Counter-Currents
American Aberrationalism:
Trump is Normal, the Republican Party is Not
Lawrence Murray
1,635 words
From the end of the American Civil War until the First World War, and then again until the FDR administration, an alliance of Northern industrial and business interests dominated the federal government of the United States through the vehicle of the Republican party, and left their stamp on American politics. The only Democrats who held the office of president were Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson, compared to 11 Republicans.
These Republican presidents were also responsible for most Supreme Court appointees, which resulted in a court so Republican that their Democratic successor FDR attempted to pass the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have let him appoint six more Justices, and therefore remove most Republican constitutional challenges to the New Deal.
Roughly sixty years of Republican administration had a lasting impact on the United States. The ideology of the Republican party at that time, and which remains one of its only limited continuities to the present, was laissez-faire capitalism and a strong emphasis on absolute property rights, with minor exceptions like the late-19th century’s tariffs or federal regulations on businesses thought to impact the national interest, such as railroads. This kind of archaic libertarianism, which has ebbed and flowed in the Republican party, has lost nearly every policy battle with the left since the New Deal. Limited government of course has much deeper roots than this in American history, such as the aristocratic republic that existed prior to the Jacksonian era, or the mostly benign neglect that persisted under the British Empire prior to the French & Indian War (Seven Years War). But given that the Republican party still exists and calls itself ‘the party of Lincoln,’ the 1870-1930 period is much more relevant to understanding why elements of this ideology are still floating around and trying to carve a sphere of authority. It is that period which has had the most immediate influence on contemporary Republican ideology.
Which brings us to today’s harping and LARPing about muh trve conservativism, taken to mean a very small bundle of principles regarding the interpretation of the Constitution—which contrary to pundits’ beliefs is 100% malleable when in the right hands, and, no, there is no process to stop the Supreme Court’s powers of judicial review and judicial supremacy—and the economy. The infamously vague concept of limited government, the unpopular notion of trickle-down economics, the emphasis on deregulation, the moral authority accorded to laws which can be voted out of existence—these are all hallmarks of trve conservative punditry. Most of these people—and in some cases, ((((those people))))—can only howl incoherently at the civic nationalist takeover of what is considered to be America’s conservative party by a loudmouthed real-estate mogul and his legions of identity-driven and anti-establishment working- and middle-class supporters. That’s not trve constitutional conservatism, they cry. This Trump fellow is a bigot and a Democrat! He’s the real racist!
The libertarianesque ideology and politics of the conservative punditry is more or less unique to the United States—Margaret Thatcher aside, but go figure that the only other country to have ever floated these kinds of policies in recent memory was also an Anglo democracy. And yes, that is important, because demographics matter. A government set up by Southern landowning exporters of raw materials and their merchant friends in New England, both of British extraction, who reject the central authority of monarchy in the name of their property rights, has certain implications that make it distinct from how other societies are run. And the people who have since succeeded them in running that government are products of it as well.
On many issues in recent memory (e.g. social security, immigration, public education, etc.), there has tended to be a center-left consensus in this descended government, one that moderates social liberalism (presentism, aka it’s the current year) with economic liberalism (19th century liberalism). This conflict and balancing act reflects how a large share of the American population is adamantly opposed to expanding the government or using it to change society, but also how when push comes to shove they not willing to fight about it. This quaint compromise has roots in our history, but the roots are being pulled up. These relics of a bygone age don’t realize that their government is no longer a casual and bare bones operation, but a massive anti-national apparatus. The eating away of economic liberalism is a process that is too far along to be reversed by voting, because the state is simply too large and the population too wanting of welfare, which is why so many pundits are more ideological and less pragmatic about the current election.What they want will never happen, and on some level they really have to know this.
If you boil away all their left-of-base social issues, what the trve conservative punditry preach is an identity-blind (everyone is just a deracinated American, period) and atavistic (1980s Reaganite masterrace) return to laissez-faire capitalism (lower taxes) which cannot succeed given the current electorate we have (over 40% vibrant). No wonder they thought Romney was a good candidate.
So where does the Trumpist heresy fit into all of this? They don’t know. They can’t figure it out. Or they get it, but don’t like it and rail against it. After all, identity politics is for Democrats; I just want my pieces of silver. Either way, they are failing to understand something which to me seems very obvious when placed in a Eurocentric context—a paradigm we have all too aggressively abandoned at the behest of ((((Boazians)))).
It’s the current year, and Trump is normal.
You heard me. Normal.
Take any country in Europe, which the United States shares a majority demographic and racial heritage with, and in their elections you have nationalists and socialists running against one another for office.
Isn’t that what is happening in the United States between Trump and Sanders?
Now, of course, there is hairsplitting over whether or not Sanders is a socialist, a democratic socialist, or a social democrat, but none of those titles change the fact that his policies are popular among homogeneous postindustrial societies with large European majorities, if not monocultures, such as in Vermont and Denmark. Meanwhile, someone running on Trump’s nativist and civic nationalist platform could expect decent results in France, Austria, the Netherlands, or again Denmark, possible victory in Slovenia, Slovakia, or Estonia, and likely victory in Hungary or Poland.
