Taki–famous to those of you who read NR back in the day–has started a new online magazine called Taki Mag. I’ve been given the opportunity to do some of my writing over there. Some familiar faces like Paul Gottfried, Daniel McCarthy, and Daniel Larison make an appearance along with many other excellent conservative writers with whom I was not previously familiar.
My first post is here. It says inter alia:
Consider the radical symbolism of the blue collar “Union Jack”: the POW-MIA flag. This flag–seen at biker rallies and whiskey bars throughout the South and rural Midwest–makes an extreme indictment. It says, in effect, that the U.S. government sold out its servicemen in Southeast Asia to expedite a face-saving peace treaty with North Vietnam. Honorable men who did their duty were left behind to fulfill political goals. Setting aside the truth or falsehood of this charge, it should be obvious that this cohort of Americans is not going to be trading their guns for a government promise of any kind. They are as skeptical of the government as they are of big corporations. Indeed, the government’s sorry history of mistreating veterans, not least in the notorious Veterans Administration healthcare system, further reinforces their self-reliant ethos. They may not be Republicans, but they sure as hell aren’t Democrats. And their attachment to guns–something that works, something that is useful, and something that declares manly independence in a world buffeted by mysterious economic forces–is even further in spirit from Obama’s leftism than the crusading “creedal nation” formulae embraced by many of today’s “conservatives.”
16 Apr 2008 at 4:42 pm
One healthy, constructive result of Obama’s “bitterness” crack is its unintended engagement of the staggering chasm that has grown between the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party and the party’s traditional base, the American working class. Beginning in the mid-’60s, when America disavowed its earlier immigration policies and embraced a gradually expanding open-borders philosophy, the working class has been hurled onto the front lines of this new social experiment, with their economic futures increasingly jeopardized by an imported labor force willing to earn much less, work much longer and toil in conditions barely fit for pest-level animal life.
As such, blue-collar America has understood from the beginning that free immigration was an economic issue, and that constant supplies of cheap labor benefitted only a tiny fraction of this country’s top-tier elite. This reality has never intruded on our homegrown salon cadres, spitting orders at third-world catering staff and discussing liberation theory – fully convinced in their blinkered hypocrisy that only reprobate racists oppose their vision of a new America. If they at all consider the native-born workers, it is at best as stooges, and at worst as raving throwbacks ready to strike up torches and rampage in lynch parties.
If toiling townies are “bitter”, it’s because the Democratic Party, offended that the unwashed can’t induldge its self-aggrandzing delusions, turned its back on them.
18 Apr 2008 at 8:13 pm
What did you think of Mr. Stegall’s column “Obama Is Right”?