Tom’s Big Picture

As most people predicted, it looks like the Democrats have taken the HOR (an appropriate acronym if I may say so) and possibly the Senate. The Evil Party has beaten the Stupid Party.

While the Stupid Party was squandering their 12-year window of power (now possibly permanently gone due to demographic trends unfixable except by extreme measures), Pat Buchanan was a voice in the wilderness, calling Republicans to use their power to build an American Nationalism that would put the American people first and build a permanent majority.

He wrote three books laying out his agenda:

1. The Great Betrayal - a book showing how corporate globalists with no sense of loyalty or caring (but rather contempt for) the wage-earning people of our country used free-trade ideology to hollow out America’s industrial base, while long-term-oriented nationalists in Asia (many large Japanese corporations, for example, have 100-year business plans) used the opportunity to build their own industrial systems at the expense of the American worker.

2. A Republic, Not an Empire- Buchanan’s warning against American foreign interventionism in the spirit of Washington’s warning to avoid “foreign entanglements”.

3. The Death of the West- Buchanan’s arguments for preserving the ethnic center of the country as a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite to national identity and historical continuity with America as it actually existed in the past. He also identifies leftist social movements (primarily the Frankfurt School Communist intellectuals originally based in Germany but who relocated to New York in 1933 to get out of Dodge) that used Freudian pseudoscience to pathologize normal family relations (particularly families with strong father figures) and patriotism as precursors to “fascism” (fascism here defined as any non-socialist political system). Bizarre Liberal Fact: The Frankfurt School is a lot of the reason why you rarely see strong father figures in sitcoms, commercials or movies- the Hollywood Left literally thinks that strong fathers lead to Hitler and gas chambers, so they always present fathers (and particularly white male fathers) as bumbling, dorky, goofy and/or stupid.

Buchanan’s two other recent books (Where the Right Went Wrong and State of Emergency), are basically updates to #2 and #3 respectively.

One of the striking features of this election is that the most powerful potential issue for Republicans- illegal immigration- was taken off the table by Bush and the Wall Street Republican crowd’s insistence on an endless supply of cheap labor to compete with native wage-earners. Those of us who have nice middle-class jobs (and in this area, nice middle class jobs associated with manufacturing that is hard to relocate to China) may have a hard time sympathizing with the typical working person- but the median wage adjusted for inflation in this country has not increased in 30 years. As much as we may care about abortion or other social issues, I cannot blame people for voting against a party that they believe (and rightly so) does not care about their situation if they are struggling to provide for their family- there is an incredible amount of humiliation and loss of dignity for a working person who can no longer count on a $15-20 an hour job in a factory, but instead must deliver pizza or take a telemarketing job for $9 an hour. We need a new Republican nationalism to bring the working people of this country back into the conservative party.

While the ethnic lobbies in the Democratic Party are just as pro-immigration as Republican elites, many Democrats DID campaign on anti-globalization and anti-unfair-trade issues, and succeeded. Republicans who voted for NAFTA or CAFTA (both documents that surrender US sovereignty to international courts) were caught in the crossfire.

Links and analysis:

buchanan.org/blog/?p=532

buchanan.org/blog/?p=382