MacMillan has made available to us an excerpt of Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower audiobook. The atmosphere in this recording is, as you may expect, dark, grim, apocalyptic—one cannot help but imagine how this will sound on the other side of the catastrophe, once what we know today and once knew is gone, and this audio, surviving perhaps in fragments, found in some archeological site, petrified but somehow partially recovered and translated, provides the titans of the next manvantara with a glimpse of what it must have been like for people in the vanished American civilisation to live in the final slope of the Kali-Yuga.

You can hear the clip here.

No, America is not about to default on its debts. And, no, Grandma’s August Social Security check won’t bounce. Nor would a failure to raise the debt ceiling result in a financial breakdown and ensuing Mad Max-style societal collapse. (This latter fact will, no doubt, disappoint many AltRight readers.)     

Democracy seems to function through mass delusion, but few recent issues are obscured by so many misconceptions and misdirections as the current “debate” over raising the debt ceiling.  Below, I’ve listed a few, all of which revolve around the fallacy that the government is about to run out of money.

One might take solace in the fact that Washington’s latest political crisis is more smoke than fire. To the contrary, examining the errors of the current debate brings one closer to an understanding the truly catastrophic nature of the world monetary system.

First, the misconceptions.

1) “If we don’t raise the debt ceiling, America will default on its debts."

No. In terms of income and outflow, Washington isn’t anywhere close to default.

As Karl Denniger points out, “default is only the failure to pay interest or principal on a loan.  Nothing else is a default.”:

The United States takes in about $2 trillion in taxes a year.  The total interest paid last year was about $180 billion, a ridiculously low blended rate, but that's what ZIRP (zero interest rates by The Fed) get you.

Let's assume for a moment that the blended rate was to more than double, to 4%.  That would be about $560 billion in interest a year, including interest on the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds" (which aren't trust funds, but I've been over that before.)

$560 billion is about one quarter of the tax revenues that the government takes in.  So even were interest rates to more than double The United States would not default.

Whatever the case, I predict that when Boehner, Cantor, & Co. finally agree to raising the debt ceiling, they will take credit for “avoiding a default.”

2) “The markets are jittery that America might default.”

No, they’re not.

First off, a default is not the end of the world. There have been many episodes of defaults by individual states throughout American history; shortly after the crises passed, bankers showed up to lend them more money.

And the Federal government is in a far better position. Washington can reproduce—for all practical purposes, without limit—the currency in which its debts and entitlement obligations are denominated. This differentiates it from Greece, which can’t print Euros and thus must plead for bailouts from its paymasters in Brussels and Berlin. As further below discussed, Washington will never default on its explicit debt, nor will it renege on Social Security and Medicare payments, for the simple reason that it always has the capacity to create more money.

True, dollars are created through issuing debt, and since 1917, Congress has had the power to limit debt issuance. However, the “ceiling” has been raised more than 100 times since it was instituted and 10 times over the past decade. On all fronts, scant resistance has been levied against the finacialization of the U.S. government.

Moreover, gold’s recent rise over $1,600 indicates that markets are (quite rationally) not predicting a default; they instead expect Washington to continue to spin off debt-to-service-debt to finance its some $15 trillion outstanding and some $70-100 trillion in liabilities [PDF], many of which, like Social Security, are currently unfunded.

Paradoxically, if Washington were to default (which, again, it won’t), the immediate result would be a strengthening of the dollar. If Washington cancelled its debts and entitlement payments, there would be, quite literally, less money now and promised in future. People would scramble for the dollars left over, and prices of most everything would fall. If the Republicans were truly concerned about the value of the dollar (which they say they are), they would be demanding not only a hard debt ceiling but a massive reneging on the innumerable future obligations. Being that the latter would necessitate informing their constituents that they should prepare for a diminished lifestyle, they won’t do anything of the kind.   

3) “The Republicans are risking financial armageddon due to their libertarian, anti-government ideology.”

It’s hard to take this one seriously.

