GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The question of whether to “privilege” production or consumption seems to have been definitively laid to rest—it was originally a Marxist inspired debate that became tangled and paradoxical to the point of incoherence when even Marx pushed the terms a bit further: the producer consumes in order to produce, consumption is a kind of production (of “labor power”), etc. While as an economic question, there may not be anywhere to go with production vs. consumption, as a political question interest in the question seemed to have faded because consumption has won the argument: who disputes that we live in a consumer society, that the consumer is king, etc.? But perhaps there are grounds for reopening the argument. I remember a brief debate on a Sunday morning talk show long ago (in the 90s, I suppose) between Patrick Buchanan and George Will, in which Will made the seemingly airtight case for free trade by pointing to the lower prices it made possible. Buchanan interrupted him with the assertion that “we are not just consumers, George,” but, rather, workers and citizens. And “worker” (producer) does seem to be far more conjoined to “citizen” than does “consumer.” Of course, Will’s point was true for the working class as well—perhaps even more importantly true for those who gained access to all kinds of previously unavailable consumer goods from outlet stores like WalMart due to trade with and investment in Third World countries with far cheaper labor. But that doesn’t settle things, if that trade and investment costs at least some of those WalMart shoppers their jobs, and if the independence, self-respect and community participation that comes from having a job are “goods” to be place in the balance against those purchased at Wal-Mart.

If we return to the mapping of American classes by the ArchDruid blog I have now referred to a couple of times, the argument for consumption is an argument for the salaried classes, and the argument for production one for the waged class. Of course, plenty of salaried employees are “productive” (engineers, technicians, etc.) while plenty of the waged are “unproductive” according to more Marxian criteria, while also catering more to “consumerism” (say, baristas at Starbucks). We will never be able to make these terms stay in one place. If we accept a little metaphorical stretching, though, we might be able to say that the salaried classes are comprised of those who differentiate themselves from each other and other classes through their consumption, while the waged classes express class solidarity and resentment towards the higher classes through their consumption. The consumption of the waged, that is, resists the consumerism of the salaried aimed at generating differences, and references a productive identity grounded in physical labor, or physicality and communality more generally. Other than the massive exception of immigration, and the possible exception (of which I am skeptical but willing to be proven wrong) of rejiggering international trade relations, I don’t think there is much that politics can do to support the productivist consumerism of the waged.

But, it is easy to say (it must be, because I see leftists saying it all the time), contrary to these sentimentalizing stereotypes of the working class, the waged are more likely to be obese, more likely to have loose morals and living habits (more divorce, more children out of wedlock, more cohabitation, etc.), to be drug addicted, on welfare and disability, and so on. To the extent that this is true, it seems to me to support an argument regarding the destructive effects of consumerism on the waged in particular. The disciplining of the working class over the past couple of centuries in Western societies has been one of the great subjects of the social sciences, the arts, and entertainment: there is no more familiar pop cultural cliché than the closed-minded and repressed majority group (white) worker who ultimately wreaks some kind of terrible destruction on himself and others. It doesn’t seem to me that too many people have thought to ask what might happen when the disciplining stopped, or stopped working. Even a rearguard action aimed at restoring this discipline along with even a somewhat, or provisionally, improved employment environment is worth the effort—first, because the more pessimistic analyses might be wrong; second, because it might buy us some desperately needed time.

But the sidelining of the “productive” or industrial working class is a side effect of much larger developments—if the workers have been shunted aside by the investors and ignored by the salaried, it must be because they were neither particularly indispensable nor a force to be reckoned with in the first place. The overall trajectory of Western capitalism is towards fewer and fewer people producing for more and more people. I have recently seen the proposal for free education made (by whom, I can’t remember—maybe all the way back to McLuhan?) on the basis of the following calculation: if you send a thousand children to school for free it will pay for itself because at least one of those thousand children will create something that will support the other 999. If that’s not exactly true, it certainly represents the general direction in which we are heading. (Which would mean that the class of “innovators,” too small, apparently, even to rate a mention by ArchDruid, are in a way more important than all the rest.) This means a very high (perhaps very specialized, but the capacity for specialization at a high level itself requires intense disciplining) level of discipline is required for a few but little or none is needed for most. Of course, we can’t know in advance who those few are, so it will make sense to keep up disciplining for most or all, at least until aptitude tests can sort out the probabilities (which is by around first grade already, isn’t it?), but what will be the motivation to sustain the notion of disciplining oneself for a 1/1000 chance of success and usefulness? In this context, all the contemporary conflicts over the American worker are a distraction. Here, in fact, we may have one of Marx’s predictions, the one, in fact, that was the basis of his communist optimism, that has come true: if producing goods, even luxury goods, is so cheap and requires so little labor, the only thing that prevents everyone from having plenty without doing much or any work is the system of private property. Wouldn’t a situation in which, say, cars cost 5 dollars to make, but since it is automation and the elimination of workers which makes them so cheap, there are no jobs, even those which pay 1$ a year, so no one can actually afford the cars, be absolutely ridiculous?

