So this week I read that Fox couldn't get Republicans to come on TV and support President Trump on Charlottesville. But I also read that Steve Bannon told a lefty journalist:
There also seems to be a suggestion out there that the left's attack on Confederate, and now Founders monuments, is part of some cunning plan from deep down in the liberal-Democratic nexus. The idea is that blacks believed that the Obama presidency would unload tons of loot on them, and it didn't happen. So now they are hopping mad and the Dems need to channel their rage into something.
Or it might lead blacks to give up on politics and start dying of despair, like the last lot that were betrayed by the progressive elite: the white working class.
But it does raise the question of which is better at winning the hearts and minds of the people: identity politics or nationalism?
Let the world note that the three great evil geniuses of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all found the need to combine their millennial socialism with nationalism. For Hitler, it was National Socialism; for Stalin it was Socialism in one Country. And Mao stood at the Gate of the Forbidden City and apparently did not tell the Han people that "the Chinese People have stood up."
But these were practical men, who would do anything to seize power and then keep it. The theoreticians of the left have always been opposed to the nation state, believing in a single paradise on Earth without boundaries and nations. And so they have always been working on undermining the notion and the fact of the nation by organizing people into sub-national groups: class, race, gender; or supranational groups like the UN and the EU.
On both cases, note that the same people will get to be the rulers.
My idea is that this war on the nation is the most foolish thing in the world, and I like to say that the world-be global ruling class took exactly the wrong lesson from all the nationalism and the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s.
My point is that, despite the stupid World War I, the inflations of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the suffering peoples of the west were successfully rallied to support and fight for their nations. The German workers, perhaps the most radicalized of any by the socialist wave, all rallied to Germany and fought for the Fatherland, twice. The British working class that had gone on a General Strike in the 1920s nevertheless rallied to Britain in World War II. In the US all the divisions of the 1930s were healed and everyone rallied to fight for victory over the Nazis and the Japs. I have a 12-CD set of World War II songs put out by Tin Pan Alley, all singing the praises of the war.
Yet after World War II the global elite decided "never again." The people cannot be trusted not to be fascists, they decided, so we must step in and neutralize the fascist bug.
Actually, what the first half of the century proved was that, no matter how badly they were governed, and how badly the ruling class screwed up, the people could still be rallied and unified to support and fight for their nations.
It is clear from President Trump's actions, and from the words of Steve Bannon, that the president is trying to rally the people once again to the notion of nation. And that the rest of the ruling class is opposed to the idea.
Are Trump and Bannon right? Or is the rest of the ruling class? I don't know. All I know is that "nation" is a very powerful idea.
Maybe it is too powerful for some people, and that is why they want to knock it down.
The Democrats … the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.Meanwhile the Z-Man analyzes the globalists and their notion that when the migrants have migrated all over the world (i.e., into the West) that a global government would be staffed by the same folks that staff the UN: the "rich brats of the world’s political elite."
There also seems to be a suggestion out there that the left's attack on Confederate, and now Founders monuments, is part of some cunning plan from deep down in the liberal-Democratic nexus. The idea is that blacks believed that the Obama presidency would unload tons of loot on them, and it didn't happen. So now they are hopping mad and the Dems need to channel their rage into something.
Or it might lead blacks to give up on politics and start dying of despair, like the last lot that were betrayed by the progressive elite: the white working class.
But it does raise the question of which is better at winning the hearts and minds of the people: identity politics or nationalism?
Let the world note that the three great evil geniuses of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all found the need to combine their millennial socialism with nationalism. For Hitler, it was National Socialism; for Stalin it was Socialism in one Country. And Mao stood at the Gate of the Forbidden City and apparently did not tell the Han people that "the Chinese People have stood up."
But these were practical men, who would do anything to seize power and then keep it. The theoreticians of the left have always been opposed to the nation state, believing in a single paradise on Earth without boundaries and nations. And so they have always been working on undermining the notion and the fact of the nation by organizing people into sub-national groups: class, race, gender; or supranational groups like the UN and the EU.
On both cases, note that the same people will get to be the rulers.
My idea is that this war on the nation is the most foolish thing in the world, and I like to say that the world-be global ruling class took exactly the wrong lesson from all the nationalism and the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s.
My point is that, despite the stupid World War I, the inflations of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the suffering peoples of the west were successfully rallied to support and fight for their nations. The German workers, perhaps the most radicalized of any by the socialist wave, all rallied to Germany and fought for the Fatherland, twice. The British working class that had gone on a General Strike in the 1920s nevertheless rallied to Britain in World War II. In the US all the divisions of the 1930s were healed and everyone rallied to fight for victory over the Nazis and the Japs. I have a 12-CD set of World War II songs put out by Tin Pan Alley, all singing the praises of the war.
Yet after World War II the global elite decided "never again." The people cannot be trusted not to be fascists, they decided, so we must step in and neutralize the fascist bug.
Actually, what the first half of the century proved was that, no matter how badly they were governed, and how badly the ruling class screwed up, the people could still be rallied and unified to support and fight for their nations.
It is clear from President Trump's actions, and from the words of Steve Bannon, that the president is trying to rally the people once again to the notion of nation. And that the rest of the ruling class is opposed to the idea.
Are Trump and Bannon right? Or is the rest of the ruling class? I don't know. All I know is that "nation" is a very powerful idea.
Maybe it is too powerful for some people, and that is why they want to knock it down.
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