A Right-Wing Critique of Capitalism

In my previous posts, I’ve noted that I had the traditional conservative American upbringing: church, football, barbecue, Fox News, a military family, and a small town in a deep red state. We routinely laughed at the hippies in California, praised our “brave defenders of traditional values” in the G.O.P., and, yes, even believed Israel was our ally. Such an upbringing unsurprisingly meant that we were also staunch defenders of the capitalist system. Of course, we were never the stock-trading, Wall Street-watching, Jordan Belfort-style capitalists who made their fortunes trading debt-swaps and mortgage-backed securities. Instead, we were capitalists because we were told that at the end of the day, as long as we worked hard and didn’t complain, we would make it. After all, what is more American than rolling up your sleeves and working hard?

It was especially easy to defend capitalism when all its biggest detractors were blue-haired feminists from Portland crying about white supremacy and Karl Marx. Communism demanded that the proletariat seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie, strike down their “imperialist masters,” and create a state-less society built on equality. Dystopian and foolish at this is, the fact that communists likewise demanded the elimination of religion, the demonization of our beloved ancestors, and, in recent times, the endless flow of third-world hordes into our country only added to its already repulsive nature. How was I to take serious the plight of the working class when its “champions” were obese trannies, hellbent on erasing my God and my race?

Interestingly enough, while we defended capitalism from leftists on the basis of hard work, we simultaneously knew – whether consciously or subconsciously – that the corporations and banks were not our friends. Soon enough, I began to notice that every measurable quality of life indicator was plummeting, but I kept a brave face because the GDP was rising! Our leaders say that means were winning, right? It didn’t take long, however, to realize that our GDP wasn’t rising despite society’s degradation, it was rising because of it. Degeneracy is not a bug, but rather a feature of capitalist greed.

Megachurches weren’t preaching the Gospel, they were selling a brand. Feminists weren’t liberating women, they were creating more workers. Republicans weren’t working to stop third-world immigration, they were inviting these poor souls here to exploit them, pay them nothing, and grow fat and rich from the lack of operating costs. Our men weren’t fighting abroad for justice and democracy, they were securing oil rights, freely exploitable natural resources, and globohomo liberalism. Capitalism wasn’t about working hard, it was about the rich growing richer, politicians joining in, and the average people, our God, traditions, and morals be merely insignificant expenses that can be disposed of.

The Myth of “Hard Work”

Imagine, if you will, that it’s the 1970s and you are a textile worker in the South, a steel worker in Pittsburgh, an auto worker in Detroit, or any other staple of American labor. Your family came to this country before 1776, had ancestors in the Civil War, World War II, and you maybe even fought in Korea or Vietnam, yourself. You’re not rich by any means, but you do well enough to support your wife and kids as the sole breadwinner of the house. After all, it’s your hard work that got you in this position. You go to work early, stay late, and always make time to play catch with your sons when you get home. On the weekends you go to Church, maybe a ballgame, and certainly cannot stand the whiners and cry babies begging for free handouts. If they wanted money, they should work hard, like you! You are doing everything right, and as long as you keep up this grueling work ethic, you’ll never fail.

Then one day, you head to work and see that the factory is closed. There’s been no accident or health hazard, so what’s going on? You then find out that the owners of the company have outsourced production to some third-world plant to save money. Sorry! Thank you for your years of faithful service, here’s a handshake. The problem: you’ve only ever done this work, it’s the only industry within a hundred miles of you, and you still have that family to support. You can’t understand how this had happened because being laid off only happens to lazy people. To make matters worse, the very company who abandoned you and thousands of your colleagues is now reporting skyrocketing profits. The economy is doing much better without you.

This is the exact story of my grandparents, and likely millions of Americans. They were textile workers in the South, both picking cotton (yes, White people did that, too) and working in the factories. One day, the textiles suddenly closed up and made for China: the land of cheap, child labor. There wasn’t anything they could do about it. They had no other practical training, and even if they did, there wasn’t another industry this side of the Mason-Dixon. Millions like them across the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and just about everywhere else were flung into poverty overnight. How’s that for white privilege?

The economy boomed, the USSR collapsed, and everyone rejoiced in America, the richest and most prosperous country in the history of the world. The small town were forgotten, their kids fled to the big cities or the military (the only place left with jobs), and the newly impoverished Americans were no longer regarded as the backbone of American success, but as backwards and helpless.

We often hear the left screeching about the evils of outsourcing on the foreign workers, but rarely do we recognize that jobs were en masse stripped away from hard-working Americans because our corporate leaders were too stingy to pay them. Today, the problem isn’t so much outsourcing, but imported foreign labor. Everyone is aware of the Indian H-1B nightmare and Vivek’s annual Christmas crash-out over the “entitled” American worker. Hard work cannot stop us from replaced by mindless laborers who are willing to whore themselves out for pennies on the dollar. It didn’t stop mass layoffs during the outsourcing of the 20th century, nor will it stop us from being replaced in our own homes today. Capitalism does not care about us, it only cares about cost. And, at the end of the day, caring for your fellow American is an expense they are not willing to pay.

