This correspondent has given up on the United States as it currently exists. Restoration is now possible only through transformation. The U.S. will be destroyed by its inflexible ideology just as the USSR was. Our one hope for the future is mass emigration of European-Americans from California (already occurring by the millions, though our worthless media does not deign to report it), the Southwest, Florida, and so forth, resulting in a break-up of the U.S. and a new European-American state comprising some four-fifths of the current U.S. territory joined with English-speaking Canada. This is what we ought to work and plan for.

This may seem like wacky science-fiction now; but it happened to the USSR and there’s no reason to suppose the USA is immune to the effects of even greater stresses. The “root cause,” in fact, will be the same: an utter inability to escape from a state ideology and the institutions it generates in order to respond to a changed reality.

(By the by, One of the most important arenas of revolutionary struggle is to arrest the transmogrification of the American military, already well under way, into a mercenary force with a high percentage of foreign troops - who, when the crunch comes, with wolfish grins will gleefully turn their guns on American citizens.)

Whenever Democrats (or other leftists) complain about increasing income stratification (or whatever they call it), it is an excellent time to put to them the following question which Republicans are either too stupid to think up, or too cowardly to ask:

Why is it that income inequality is so much worse in cities run by Democrats?

Let’s look at some typical GOP cities— Jacksonville, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Syracuse, Grand Rapids, Omaha, San Diego, you could easily think of more.

Now look at what the Democrats control— Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. (“RINO” mayors don’t count…)

The level of inequality isn’t driving the party vote here; in most of these places the ruling party has been in control long enough that that level is the result of their policies.

The desired result. There are no “unintended consequences” here.

I suppose the Dems’ answer would be: We get elected in those cities because we get more elctoral support from minorities. But the income stratification in those cities is not the fault of our cities’ governments, it’s a national phenomenon, the fault of white (Republican) America which creates obstacles against minorities in the nation as a whole.

As a Canadian of European descent, I agree with Shrewsbury that at least part of Canada, the part that is still mostly white should join a new American-White state - strength through numbers.

This applies mostly anymore to the West of Canada, in which a movement exists to separate, and the Atlantic provinces, since unfortunately the cities of the most important provinces, Ontario and Quebec i.e. Toronto and Montreal are going colored very quickly.

Science-fiction as Shewsbury says? Due to the migration away from the cities that he speaks of, I’m afraid the possibility is becoming all too real.

This is what things have come to due to the ideological insanity of the liberal-left in the Western world.

Unfortunately, outside of Alberta and maybe parts of Saskatchewan, English-speaking Canadians have bought so heavily into liberalism that they would be unsuitable partners in any European-American nation. It’s always possible they’ll wake up (as the Dutch are beginning to wake up on the subject of Moslem immigration, for example); but at present, there’s little sign of it.

Plus the middle class and working class is getting deeper in debt with no money down FHA mortgages and credit card debt. Credit cards love the new debtor class making monthly payments (rent) on a principle they can never pare down nor pay back. Paying rent to their lords same as ye serfs of old.

Dennisw is quite right. Most large manufacturing corporatons do not make their money from manufacturing but from financing what they manufacture. GE would be a financially failing company were it not for GE Capital. (I recently got an opportunity to acquire a John Deere Credit Card for crying outloud!) Every corporation seems to want to live off the credit payments of the American middle class. And so far they are succeeding.

Paul,

I’m afraid you are right, present-day Canadians are hopelessly brainwashed by decades of liberal-left propaganda. Yet, there are others, like me, who are trying to break free.

Besides, no matter what degree of acceptance to the new order there appears to be on the surface, the fact is that many white Canadians are leaving the cores of the cities for the suburbs, and I personally see mostly whites getting together with whites, and the others with the others. Something is wrong, and whites know it inside.

Michael Lind has an article in the current Atlantic saying there have been three stages of the middle class in American history, each midwived by good government policies (which Lind, trying to piggyback his own preferred redistributionist schemes onto a successful American past, falsely describes as “social engineering”). The first middle class was an agricultural middle class of the early 19th century, helped into existence by the division of Western lands into small plots which enabled many people to acquire land. Next came the industrial middle class of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, enabled by high wages maintained by high tariffs. The third was the white-collar middle class of the 20th century, enabled by social security, medicare, college loans, and mortgage guarantees.

Lind argues that the downward pressures on the middle class today, stemming from low-wage labor and other factors (I’ll discuss his analysis after I’ve finished the article) necessitate much larger government action than in the past, to create a new middle class.

It has been a constant refrain of paleos for decades that America is becoming two nations, as poor whites are kicked to the side by transnational elites and their “minority” proteges. This is a regular theme of Sam Francis, for example, and of Pat Buchanan. I don’t buy it. Certainly there are always going to be poor and incompetent white people, and the cultural and political environment contributes to their degradation. But the economy in the U.S. has been really good for most everybody who wants to work for a long time. Owing money on credit cards and mortgages is not debt slavery.