According to Austrian economics, there can never be “real” unemployment (that is, employment not caused by government imposed mechanisms such as the minimum wage)—in other words, there will always be someone who wants something done for which they are willing to pay that 1$ a year. In the long run, that may be true, but there is no guarantee regarding the kind of jobs we’re talking about—if the only work available is brushing the dust off the shoulders of rich men’s coats, we may have a free and even prosperous society, but not one with much dignity. These are extreme examples, of course, but that’s the best way to bring larger trends into focus. We could say that people will get smarter and more will be capable of handling the advanced programming and designing work that will be the genuinely “productive” work in such an order (perhaps it will be considered necessary to employ eugenics), but there’s no reason to assume they’ll be enough of that work even for the highly intelligent. The highly intelligent, though, might at least be expected to find stimulating ways to spend their time—others will have to be provided with ever more stupefying modes of entertainment. Surely many of them will become dangerous—perhaps the tiny productive ruling class would have to live behind high walls.

The more immediate problem is addressing the resentments that result from bad and often malicious policy making, for sure, but ultimately by economic and technological developments that are beyond anyone’s control and yet might well inflate those resentments beyond any conceivable remedy. When you see assertions like “American manufacturing jobs have been cut to 1/3 of their previous level since NAFTA” it’s easy to forget that many of those jobs would have been outmoded by now anyway. Even granting they were “lost” to China et al, if they had stayed here automation would have just been accelerated, perhaps costing lots of other jobs as well. There’s no reason to assume that “manufacturing” and “industry” were anything more than a couple of centuries transition from agriculture to information.

To propose solutions to these problems would be to make oneself look like a ridiculous futurist (by 2050, flying cars will shuttle us from our floating, solar-powered dwellings to…). The solutions will have to be proposed and struggled over (and, mostly, staggered towards) by those confronting them. For now, we can try to observant enough to notice everything (all the norms and institutions) that is likely to be shaken loose as we proceed. But we can also stay focused on defending civilization, always a complicated matter, as civilization is itself intrinsically experimental. In any given practice, association, institution or discipline, we are always on the verge of either adding or subtracting an increment of discipline. We can resist the subtraction and promote the addition, even if we don’t quite know what for or for how many—the “base” or “constituency” here comprises those, certainly a minority, who find self-discipline intrinsically liberating and a source of other liberations (moral, intellectual, economic, cultural). But this approach involves defending the terms upon which such determinations can be made—that is, it involves keeping “social justice” at bay. Aside from all the reasons we can easily bring to mind for resisting the victimary, a more neglected reason is that only by pulverizing the anti-discrimination ideology can differences emerge and flourish—sexual differences, ethnic, national and racial differences, for sure, but also, simply, differences in style, interest, talent, risk aversion, tolerance for novelty, etc. Among the opportunity costs of the victimary are surely all the forms of association and cooperation, and all the ways of designing living and working spaces and communities, including the ways of facilitating the fuller participation of the less intelligent and less talented, that might have been invented if the victimary censorship module had been shut down (and we didn’t have to pretend that differences in intelligence and talent were irrelevant or non-existent). How much energy has been drained by the anxiety over the fear of discovering that one has in fact been (or inadvertently will be) racist or sexist in some hitherto unknown way—and not just over the past 10 years, but over the past 50 or so, because the societal mobilization to hound the “prejudiced” goes back at least that far. (It’s interesting to look back at what the visionaries of the 60s, like Buckminster Fuller, had in mind for us, plans they expected to come to fruition within a couple of decades. Were they just fantasists, or did social priorities get disastrously misaligned? Perhaps a nationalist, alt-right position can get the best of all worlds—support both civilization and the working class here and now, while opening some space for the transformations that will make these problems disappear—to be replaced by other problems, surely.) Which is, again, to say that destroying the victimocracy is the problem of problems—only by solving that one can we even hope to take on all the others.

