There are a lot of ways to describe the new political
divide that has emerged over the last decade. We have nationalists versus
internationalists, globalists versus populists and identitarians versus the
multiculturalists. All of those are true,
but another way of thinking about it is that the debate is now moving upstream.
For a long time, public debate was focused on economics or maybe politics.
Those are downstream from institutions, culture and biology. Now, the
debate has moved upstream, to the the stuff that really matters.
Not everyone has figured out that the debate has changed. The
Bernie Bros, for example, are like the Japanese soldiers, who were cut off in
the war and lived in the jungle for years, still fighting the war. The Bernie
Bros still think the Democrats are the party of the working man, as if anyone
in Washington cares about the working man. The legacy conservatives are
similarly trapped in a bygone era. You see that in this
post, by our old friend Sloppy Williamson, on the ravages of
socialism on Venezuela.
The United States has resigned in
protest from the UN Human Rights Council, which has a long and ignominious
record of protecting the world’s worst abusers of human rights. The proximate
cause of the U.S. resignation was the council’s unwillingness to act on the
matter of Venezuela, where the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro is
engaged in political massacres and the use of Soviet-style hunger-terror
against its political enemies. Venezuela remains, incredibly enough, not only
protected by the Human Rights Council but an active member of it, an honor
shared Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its political assassins, the People’s
Republic of China and its organ harvesters, and the Castro dictatorship in Cuba
with its torturers and al paredón justice.
Venezuela and North Korea could not be more dissimilar in terms
of their respective cultures, peoples, and histories. And yet they have arrived
in approximately the same place: at the terminus of F. A. Hayek’s “Road to
Serfdom.”
For generations, it has been an article of faith, among
conservatives, that everything depends upon economics. It’s not just that if
you get the economics right, then the miracle of the marketplace will usher in
the the age of bliss. It’s that their preferred economic models are
intrinsically moral. That means the wrong economics must always result in
terrible outcomes. Bad tax policy not only makes people poor, it makes them corrupt,
violent and cheat on their wives. Like Marxists, they think the system makes
the man.
Well, what about Venezuela? What’s really going on? Here’s the
per capita GDP.
That’s in constant dollars and it shows a remarkable thing.
After the turmoil that brought Hugo Chavez to power, the Venezuelan economy
started a nice run. Per capita GDP is a benchmark number that economists love
to use to measure the health of a country. Here’s what wages look like in
the country:
source: tradingeconomics.com
Now, wages and economic
growth don’t tell the whole story. Venezuela suffers from the curse of natural
resources, which in her case is oil. What dumb people call socialism is really
just the way things have always operated in countries with low levels of human
capital. The elites monopolize the natural resources and the profits that come
from selling them on the international market. They spread enough money around
to prevent a revolt, but otherwise it a system not all that different from what
existed in colonial times.
In other words, what ails Venezuela is not ideology. It is biology.
It is the way it is because of its people. What determines the nature and
character of a country is not the tax code or the regulatory regime. The nature
of a country comes from the people. Venezuela lacks the human capital to
operate a modern economy. It has and always will suffer from the smart fraction
problem. That is, it lacks a large enough smart population to carry the rest of
the population into a modern economy. It remains stuck in a model suited for
its people.
Put another way, it
is people, not pots. Replace the Venezuelan population with Finns
and they will figure out how to make a mild form of Nordic socialism work just
fine. Fill the place up with Japaneses and the country will look like an Asian
tiger. At the same time, begin to fill up the United States with Latin
Americans and it is going to start to look like Latin America. That’s why your
newly imported replacements are running on platforms familiar
to anyone getting ready to vote in the upcoming Mexican elections.
Of course, the reason that raging cucks like Sloppy
Williamson avoid the obvious is that it is much safer to focus on trivialities.
Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter if he avoids taboo
subjects. That and these guys have been playing the role of useful idiot for so
long, they are unable to notice that the world has changed. They operate like a
cargo cult, convinced they can pretend it remains the 1980’s and it will
magically be so. National Review is like a weird living museum to the Reagan
era.
The world has changed,
though, and the debate has shifted upstream. People are noticing that when you
elect a new people, you don’t actually end up with a new people. You end up
with a culture that reflects the biology of the people you imported. Whites in
America are now coming to terms with the choices in front of them. Keep their
head down and play make believe while they are replaced, or risk moral
condemnation for defending their heritage and their culture. It’s a future with
you or without you. That’s the debate.
