National Review: The Christmas Miracle of Walmart

Kevin Williamson has a new article at National Review on the Christmas miracle of Walmart:

“The more squared-away among us have been doing their Christmas shopping for a while. People like me are getting started. It’s fashionable to dislike shopping. Men of course aren’t supposed to enjoy shopping, because shopping is a stereotypically female thing, and we men are weirdly delicate in the face of such threats. But many women say they dislike shopping, too: It’s a hassle, it’s stressful, and taking pleasure in the mere exercise of consumption strikes many as suggestive of shallowness. It’s a fine argument, but I don’t buy it. …

When the alien archeologists land on Earth in some future age, they’ll see the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal and they’ll know that there was once a real civilization here on Earth. (“And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent Godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.”) They’ll wonder at some of our strange and barbaric practices, but they’ll know we had something going on. I hope they find a Walmart.

I’ve been to the Taj Mahal, Mount Rushmore, and St. Paul Outside the Walls. (“The alabaster columns were a gift from Muhammad Ali,” the priest showing us around said. “The real Muhammad Ali.”) And each lives up to its reputation — none disappoints. But spare a thought for the everyday miracle of the Walmart Super Center, which contains within its walls a selection of worldly riches and exotic treasures that Cleopatra would have blushed to contemplate. A 60-inch flat-screen television was, until the day before yesterday, a token of wealth. You can buy a good one from Samsung for less than $300, or just a couple of bucks over what a minimum-wage worker earns in a 40-hour week. …”

In a nutshell, this is the difference between the Alt-Right and mainstream conservatism.

Here is what I see when I go into a Walmart: while the cavernous aisles of Walmart are filled with cheap products from China and Latin America, I see lots of fat people, elderly White grandmothers with their mulatto grandchildren, interracial couples, gender non-conforming lesbians, plenty of Hispanic illegal aliens who work at the local chicken plants and tons of ordinary White people who strike me as demoralized and who are getting visibly poorer year after year.

It is a depressing experience. I don’t believe it is unique to my area either (spoiler: my local Walmart is located adjacent to an abandoned textile mill). I can go pretty much anywhere in the South these days and behold the same Walmart miracle. The buildings and their utilitarian layout are exactly the same. The people who are shopping there fit the same profile. Many of the Walmart associates are college graduates who can’t find jobs that match their education in this economy. This is what it feels like to me to be losing your country in exchange for cheap imported Samsung televisions.

How do we explain this paradox of cheap imported goods and White working class misery?

1.) First, Walmart is now the biggest employer in the South. It is symbolic of the reality of the post-industrial, low-wage, non-unionized service economy:

2.) Second, the United States has run a trade deficit since 1975. The big story here with Walmart though is the trade deficit with China that has soared since the 1990s:

3.) Third, the American middle class is shrinking as wealth is being concentrated at the top of the social pyramid in our service economy:

4.) Fourth, real wages for most US workers has stagnated for decades:

5.) Fifth, average household income has declined since the late 1990s:

6.) Sixth, the national debt has grown by leaps and bounds since 1970:

7.) Seventh, the foreign born population has swelled since the 1970s as millions of immigrants have been admitted to the United States:

8.) Eighth, the value of the stock market has soared since the 1970s:

The moral of the story: neoliberalism has devastated the United States on two fronts.

Economically, the trend since 1970 has been toward economic liberalism. Conservatives have won across the board on this front. We’ve moved toward a low-tax, low-wage, deregulated, open borders, free-trade economy, which has hollowed out the middle class while expanding the ranks of the very poor and very rich. The national debt and the value of the stock market has soared.

Culturally, the trend since 1970 has been toward social liberalism. We’ve seen the family collapse, divorce and out-of-wedlock births skyrocket, millions of babies have been aborted, the legalization of gay marriage, religion has retreated from public life and millions of non-English speaking immigrants have poured into the United States from all over the world. We’ve seen the normalization of miscegenation, cohabitation, homosexuality and transgenderism.

The Obama years gave us gay marriage. The Trump years are giving us tax reform. We oscillate between social liberalism and economic liberalism. The result is always more liberalism. The answer to every problem is always MORE liberty or equality at the expense of everything else. Over the long term, it has produced BOTH a loss of cultural cohesion and extreme economic inequality, or your depressing experience at your local neighborhood Walmart.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

51 Comments

  1. I was born in the late 1950’s. There is simply no cohesive rational for this country any longer. Other than inhabiting some space within the longitude and latitude of the U.S., nothing whatsoever unites these inhabitants. For the younger readers, it wasn’t always this way. I only caught the tail end of something that could be roughly called a united culture/nation.