David Gelernter, in the course of explaining the appeal of Donald Trump as the anti-PC candidate, offers an excellent diagnosis of what he correctly calls “the biggest issue facing American today.” Gelernter would have us dispense with the euphemistic “political correctness” and refer to the threat as “invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism.” So far, so very good. He goes on to point our the depredations carried out by “invasive leftism” and its devastating effect on our very ability to engage in discourse, and, therefore, ultimately, to think: about the military (because social justice dictate gender equality, regardless of preparedness); about terrorism (because we can’t identify Islam and Muslim as the source); about history (because the past can be seen as nothing more than the depository of today’s hated oppressions, with the few exceptions of those “ahead of their time”). He points out how institutions and policies like the IRS, the EPA and affirmative action are informed by vicious and bizarre stereotypes about whites, Christians and traditional industries—that, again, go unquestioned, in any vigorous way, by anyone, including Republicans. Gelernter says a bit more, and could say much more, in particular about crime (racial disparities in the commission of which lead to campaigns to treat punishment as a form of racism) and the uses of gender equality (Title IX) to impose Stalinist style inquisitions in sexual assault cases at colleges across the country. He could have mentioned the real “elephant in the room,” immigration, which cannot be respectably opposed because that would imply a preference for “types” of people already here over those to come (and would then presumably retroactively privilege the earlier over the later comers among those already here). (Perhaps Gelernter’s own obeisance to PC constrains him?) He even points to the class content of PC, which leaves the “privileged” or salaried and investor classes with plenty of room to maneuver while sharply constraining (and demonizing) the waged, working (especially white working) class.

After all this, though, all Gelernter has to say is that the Republican political candidates should “fight” PC. As for what they would be fighting it in the name of, he only gestures towards “the old-time American mainstream.” As he correctly points out, “even Trump has just barely faced up to it.” But the old-time American mainstream didn’t prevent the emergence of “metastasized progressivism” in the first place, and the reason might be that it shared too much with it—indeed, what else could that progressivism have metastasized from, if not constituent elements of that mainstream? The truth is, you can’t argue about abuses of the civil rights legal and political inheritance without being forced to disentangle what from that inheritance is worthy of preservation. And you will then find—and I suspect conservative politicians and pundits recognize this intuitively—that, aside from simply ensuring every American citizen the right to vote, nothing from that inheritance is worth preserving—not the body of law, and not the anti-prejudice, anti-discrimination, blank slatist ideologies that have come to protect that body of law. Once you say that businesses can’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, etc., you must then answer the question: since, once it’s illegal, no one will tell us that they are discriminating, how can we tell? You can either sort through the minutiae of each individual case, with all the local and personal idiosyncrasies each case drags along with it, or you can simplify things by just saying that if 20% of the population in a specific area belongs to a specific group, if you have only 10% of that group among your employees, the burden will be upon you to prove that you are not discriminating. The choice will be very easy to make.

All of “PC” follows from this arrangement. The lies, the hysterical denunciations, the atmosphere of terror—everything, because the proportions will never line up according to the non-discriminatory model, so in the end every policy advanced, every word officially uttered, must tend toward an effort to explain that failure, apologize for it, target scapegoats for it, promise to remedy it, prove that it is being remedied, and so on. Who is ready to reject the entire model—in policy terms, to roll back almost all of the “achievements” of the civil rights era? No one anywhere near power today. So, the invasions and metastasizing and thought-policing will continue until more tectonic shifts take place. And they can’t really come from anywhere other than an unlikely alliance between a large, dissident minority with the salaried , professional classes and the white working classes. The working class can fuel the revolt, but only the more “disciplinary” classes can dismantle the legal and ideological apparatus and defend the primacy of the project or the inquiry over social justice.

