 Liberals have taken to promoting socialism, which is the state-sanctioned appropriation of private property. Or, communism.
In communism's parlance, this theft of a man's life, labor and land is referred to as state-ownership of the means of production. Liberals are less known for misappropriating intellectual concepts. But they do that, too. Take the term "liberal." It once belonged to the good guys. But socialists, communists and Fabians stole it from us. Having originally denoted the classical liberalism of the 18th and early 19th century, "liberal" used to be a lovely word. However, to be a liberal now is to be a social democrat, a leftist, a BLM, antifa and MeToo movementarian; it's to be Chris and Andrew Cuomo. A French classical liberal, Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), explained what liberalism stood for: "Individuals must enjoy a boundless freedom in the use of their property and the exercise of their labor, as long as in disposing of their property or exercising their labor they do not harm others who have the same rights." This is the opposite of communism aka socialism. By harm, classical liberals mean aggression, as in damage to person or property. To contemporary liberals, "harm" encompasses anything from Donald Trump's delicious tweets to the economic competition posed by a kiddie lemonade stand. In the UK, those in-the-know still use the word liberal in the right way. The august Economist—essential reading for, unlike American news outlets, it covers The News—has recently lamented that democracies are drifting towards "xenophobic nationalism," and away from liberal ideas. At the same time, the magazine allows that "liberalism is a broad church." It mentions the "Austrians" as being among liberalism's "forerunners"—a mention that gave me, as a devotee of economist Ludwig von Mises, the opening I needed. So, let me ask the following: Have the Economist's left-liberal editorializers (excellent writers all) read what liberal extraordinaire von Mises had to say about nationalism vis-à-vis immigration? Mises was a Jewish classical liberal in the best of traditions—a political economist second to none. He escaped the Nazis only to be treated shoddily in the American academy, by the Fabian "forerunners" of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's teachers. Another formidable, younger classical liberal thinker is David Conway (a friend). Dr. Conway has argued most convincingly and methodically—he's incapable of arguing any other way—that nationalism is in fact a condition for the emergence of liberalism. To that end, Conway invokes Mises. In "Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition," published in 1927, Mises warned that, "In the absence of any migration barriers whatsoever, vast hordes of immigrants … would … inundate Australia and America. They would come in such great numbers that it would no longer be possible to count on their assimilation. If in the past immigrants to America soon adopted the English language and American ways and customs, this was in part due to the fact that they did not come over all at once in such great numbers. ... This … would now change, and there is real danger that the ascendancy—or more correctly, the exclusive dominion—of the Anglo-Saxons in the United States would be destroyed." Mises was not only a true liberal, but a master of the art of argument. Still, he didn't imagine he needed to explain why the West had to stay Western to be free. And in "Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War," published in 1944, Mises could not have been more emphatic: "Under present conditions the adoption of a policy of outright laissez faire and laissez passer on the part of the civilized nations of the West would be equivalent to an unconditional surrender to the totalitarian nations. Take, for instance, the case of migration barriers. Unrestrictedly opening the doors of the Americas, of Australia, and of Western Europe to immigrants would today be equivalent to opening the doors to the vanguards of the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan." As Conway surmises, "Mises feared a massive immigration into the liberal democracies of peoples of vastly different ethnicity, culture and outlooks. Without strict immigration controls, Mises thought, host populations would rapidly become national minorities in their own lands. As such, the hosts would become vulnerable to forms of oppression and persecution at the hands of new arrivals." As far back as 1927, when the seminal "Liberalism in the Classical Tradition" was published, Mises, a gentleman from Old World Vienna, understood the following: Once illiberal, unassimilable people gain "numeric superiority," they will turn their population advantage into political advantage, using the host population's liberalism against it. Note: This piece was originally published at IlanaMercer.com on August 23, 2018.  