The Atlantic: This Is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End

If you are dumb enough to believe that Donald Trump and National Conservatism have brought about the end of the Reagan and Thatcher era, I don’t know what to tell you. The Trump administration has only doubled down on neoliberalism.

The Atlantic:

“In an Italian hotel ballroom of spectacular opulence—on red velvet chairs, beneath glittering crystal chandeliers and a stained-glass ceiling—the conservative movement that once inspired people across Europe, built bridges across the Iron Curtain and helped to win the Cold War came, finally, to an end.

The occasion was a conference in Rome last week called “God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations.” Inspired by the Israeli writer Yoram Hazony, convened under the banner of “National Conservatism,” this event was co-organized by Chris DeMuth, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute (in the era when it supported global capitalism and the Iraq War) and John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. O’Sullivan now runs the Danube Institute, which is funded, via a foundation, by the Hungarian government. The conference itself was funded, according to DeMuth, by an anonymous American donor. This was the successor to the National Conservatism Conference held in Washington, D.C., last year. That occasion featured a strange agglomeration of new and old conservatives, including both John Bolton and Tucker Carlson, people who still talk hopefully about shrinking the state and those who want to enlarge it, people still jockeying to be relevant and people full of confidence that they now are. …”

A word salad.

Here are a few reasons to be skeptical:

1.) The Tories have wanted out of the EU for decades in order to transform Britain into a free trade utopia. The White working class in Britain also wanted out of the EU, but for entirely different reasons. Boris Johnson wants to bring in more African immigrants to Britain. Now that BREXIT is over, there is no reason for this coalition to continue to exist.

2.) Donald Trump lied about all his “nationalist” and “populist” positions in the 2016 campaign to attract swing voters. He ran as the “law-and-order” candidate who supported a nationwide stop-and-frisk policy. Today, he is boasting about how he delivered criminal justice reform as president. He literally ran on one thing to win the 2016 election and delivered the exact opposite.

3.) Donald Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment as president is cutting the corporate tax rate. He has renegotiated and rebranded our existing free trade deals. He boasts at his rallies about the success of his deregulation agenda. The budgets he releases propose cuts to entitlement programs. There is no substantial difference between Donald Trump and his neoliberal predecessors stretching back to Reagan. They have all consistently pushed tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement cuts and free trade. The only difference is the manner in which they have pitched it to voters. Trump rails against illegal immigration, free trade and cultural decline to harness and exploit the public’s anger about those issues while doing nothing about any of it in office. The Left goes along with it to incite their voters against the boogeyman.

4.) Donald Trump boasts about his military build up. How is squandering billions of dollars on the military, increasing the number of troops in the Middle East and remaining mired in the “forever wars” in the Middle East any different from Ronald Reagan or the Bushes?

5.) Donald Trump has given Israel virtually everything it has asked of the United States for the past fifty years. Trump has only been more intensely Zionist than Ronald Reagan or the Bushes.

6.) As for the culture wars, Donald Trump’s great accomplishments on that front are presiding over the mainstreaming of homosexuality on the Right, the intensification of political correctness and his supporters being wiped out by Big Tech censorship.

7.) Donald Trump said all kinds of things about immigration in the 2016 election to get elected and delivered on virtually none of it. There was never a Deportation Force. He failed to build the wall. He actually increased the caps on all guest worker programs. He is now running on INCREASING immigration and giving an amnesty to the DREAMers (!!!)

What do you call this peculiar combination of tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, increases in military spending and troop deployments to the Middle East, cultural decay, cuts in entitlement programs, spending a whole year on “fighting anti-Semitism,” giving Israel everything it wants, increasing guest worker programs and more legal and illegal immigration? If that is the new “nationalism” and “populism,” it is a meaningless distinction without a difference.

Aside from calling itself “National Conservatism” instead of mainstream conservatism, the only difference on display at this conference is that Yoram Hazony made a point to include prominent rightwing homosexuals and give them a platform. This version of conservatism is more virulently Zionist than previous versions. It isn’t as veiled either in the sense that Israelis are defining “American Nationalism.” Otherwise, it is a ring of the same conservative elites from Rich Lowry to John Bolton who have run this country into the ground for the past half century.

If the choice in 2020 is Bernie Sanders or this crowd, I would rather take my chances on Sanders. I think President Bernie Sanders would have a more transformative impact on the Right than these people. Nothing will change on the Right until there is a serious threat to their money. Go after the money of the Republican donor class and start confiscating their mega yachts.