According to Marx, in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the peasants of France, even though they were the vast majority of the population, “cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” The peasants were scattered, barely, if at all, literate, mired in prejudice (“rural idiocy”). It seems to me that we could say something similar about the white working class represented by Donald Trump (indeed, the fact that no one has thought of referring to Trump as a “Bonapartist” shows that we have become illiterate in Marx), albeit for some different reasons: the white working class is obviously quite literate and plugged-in, sensitive to the way they are represented in popular culture and thrown bones by politicians whose real interest is in more affluent or boutique constituencies. The problem with the white working class is that their resentments have no clear object, there is no clear way to remedy or defer them; and, at the same time, those resentments are not a particular threat to anyone either—no one needs to be afraid of the white working class. They are pretty well boxed in.

An article on the subject in National Review on the topic (Trump’s success has led the establishment conservatives to take a fresh look at this strange beast) suggests I should revise my estimate of the percentage of the population represented by the “wage earners” from my “Immigration (and then some other things)” post down to 40% from the 45% I had there. That just reinforces my point that, on any question where all the other classes are aligned against the wage earners (even if through indifference), the wage earners will be powerless to impose their preferences. This includes the more symbolic preferences, because the kind of straightforward, unapologetic patriotism and America-firstism that resonates with the working class requires an overwhelming cultural consensus to be sustained, and we simply don’t have that any more.

Most of those preferences are incoherent, anyway—how is any president, even in conjunction with a sympathetic or compliant congress, going to “bring manufacturing jobs back to America”? Any attempt to keep American companies in the US, or to encourage foreign companies to come here will get mired in even deeper layers of cronyism, incompetence and inefficiency (along with further infringements on the rights of small businesses and independent contractors) than is already considered intolerable by those in revolt against the “establishment.” Also, for decades it has been recognized that the line between American and foreign, when it comes to companies and consumer goods, has become irremediably blurred: is it more patriotic to buy a Toyota built in Tennessee or a Ford built in Mexico? Making America a more attractive site for manufacturing means eliminating unions, which, even in their currently shriveled state, are a source of pride and solidarity for millions of American workers. The idea of making more nationalistic trade deals is even more hopeless—I’m fairly certain that the unanticipated consequences will considerably outpace the intended ones. The logical conclusion, which I have seen drawn by one writer on the VDARE site, to the insistence on making preserving American jobs the nation’s primary imperative, is to resist automation altogether, a position I don’t yet find it necessary to refute. In other words, Trump’s promises and bluster in all these areas are pure BS.

But there are two issues where the working class resentments are directly actionable: immigration and Islam. The government certainly can eliminate illegal immigration, cut legal immigration, and forbid entry into the country by Muslims. Or to put it another way, if it can’t do these things, that is, if it is literally incapable of bringing manpower and technology to bear effectively on these purposes, there is absolutely no reason to believe it capable of doing anything else. But these are precisely the issues that place the working class most directly in confrontation with the salaried and investor classes, represented by powerful forces within both major parties. Moreover, the welfare class, while not particularly interested in immigration or Islam, is represented by the Democratic party, which is extremely interested in increasing the welfare class through immigration policies. (Polling regularly shows sizable majorities—65-70%—in favor of ending illegal and restricting legal immigration, which is why the amnesty bills regularly floated so hopefully by bipartisan blowhards are always dead in the water, but politicians sympathetic to or hoping to benefit from this majority probably assume—rightly, I think—that the numbers will go down dramatically once the actions needed to expel illegals are set in motion and exposed relentlessly by the national media. Maybe down to about 40% who have the stomach to see it through. There’s good reason to assume, then, that the expulsion of illegal aliens will be another quagmire, this time played out in our major cities throughout the country.)