Without question, this standoff wouldn’t be happening were it not for the Republican leadership’s desire to throw the Tea Party a bone. (Otherwise, the ceiling would have been raised with little fanfare, as it was in the past.)  That said, most proposed spending cuts, which were said to “match” hikes in the debt ceiling, are entirely symbolic.

As Gary North notes, “ . . . over the next decade” is tacked on at the end of any promised reduction. Thus, John Boehner’s big number of $4 trillion in unspecified cuts (which has been floated, then retracted, then floated again) becomes a relatively small number of $400 billion each fiscal year—which would still result in Washington running deficits of a trillion per (!).     

4) “If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, Grandma won’t get her Social Security check.”

Once again, no.

It is quite ironic that during the Obamacare “town halls” two summers ago, Democrats ridiculed the idea that Obama would take away Grandma’s Medicare payments (or even “pull the plug”). Now, Obama is quite explicitly threatening seniors with their lives: “There may not be the money in the coffers” to send out August-3 Social Security checks, Obama informed 60 Minutes’s geriatric audience.

And some might think that Obama’s hands are tied in this situation, since, according to government accounts, Social Security went bankrupt last year (that is, its “fund” issued more than it took in.)      

But Obama’s threat rests on the widespread illusion that the federal government’s finances amount to “coffers” filled with money—that is, some kind of large, though limited, source of wealth: eg, a bank account or gold hoard or dark basement filled with stacks of hundreds.

But this is not how modern government finances work. The Social Security “trust fund,” for example, is not a fund at all but a mass of liabilities. When it was cash-flow positive for 75 years, its revenues were traded for Treasury Bond IOUs and used for other governmental expenses: war, contracts, salaries, etc. Social Security is now cash-flow negative and requires debt to operate. There is all but no chance that Boehner and Cantor, or any politician, would allow themselves to be the one to shut off the credit line necessary for Grandma’s Social Security check to go out.  Obama certainly knows this, which is why he’ll make such threats, knowing his opponents will cave.    

But let’s stop here with the minutia. It’s easy to get lost in the political maneuvering and posturing and lose sight of the big picture. Overall, there are two elemental components of Washington debt-financed everything that are of paramount importance; both of which are so simple, and so nefarious, they boggle the mind:

1) There is practically no limit to the amount of debt Washington can issue.

2) Washington never plans to actually pay off its debt (ie, clear its balance); it will instead service its debt with more debt ad infinitum.   

The first of these is directly relevant to Washington’s innumerable and unfunded promises and liabilities, which again, it will have no problem fulfilling in nominal terms.

Forget about paying Grandma two grand a month. If it so desired, Washington could request that the Fed purchase 30 trillion in new bonds, have the treasury print this up in thousand-dollar bills, and mail each citizen 100 grand in cash. A “stimulus package” of this kind is entirely feasible in a fiat-money system.

Of course, something like this would likely result in a Weimar/Zimbabwe hyperinflation, and hilariously high prices for everyday goods. And Washington is well aware of this, which is why a scheme of this kind would only be tried as an act of desperation.

And it’s also unnecessary, for in avoiding brazen money printing—and instead maintaining the dollar as the premiere vehicle of worldwide indebtedness—Washington has gotten away with inflations that are equally, if not more, outrageous than what I just described. Currently, the total dollar-denominated debt (including sovereign debt, consumer and student loans, mortgages, etc.) amounts to some $50 trillion (350 percent of GDP). And as mentioned above, the entitlement promises actually dwarf this gargantuan number.

Actually clearing America’s balance sheet would require most all of the production and savings of the entire world for years to come. But again, Washington won’t ever truly pay it off. Its solution is more insidious.   

Dick Cheney’s infamous 2002 statement that “deficits don’t matter” wasn’t a mere confession of irresponsibility. He was accurately describing an arrangement in which America’s overseas empire, its citizens lifestyles and entitlement programs could be expanded—practically endlessly—through debt—debt serviced by the issuance of more debt.