    • I agree with you. I remember being raised next to farmers. People who were good and raised good kids. Crime was not an issue, your neighbor would say hello to you or maybe even talk and would definitely help you if you needed assistance. Grandparents came around and were shown respect, schools taught real subjects and provided a soild education. We never locked our car at the store and the backdoor was always open. What has been allowed to happen in this country during my lifetime is despicable. I have come to realize that my generation may be the last to have any real historical memory that things do not need to be this way. The people born from this day forward will be tricked and manipulated into thinking this current way of life is correct and they will suffer dismal, sad, alienated lives with no cultural connections and no real community. There ought to be a reckoning and the people who did this and continue doing this, destroying this nation should be brought to justice.

      • “The people born from this day forward will be tricked and manipulated into thinking this current way of life is correct and they will suffer dismal, sad, alienated lives with no cultural connections and no real community.”

        Exactly. This is what I’ve told my sons and their friends – that their generation doesn’t understand that this is NOT the norm – I remember the 70s where steel workers, auto workers, machinists, etc. were making great wages that could support a family comfortably. My oldest son just finished his first year at local community college (4.0 average because he studied hard and understands the harsh alternative if he doesn’t get his higher education) – but two of his friends work at … Walmart and Walmart.

        One of them worked for a few months on an assembly line – I was excited when I heard he got the job because I’m thinking “great wages!”. But then I found out that he was making $7.50 an hour. So nowadays it doesn’t matter where you work – Dollar General, gas station, assembly line, Walmart – the wages are all flat and poverty-level.

        Hunter hit it out of the ball park with this article. There is no 1st world nation that doesn’t have a solid middle class – our middle class is rapidly evaporating. With the shrinking middle class and diminishing White population – as a percentage of the whole – the United States is finished.

        I am typically an optimist but you can’t stick your head in the sand regarding this situation. We’re $20+ Trillion in debt, our middle class will soon be gone, Black & Brown immigrants / invaders are destroying and sucking up our resources and dumbing down our quality of life, etc.

        Basically Trump has bought us time to prepare – but unless a lot of people in Congress and corporate people get onboard with his objectives, it’s just a matter of time until we’re a 3rd world nation.

        • it’s just a matter of time until we’re a 3rd world nation.

          For some strange reason I suspect that is exactly what they want. However the whole thing may backfire on them as it is beginning to now. If this was about power they should have realized that keeping us fat, dumb and happy was working just fine but instead with their abject stupidity they decided to bite the hand that feeds them. The other hand is gonna go defensive as the pain gets worse and worse.

  2. 90% OF WHAT WALMART SELLS IS HIGH PRICED JUNK.

    I try to go to these department stores to try to buy something basic, that I need, and often they DON’T HAVE IT. They tell me to go online!

    Eg. VO5 shampoo for $1: Discontinued. They want you to buy Pantene Pro V for $10.
    Basic man-sized manual can opener that can open a big can: Discontinued, to force you to buy the $30 electric one that breaks down every few months, or settle for the tiny weak one that bends and breaks and won’t cut a lid for $1.

    These stores are full of made in China junk that people don’t need. The prices have gone up, and the quality and quantity has gone down.

    2 oz of cookies in a big huge box for $1. It comes to $8 per lb. of cookies.

    1 oz candy bar in a big wrapper for $1 = $16 per lb. for chocolate!!

    Big packages, big prices, little food inside.

    National Cuckview writers are idiots.

      • THIS NATIONAL CUCKVIEW ARTICLE IS JEWISH PSYCHOPS.

        I agree with you.

        This article is Jewish psychops. It is a way to tell white people, don’t worry, be happy.

        Look, the 3rd raping murdering aliens are invading your country, the negroes are stealing your white women, your birth rate is falling, you will go extinct, as per our Jewish plan, while we build fences in Israel.

        But at least, you get to buy some cheap junk at Walmart, so don’t complain. Just buy a cheap TV, drink a beer and watch the negroes throw a ball at other negroes.

        • I’m not bragging here, signaling or otherwise. But at no time in my life did I have the slightest interest in watching negroes throw balls about. I was involved in a lot of individual type sports. I got a small bit of satisfaction seeing that more and more men are just walking away from that absurdity.

  3. At the same time as you look at the vendors for the TV object/commodity you’ll moan about multicultural advertising standards beamed through the same TV content.

    You are the end product of advertising.

  4. “We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.” – George Orwell

  5. Very well written Hunter….very well written.

    I’m in New England, and while the China-Marts on the Maine/NH border are not as bad as what you experience they are never-the-less challenging. There are two in this area. One, a Super-China-Mart, I simply will not go to, because as you wrote, it is depressing.

  6. Excellent article, I for one would like to see more like it. Put forth information explaining our current condition and then offer solutions. Sound like good strategy.