But the white working class must continue to be represented, however boisterous, uncouth, vulgar and at times flailing, buffoonish and nasty that representation must be, and not only by Trump, because in the areas of immigration and Islam the vital interests of the working class coincide perfectly with the conditions of survival of the American nation. And this makes perfect sense if, indeed, the white, “Jacksonian,” working class is the core of the American nation. It’s also not surprising that these two issues bear the enormous weight of the central political questions of the day: nationalism vs. globalism and republic vs. empire; freedom vs. statism; the victimocracy vs. the normalization of firstness. Mark Steyn, who often follows these struggles through the prism of the question of free speech, which has been forced upon him over the past decade, has been observing recently how tenuous the default assumption in favor of free speech has become. He chronicles how, time and after time, the once uncontroversial claim that “we all have a right to our opinion” is met with hostility and incomprehension. It has come to seem more obvious that there are all kinds of things people shouldn’t be allowed to say. I think there is even a larger problem behind this capitulation to a regime of speech rules: the absence of credible role models. Parents, however good and caring, are increasingly unable to show children how to navigate a social and moral order that is foreign to them. Politicians, business leaders, sports stars, celebrities and once honored historical figures come virtually pre-debunked. It may be that the current craze for erasing symbols of an unacceptable past is both an attempt to make explicit this state of affairs and establish some set of rules, however bizarre, to replace it. Even apolitical young people seem desperate to have the rules under which they are expected to operate laid out explicitly, as the tacit understandings that once made a looser regime possible have been demolished. The white working class, its belligerence, the constant intrusion of a world of manual labor and intractable necessities and the implacable judgment of physical reality it represents, its unreconstructed gender roles, its untutored, spontaneous opinions regarding violence, still grounded in an older idea of “frontier justice,” its blinding, unbearable whiteness, all make it an irresistible depository of all those fears of a world that cannot be bent to a therapeutically approved homogeneity. Which also means it’s a container of all those differences we need to remember in order to continue thinking in such a world.

Feminist critiques of liberalism (like, e.g., Carole Pateman’s) hit on a crucial point: by pointing out that the presumed or iconic liberal subject was the bourgeois male property owner, with no wife and children or, for that matter, no parents or previous childhood, to shape his entry into the marketplace, such critiques revealed liberalism’s horror of biology. Indeed, the feminist critique can easily be taken in directions that would make feminists themselves extremely distraught (thereby revealing their own liberalism): the findings of the “manosphere,” which has undertaken a systematic, auto-didactic (because the history of Western social and political thought offers about zero help here, and contemporary educational institutions offer far less except, perhaps, informally) study of sexual relations and hierarchies, shatter the assumptions of equality and rationality undergirding liberalism and feminism alike. These critiques of liberalism can easily forget that liberalism didn’t address such issues because there was no need to, as such essentially tribal relations were still visible and, in fact, constituted the tacit background out of which liberalism sought to carve a new space. But the critique becomes even more important once we consider that, at a certain point (already in the Enlightenment, but accelerating dramatically from the early 20th century on) liberalism decided not just to erect a free system of exchange over the more primitive quasi-tribalist relations but undertook to extirpate those relations altogether and install the liberal program at all sites, public and private. At that point, liberalism’s distancing of itself from biology becomes an assault on biology.

The acceleration of liberalism’s biophobia is certainly in large part due to the biopolitics of Nazism, and the consequent recoil against all attempts to bring racial differences into politics. Liberalism’s autoimmune response to the catastrophic eruption of biological differences that had been assumed marginalized was to transform itself into a self-enclosed, self-reproducing and viral system of rights that automatically excludes any claim tainted by the biological—and, like any good autoimmune system, attacks the carriers of such claims. The anathematization of nationalism and populism in liberal thinking is an expression of this autoimmune response: nationalism is not quite as deeply seeped in biology as race and sex, but there is always a racial component and sexual politics to nationalisms; while populism, likewise, reaches into that amorphous region where emotions, impulses, mimetic contagion, taunts, unspoken commonalities, and so on cannot be kept from contaminating the approved discourse of “policy,” “principles,” “accountability,” and so on.

Once the biological is let into politics, the liberal (and post/ultra-liberal, e.g., feminist) fears, there is no telling where it will end. The rule of law must be kept free from, while somehow authoritatively regulating, biological matters. The American constitution limits the “executive branch” to certain powers, and only those powers—but what if some surge of nationalism and/or populism demands an override of those limitations? That surge will almost certainly prove stronger than the categorical imperative embedded in the Constitutional provision, and why should nationalism respect such limitations—why should the question, “is it Constitutional” out-rank the question, “what’s good for the American people”? Also, biology has been overriding legality for a century already, as the government has made it its business to manage the care of the elderly, the raising of children, marital relations, food and medicine and now all of health care along with the micro-managing of the most intimate of sexual relations. Constitutionalism has apparently found no way—or shown no desire—to resist those developments. So, maybe the problem is liberalism.