Note: I’m not going to vote for or support Bernie Sanders. I will be damned though if I am going to support “National Conservatism.”

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

15 Comments

  1. The problem is that if Bernie wins and rich conservatives become “radicalized” by their fear of “socialism” that they will become “white nationalists” then they will just end up hijacking white nationalism and making it even more reactionary then it already is.

    What we need is a president who is uber-woke and explicitly anti-White while also being an overt capitalist pig. That way a White nationalist mass movement that is anti-capitalist and working-class – which is NEEDED – will arise as people will make the connection between White Genocide and Capitalism.

  2. Anti semites are simply humans who are aware of the jewish menace and speak up about it. Never mind that Hong Kong Phooey virus, we need to deal with something far deadlier – the hooked nosed intestinal parasite!

    • “Nothing will change on the Right until there is a serious threat to their money. Go after the money of the Republican donor class and start confiscating their mega yachts.”

      Ding, Ding, Ding! We have a winner!

      • No God-damned Ay-rab should EVER have that much money, power, or the presumption that they are the White Man’s Equal. Better to start the dispossession of this entire class of sub-humans, than to pretend that Democracy matters. Sycophants like that French-speaking Norwegian effete twit should be reduced to working on a herring boat in the North Sea, and his money stripped from him.

        Hey…. I’m beginning to sound like a Communist. But if men will not live as though their brethren matter more to them, than their Fortune 500 portfolio, so be it.

        “I’m not going to vote for or support Bernie Sanders. I will be damned though if I am going to support “National Conservatism.”

        I WILL vote for Bernie, HW. Because not voting is still voting- it’s just being a coward, rather than a man. Better to bring down the godless empire, than perpetuate it for one day more.
        Czar St. Nicholas, pray for the people of Christendom, that we may build the Kingdom of God correctly, after this Captivity which Christ God hast ordained, for his disobedient ‘Israelite’ children.

  3. Reagan and Thatcher were the two biggest political con-artists of the late 20th century. But at least they acted like adults, which is more than can be said for Blormp.

  4. Reagan was the death knell for unions, some of which had become corrupt by that point. Rotten Ronnie was the start of corporatist globalism writ large in the US. Economic inequality began to surge under him, and worker’s wages have stayed flat since. Raygun was the progenitor of building up the war machine, making the stock market our elites’ piggy bank, and other diseased chickens coming home to roost. The atomization of people as economic units that either gained or lost value started to be emphasized under the old bastard. He wrecked the Soviets that were on their last legs, and helped transform our own society into one about money and self-indulgence. Ronnie destroyed both empires in one fell swoop, imo. Ours is just taking longer to implode.

    • Reagan was a better actor than he was given credit for, because he fooled millions of white middle and working class Americans into voting for their own destruction. Ever since the 80s it’s been nothing but debt and wage stagnation for everyone except the top 5%, who own something like 80% of the wealth. Fuck capitalism and the “free market”. We have a distribution of wealth here in ZOG USA that’s no different from any third world banana republic.

      • Reagan and Thatcher also helped bring about the end of white rule – in other words white civilization – in South Africa. They are no heroes of mine.

    • The Republicans wax nostalgic for the supposed good old days of that old, senile bastard in the White House, Ronald Reagan. To them Reagan was a “good conservative”, and I suppose he was. With his union busting, amnesty for wogs,1987 bail out of Wall Street, bloated military, landing troops in Lebanon, out of control budgets, slobbering over police and pushing for acceptance of fags because all of his Hollywood pals were getting AIDS he set the course for the shipwreck that is the U.S. today. DJT is just following in his foul wake.

  5. There’s no saving this doomed empire. We’ll probably oscillate between fake Nationalists like Trump and ineffectual Socialists like Sanders until the whole rotting corpse falls apart. The oligarchs won’t go peacefully into that good night and the people are too disorganized to rise up. So we’ll just lumber along until demographics and the economy do their thing and we disintegrate like Rome.

  6. I think it’s important we still vote GOP at the local level. I agree with Hunter, I won’t vote for Bernie out of principle, but it would be hilarious to see him destroy boomer conservatives. The national GOP platform of “Socialism bad, orange man good, Legal immigration good, Corporate tax cuts good” is not worth supporting.

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