  7. Every time I walk into a Wal-Mart, I don’t know if I’m in a foreign country or a freak show. As my nonagenarian father says, “if you want to see the future of America visit your local Wal-Mart.”

    By the way, the Wal-Mart in Fairfax, Ohio, dubbed as one their first “up-scale” stores sits on the grounds of a former Ford Motor Co. transmission plant. Their Sam’s Club store, just under 3 miles west in the Cincinnati suburb of Oakley, is located where the Cincinnati Milling Machine nka Milacron Corp. once stood. At one time, Milacron was the largest producer of machine tools in the U.S. Finally, about 2 miles from there, in Norwood, Ohio, no Wal-Marts, but lots of stores, specialty shops, restaurants & sports bars now occupy the land where GM once had a sprawling factory that produced the Chevy Camaro & Pontiac Firebird. How’s that for progress?

    • What you’ve described is symbolic of how the American economy has changed from industrial to consumer-based over the last 50 years. It’s also a good description of how the population has changed as well.

  8. The National Review’s article on the “morally indefensible” white working class in March, 2016 convinced me finally and completely that I am not a “conservative.” I want nothing to do with “conservatism.”

    My experience of Walmart matches Johnny Paycheck’s– foreign country or freak show.

  9. Many of their employees’ wages are so low that they still qualify for EBT cards, section 8 housing, etc… The Walton family is worth $150 billion… So who’s really ducking America dry? It’s not the welfare recipients. It’s THEIR EMPLOYERS

  10. Walmart is not inherently bad.

    “In 1945, businessman and former J. C. Penney employee Sam Walton purchased a branch of the Ben Franklin stores from the Butler Brothers. His primary focus was selling products at low prices to get higher-volume sales at a lower profit margin, portraying it as a crusade for the consumer. He experienced setbacks because the lease price and branch purchase were unusually high, but he was able to find lower-cost suppliers than those used by other stores. He passed on the savings in the product pricing.”

    Just like the concept of a national media and Hollywood are not inherently bad. It’s when JEWS control them, when a hostile, sociopathic, alien elite who want to exploit the host population have control over these institutions that you have problems. Trump criticizes the media and Jew-controlled puppets attack Trump as being a dictator who doesn’t want objective reporting! No, we don’t want lying Jews in control of the media! That’s the problem, not the idea of having a news media!

    The American experiment worked for different white ethnicities. It didn’t work for Jews and non-whites because they have different historical, psychological and evolutionary agendas than whites do. Semites and Bantus can not be assimilated without irreparable damage and therefore SHOULD NOT be attempted which is our argument. Allow disparate groups to have their own sovereign territories.

  11. Dick Fosbury was an American genius, but his glory was fleeting. After his stunning gold medal high-jump win in 1968, it was certain that his “Fosbury Flop” would either be banned, or learned and used by stronger athletes to reach heights that poor Dick could never achieve.

    What did you expect the 21st century to look like? There are really only three paths to prosperity:

    (a) Control access to some vital resource and extract rents from it.
    (b) Invent new and useful widgets that didn’t exist before.
    (c) Figure out how to produce and distribute familiar widgets at lower cost.

    Landlords, governments, and their associated parasites have (a) covered, while the Chinese and Walmart own (c). Innovation (b) is really hard because our ancestors picked all the low-hanging fruit, we’re stupider than them thanks to mass immigration and dysgenic breeding, and affirmative action, environmental regulations, and Sarbanes-Oxley have created rules that are impossible to comply with, or sometimes even understand.

  12. I also will add this pathetic story-since it’s Christmas. This year in Walmart I saw a foreign guy in the clothes department take his shirt off in the middle of the store. It’s time for bull whips.

  13. By a show of hands, how many here have been physically forced to spend your money at Walmart?

    That’s what I thought, me neither.

    • I shop at Wal-Mart all the time. I don’t think Wal-Mart is to blame for the so called cheap Chinese products. The manufacturers are to blame. As far as the customer base goes, in an area that has other options, that is when Wal-Mart becomes the freak show that its detractors use against it. In the small towns, all customer demographics are there so the midday dirty pajamas wearing slobs don’t overwhelm you.

    • @truth corps

      It’s not about being forced to shop at one store. You have been forced to enjoy the same demise of American economy that all of us have endured. You are just choosing to blissfully accept it as “your freedom of choice.” I am glad you only buy American products and never support any of this hostile takeover………wait that’s a lie.

    • Physically? No. But anyone who has spent much time in small towns knows that there often isn’t much of a choice.

      Hunter us pounding the nail square on the head here, and is describing Wal-Mart/America as it is. A stroll through Weimart is a depressing look at the short path to destruction that America is on, at least the very large underbelly that smothers the masses.

