Posted on 07/02/2013 6:18:38 PM PDT by NotYourAverageDhimmi
On Nov. 3, 1969, Richard Nixon, his presidency about to be broken by massive antiwar demonstrations, called on “the great silent majority” to stand by him for peace with honor in Vietnam.
They did. Within days Nixon’s approval surged to 68 percent. The ferocious Republican partisan of the 1950s had won over millions of Democrats.
Why? Because sons and brothers of those Democrats were doing much of the fighting in Vietnam. If Nixon was standing by them, they would stand by him.
In 1972 Nixon would win 49 states. Ronald Reagan, backed by his “Reagan Democrats,” would win 44- and 49-state landslides.
Yet since Reagan went home, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of six presidential elections. The New Majority is history. The Reagan Democrats have departed. What happened?
Answer: For a generation, when forced to choose between Middle America and corporate America, on NAFTA, most-favored nation for China, and free trade, the GOP establishment opted to go with the Fortune 500. In the GOP the corporate conservative rides up front; the social, cultural and patriotic conservatives in the back of the bus.
Consider who has benefited most from Republican-backed globalization.
Was it not corporate executives and transnational companies liberated from the land of their birth and the call of patriotism?
Under the rules of globalization, U.S. corporations could, without penalty or opprobrium, shut their factories, lay off their U.S. workers, erect new plants in Asia, produce their goods there, and bring them back free of any tariff to sell to consumers and kill the U.S. companies that elected to stay loyal to the U.S.A.
They then used the profits from abandoning America to raise executive salaries to seven and eight figures.
And how did the Reagan Democrats make out?
Real wages of U.S. workers have not risen for 40 years. One in three U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished between 2000 and 2010. The nation that used to produce 96 percent of all it consumed depends now on foreigners for the clothes and shoes we wear, the TV sets we watch, the radios we listen to, the computers we use, the cars we drive.
A nation that used to export twice what it imported has been running huge trade deficits for decades. China now holds $1 trillion in U.S. debt and can buy Smithfield hams out of the petty cash drawer.
With 50,000 U.S. factories closing in this new century, the greatest manufacturing power in history has been hollowed out, as Beijing booms at our expense. Corporate America is building the new China that is pushing Uncle Sam out of the western Pacific.
“Where did the ‘America’ in corporate America go?” asks Robert Patterson in National Review.
The Bush aide hearkens back to “Engine Charlie” Wilson, Ike’s first secretary of defense, who said, “For years I have thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” Wilson’s words were twisted by a capitalist-baiting press, but he saw GM as first and foremost an American company.
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Before Wilson there was William Knudson, the dollar-a-year man of FDR’s war effort who converted GM and Detroit into the great arsenal of democracy, a story movingly told by Arthur Herman in Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.
“In the good old days,” writes Patterson, “Americans could at least count on business leaders being pro-American. Beloved or not, major corporations functioned as true stakeholders of America: fortifying American industry and building American factories, spreading American innovation, paying billions of dollars in American taxes and creating millions of high paying ‘family-wage’ jobs that helped create and sustain an expanding middle class.”
And today?
“No longer committed to a particular place, people, country or culture, our largest public companies have turned globalist, while abdicating the responsibility they once assumed to America and its workers.”
Citing Joel Kotkin’s work, Patterson adds, “the worst offenders are Apple, Facebook, Google, the high-tech firms secluded in Silicon Valley, a dreamland where the information age glitterati make Gilded Age plutocrats look bourgeois.”
Google has five times GM’s market capitalization but employs only one-fourth the number of GM’s American workers. Steve Jobs’ Apple has “700,000 industrial serfs” working overseas.
Since we bailed it out, GM has become “General Tso’s Motors,” creating 6,000 new jobs in China while shedding 78,000 U.S. jobs here.
Marco Rubio today leads Senate Republicans in doing the bidding of corporate America, which, in payback for its campaign contributions, wants amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens.
Agribusinesses need more peons. Restaurant chains want more waitresses, dishwashers, busboys. Construction companies want more ditch-diggers. Silicon Valley demands hundreds of thousands more H-1Bs—foreign graduate students who can be hired for half what an American engineer might need to support his family.
“Merchants have no country,” said Thomas Jefferson. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”
Amen to that.
“In the good old days,” writes Patterson, “Americans could at least count on business leaders being pro-American.
Who can honestly say that now?
