November 9, 2016 at 1:55 p.m.
Redefining politics
Redefining politics
"This is a businessman who is not running on a business platform," Carlson said. "The business platform has been the Republican platform for my lifetime. You didn't hear anything about entitlement reforms, or capital gains tax cuts, or entrepreneurship. It is now a nationalist party that's focused against the elites and for the middle class. Whether he wins or loses, it's a completely new definition, and it's striking."
Carlson didn't have it quite right, but he was close. The GOP is indeed now a nationalist party rooted in the middle class, but it has only partially departed from its pro-business platform. It's perhaps more accurate to say that the GOP is now a pro-small-business (i.e., middle-class) party and an anti-big-business party.
And that distinction between big business and small business tells us a lot about the redefinition of politics, not just in the Republican Party but across the political landscape.
For years, both the Left and Right have lumped all business together into one category. You were either pro-business and anti-worker (conservative) or pro-worker and anti-business (liberal).
It was always a false dichotomy. The interests of small business and big business simply aren't the same, and never have been.
The differences are stark even on the theoretical level, that is to say, the goal of big business is to devour small business, or at least to put it out of business. Capitalism is certainly the one system that has fueled prosperity for the masses, and has assured the most efficient delivery of goods and services in history, but it has not always worked perfectly.
Ideally, capitalists compete on a level playing field; companies thrive, companies die. In real life, markets tend to become unbalanced and to lead to monopolies or quasi-monopolies.
Over time, survival depends less on an entrepreneur's ingenuity, innovation, and hard work and more on his or her position in the market hierarchy. The big business leverages ever more political and economic power to thwart the free market and create a rigged market.
Welcome to the world of cronyism.
Collusion among the biggest players is a game the small businessman or woman is not allowed to play, and conservative and libertarian thinkers have long recognized this. Adam Smith saw the monopolist as the enemy of free markets, especially when encouraged by government regulators: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
And F. A. Hayek loathed "laissez-faire banking."
The point philosophically is, government has a role in the economy, but that role can aid free-market capitalism or it can abet its destruction. For conservatives, the proper role of government is to help maintain balance in the markets without usurping the primacy of the markets themselves.
Maintaining market balance aids small business; usurping markets - as we have the government doing today - underwrites government regulators, who actually want their big-business allies commanding what's left of the market economy.
It all works out well for big business in practice. When big manufacturers move their factories to foreign countries, they not only eviscerate the manufacturing work force, they cripple the smaller American service businesses that served them.
Those smaller businesses go belly up while the internationalist capitalist elites stuff wads of blood money in their pockets. That's why you see so many multinational corporations climbing into bed with the bureaucratic-driven climate change lobby. They can put their competitors on American soil out of business and move overseas where they can still pollute profitably.
Hence the nationalistic fervor Carlson is talking about.
Then, too, the big multinationals who stay on American soil do so only as they insist on immigration "reform," in other words, an easy and continuous flow of cheap labor. Again, the corporate elites stuff their pockets, but wages are depressed for everybody else and that's especially bad news for consumer-driven small businesses, who lack the economies of scale needed to make their prices competitive.
The same goes for regulations. For the most part, big businesses - at least those favored by the bureaucratic elites - don't have to sweat all those rules and directives coming from the executive branch.
They have enough lawyers and lobbyists to be able to navigate them profitably. Not so small business. They groan and collapse beneath an overweight of red tape that causes paperwork to consume as much as 15 percent of their revenues.
The tax code, too, is designed to favor the 1 percent at the expense not only of middle class individuals but of middle class commerce, otherwise known as small business.
The Left has a valid point when it complains about too many corporations not paying their fair share, or even any taxes at all. The too-high corporate tax rate of 35 percent doesn't affect the 1 percent, for the most part, but many small businesses don't have the loopholes and subsidies the big businesses do, and they pay that rate or close to it.
Labor shortages, too, cripple small businesses as generous government subsidies make it more profitable for many to just leave the labor force. That deprives small businesses of the competent customer service employees they need, and illegal immigrants just can't fill those jobs the way they can disappear into factories and fields.
High taxes, burdensome regulations, bad trade deals, the inability to command a competitive price, the shortage of good workers - all these are the products of a rigged economy, manipulated by Washington bureaucrats and their multinational corporate allies, otherwise known as the 1 percent.
To be sure, the rhetoric hasn't caught up to all this. Hillary Clinton routinely bashed the Koch brothers on the stump this year, never mind that the Koch brothers were effectively in her corner. But they probably didn't mind if it helped the cause.
All of this has made it less important to be a liberal or a conservative. The more relevant question these days is, are you a globalist or a nationalist?
That is to say, the power equations these days are between the globalists - the multinational corporations and increasingly supranational government bureaucracies - and nationalists - those who would prefer the sovereign nation-state model of global governance and commerce.
In general terms, the liberals are with the globalists, those who dream of one-world government and top-down command of society and commerce, while conservatives are with the nationalists and their fidelity to self-governing constitutions.
Under the old definitions, liberals could be nationalist, and some still are. This past year, for instance, in attacking the "dream of open borders," Bernie Sanders said that open borders "would make everybody in America poorer - you're doing away with the concept of a nation state..."
Then, too, many globalists have also continued to called themselves conservative. They pledged their support for such fundamental freedoms as gun rights and religious liberty.
Mitt Romney even said he was severely conservative. Yet earlier this year he said his heart was breaking as he watched Trump stand up for the American worker and oppose the kind of trade deals Romney embraced.
So the distinctions are becoming increasingly more important, and in this past election the fault lines were exposed. The transition from a world defined by liberalism versus conservatism to one defined by globalism versus nationalism has led to some absurd alliances - for example, Leftists who despise multinational corporations and international warmongering supporting Hillary Clinton, the ultimate corporatist and warmonger.
Gong forward, no one can reasonably believe that big government can stop at the ocean's edge, and no one can reasonably believe that constitutional vandalism for the goals of internationalism can protect religious liberty and gun rights - or any of the Bill of Rights, for that matter -for very long.
It is clear at long last that the Republican establishment belongs in the Democratic Party. It is evident that what was once the Left and Right should work together on issues upon which they agree, such as trade and stopping the Trans Pacific Partnership, not to mention for a less interventionist foreign policy and stronger laws governing transparency and civil liberties.
Those latter issues can unite the former Left with the former Right because they are not liberal or conservatives issues; they are all, first and foremost, a stand for nationalism in a globalist world built on interventionism, secrecy, and an elitist international command economy.
At the very least, this year has exposed globalists masquerading as conservatives, a partisan media masquerading as objective, and Democratic globalists masquerading as crusaders for justice for American workers. That's a healthy development.
This morning, Donald Trump sits atop that political world as president-elect. He has toppled the establishment; David has taken down Goliath. We have no way of knowing whether Trumpism will be successful - though with a Republican Senate and House his agenda will have clear sailing - but his upset victory only served to cement the redefinition of politics that the campaign season indicated was happening.
That is, Trump's win was clearly not about conservatism or liberalism. It is about the USA. It is about nationalism.
So the Republic and all the world head off this week into uncharted waters, sailing in seas in which politics and political alignments have forever been transformed. The one thing we know as we leave port is that we are all sailing toward a new world, and leaving a very old and tired world order behind.
May the sailing be clear.
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