  14. Visit a shopping centre anywhere in Australia such as Westfields-owned by Jews-and you see Asian women walking around with their nerdy blond husbands and three kids buying Chinese-always Chinese -made garbage.
    Many of the stores are staffed by Asians and they tend to employ only each other.
    Owing to free trade agreements which were meant to benefit us, there’s nothing you can buy here now that isn’t made in China or Thailand. They do buy our food and drink-but only because their own is such crap.
    The manufacturing sector pretty much went under overnight-and sent whole Australian suburbs to the welfare que.
    Asians-like Jews-are high IQ people out to destroy us…..and our useless leaders just let it happen.

  15. I’m old enough to have witnessed the destruction that Wal-Mart wrought in its introduction into local communities. Many larger economic zones have been able to come back while the small communities were literally destroyed. Amazon will offer this current generation a view of how this destruction works.

  16. Kevin Williamson is what the late and missed Sam Francis called an “economic man”. Only someone like that would write the materialistic tripe that he did.

  17. Kevin Williamson is an arrogant, contemptuous fag, so who cares what he or his chink “husband” have to say about anything? The entire staff of the National Jew Review are truly oven-worthy. Ditto for The Atlantic.

  18. Outstanding article, Hunter. I have a similar internal monologue running through my head every time I set foot in my own local supercenter.

  19. I can’t say enough because the societal net losses are racking up! Here’s one more for us all to really ponder on.

    Ask any American (even hard right) and 99% will be under the misconception that basic necessities will always be provided. They can’t imagine the notion of not being able to buy….let’s say a toothbrush or anything that we deem a cheap necessity.

    But I promise you friends, the end game of capitalism has no soul or heart. The moment we reach the loss side of the equation the products stop coming. The boats from China will stop and the scramble will begin.

    • Professional, you are quite prophetic! The black riots we have witnessed are nothing compared to what we are going to see when food and commodity deliveries stop! I have been trying to warn folks for the last 30+ years, but no one listens. Not capitalism, but UNBRIDLED CAPITALISM, absent any kind of MORALS, better described as, GREED, is the problem!

  20. I think that it’s abundantly clear that neither political faction cares at all about most of the American people, they care about the people who have enough money to keep them in office, that’s it. To me the main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is while neither of them care about the ordinary American, the Democrats don’t care while the Republicans actually seem to enjoy tormenting the poor and working class. I saw one Republican House fucko being interviewed and he was pissed because he didn’t get to vote on cutting Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts would have gone to the pentagon or people like Warren Buffet.

    The Republican dildos in Wisconsin are making it so that people on the Snap(food stamps) will have to be drug tested, anything for these bastards to hassle the people who are struggling the most. In many instances a lot of these people don’t even have a vehicle to get to the drug test.

    When William Jennings Bryan ran for President in the 1890’s, he said, “The Republican Party is rule by the plutocracy.” Nothing has changed much except that the Democratic Party is no longer a vehicle of the working class, all it cares about are homosexuals and imbecilic non white ‘minority’ groups.

  21. Professional: “It’s not about being forced to shop at one store. You have been forced to enjoy the same demise of American economy that all of us have endured. You are just choosing to blissfully accept it as “your freedom of choice.” I am glad you only buy American products and never support any of this hostile takeover………wait that’s a lie.”

    I suppose the next gem you’ll impart to us all is how I enjoy/endure endless games on TV involving a nigger and a ball of some type. Something I haven’t watched in a decade. I buy Japanese cars/trucks and have for three decades, because THEY FUCKING WORK and I don’t support the $80.hr UAW niggers in Detroit building shit-heaps for those that want to “buy American”.

    I blissfully accept that people like you think we’re going to meme/vote our way out of this when I’m too busy stockpiling ammunition to give your false premise a thought otherwise.

  22. Walmart is a symptom of the economic rape of America rather than an actual cause. The underlying problem is stagnant wages for the working class and the loss of millions of family-supporting jobs that don’t require college. (This is also the main reason the white birthrate has plummeted, but that’s another story).

    Speaking of depressing Walmart experiences, my husband and I went there the other day with $13 in our bank account to buy food to last us 4 days until payday. Of course, that means it’s almost entirely processed food — 68 cent boxes of macaroni dinners, $2 package of hot dogs, tuna, cheese, milk, cheap bread, crackers. When finances are tight at times like this, I don’t know what we’d do without Walmart and the dollar store (and in a couple of really dire situations, the food bank). For the working poor, it’s often the only way to survive. I don’t think we should be blamed for supporting a store when the alternative would be going hungry. Instead, blame those who have offshored unskilled labor, knowing what the consequences would be.

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