Normal governments have to bring their expenditures in line with tax revenues. The exceptional nation doesn’t have to bother. That Washington collects revenues at all seems only to be a means of assuring its creditors that it has enough cash flow to make interest payments.  

Conservatives and Republicans might want to blame this all on “big government,” but the reality is that for decades, all components of the Establishment have benefited from the arrangement: it is the way—indeed, the only way—Washington can finance wars, entitlements, student loans, mutliculturalism, and mortgages all at once.

The arrangement’s fatal flaw is not so much that it’s unfair but that it’s based on a paradigm of infinite debt growth in an intrinsically limited world. (And it’s only a matter of time before a rival country has the guts enough to offer a replacement for the dollar or at least stop indefinitely footing Washington’s bill.)

America’s debt empire, too, shall pass. And when it does collapse, the consequences will be more spectacular and catastrophic than anything prophesied in the current debt-ceiling debate.      

When my brother and I are playing video games, we often give my nephew—a toddler—an unplugged controller. We encourage him to believe he's actually playing the game, congratulating him on playing well and cheering when he completes each level. He probably senses that his character's not quite doing what he wants him to do, but it's easiest to dismiss those concerns and play along. After all, he's playing as well as his adult mentors. Our scheme will probably continue to work as long as he feels like he's winning.

A toddler can be forgiven for this naivety. But what about the hundreds of millions of Americans who line up at the polls every other year to fall for this same scam being perpetrated on a sweeping national scale? Unlike the noble lie perpetrated by me and my brother, this lie is anything but noble. In every election, the people try to vote for smaller government, fewer imperial wars, secure borders, and safe jobs. Yet, the controllers deliver up more government, more wars, more open borders, and more free trade agreements no matter which buttons we press.

For decades, we Americans have absentmindedly played along because it seemed like we were winning. However, the unraveling credit bubble and the unmistakable impression that America is becoming "the sick man of the globe" is leaving many of us feeling less like we're winning, and more like we're this idiot in the middle . . .

We've become a nation of idiots. Alain de Benoist, a leading luminary of Europe's New Right, confirms the worst in his recently translated book, The Problem of Democracy...

The notions of citizenship, liberty, and equality of political rights, as well as popular sovereignty, were closely interrelated. The most essential feature of citizenship was one's origin and heritage: Pericles was the 'son of Xanthippus from the deme of Cholargus'. From 451 BCE, one had to be born of an Athenian mother and father in order to become a citizen. Defined by his belonging, the citizen (polites) was opposed to the idiotes, or non-citizen—a designation that quickly took on a pejorative meaning (from the notion of the isolated individual with no belonging came the idea of the 'idiot'). Citizenship as a function thus derived from the notion of citizenship a status which was the exclusive prerogative of birth. To be a citizen meant, in the fullest sense of the word, to belong to a homeland - that is, to a homeland and a past.

We're regressing from true citizens with a common heritage into isolated individuals . . . idiots. We no longer have the power or the will to direct this government, a government which no longer belongs to us in any meaningful way. While many of America's founding fathers were known for churning out universalist platitudes, the founding documents and the Republic they instantiated reflected the united spirit and will of a common people. John Jay explained it best in Federalist Paper No. 2 . . . 

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established liberty and independence.

In addition to John Jay, Louis March's Immigration and the End of Self-Government quotes Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge, all corroborating the same basic vision of American identity. Abraham Lincoln, a racialist and ethnic nationalist by any standard, is conspicuously (though unsurprisingly) absent from this Southern gentleman's comprehensive list. Whether they were Federalists or Anti-Federalists, Yankees or Confederates, Democrats or Republicans, Americans shared an essentially Athenian conception of citizenship.

March contrasts this with Jewish neoconservative Nathan Glazer's contention that, "The United States is unique among the great nations of the world in the degree to which it refuses to define itself in ethnic or religious or national terms, as our basic founding documents make clear." A nation that refuses to define itself in national terms is a nation of idiots (to rely on the more common definition). Not that there's much of an American nation left...perhaps more of a global circus of "propositional" Americans propositioning one another.

