{"id":26861,"date":"2014-07-17T07:58:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T11:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26861"},"modified":"2017-06-24T11:36:09","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T15:36:09","slug":"mussolini-would-recognize-and-approve-of-economic-patriotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/17\/mussolini-would-recognize-and-approve-of-economic-patriotism\/","title":{"rendered":"Mussolini would recognize (and approve of) “economic patriotism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Williamson<\/a> isn’t a fan of the recent upsurge in usage of the term “economic patriotism”, both for practical and historical reasons:<\/p>\n

\u201cEconomic patriotism\u201d and its kissing cousin, economic nationalism, are ideas with a fairly stinky history, having been a mainstay of fascist rhetoric during the heyday of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s favorite \u201cadmirable Italian gentleman<\/a>.\u201d My colleague Jonah Goldberg has labored mightily in the task of illustrating the similarities between old-school fascist thinking and modern progressive thinking on matters political and social, but it is on economic questions that contemporary Democrats and vintage fascists are remarkably alike. In fact, their approaches are for all intents and purposes identical: As most economic historians agree, neither the Italian fascists nor the German national-socialists nor any similar movement of great significance had anything that could be described as a coherent economic philosophy. The Italian fascists put forward a number of different and incompatible economic theories during their reign, and the Third Reich, under the influence of Adolf Hitler\u2019s heroic conception of history, mostly subordinated economic questions as such to purportedly grander concerns involving destiny and other abstractions.<\/p>\n

Which is to say, what the economic nationalism of Benito Mussolini most has in common with the prattling and blockheaded talk of \u201ceconomic patriotism\u201d coming out of the mealy mouths of 21st-century Democrats is the habit of subordinating everything<\/em> to immediate political concerns. In this context, \u201cpatriotism\u201d doesn\u2019t mean doing what\u2019s best for your country \u2014 it means doing what is best for the Obama administration and its congressional allies. This is where my fellow conservatives who write off Barack Obama as a Marxist really get it wrong: He has no meaningful economic philosophy whatsoever. Marxism might be a moral step backward for Barack Obama, but it would be an intellectual step up in the sense that it at least represents a coherent worldview. (\u201cAt least it\u2019s an ethos<\/a>.\u201d) In years of listening to Barack Obama\u2019s speeches, I\u2019ve never detected any evidence that he understands, or even has any interest in, economic questions as such. He is simply a keen political calculator. The conflation of the national interest \u2014 \u201cpatriotism\u201d \u2014 with the interest of the party or the supreme leader is too familiar a demagogic technique to require much explication.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the Washington way: Create stupid financial incentives, complain when people respond to them \u2014 and then declare that conformity with your political agenda is identical to patriotism. The production values may be Hollywood slick, but this is just another third-rate sequel: Banana Republic: The Tax Code Strikes Back<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Except the tax code is not striking back. Democrats complain about it, but they rarely if ever try to do anything about the industry handouts and sweetheart deals enshrined therein \u2014 given that they wrote so many of them, why would they?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Williamson isn’t a fan of the recent upsurge in usage of the term “economic patriotism”, both for practical and historical reasons: \u201cEconomic patriotism\u201d and its kissing cousin, economic nationalism, are ideas with a fairly stinky history, having been a mainstay of fascist rhetoric during the heyday of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s favorite \u201cadmirable Italian gentleman.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,7,13],"tags":[158,645,727,457,1135,118],"class_list":["post-26861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-history","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-corporatewelfare","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-fascism","tag-mussolini","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Zf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26862,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26861\/revisions\/26862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}