While we can find no self-limiting principle in the victimary (or on the left more generally), though, we certainly can with nationalism. The nation itself, and its relations with and differences from other nations is the first such principle. Even the most horrific form of nationalism imagined by liberals, the physical expulsion of unwanted (less “national”) populations, would confront the plurality of the world as a limitation: let’s say some American nationalist of leftist nightmares decided to expel the Jews, the Mexicans, the blacks, or even the leftists themselves. Where to? Forcing such groups to simply leave and become refugees would create an enormous burden, first of all on neighboring countries, and thereby poison crucial relations. (Of course, expelling Mexican citizens who are in the US illegally would be a different matter—in that case, indeed, it is the Mexican government and nation that has acted unjustly by encouraging illegal migration, even while many Americans are, of course, complicit.) Well, maybe that leaves no choice but genocide, one might say—far easier said than done, though, without the context of a hot civil war or a policy of conquest that makes possible the allotment of faraway territories for carrying out such atrocities.

Furthermore, nationalism transcends while incorporating the tribal. At the very least, nationalism entails the free movement of all nationals through the national territory, and the free adoption of any profession by all. In other words, nationalism presupposes at least a minimal market, and that that market is protected from the imperatives of tribal honor. Insofar as the nation remains, at least to some extent, a nation of tribes, but also of cities, towns and neighborhoods, various forms of local patriotisms will ensure resistance to premature or abusive attempts to establish, preserve or restore national unity from some national center. Of course, such attempts will be made, and sometimes they will succeed, and sometimes to the benefit of the nation as a whole. (I don’t think many Frenchmen and women would prefer [or could even imagine] a France in which French was the language of the educated in the capital, with the rest of the country speaking a few dozen or so different language, even while acknowledging the cultural loss in the “expropriation” of the speakers of those languages.) But the resistance will still ensure that national ‘incorporation” is conducted in such a way as to allow the margins to adopt and inflect in their own ways national imperatives. Anomalies will always remain, though, and it’s good that they do. Nations benefit from a bit of irritation, a touch of idiosyncrasy.

Finally, every nation will have its professions, or its disciplines, and will want to take pride in those disciplines. Every real nation, and, therefore, every real nationalism, is civilized, that is. The nationalism of the nations lawyers, journalists (or bloggers), and academics (or bloggers), doctors, etc., can, of course, allow them to be swept up in pathological nationalist contagions, and lend their expertise and influence to shameful deeds. (One consequence of embracing nationalism is accepting that politics cannot be deployed so as to abolish human sinfulness—there is no ultimate answer to “what about…?” type questions.) But they (as can non-experts proud of the disciplines) can also insist that in this nation, among this people, the rule of law, professional standards, and dissemination of the truth will prevail, even in the face of the mob. And this would include, of course, for Americans, an insistence on Constitutional primacy (and the entire system of legal thinking and institutions it entails), insofar as the Constitution has become far more than a legal code, having worked its norms and its language into American discourse and culture at all levels. But American nationalism cannot wait for a constitutional “restoration” before it addresses, in some necessarily rough ways, the biopolitics of immigration in particular. Indeed, a nationalist restoration (evidence of which would be that more than one presidential candidate would be simply taking for granted in casual utterances that America should be for Americans) is a precondition for a constitutionalism that would be something other than a Trojan Horse for a transnational progressive (“human rights”) legal regime. To take a concept from the cultural left, that restoration would require the “circulation” of nationalist “bodies”: nationalist masculinities and femininities, ethnicized and maybe even racialized nationalisms, popular and elite nationalisms, and so on. The US has some of this—but we had a lot more of it 30 years ago, and even more 60 years ago—and such overt expressions of American pride and uncritical belonging and celebration have been increasingly seen as shameful. It is the attempts to make those expressions shameful that should become shameful.

