Should Republicans Be More Explicitly Racist?

As I’ve previously written, Groyperization on everything but the Jews has already occurred on the right. That leads to the question of what we do from here. We basically have a mainstream conservative movement that is motivated by implicit white nationalism, being challenged by an insurgency that is explicitly white nationalist. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that people who stress identitarian concerns will often be very flexible with economic arguments. Often, they end up agreeing with the left on economic issues, because that is the easiest way to make nativist arguments in a relatively non-offensive way.

One of the main things that differentiates pro-market and anti-market thinkers is the degree to which each side believes that market processes are zero-sum. Socialists tend to assume that there are fixed amounts of jobs and resources, and politics revolves around fighting over who gets what. Capitalism rests on the idea that trade generally makes both parties better off, and we can set things up so that everyone gets wealthier in the long run. The entire history of the progress of our species is one long advertisement for how the capitalists are right and the socialists are wrong.

People always feel the need to argue that their preferred policies will make others in society better off in tangible ways. Even postliberals who stress that things other than GDP matter will when they can argue that their preferred policies improve living standards. They get to have it both ways, making economic arguments when convenient and retreating to “we’re a nation, not an economy” when things go wrong.

When opposing low-skilled immigration, to appeal to economic self-interest you can argue about welfare use and crime. But you can’t make that case for H-1B recipients, so in order to have any materialist reason at all for opposition, you need to invoke the lump of labor fallacy. In this view, each new arrival robs an American of his livelihood. People who find such arguments convincing, however, will tend to apply them more widely, and end up with worse economic views about everything. Labor unions, high minimum wage laws, banning new forms of technology, and other restrictions on commerce all rest on the exact same theory.

This leads to the question of whether explicit racism is preferable, because it helps avoid this problem. We must be very careful here, as adopting such a strategy ...