Mr. Auster doesn’t want to focus too much on immigration and ethnicity, but I think that is pretty much the whole story. The “poor” in America, the “uninsured”, the minimum-wage worker, are immigrants. As long as we import Central American peasants we will have a lot of poverty here. Otherwise, although I have no shortage of suggestions for policy changes which will improve the economy, we’d hardly be discussing the issue.

Lind’s theories, by the way, are crackpot. High tariffs are good for manufacturing? The middle class of the 20th century was created by the government taxing working people’s wages and, after spending a portion on favored clients, transferring the rest of the money to nonworkers in the form of Social Security and government-run health care? Government college loans programs transfer money from working people to Latin professors like myself. How does *that* help the middle class (other than my lovely family, of course!)?

“Mr. Auster doesn’t want to focus too much on immigration and ethnicity, but I think that is pretty much the whole story. The “poor” in America, the “uninsured”, the minimum-wage worker, are immigrants. As long as we import Central American peasants we will have a lot of poverty here.”

Certainly the racial changes in AMerica are the leading cause of poverty and class separation. I don’t know enough about economics to say that it’s the whole story.

Of course Lind is generally a crackpot, but I found his three-stage history of the American middle class useful, though not the ideological twist he puts on it. My limited area of agreement with him is on the simple point that intelligent laws, not just an abstract “freedom,” are indispensable to the health of a society.

Enjoyed this piece of unintentional insight from the light-as-a-feather Instapundit:

“Daschle says that when our parents were kids, all Americans could go to good schools. Really? When my parents were kids, schools were segregated.”

D’oh!

(The notion, so prevalent amongst neoconservative types, that America was an hellish, semi-totalitarian nightmare of racial strife and hatred BEFORE the “Civil” “Rights” “Movement” is perhaps the most grotesque of all political legends….)

I don’t think Shrewsbury’s comment about neocons is correct. You never hear them discuss America in those demonizing terms. To the contrary, they downplay the racial conflict and inequality of the past, emphasizing the universal ideals that were our true essence and which won out over any unfortunate racial problems. Yes, they promote the race-blind universalism and dismiss any ethnic/racial concerns on the part of whites. But they do not attack the historic America as Shrewsbury charges.

Well, you may be right, but it sure seems like it’s sort of a subtext to a lot of comments one reads on the blogs of the type. (E.g., you will certainly recall the big brouhaha over Senator Lott’s supposedly abominable remarks at Senator Thurmond’s 100th birthday bash. I mean, what were the premises upon which all that (possibly disingenuous) outrage was founded? “Traditional America bad, noble, earthy minorities, good,” seems like.)

Or maybe I could have with more justice written, “Traditional America bad, Proposition Nation good.”

Re the Lott affair, yes, certain of the younger neocons did demonize Lott or what they thought he represented. That was in the context of what they saw as an unwelcome remnant of an American past that they had assumed was behind us. But generally when speaking of American history, neocons have spoken in glowing terms of the American Idea, almost as though the racial conflict and hierarchy of the past had never existed.

The neocons are preoccupied with political popularity and political positioning. They know the Zeitgeist runs a certain way in this country with regards to Trent Lott’s remarks, so they instantly distance themselves from him so that the media and the left cannot convince the public that “all those conservatives are secret racists.”

This neocon reaction, by itself, tells you nothing about how they feel about minorities as opposed to WASPs.

I think that an examination of Commentary magazine would settle the issue. Neocons ARE patriotic, although their view is distorted by their addiction to the Proposition Nation concept and taboos on seriously discussing immigration. One should also take into account the point that, like everyone else, they have been living in a swamp of liberal and leftist media which has distorted the American past for decades. So they can often sound like conventional self-flagellants when discussing the treatment of Negroes before the 1960s. On the whole, however their view of the American past seems to be positive.

Their view of the American past is positive, but only in the Proposition Nation, Nation of Immigrants, sense.

I should have added, to the my previous comment, an invitation to compare Commentary to the Nation or the New York Times. That would, I think, drive home the point that by the miserable standards of the present day, neocons are patriots, albeit addled ones.

And that is the mixed nature of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism is conservative, insofar as it it upholds traditional values like love of country; but it is liberal, insofar as the country it loves is not a real country but a universal ideology—or, alternatively, a cornucopia of economic prosperity. The neoconservatives do not love America as a historical country and people; they love non-discrimination, freedom, and material bounty.

Neoconservatives, like the liberals that they really, truly are, want to have it both ways. When singing from their Proposition Nation songsheet, they praise American history (especially President Lincoln and his place in it). When reacting to criticism of mass immigration, they swing into action to condemn immigration’s critics as “nativists” and cite the pervasive bigotry and racism that marred the fair face of America before about 1965. Mr. Auster is right; the neocons love an idea, not a nation. That is precisely why they are so dangerous: they would destroy this nation for the sake of their idea. Sadly, their idea can never be fully achieved on earth, so the destructive, perfecting impulse can never be satisfied. They sound like liberals because they are. HRS