Immigration

As alluded to above, leftists tend to solely focus on the plight of foreigners who, by way of outsourcing, are subject to gruesome work conditions, inhumane hours, and unbelievably low pay. While I shrugged this off above, I am not completely unsympathetic to this problem. In fact, Sir Oswald Mosley lamented this feature of international finance in his 1963 speech, saying:

“how the financial forces in the thirties went into these backward countries: into India, within the Empire, into Hong Kong, into Japan, into China, and exploited these people to produce cheap, sweated goods, which ruined the great industries of Britain and Europe, which put Lancashire out of business in the cotton trade, Yorkshire out of business in the woollen trade. And these poor devils of coolies for a wage of a few shillings a week, for what purpose. To enable the city of London and Wall Street New York to make fatter profits!

…but what was the result? China thrown into the arms of Communism… because if you treat people like that, it’s the only possible result… they’ve simply been grounded into poverty, and sweating, and exploitation. What can you expect, except they go Communist as they did?”

The treatment of foreigners as quasi-slave laborers, afar as it is, may appear to be a distant problem. Sad as it is to say, this problem mostly is out of site, and thus out of mind. After all, it is only natural that we care more about our fellow countryman and kinsmen than orientals far away. A natural impulse, yes, but a nevertheless naive and short-sighted one. Alas, it would be foolish to think that the predatory, ravenous nature of international finance would be contained outside our borders. Did we forget that they ravaged our domestic labor class in favor of cheap, outsourced labor in the first place?

International finance’s new ploy has been far more sinister. You’ve heard it over and over again: this country was built by immigrants, our economy needs immigration, diversity is our strength! And so on and on; reinforcing the party narrative into our heads that our economic successes are not our own, but rather due to the influx of cheap, foreign labor. Rather than regale you with all the reasons why mass immigration is bad, a story you undoubtedly know by heart, I’ll instead give a brief summary of the decay of the Roman Republic:

In the waning days of the Republic, the Roman economy boomed. Slave labor and indentured servants began to work en masse in the Roman countryside, aiding farmers in the arduous work on which the Eternal City was built. Eventually, so much of the agricultural work was taken over by the slaves/indentured servants, that the former farmers of Rome were “emancipated” from such grueling lives and free to pursue their own interests. Flooding the cities, these Romans pursued the arts, entertainment, poetry, and all sorts of finer things. The agrarian countryside eventually amalgamated into fewer, large-scale farms wherein the richest farmers owned much of the land while operating at a fraction of the cost. Rome was growing far more crops with far less expenses.

In the cities, however, the dream of finer things and indulgent pleasures started to fade. It didn’t take long for the demographic realities to kick in. The cities were now becoming far overcrowded, leaving many unemployed, restless, and purposeless. This mix of aimlessness and pleasure-seeking left Rome in the throws of constant civil strife and degeneracy. So, while the Republic grew richer by the day, its cheap, foreign labor eviscerated the Roman working class, leading to its demise.

Sound familiar? If it does, it’s because the exact same can be said of the mass immigration crisis of contemporary America. Unchecked hordes of Latin American migrants have poured over our southern border for more than half a century, taking low-wage, grueling, and definitely low-interest jobs. Farming, plumbing, lawn-care, handyman, janitorial, custodial, human resources, and so on and so forth, graciously shouldered by the benevolent migrant. Whereas in a former America, Americans were forced to man the steel mines, pick the crops, till the fields, work construction, and all the other menial tasks we now consider “low,” modern Americans are thankfully free to pursue their interests and the finer things of life. Rather than do blue collar jobs, almost all Americans now attend university and get high status degrees to become high status people. The cheap migrant labor is allowing us to produce far more for far less, and our own are all attending universities and pursuing high class careers… sounds perfect, right?

Unfortunately, like the Roman Republic, this idealized vision turned sour very quick. Now that everyone has a university degree, university degrees mean nothing. Whereas they were once a sure ticket to upper-level management, they’re now nothing more than $200k entry fee to your exciting career at Starbucks. Usurious loans and high interests rates likewise trap most in an eternal debt-slavery. All this has led to an unemployment crisis, wherein even the most highly educated of the most prestigious institutions are left wondering what’s next. Aimless and still motivated by the promise of exuberant pleasures and indulgent desires, our desperation leaves us in constant civil strife. But our fearless leaders are quick to remind us, “the GDP has tripled since 2000. Everything is going great!”