Once upon a time there were two politicians. One had the power to give media and political elites goosebumps. Still does. The other causes the same dogs to raise their hackles. The first is Barack Hussein Obama; the second Vladimir Putin. The same gilded elites who choose our villains and victims for us have decided that the Russian is the worst person in the world. BHO, the media consider one of the greatest men in the world. Obama leveled Libya and lynched its leader. Our overlords were unconcerned. They knew with certainty that Obama was destroying lives irreparably out of the goodness of his heart. Same thing when Obama became the uncrowned king of the killer drone, murdering Pakistani, Afghani, Libyan and Yemeni civilians in their thousands. That, too, his acolytes generally justified, minimized or concealed. In June of 2008, Obama marked his election as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” Media did not mock their leader’s delusions of grandeur. All the estrogen-oozing amoebas of mainstream media would do in response to the Obama charm offensive was to turn to one another and check, “Was it good for you? Did he make the earth move and the oceans recede for you, too?” Recently, Obama romped on to the Third World stage “bigly.” He delivered an address in this writer’s birthplace of Johannesburg, South Africa. The occasion: the centennial commemoration of Nelson Mandela’s birth. On that occasion, Obama praised “the liberal international order,” which is founded on inverted morality: Good is bad and bad is good. Small wonder, then, that nobody—broadcaster Tucker Carlson excepted—was willing to shame Obama for lauding genial thug Cyril Ramaphosa as an inspiration for “new hope in [his] great country.” President hope-and-change Ramaphosa has gone where his four peer predecessors had not dared to go. He led a wildly fruitful effort to tweak the already watered-down property-rights provision in the South-African Constitution. Theft of land owned by whites will now be permitted. Other than their modern-day-messiah status, BHO and his hero Mandela share something else. Both were silent about the systematic ethnic cleansing and extermination, in ways that beggar belief, of South-African farmers, in particular, and whites in general. Does the barefaced Barack care that white men, women and children are being butchered like animals, their bodies often displayed like trophies by their proud black assassins? An example among thousands are Kaalie Botha’s parents: “You can’t kill an animal like they killed my mom and dad. You can’t believe it.” The Achilles tendons of Kaalie’s 71-year-old father had been severed by his assailants so he couldn’t flee. He was then hacked in the back until he died, his body dumped in the bush. The head of wife Joey had been bashed in by a brick, wielded with such force that the skull “cracked like an egg.” A day in the life of farming South Africa. Yet, there was Mr. Obama touting the new South Africa as the instantiation of the ideals promoted by Mandela. Mind you, Obama might be on to something, in a perverse way. As stated, Mandela was mum about these killings, labeled genocidal by the expert Dr. Gregory H. Stanton. As for “Madiba’s” fidelity to the cornerstone of civilization, private-property rights: In September of 1991, “Mr. Mandela threatened South African business with nationalization of mines and financial institutions unless business [came] up with an alternative option for the redistribution of wealth.” Had he lived to 100, Mandela would likely be cheering Ramaphosa for authorizing a free-for-all on white-owned private property. You know who’s not ignoring or minimizing those ongoing attempts at extermination and immiseration in South Africa? President Putin. Russia has purportedly offered to give shelter to 15,000 white South African farmers, so far, recognizing them for the true refugees they are. But Mr. Putin must be a racist. At least that’s what the cruel and craven African National Congress (Mandela’s party) dubs any nation daring to succor white South-Africans. The very idea that black Africans would persecute white Africans is racist in itself, say South Africa’s ruling Solons. In fact, the ANC regularly intervenes to set aside findings made by Refugee Boards across the West in favor of South Africa’s endangered minority. Putin, of course, has a history of such “racism.” Take his “unhealthy” fixation with saving Christians in Syria. Yes, that community is thriving once again because of the Alawite and Russian alliance. True to type, “racist” Russia is now looking out for the Afrikaner settlers of South Africa. In 2011, when “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” was published, there were approximately 40,000 commercial South-African farmers who remained on the land of their ancestors. Minus about 3000 slaughtered. The total number of commercial farmers who feed South Africa is now less than half the number of “refugees” the US takes in each year. To date, “there has been a trickle of South Africans applying for asylum in the United States on the grounds of racial persecution. Almost all have been deported.” It should be news to no one that American refugee policies favor the Bantu peoples of Africa over its Boers. As Obama would drone, “It’s who we are.” Whichever way you slice it, on matters South Africa, Russia is the virtuous one. Note: This piece was originally published in the Unz Review on August 9, 2018.  To listen to political psychologists and demographers, women are "abandoning the Republican Party" and voting for progressive policies because "they care about reproductive rights."