For the past several decades, most Americans have eagerly parroted the multicultural platitudes on command but have implicitly identified with the traditional American ethnicity. This unexamined contradiction is increasingly strained by the demographic, political, cultural, and economic ramifications of having designed our nation's policies on those idiotic platitudes. The cognitive dissonance is reaching an inflection point, with more and more of us terrified on an instinctive level by our displacement, yet lacking the vocabulary to give voice to that fear. We're repelled by the progressive's "progress" yet remain indoctrinated in the progressive's ideological frame. More and more Americans perceive themselves as "standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"

This growing unease with the status quo is an opportunity for us to sell Americans on a completely different type of progress, a radical alternative to idiocy. Unlike our opponents, who've been reduced to "waiting for Superman" to save them from their own mess, we can credibly offer a future worth looking forward to. Do you want better education? Remove diversity from the equation and our schools are among the world's best. Do you want to balance the budget? With a cessation of our imperial military adventures and gutting of the monolithic bureaucracies dedicated to social engineering, we can do that. Do you want better jobs? We can seal off the borders, broker trade agreements that protect America's strategically critical industrial infrastructure, and put Americans back to work. Do you want less crime? Well, you get the idea . . . 

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether Americans can break free of the progressive paradigm and embrace a traditional one, one in which progress is to be fertile instead of sterile, honorable instead of respectable, enriched instead of rich, and equal in the Athenian sense instead of the modern egalitarian sense. Recent developments are encouraging. Both mainstream academics like Robert Putnam and mainstream politicians like Angela Merkel are conceding that the global social engineering experiment in multiculturalism is dead. 

We know that we're not winning and we've lost faith in our elites. Sooner or later, my nephew's going to wise up and demand genuine and complete control of his character and determine his own course. Hopefully, we as a nation will stop being idiots and demand the same for ourselves.

In a video recording of Jamie Kelso’s experience at CPAC, the argument was made that Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics have equal claim to the United States. Disappointingly (at least to me), this is what passes for White conservative opinion on this matter today.

Black activists today defend their equal claim arguing that the United States was built on the backs of Black slaves, implying that the United States would not have been possible without them. Hispanic activists go further, and assert that their claim is greater, arguing that they were in the continent first and that, in fact, Whites should not be in America at all.

Mr. Kelso’s position at the abovemented event was (1) that Whites have the right to a homeland and (2) that Whites in the United States have the right to call that country their homeland because it was built by Whites.

On the surface, the second argument seems a strong one, but in today’s context it is seriously undermined by the present day weakness of the first one.

That I consider the first argument weak nowadays may seem extraordinary to those who consider it irrefutable: after all, Whites did built the United States! Yet as an argument it is weak in the present day context because it not only depends on a false premise, but also relies on the implicit acceptance of a racial self-identification that is rejected by most White people today.

The argument "Whites have the right to a homeland" presupposes that rights have an existence independent of the consensus that is needed to make their enforcement possible.

That consensus does not exist today.

Only some Whites believe in the existence of such a right, and among them only some are willing to act in consequence. That is not a consensus in practical terms: that is a minority view.

The argument also presupposes that Whiteness is accepted as a valid category. Many White people today, however, do not accept that race exists, that the White race is a race, that they are members of a racial group, or that membership of that racial group has any value whatsoever. Many act as if they accept some or all those things, but only so long as there is no risk of being called a name by someone; in a debate, when called on the issue of the validity of their racial identification and interests as Whites, they reject them.

"Whites have the right to a homeland" is the type of argument that is used when preaching to the choir, when high-fiving among ourselves and patting each other on the back; not the type of argument that will sound convincing to a White person with conventional modern views on race.

Such a person does not accept "race", much less "White race" (pride of and identification with which they regard as evil), and therefore finds "White homeland" rather queer, if not outright immoral.