If this wasn’t bad enough, the already endless hordes of foreigners grow exponentially by the decade. No longer is menial labor the only sector in which foreigners dominate; corporations now realize they can cut cost (and quality) by foregoing with home-grown talent, and instead hiring cheap, foreign labor. IT slaves from India, eager to accept prolonged work hours for a fraction of the price an American, flood our cities with a fresh arrogance. My Chinese-made slop breaks in a week, and the repair hotline asks if I want a Spanish representative before giving me a half-educated Pakistani as the “English” speaker. My law school touts its African alumnus, who laments the SFFA v. Harvard decision because, “I wouldn’t have been accepted without Affirmative Action.” And, like clockwork, our fearless leaders ignore that every measurable quality of life indicator has gone down because “our GDP is growing.”

That’s because our “conservative” do not serve you, or me, or traditional values, or even America. They serve the GDP. And the fact of the matter is that foreign labor is cheap, profitable, and the American middle class be damned because the 1%, their campaign financiers, grows richer by the day. If it wasn’t obvious by know, the new god of the world is Profit. All else will eventually be sacrificed on its altar.

Moral Decay

As detailed above, capitalism prioritizes profits above all, including morality. Corporations are a powerful force in reinforcing pre-approved narratives onto unsuspecting consumers, cementing the zeitgeist one commercial at a time. The chameleonic nature of these corporations are such that they promote whatever the in-vogue political opinion as their own, hoping to appear “part of the movement.” Russell Walter eloquently described this phenomenon in his recent article, which I will cite here:

“Lululemon promoted an event about ‘decolonizing gender’ and ‘resisting capitalism.’ Amazon donated millions to Black Lives Matter. And it’s probably only a matter of time before Lockheed Martin releases a line of anti-imperialist missiles.”

I won’t belabor this point too much, as certainly everyone remembers the 2020 Summer of Floyd wherein companies ubiquitously and overnight transformed into BLM talking heads, the NFL placed “END RACISM” on its end zones, and BLM shirts eerily similar to the Straight Outta Compton logo were sold by the millions. A whole post could be dedicated to the promotion of degeneracy for profit, but I’ll just summarize it with this:

OnlyFans models, marijuana dispensaries, legalized gambling, and HIV medicine; Christianity-mocking paraphernalia, TikTok brainrot, and the most disgusting fast food imaginable; sin itself is monetized and sold with endless returns.

Foreign Policy

Somewhere in the 1960s, the American foreign policy establishment undertook a cataclysmic shift in the history of international relations theory. The hitherto omnipresent doctrine of realism was tossed aside for the new, (asinine) liberal institutionalist theory, or just liberalism more broadly. Of course, idealism, of which liberalism is a subset, has periodically shown forth on the geopolitical stage, but never to any avail. Liberal international theory, however, was about to dominate the world. I am a big international relations nerd, and in IR theory in particular, so allow me to over-explain these theoretical concepts to make it seem like my Master’s degree was worth it.

Before understanding liberal international theory, we must first understand the theory that America tossed aside: realism. There are a few variants of realism – Offensive, Defensive, Classical, etc. – but all trace their origins to basic geopolitical concepts innate to human nature, first expressed in writing by Thucydides. Power, or better yet, the pursuit of power, is the fundamental motivation of every state. Given that survival is the top priority, states are forced to accrue power at the behest of others. This zero-sum system is due to the anarchic nature of international relations. Importantly, this is not to say that the system is “chaotic or riven by disorder,” but simply that there is no higher authority to protect states from each other. As such, the structure of international relations is defined by the number of great powers. Therein lies the underlying determinant of war: the changing ratios of power present at any time among great powers. This, of course, is a crude summarization of war according to the theory of realism, which itself also claims to be a crude summary of geopolitics. However, its core tenants remain important. Given that power defines structure, and states pursue power in zero-sum fashion, great powers are bound to rise and fall. As such, history is neither linear nor evolutionary as Fukuyama or Marx posit, but ever-changingly amorphous. Power-parity calculations – such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Thucydides trap, and so on – dominate foreign policy decisions. The decision to aggress or remain idle, to bandwagon or to balance; these important policy decisions are informed by a careful reading of the distribution of power in the system. Imperatively, ideology has no role at the international stage.

