dynamic works like this. The socialists build the state machinery, but their plans fail. A crisis arrives. The population seeks answers. Politicians claiming to be anti-socialist step up with new authoritarian plans that purport to reverse the problem. Their populist appeal taps into the lowest political instincts (nativism, racism, religious bigotry, and so on) and promises a new order of things under better, more efficient rule.
Hayek’s thesis is very similar to Mises’: that the greatest threat in the world today comes from a version of socialism — a rightist socialism — cobbled together in the name of fighting authoritarianism abroad and countering leftism at home. The road to serfdom, in Hayek’s view, is paved by a blind pursuit of unified nationhood and central planning in the name of national greatness. Or, to use today’s language, “making America great again.â€
Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton agree on a lot, especially on the need to protect and enlarge state power. None of them accepts any principled limits on what the state may rightfully do to the individual. Even on big issues where one might think they disagree — healthcare, immigration, and control of lands by the federal government — their positions are more alike than different. …
Most of these candidates’ supporters don’t see it that way, of course. They imagine themselves to be rebels fighting power itself, however they want to define it: Wall Street, the party establishment, the paid-off politicians, the bureaucracy, the billionaires, the foreigners, the special interests, and so on.
But notice that neither Trump, Sanders, nor Clinton attacks government authority as such. Instead they aspire to use it and grow it for their purposes. “The conflict between the Fascist or National-Socialist and the older socialist parties must indeed very largely be regarded as the kind of conflict which is bound to arise between rival socialist factions,†Hayek wrote. “There was no difference between them about the question of it being the will of the state which should assign to each person his proper place in society.â€
As the campaign progress over 2015, the close relationship between right and left socialisms became more obvious. On the surface, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump represent opposite extremes. But in their celebration of the nation state as the people’s salvation — their burning calls to overthrow the existing elites and replace them with a more intense form of top-down rule — they are morally indistinguishable, and equally un-American.
Never Yet Melted’s logo comes from a 19th century Life of Frontiersman & Indian Fighter Lewis Wetzel, depicting Wetzel shooting one of three Indians attempting to kill him. Wetzel was able to reload on the run and killed all three of his pursuers. The image was chosen as a rustic American homage to the images of irrationality and barbarism defeated by civilized Western intelligence originally displayed on the Parthenon in Athens and on the Great Altar of Zeus and Athena in Pergamon.
Never Yet Melted has been around a while now, but remains (the complimentary term is) a boutique blog, inevitably limited in readership due to the idiosyncratic opinions, eccentricities, and often esoteric interests of its solitary editor and proprietor.
Surprisingly, today NYM has been named (for the first time ever) to one of those lists of THE FIFTY TOP BLOGS RIGHT NOW by The Daley Gator.
We’re in some good company on his list, though he has obviously overlooked a number of far more prominent and important conservative blogs than this one.
Thomas Lifson notes current levels of intimidation and ideological indoctrination in this country, without even once mentioning an event at one of our elite universities(!).
Political correctness has attained a level of institutional power today in the United States that it can justifiably be compared with the totalitarian brainwashing efforts seen in Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (also known as “fundamental transformation”). The salient social mechanisms shared by the two efforts at thought reform are pubic shame and self-criticism.
Consider the case of Louis Graham, editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the city’s venerable daily newspaper. He had the temerity to publish an accurate headline.
The fact that Menards thinks they can sell 8″diameter/9 inch high logs for $9.99….
Or that I saw some hipster in fake work boots loading 4 into his cart.
Or 1) that these are unsplit and so large in diameter that you will have to have a fire already going well with a good bed of coals before there is any possibility of getting any of them lit. They are too short for a fireplace and they all need to be split.
and
2) They are all birch (!). Get one of these logs lit finally, and poof! it will be gone in a ridiculously short interval of time.
Not only are these pieces of alleged firewood ridiculously priced, they are useless as firewood.
Commenter Hammond Aikes knows more about these than I did. I thought they were just logs. But “Bonfire Log” is a brand name. They are actually chemically-treated artificial logs, which will light readily and burn 1 1/2 hours in the Regular size, 2 1/2 hours in the Jumbo.
Zoomorph B photographed at Quiriguá, Guatamala in 1902. This monument was dedicated in 780 by K’ak’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat, and is a multi-ton boulder sculpted into a half-crocodile half-mountain beast. The hieroglyphic text on this monument consists entirely of full-figure glyphs. Traces of red pigment have been found on the zoomorph, which is 4 metres (13 ft) long. A dedication cache was found buried in a pit under Zoomorph B, including seven flint blades between 14 and 46 cm (5.5 and 18.1 in) in length.
Stacey Patton, obviously an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Morgan State University purely on the basis of racial favoritism, in the Washington Post, blames all the problems and misbehavior of Black America on white people and rejects Hillary Clinton’s recent call for reconciliation and national unity.
Asking black people to participate in this reconciliation process … suggests that we bear responsibility in this mess. But we didn’t invent the concept of race. We didn’t create and don’t sustain institutionalized racism. And we surely don’t benefit from it.
Rhetorical calls for unity won’t address the fundamental sources of inequality: mass incarceration, employment discrimination, militarized policing, the school-to-prison pipeline, divestment in communities of color, political disenfranchisement, displacement of poor and working-class people of color from gentrifying cities. The emphasis on unity makes no room for discussion about growing white resentment and feelings of victimization, and it presumes that black folks bear responsibility for the entrenched problem of a “colorblind†white America that denies racism even exists.
And while Clinton may not have intended it this way, what the message of unity winds up doing is blaming communities of color for failing to assimilate, rather than acknowledging that the very fabric of this nation is built upon a diabolical, calculated and constantly evolving system of racism.
It’s really time for major national newspapers to stop pandering, and granting legitimacy and publication space, to this kind of offensive, insolent, and infantile leftist poppycock.
Pimps and drug dealers are not criminals because somebody else discriminated against them in employment. The illiterate underclass is the underclass because its members prefer the pursuit of intoxication and sex to gainful employment, not because somebody else took away their upper-middle class professional status. The world does not owe inner-city communities of thugs living in state-supplied housing who’ve ruined their own neighborhoods outside investment.
The author’s own history demonstrates that very modest cooperation with the universal free education system in this country will currently easily gain African Americans status and employment well above their actual deserts.
Ms. Patton’s expressed world-view constitutes a pathological, self-defeating fantasy of perennial victimization, and is really nothing other than one more manifestation of the long-entrenched African-American habit of using Angry Black Person dramaturgy to elevate their own personal status and to shakedown more free goodies from the liberal suckers in charge of the system. These days, if Ms. Patton writes enough of this kind of thing in sufficiently hysterical tones containing precisely this kind of bold-faced insult and accusation, white liberal masochists at the Atlantic will probably give her a really well-paying and prestigious gig helping Ta-Nehisi Coates take another poke at whitey every month.
The local paper reports that the terrorist was “of Tunisian origin,†which surprises no one, of course. But since he was killed by police, President Obama may never know his real motive.