I know it is hard to let go of the idea that America is a city on a hill meant to enlighten the world with our uniqueness by making everyone just like us so we can all participate in one world economy with as little friction as possible, but please. American exceptionalism, in the political sphere, is more accurately termed American aberrationalism. With reference to most of continental Europe, what we have is highly divergent. Other countries do not have the same convoluted representation system that we do which allows different political parties to run different branches of the government despite being voted for by the same people, nor do they have have the same aggressive but selective anti-government ethos. They often view the government as their own instrument, not a hostile power. I am not saying the government is inherently good, but if you are not willing to use it to implement your will when you have the ability to—while competing with ideologies that will not flinch about doing so once they are given power by the same system that gave it to you—you are going to lose. And lose you have, cuckservative pundits. For it was the statists all along who were destined to inherit the state if it were put to a vote; how could you not make this connection?
One reason it may have taken us so long to catch up to Europe (or regress to Europe, depending on your view) and become a normal country is that the Anglo-American political tradition managed to hold dominance into the 20th century despite waves of non-Anglo European immigration from the 1840s-1920s. Many of these people adopted an American way of life and thinking. But a good amount of them never became good bourgeois trans-Englishmen, and instead contributed to the decline of limited government. And since the end of non-white immigration restrictions in 1965, the share of Anglo-Americans—and as a result the share of Anglo-American conservative voters who make up almost all of the conservative voter base—in the national population has been in free-fall, from almost 90% mid-century down to 60% today. It will be under 50% in a few decades.
Dear cuckservatives: your limited government, your empire of liberty, and your Constitution were all dependent on having a state intelligent and muscular enough to resist subversion and protect its national character. In the post 1960s era, every principle but identity was intellectually fought for and defended, and so conservatives lost again and again because they refused to recognize the new yet eternal rules. Results matter more than theories. And now that American politics is just Euromutts vs diversity mystery meat and their White “allies,” your world is gone.
It’s time to make a choice. You can accept that Trump is the right now by both popular mandate and the collapse of establishment candidates, as he would be in any European country, or you can cast your lot with the left and literally betray every last thing you’ve claimed to support, thus exposing yourselves as the frauds you are. At least under Trumpism, there will be a block against liberal voters immigrating to the United States. How’s that for a deal?
Whatever decision conservative pundits do decide to make, it isn’t likely to matter. Their influence was clearly overestimated relative to that of nationalists. Nationalism is rising across the entire West. Your time here is ogre.
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2 comments
“I am not saying the government is inherently good, but if you are not willing to use it to implement your will when you have the ability to—while competing with ideologies that will not flinch about doing so once they are given power by the same system that gave it to you—you are going to lose. ”
Yes, I’ve been saying this for years. The Alt-Right should distance themselves from the cuckservative, libertardian hatred of the State. Use Big Government for our own benefit. The future is authoritarian.
Hmmm interesting history. I wonder if there is a relationship in what the author wrote compared to the following:
I wish to quote an item I found in “Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization.” (link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3310.htm )
Long before the birth of the American Republic, the British crown adapted the corporation that was the form of ancient universities into a device to dominate British colonies throughout the world, including those on this continent. Through their “crown corporations” the Kings of England and their designated agents governed, taxed, and controlled the production and trade and skimmed off the profits of their colonial lands and subjects, enforcing their reign by military means. When our forebears revolted, defeated the British, and formed the United States, we also wiped out the King’s corporations. They ceased to exist here. That was part of what independence meant to our founding fathers.
By the time of our civil war, however, the “robber barons,” those famous, greedy, wealthy, ruthless American industrialists, had again found ways to establish device of British kings to their own aggrandizement. In court case after court case for almost a century and a half, corporation lawyers have refined and perfected the legal immunities and powers of these artificial, state-created, wealth-hoarding, irresponsible entities. Beginning in 1886, they prevailed upon the U.S. Supreme Court to grant them virtually all of the constitutional rights of citizens. This in effect allowed them to resume the role of their royal predecessors in ruling the country. In cahoots with their banks, huge corporations now control America’s body politic by reason of their bald-faced purchases of the three branches of the American government and America’s major media.
In consequence, by the beginning of the 21st Century the United States had ceased to function as a republic, much less as a democracy. These giant corporations, headed in most instances by members of an extremely wealthy elite group of multimillionaires and even billionaires, subvert healthy enterprise and true entrepreneurship. One percent of those at the top of the economic scale now have as much wealth as the bottom 95%, and the ratio keeps worsening. We humans, reduced to being “the non-corporate citizens” of the United States, retain only those rights and benefits that Corporate America allows us. Corporations in essence now elect and control our government, write virtually all its laws, and have control of the police, the courts, and the military.
This same Corporate America, ensconced now as “the only superpower,” through its foreign subsidiaries and the state-corporate world-governing instruments, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, effectively controls the entire world. We Americans have come full circle in these past 225 years. We overthrew the British King’s corporate rulers in 1776, but now we suffer the domination of American corporate rulers who are also colonizing the rest of the world on behalf of themselves.
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