Liberalism, however, rejects such “barbaric” and “antiquated” thinking. As a child of idealism, liberalism believes that trust can in fact exist among states. However, rather than regard each state with blind neutrality vis a vis morality, liberalism posits that there exists good and evil in the international system. Manifested in ideological terms, the enemies of liberalism are thus regarded as an apocalyptic evil that threatens the peaceful consensus. This so-called “pacific union” is derived from the Democratic Peace Theory, which asserts that, since democracies do not fight against one another, it shall be the goal of every liberal power to make every country democratic. Naive and foolish as this is, in the 1990s liberalism seemed like the Gospel, itself. When Francis Fukuyama famously posited that humanity had reached “the end of history,” many gladly clung to the prospect of a warless future. The ideological wars that fraught the twentieth century were now over, with Fukuyama triumphantly declaring democratic liberalism to be epitome of history’s linear progression. The collapse of the Soviet Union preceded a new wave of international relations theory. The United States’ unprecedented unipolarity allowed scholars to envision a world of diplomacy, cooperation, and peace. Grounded in “Democratic Peace Theory,” there was now to be a “pacific union… established among liberal societies.” As such, optimism abounded. After all, if democracy was the final, inevitable step of history, and democracies do not fight each other, then the world can blissfully observe the slow decline of state conflict.

Now, based on this alone, the American switch to liberal international theory may seem like a purely democratic or even neoconservative decision. What does this have to do with capitalism? International relations theorist Christopher Layne details the link in his Open Door concept of U.S. grand strategy. Rather than pursuing a liberalist paradigm on purely ideological grounds, the U.S. enforces a liberal world order as a means to create an “open door” to the world’s markets. This “Open Door” world order necessitates ubiquitous democracy and, more importantly, aggressive intervention. If America is to secure the free flow of foreign markets, investment opportunities, resources, and trade, it is structurally compelled to prevent autarkic blocs run by rival powers. Multipolarity inherently demands spheres of influence, which in turn closes the U.S. off to prospective economic opportunities. Multipolarity is thus anathema to America’s international financial interests. The dollar-based monetary order imposed at Bretton Woods institutionalized this “Open Door,” as sanctions and containment against autarkic states during the Cold War was America’s modus operandi.

The fall of the USSR, however, granted the U.S. the extra-regional hegemony it needed to enforce its international free-market obsession militarily. For instance, the Arab Spring was not a grass-roots democratic uprising, but rather an American-enforced disposal of regional strongmen. Among other sinister reasons, Arab strongmen like Muammar Qaddafi, Bashar al Assad, and even Saddam Hussein (not technically Arab Spring) had sought to remove themselves from the dollar-based Open Door order and instead promote regional or state-based economic transactions and autarky. Of course, the Arab Spring proved disastrous for both idealistically naive neoliberals wishing for world democracy, and for money-hungry businesses hoping for oil access as the power vacuum was filled with radical Islamists, not West-loving liberals. However, the Arab Spring proves that armed intervention is part and parcel of the capitalistic desire for unfettered, free, international trade. A greed that our fathers, brothers, and sons are sent to die for.

The Open Door order has likewise proved ruinous for our allies. Much can be said about the Washington-orchestrated 2014 EuroMaidan coup and subsequent encirclement of Russia, installment of liberal leaders, and the “guns for gays” promise to Ukraine, but I will go into further detail into Ukraine/Russia in a future post.

Under the Open Door order, patriotism is a threat; patriotism leads to self-reliance, self-reliance leads to autarky, and autarky means closed markets. Nationalistic tendencies that even seemingly resemble self-determination are met with immediate condemnation. Poland, perhaps the 21st centuries most improved country, is one such example. Poland has quickly become one of Europe’s best economies, among its most powerful and willing militaries, and most importantly, perhaps its most proudly Christian, patriotic, and self-reliable country. It’s curious, then, why in 2023 hundreds of thousands passionately protested its Law and Justice Party (PiS) right at the peak of Poland’s success. It is also curious that the über-successful PiS was replaced with a leftist coalition led by Donald Tusk who promised to “return to Europe” (read, return to liberalism) and open Poland up to more immigration. In turn, the EU gave back long-blocked funds to Poland for Tusk’s commitment to European values, free trade, and foreign investment. Tusk, for his part, has not only opened Polish markets, but its borders to immigration, as well.

Conclusion

My biggest fear in writing this post is that it would read like my coming out as a communist/socialist or anything of that nature. My cynicism has certainly not led me to doubt the importance of hard work nor merit-based value within the market. It is clear, however, that unfettered capitalistic obeisance has neutered our country and everything we hold dear. We do not suffer from scarcity, but rather from gluttonous successes and degenerate indulgences. Profit maximization spits on the very people who built this country; when spreadsheets say you can save a buck by hiring cheap, foreign labor, Americans are tossed to the wayside. The shareholder is a jealous god, and he will not let even the Christian Lord take precedence over his bottom line.

If we are to take our homeland back, or even more so, build something better, we must understand that there are more important things than the GDP. Family, community, morality, health, culture, demographics, and most importantly God Himself must take precedence over international finance. In sum, I hope to open more right-wingers up to the fact that it is okay to criticize capitalism, and – despite what Fox News might tell you – such feelings do not make you an unpatriotic, America-hating communist.

IC XC NIKA