I was very glad to see Kevin Williamson’s article, “The Buchanan Boys,” in today’s NRO. At last, we are getting engaged: the “mainstream” right, represented most prominently by National Review, is being compelled to recognize the alt-right—recognize, at least, in the sense of acknowledging they exist and that their “numbers aren’t trivial.” Williamson has noticed the enthusiasm of white nationalists for Trump’s campaign, and his observation that this attachment to Trump represents a continuation of the white working class resentment first advanced by Patrick Buchanan’s campaigns of the 90s is a real and important insight. And Williamson raises some crucial questions about the “economic nationalism” of Trump and those hoping he will be the vehicle of their movement: here, Williamson is on familiar ground, and within his sphere of expertise, and I certainly agree that attempts to rejigger trade agreements with the rest of the world so as to protect the jobs of the American working class are likely to backfire. Indeed, I doubt that anyone has a very clear idea of how to do something like that. Still, if we are just free traders, why do we have trade deals at all? Why not just let American consumers and businesses buy and sell from and to whomever they like? Well, one might say that other countries won’t reciprocate—but, according to free trade orthodoxy, they’re just hurting themselves, and should be left to their own devices. But we do enter these enormously complex agreements, negotiated with dozens of countries over many years, so those negotiating in our name must be trying to get something out of it—what? Is it so unreasonable to assume that they have the interests of global corporations, along with the pet environmental and immigration (among other) concerns of the participating politicians, or even, perhaps, abstractions like “the stability of the global market” uppermost in their mind, rather than the living standards of American workers? Rather than adopting the libertarian utopianism of eschewing such agreements altogether, why not impose the interests of American wage earners upon them, and figure out the details as we go? Williamson doesn’t seem interested in this line of thought.

Williamson also has a point, albeit a more tenuous one, when he asserts that

The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency.

And

It is an odd line of thinking: If the government levies a tax on your neighbors in order to fund an earned-income tax credit for your family, then you’re a welfare queen; if the government levies a tax on businesses that is passed on to your neighbors in order to subsidize your earned income through higher prices, then that’s economic nationalism.

It is true that, by definition, adopting economic policies so as to benefit a particular group (in this case, white working class men), is, in effect, a way of redistributing resources to that group, and you could call that a “subsidy.” Of course, as Williamson must realize, the presumed alternative of subsidizing no one is not exactly on the horizon—indeed, Williamson, who has been writing of late of the great condition conservatism is in, would be hard pressed to identify any progress conservatives in power have made to the de-subsidization of the American political economy. On the simplest, or at least most cynical, level, then, why shouldn’t white male wage earners get cut in on the scam? But by distinguishing between the earned income tax credit and the higher prices brought about by protectionism, Williamson skews the question: the earned income tax credit, which also goes to wage earners, has not to my knowledge, been on the economic nationalist hit list. Williamson wants to keep the discussion on secure “free trade” grounds, which precludes establishing criteria for more or less preferable “subsidies.” Are there good grounds, if we are already “distorting” the economy, for distorting it in favor of white male wage earners, compared to some of the ways it is presently distorted? Nothing from Williamson on this question.

Most symptomatic, though, is Williamson’s evident desire to skirt the real question regarding the “Buchanan Boys,’ and Trump, their current “celebrity mascot”: immigration. According to Williamson, the economic benefits of immigration are mixed and unclear; and he acknowledges that immigration is not only an economic issue. And that’s pretty much it. But there has been a real bait and switch in that case, because the only objective correlative to Williamson’s name calling, explicit and implicit (jackboots are evoked), lies in the immigration question. You don’t call people Nazis because they want tariffs on kids’ toys made in China; you call them Nazis because they want to bust into houses in the dark of the night and drag out cute little brown kids. So, what is Williamson’s view of, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the traditional preference given to white and European immigrants—i.e., those immigrants most like the people already living in the country? Is it racist to want a country that maintains its current demographic proportions? (And if it is, should we care? What are the consequences of making not being racist the prime directive?) Can he propose a way of discussing this without overt engagement with the question of ethnic differences? Can he propose such an engagement that won’t bring a hailstorm of denunciation from the Left (and many on the supposed Right)? Would he like, then, for immigration restrictionists to capitulate or to stand firm and, even, answer insult with insult, tribal banner with tribal banner? Or is the issue not even worth discussing—as seems to be the case, for Williamson, given his silence on these questions.

Williamson had a chance here to engage with some of the ideas informing the “white nationalists” and “immigration reform patriots”—and the thinkers, people like Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, James Kilpatrick and others who publish regularly on the VDare site; or, someone like Sam Francis, who has been referenced quite often lately in discussions on the alt-right—or, for that matter, the bogeyman informing his entire diatribe, Pat Buchanan himself. Well, he will have other chances—perhaps, eventually, he will have no choice (it sounds to me like he wishes he had a choice not to write this article). This is really not a bad way to get started.