Therefore, in a time when none but a minority of Whites in the United States recognise their exclusive or primary right to the country, and / or when none but an even smaller minority is prepared actively to enforce that right, even where enforcement requires only expressing an opinion without apology or embarrassment, we can conclude that for all practical purposes Whites in the United States today do not have a right to claim the country as a White homeland.

The right may still exist in the abstract, in the minds of an unconventional minority of racially conscious White folk, but that does not make it exist in practice throughout the country today.

The right certainly existed in practice in the past, but that does not make it exist in practice today.

Evidence: tens of millions of Whites persist on voting into, and keeping in, office politicians who openly reject pro-White immigration laws. Even the existing immigration law is poorly or not enforced at all. When a supposedly conservative, politically active White youth is asked whether he cares about his racial heritage or the destruction of his race, he replies, "I don’t give a sh*t". When the question of to whom does the United States belong is posed to another such youth, he asserts in effect that to all peoples of all races, equally. These youths are not exceptional: they are the product of modern mainstream education and media and represent modern conventional opinion.

Of course, it does not have to be that way.

Nor does this mean that I accept the competing claims put forth by other groups.

To my mind, Whites in the United States are the only ones who could legitimately claim the country as their own.

I reject that Blacks have equal claim to the United States because Blacks made up but a small percentage of the historical American nation, and for whatever reasons, the economic output of Blacks on average has been vastly inferior to that of Whites. Indeed, in the contemporary United States Blacks cost more than they produce on the whole—particularly when we consider the cost of violent crime, affirmative action, and welfare recipience, where they are disproportionately represented. As Michael Levin argued in American Renaissance in 2002,

A propos whites’ supposed enjoyment of the un-or undercompensated fruits of black labor, reparationists frequently claim that “blacks built America.” This is patently untrue. At no time have blacks been a substantial part of the US population, and until the Second World War they lived largely in the rural South; they were a part of southern agriculture but played virtually no role in the development of the large cities, industrial complexes, universities and public projects that support American prosperity. In fact, it is precisely those parts of the country with the largest proportion of blacks that have traditionally been the poorest, which is the reverse of what we would expect if blacks were the source of American prosperity. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were English colonies that developed during the same period as the United States. If slavery was the basis of American prosperity, how did these countries achieve comparable levels of prosperity without it? Blacks did not contribute significantly to science, medicine or technology. America would have been different without blacks, but not poorer.

Indeed, it is conceivable that the United States would be even more powerful had there been enough of a consensus to return all of the emancipated Blacks back to Africa upon the abolition of slavery.

Blacks only have an equal (or greater) claim if Whites cease to assert theirs, as they did in Southern Africa.

I also reject that Hispanics (who are mostly mestizo or Amerindian) have a greater claim to the United States than do the Whites. There was no United States in the North American continent before the advent of the White man, and there would be no United States now had the White man not successfully colonised and organised the region in his own image. Had the White man remained oblivious of the existence of the continent we call America, no European-style nation states would exist there today; indeed, small parts of the continent would be controlled by mostly pre-historical tribes, isolated by large swathes of uninhabited space.

The famed Aztlan claim is particularly bogus, as Mexico lost the right to control that area by weakly settling it, by being defeated in war, and by selling that land to the United States.

They only have a greater claim if Whites cease to assert theirs, as did the White Spaniards in a different but more radical way when they interbred with the Amerindian and imported African population.

So much for competing claims.

The point of this article is that if debate-oriented activism is to be successful, it must among other things rely on arguments psychologically compelling to an audience with conventional modern views on race.

I say this not to devalue Mr. Kelso’s efforts, but rather to stress that if those efforts are to be more successful next time, we need to equip him and similar activists with better arguments and debating tactics. The fault is partly with the intellectual echelons of the Right, sections of which hang on to subcultural notions not applicable to the situation as we find it today. “Whites have the right to a homeland” is a archaism, a subcultural platitude, and in practical terms a fallacy where there is no consensus that makes exclusive White rights to anything—even in traditional White homelands—enjoy either moral sanction or the force of law.