Get it? Women "care." What do they care about? "Rights." The implication, at least, is that "the gender gap in American politics" is related to something women possess in greater abundance than men: virtue. Put bluntly, women believe they have a right to have their uteruses suctioned at society's expense. For this, they are portrayed favorably by those citing these proclivities. Whereas women are depicted as voting from a place of virtue, men are described by the same cognoscenti as "sticking with the Republicans" for reasons less righteous. Men are "buttressing the Republican party," complained the Economist, in an article claiming to "mansplain" why male voters—young even more so than old—are sticking with the GOP. If not for men, the party "would otherwise be falling over."As spare and as strong as the Economist's text always is; the writer was unmistakably cross. Academics conducting surveys no longer stick to reporting the trends observed in their often-dubious data, but attach value judgments thereto. Their default bias in the matter of the yawning "gender gap in American politics" is this: Support for the Republican Party is wrong, perhaps even wicked. By leap of illogic, the reasons for such support must surely lie in the dark recesses of the male mind. In search of such confirmation-bias, you have to wonder how would our brainiacs dismiss Republican women? Let me guess: Unlike men, women are good. Therefore, if they vote Republican it must be because they're still oppressed by the patriarchy (if only). Research methodology has moved away from impartially reporting emerging trends, and toward attaching value-judgments to them. These come in the shape of fancy sounding constructs. Most are purely political. The nebulous concept of "status threat," in this case, is galvanized by ill-intentioned and intellectually ill-equipped academics, to cast men as bad actors. When men depart from the "righteous" electoral choices taken by females, and exhibit a preference for the Republican Party—they are said to be acting because of an unseemly fear that women will usurp them to take their rightful place in the world of work. Or so researchers posit. As any researcher worth his salt should know, there are reasons other than "status threat" to vote for the Republican Party (in as much as these men don't yet recognize the GOP for what it is: a party of quislings who seldom keep promises). For instance, men are being crowded out of colleges; 56 percent of college students are women. And, merit be damned, company human-resource departments now put a premium on recruiting women over men. Survival, not necessarily status, is at stake. That sort of thing. From the smart set comes the same type of response to the demographic implications of mass migration. Everybody, the Republican Party establishment excepted, knows that Trump voters voted because of immigration. Deplorable Americans sense that their country's slipping away. They no longer recognize their communities. Accompanying this transformation are strict instructions to accept, never question, the "browning of America" (in the words of a progressive at Vox.com). For this is "some vast natural process," as Steve Sailer puts it. It's "like the drift of the solar system through the Milky Way." Prosaic types that they are, deplorable Americans are not feeling the poetry. Becoming aliens in their own homeland is no fun. For these pitifully small expectations, they're labelled "nativists, "racists" and "bigots." For once, however, "Ezra Klein, founder of Vox and paladin of mainstream Democratic thinking," avoids passing ad hominin for analysis. Instead, Klein has at least described the political effects of putting the American majority on the road to political extinction. Without once saying "nativist, "fascist," "racist" or "tribalist know-nothings," Klein admits that "demographic change is fracturing our politics," and that whites feel threatened by "the browning America." Klein's essay "suggests a bit of a step toward realism among Establishment punditry," concedes Sailer. Again, to explain voting patterns, Klein has avoided brandishing political constructs like "status threat" as weapons to shame. Rather, he practically admits (although doesn't quite state) "that white Americans are slowly waking up to the fact that they don't really want to get pushed around by newcomers just for being white." Progressives, alas, seldom progress. To the rest of the commentariat of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, wanting a place you can call home while white is … racist. Klein certainly won't completely disappoint his prog peer group. To overcome that lamb-to-the-slaughter dread the majority harbors, Klein advises elites to "lie harder" to Americans. Isn't California a good example of the glories of an inevitable majority-minority transformation?! Klein certainly thinks so (and says as much). Name calling remains the purview of the Economist, which is forever grumbling about Trump's "white-identity politics." (Or the Russians.) However, without exception and without let, progressives—one-worlder, open-border wonders that they are—celebrate that nothing Mr. Trump can do "will interrupt how America is changing." This "combination spells a long-term disaster for [the Republican] party," gloats the Economist. Note: This piece was originally posted on IlanaMercer.com on August 2, 2018. |
