The New Nationalism--How The Next Great American Debate Will Restore Our Country By Recasting Our Politics

Harlan M.C. Field

Description

In this book, Harlan Field boldly asks modern Americans to leave behind their old politics which have placed America's greatness in jeopardy and exhorts us to pursue a new political strategy that will assure America's great tradition for its future generations.

"As we enter a new millennium," Harlan observes, "we stand poised to discard the crowning achievement of the last thousand years–the modern Nation-State. The only known entity that is capable of preserving Freedom and opportunity for the individual, justice for the masses, a healthy environment, a stable society and a vibrant economy is falling victim to the seemingly invincible juggernaut of Globalism. The five cardinal prerogatives of a free people are all being surrendered with little debate and even less thought. The rights of a sovereign people to formulate their own independent foreign policy, to raise and command a national army, to admit or exclude aliens, to levy tariffs on goods of foreign manufacture, and to coin their own money are under attack all over the world through such peculiar pretenders to legitimacy as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the European Union (E.U.). W e no longer can even remember what makes a group of people into a nation: A common culture, a common heritage, a common language, shared goals, shared sacrifice, shared progress."

This book is a must read for our politicians on the left and on the right, lest, because of party politics, America is made to give into a secondary role on the world stage of ruthless politics and demagoguery.

Sujets

• American Government
• Political Science
• National

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780828324243
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE NEW
NATIONALISM
HOW THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN DEBATE WILL RESTORE OUR COUNTRY BY RECASTING OUR POLITICS
By Harlan Field
Branden Books, Boston
 


© Copyright 2012
Branden Books
E-Book Edition ISBN 9780828324243
Print Book Edition ISBN 9780828322140
Published in eBook format by Branden Books
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 


• The first book to pass judgment on the baby boom generation unhindered by the blinders of ideology.
• The first book to recount the tale of the last half-century of American life with any degree of satisfaction.
• The first book to offer a real, meaningful alternative direction for America.
• A different take on history, economics and politics, set against the backdrop of the last three administrations--this is a case that will withstand the test of time, with a new conclusion, drawn from today’s headlines, addressing the questions:
• Where does American politics go in the twenty-first century?
• How can the American economy recover the prosperity that we once enjoyed?
 


To the Reader:
You are asked to suspend some of the assumptions you have lived with for a long time. After examining all of the evidence and all of the arguments, with the aid of your own experience, you may then reach your own conclusions. This book will be a challenge to anyone who places themselves at any fixed point anywhere on the current political spectrum. If it causes you to seriously reassess your own views, even though you may end up not changing any of them, then it should not be said that it was a failure. But if it should synthesize some of the frustration felt all across the spectrum, then it should be said to have accomplished something significant.
 