Crony Capitalism aka Fascism.
Fascism is a form of Socialism. It's a left-wing collectivist philosophy which, on an economic level, forges an alliance between big government and big business. Tax policy, regulations and subsidies all play their part -- government helps business, if the business helps government. The businesses that don't play along are punished.
This is where we are today. The GOP is a socialist party, promoting fascism. And the Democrats are a socialist party promoting fascism.
There is only one party, folks. We live in a one-party state, and the Party is at war with you.
But, hey, I think American Idol is on.
But, hey, I think American Idol is on.
Sure or watch the important game.
Your correct point, that American business leaders are no longer pro-American but instead are globalists, has been a point that Buchanan has been harping on for at least two decades, and was part of the reason he split with the GOP.
“In the GOP the corporate conservative rides up front
Crony Capitalism aka Fascism.
Fascism is a form of Socialism. It’s a left-wing collectivist philosophy which, on an economic level, forges an alliance between big government and big business. Tax policy, regulations and subsidies all play their part — government helps business, if the business helps government. The businesses that don’t play along are punished.
This is where we are today. The GOP is a socialist party, promoting fascism. And the Democrats are a socialist party promoting fascism.
There is only one party, folks. We live in a one-party state, and the Party is at war with you.
But, hey, I think American Idol is on. “
Well a bit of bad news, American Idol will not be on again until next January.
Ping. For further contemplation
My Father was a “Yellow Dog Democrat” which meant he would vote for a yellow dog before a Republican. He was generally conservative but voted for Roosevelt, Truman and many local Democrats. Back then if you won the Democratic primary in our area of the state, you won the election.
I never heard the term “Blue Dog Democrat” until a few years ago but I guess it means the same thing.
Jimmy Carter did the impossible. He turned Daddy into a Republican. He and Mother voted for Reagan and never looked back.
They weren’t Reagan Democrats. They completely changed. They were Reagan Republicans.
bump
I think Obama has had a similar effect on many people ay today Carter did on your dad back then. Once people see a true dyed-in-the-wool Lefty in the White House and see how complicit the media is in forwarding an agenda that most Americans disagree with, it causes (honest and/or intelligent) people to ask questions and consider other options.
does it really matter how many voters barry runs off with his leftism if he controls the counting of the votes?
The irony for the GOP is that by selling out to the corporate fascists, all the dispaced formerly productive workers were driven onto democrat dependency plantation. Now they can’t cobble together a majority and never will again. The GOP fascists played themselves for suckers.
A “Yellow Dog Democrat” was not much different than today’s Democrat voters. They were culturally conservative but their hands were out for the free government handouts. That was true in the 1930’s and it is still true. I honestly believe we lost the election because we promised to create millions of new jobs, that scared the hell out of lot of people. The 53% want disability payments not jobs.
“Could it be that the men who create wealth today have at best been trained to think that America is no better than any other country?”
#1 post of the day.
Note: our President doesn’t believe in ‘American Exceptionalism’.
The demonrats have the historical cred of "winning the Big One" and have been good at showing the right face and/or making the GOPe show the wrong one.
Underneath the facade, they only differ by "the companies they keep", so to speak in that crony capitalism sort of way we've come to know so well.
The only questions are whether we're tired of doing this and if so, what we'd like to do instead.
We aren't going to break this habit until we do. Same old, same old is their way.
That certainly doesn’t describe my parents. Neither of them ever accepted any kind of Government assistance except Daddy had a VA loan which he qualified for in WWII.
In Daddy’s last year he was in a nursing home. His retirement pay was within around $40 short of paying for his monthly bill so they put him on Medicaid just to get that extra $40.
Pat has been prescient, which is of course good. John of Patmos was divinely inspired, which is even better. He revealed the truth of these days as if it were on a movie screen as large as the sky itself, a couple of thousand of years ago.
Thanks for the Takimag articles, great lot of contributors they have. When I read articles from smart and courageous people such as these writers, I get a feeling of “learn all you can while it lasts, because it won’t last forever”. Maybe not even the span of my life, I don’t know.
The “Right” (as distinct from us conservatives on the right) loses its best and brightest by treating them as intruders to be repelled, such as Buchanan and Derbyshire. They’re (the “Right”) not that stupid, not the ones pulling the strings-it must be on purpose.
No. The elites are intentionally globalist.
Bump for later.
The original yellow dog Democrats were pro-Confederate, I believe.
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