Did corporate types think they would thrive in a Third-Worldized America?
In response to the
entry, “If you don’t want the government telling you how to run your business, don’t accept billions in aid from the government!”, RB writes:
Obama’s agenda is cause for concern. However, I don’t really feel any sympathy for the executives involved. I’ve known many people like that when I worked in the financial district. Wearing pinstriped suits does not mean that they have not been inculcated with the leftwing ideology from their college days in the 60s and 70s. And for three decades they have promoted and even profited by the flood of third world immigrants. The rise to power of a figure like Obama was an inevitable result. What were they ever thinking?
LA replies:
That’s an interesting argument.
They fully supported the browning of America, while also wanting to make lots of money. Did they think a brown America would continue to elect conservative white presidents who respected the wealth production and property rights of rich white people?
Remember also the truth that universalist, race-blind liberalism leads inevitably to race-conscious surrender to nonwhites. The greatest example ever was David Horowitz’s response to the celebrations surrounding Obama’s inauguration, which I wrote about here. Betraying an entire life-time of saying that race doesn’t matter, Horowitz joyously greeted the fact that race-conscious nonwhite masses had become part of the American political system through their race-conscious identification with a nonwhite politician.
- end of initial entry -
Sebastian writes:
I was happy to read RB’s comments for they mirror my experience to a “T.” Easily two thirds of the investment bankers and financial workers I know and all but two of the many corporate lawyers in my life passionately supported Obama. Lawyers tend to be knee-jerk liberals, but the bankers often had complicated arguments about the global economy and post-national world. They live in an atmosphere that ignores all the preconditions to their existence and way of life: the rule of law, the long-fought battles for the protection of personal property, the safety (and narcissism) of their women, the food delivery systems … everything that allows New Yorkers to live so far removed from nature in abstract bubbles of abundance. They have no clue that things could be different. Many are suffering from such narcissism and egomania, they assume their smarts and hard work would put them in the same position had they been born and raised elsewhere.
When you point out to them that importing a mostly illiterate, agrarian populace into a 21st century culture and economy may not be a wise move, they simply assume you don’t like Mexico because someone stole your shoes on the beach in Acapulco.
I do not want to see Obama’s policies implemented, but I admit that if I were older and already sitting on a pile of real money, Schadenfreude may get the better of me. Seeing these liberal-chic “masters of the universe” robbed of their labor and dispossessed would be funny if it didn’t also have an impact on me and my career and ambitions.
RB writes:
About a year ago I attended a dinner with some business and financial reporters and consultants, including Tamar Jacoby and some Wall Street Journal bigwigs. I made a roughly similar argument in a nicer way. Afterward, some of the attendees (not Jacoby and the WSJers of course) came up to me to express their approval. Their positive reactions were quite encouraging, but I also had the disturbing impression that such thoughts had never previously occurred to them on their own.
April 9
Paul Nachman writes:
Sebastian’s response to RB opens an excellent theme that deserves to be pounded away on.
First, a personal experience, involving my second cousin who lives in Long Island City. (He grew up on Manhattan and wishes he could afford to live there now, since everything a person could ever want can be found on Manhattan.) I stayed with him for a few days before Christmas in 1991 and he was excited to give me a tour of NYC, specifically Manhattan.
As we went from Columbia to the Met to Central Park, he was always asking for my reactions. At one point I said it was all very interesting [it was!], but that it struck me as, altogether, a very insecure place, an appendage linked to the continent by a few bridges and tunnels, even having trouble getting rid of its own garbage. (The case of the wandering garbage barge had probably preceded this conversation.) Cousin Rich was very surprised by this, saying he regarded New York City, specifically Manhattan, as a “very secure” place. To me, this was a fantasy to match those of the bankers and lawyers Sebastian writes about.
At the societal level, what Sebastian wrote reminds me of this passage that I’ve now laboriously transcribed from Georgie Anne Geyer’s Americans No More (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), pp. 197-198:
[I]n 1974, the Ford family and motor company broke financially with the [Ford Foundation], and the foundation disposed of its remaining Ford stock, now to depend upon other more diversified income sources.
Henry Ford II’s melancholy letter upon his own resignation as trustee, a post in which he had served since 1943, came on December 11, 1976, a date that in many ways marked the end of a period of Americana. Charging that the foundation no longer understood America as a whole, Ford wrote in what was to become his historic and famous missive that “the diffuse array of enterprises upon which the Foundation has embarked in recent years is almost a guarantee that few people anywhere will share a common perception of what the Foundation is all about, how it sees its mission and how it serves society …”
Then he asked the activists to try to understand the very system that made their enthusiastic philanthropy possible. “The Foundation exists and thrives on the fruits of our economic system,” he commented. “The dividends of competitive enterprise make it all possible … In effect, the Foundation is the creature of capitalism—a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the Foundation does. It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the Foundation’s grant programs.”
Ford went on, “I’m not playing the role of the hard-hearted tycoon, who thinks all philanthropists are socialists and all university professors are Communists. I’m just suggesting to the Trustees and the staff that the system that makes the Foundation possible is very probably worth preserving. Perhaps it is time for the Trustees and staff to examine the question of our obligations to our economic system and to consider how the Foundation, as one of the system’s most prominent offspring, might act most wisely to strengthen and improve its progenitor.”
We see this blindness in many institutions that consider themselves solidly established. The alumni magazines of my two undergraduate alma materi, Grinnell and Carleton, are full of diversity-babble on the tribulations of “the other” residing in our heartless, white civilization. How do they think their Olympian perspectives were made possible? And I think it literally true that 99.9% of the American academy shares this stupid and fatal myopia, which is why I now donate only to Hillsdale College.
Then there’s the ACLU, as someone wrote “pounding away at our common civic culture.” When they, and Ken Hechtman, succeed, do they think the resulting authoritarian government that’s needed to keep the lid on will tolerate institutions such as the ACLU for even a microsecond?
Sebastian’s other observation …
When you point out to them that importing a mostly illiterate, agrarian populace into a 21st century culture and economy may not be a wise move, they simply assume you don’t like Mexico because someone stole your shoes on the beach in Acapulco.
is both wonderfully wry and penetrating. What he captures there is so many people’s inability to conceive of reacting to something based on anything but incredibly parochial self-interest. The idea of being disinterested (not to be confused with “uninterested”) is foreign to a large part of the population, I think.
That reminds me of the case wherein it was suggested to one of Chicago’s aldermanic hacks (during the first Daley regime) that some public action he took was a conflict of interest. He responded that he didn’t see any conflict with his interests!
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 08, 2009 12:42 PM | Send