INTRODUCTION
{The following is the text of a letter written by the author and sent jointly in the opening days of 2006 to Ms. Bay Buchanan of The American Cause and Ms. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, two prominent Washington-area political advocacy groups, which, although from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, share many of the views herein contained. They also received a copy of the first edition of this book}
I am taking the unusual step of writing to both of you jointly because I believe the way forward in American politics lies in a coalition of anti-globalists that would speak for the interests of the forgotten American people. This coalition would strongly oppose both Bush’s American Empire, which threatens America’s future with imperial overreach even as it further drains our debt-ridden treasury, and Clinton/Kerry’s Global Economy, which produced the very terror the Empire is sworn to defeat as well as instigated our economic decline. Although both of you head separate organizations that are now veterans in the fight against Globalism, there is not now any effort to unite natural allies because of the harsh left vs. right divide that characterizes our politics today.
Your own experience will surely attest to the sad fact that this bitter divide ends up causing liberal and conservative dissenters from the global agenda to support those with whom they have deep and profound disagreements. The dirty little secret is how those who feel strongly about social issues end up being used by the image-makers employed by both parties to cover up their consensus on political issues – a consensus to which many on both sides of the cultural divide would mutually object. We must strive to heal the breach in our culture even as we dedicate ourselves to bring discord to the global agenda which helped to divide our culture in the first place. Without doing the former, we have no chance of accomplishing the latter. Culture wars thrive whenever a people’s fundamental unity becomes dissipated by pursuits inimical to the common good. A new form of Nationalism can both unite the separate anti-global efforts into one complete whole and detour our path away from a frightening future, as it is the powers and the prerogatives of the nation-state as a sovereign entity that are assaulted by the trade, defense, foreign, economic and border policies of the status quo. It is the ties that bind a nation’s citizens together that are routed when our leaders respond that the War on Terror will never be won, that our borders can never be secured, that the manufacturing jobs are never coming back, that our culture will forever remain divided. Despite the present overdue focus on security, the ultimate choice we face is no longer whether we should have a big or a small national government, but whether we should have any effective national government at all. It isn’t only the people of New Orleans who have been abandoned by their government – in so many ways a majority of Americans have also been cut adrift.
The documents which follow are the result of an almost seven year effort on my part to craft a specific argument and a general creed that could help to form this new political alliance whose ultimate goal would be to recast America’s liberal vs. conservative politics and replace it instead with a nationalist vs. globalist debate. Our current campaigns offer us only a Hobson’s choice because the present system is focused on issues that distract us from the challenges America faces: How to secure the American homeland in light of the terrorist threat when all authority is held by forces determined to continue their global pursuits; how to restore our declining middle class and reform our two-tiered economy when all our powers have been ceded to those same global interests that have precipitated these very results? This is an argument no one else is making. This is an argument that would return American politics to the traditional question of “Who should govern us?” – a question that implicates the division of power rather than the use of power. This is an argument that focuses on enduring questions of rights, duties and loyalties, as opposed to the heated but often, in the larger scheme of things, transitory passions present in the current division. This is an argument that also seeks a traditional political realignment, driven not by ideology or by culture, but by economics and allegiance. This is an argument that has the potential to combine both of your efforts into a new political majority.
Neither party is now responsive to the needs of the American people. As both are in thrall to the global elite, a candidate with an anti-global platform can win neither’s nomination. None of our recent elections have even broached the serious issues we continue to face. In 1988 when we were bleeding jobs and the trade deficit was setting new records, our political leaders were proposing more free trade agreements while debating only flag burning and the ACLU. Eight years later, in 1996, when we were being inundated with millions of foreign migrants, they sung the praises of a borderless world while they debated metaphors about bridges in time. Eight years after that, in the election that took place only two years ago, when our military was chasing the wrong enemy abroad, our foreign policy alienating people around the globe and our country wide open for terrorist retaliation, we debated Vietnam. These are the same campaigns that always end up with administrations of both parties further sacrificing our own interests in favor of global pursuits. Despite all of these disturbing trends, their tone-deaf message that tomorrow will still be better remains unchallenged, for real political debate has been curtailed in favor of circus sideshows and tabloid distractions.
Events move at their own pace, whether or not we are prepared to deal with them. We will soon stand at the edge of a great decision: How shall we rein in these global forces which have unchecked and unjustified power over us? America and the rest of the world could give up what is left of our freedom and create more and bigger international entities and tame the global corporations with global government. Or America and the rest of the world could recapture these escaped enterprises and bring them to heel by renationalizing our societies and reclaiming our destinies as distinct peoples. But the American people will be robbed of the opportunity of making such a choice unless the political divide is realigned to highlight the very basic question of “Who should govern us?” That age old question is again what is at stake today. Making its invocation a familiarity constitutes the immediate mission of this effort. Divergent answers to the question of who should hold power as opposed to divergent answers to the question of what our private, personal beliefs should be – aren’t they the very archetype of the kind of question that should inform our basic political division?
Invoking America’s historic beginnings, this re-declaration of independence comes down strongly on behalf of a world of sovereign nations rather than a world of sovereign corporations or a world of global empires. This is the cause that will engage the electorate rather than distract it. As to this monumental decision which encompasses nearly all of the overriding challenges we will face in the future, there are no liberals; there are no conservatives. There are only Nationalists and Globalists. Isn’t a change in focus long overdue when American internationalism is continually defeated by the nationalism of others – yesterday in Vietnam, today in Iraq, tomorrow maybe within our own land?
Almost one hundred and fifty years ago, two-thirds of a million Americans died for the proposition that all Americans were bound together in an inseverable Union, one not divisible into North and South or black and white. The lasting legacy of Shiloh, of Antietam and o