Today six people were stabbed in Sacramento. One was a skinhead marching against globalism, and five of them were Antifa protesting the skinheads. The march was organized by a group called the Traditionalist Worker Party – one that I have followed with increasing apprehension and disgust for the past year. Not only does the Trad Worker Party twist the rhetoric of localism into their entitled, violent fantasies – but they appropriate The Church into their hate-filled narratives. The blasphemous arrogance of this group is beyond the pale.
The Trad Workers first came to my attention when founder Matthew Heimbach was photographed beating a member of the Bloomington Slut Walk while holding an RussianOrthodox cross. The picture had the caption "Good Night, Anti-White", which continued "When you come and attack Trad Youth while we are peacefully demonstrating, make sure you can end the fight before you start it."
The juxtaposition of violence, racism, and Orthodoxy is jarring, and rightly so. The idea that Orthodoxy supports ethno-centric violence is ridiculous – but this idea seems to be taking root in certain vocal circles. With that in mind, I'd like to attempt to break down the Trad Worker argument from an economic, political, and social perspective.
I don't like amplifying the rhetoric of folks like this, but for the sake of making a clear argument, I'll quote from the event page that announced their march today:
After carefully weighing the pros and cons, we have decided that this would be our Thermopylae, no matter what it costs or what it takes the march will go on! After witnessing the brutal assaults these cowards, drug addicts, illegal immigrants and criminals committed in orchestrated pogroms by Zionist agitated colored people against elderly people, women, children, and even the disabled at Donald Trump events throughout the Golden State, we concluded that it was time to use this rally to make a statement about the precarious situation our race is in. With our folk on the brink of becoming a disarmed, disengaged, and disenfranchised minority, the time to do something was yesterday!
California is a textbook example of the neo-liberal globalized dystopia that awaits us all if we don’t fight back. The contemporary union of global capitalism and New Left Marxism has manifested itself in a pincer attack on white workers in Sacramento, where economic exploitation and dying wages don’t keep up with exploding costs of living, while at the same time, their family’s [sic] are under siege from the lumpen-proletarian of third world rapists and murderers being foisted into their communities and public schools. In California, the elites destroy working and middle class neighborhoods, while they themselves live in exclusive gated communities, while their children attend public schools.
But we too have a human right to live, work, and have our kids be safe. Enough is enough!
Trad Worker Website, June 2016
Here's where we get to the narrow straight I am trying to navigate: the snarled, screed coast of Nationalism looms high to the right, and the estuarine mangrove of Globalism stretches far on the left. A narrow channel of clear brine is in the middle, and I intend to pickle myself in it.
There are legitimate critiques of globalism, just as there are legitimate critiques of nationalism. Here is a small, incomplete list of generally accepted legitimate critiques of each:
Nationalism:
Globalism:
Generally speaking, I agree with all of these criticisms, and see the relative merits of each. I find them to all be rational, defensible arguments, and I hope to further explore them. Let's look at the arguments that the Trad Worker Party used in their grievances for the march this morning:
Trad Workers are marching against Globalism because:
It's hard to decipher such a buttressed proof, but after a lot of work I distilled it down to this argument:
Here, we've come to the foundation of the Trad Worker grievances: the ills of immigration. Let's break each part of the argument down and examine each component.
While immigration deregulation is a stated goal of Globalism writ large, immigration policy is really a question of liberty. Freedom of Movement within the United States is a fundamental Constitutional right. Other countries handle their own internal migrations differently, of course, but most allow freedom to move within a particular country freely. Internationally, the consensus is that Freedom of Movement is a human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states:
- Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
- Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Regardless of any particular nations' stance on Freedom of Movement as it applies to citizens of other nations, the idea of Freedom of Movement as a human right is powerful. One could argue that while Globalism prefers the loosening of immigration law, our basic human rights demand it.
For a long time, I assumed that this would be the case that local jobs, especially in smaller communities, would suffer from immigration. After a small amount of cursory research, here's what I found.
"Economists who have analyzed local labor markets have mostly failed to find large effects of immigrants on employment and wages of U.S.-born workers."
FRBSF Economic Letter, The Effect of Immigrants on US Employment and Productivity
"Although many are concerned that immigrants compete against Americans for jobs, the most recent economic evidence suggests that, on average, immigrant workers increase the opportunities and incomes of Americans."
The Hamilton Project, What Immigration Means for US Employment and Wages
"In summary, an increase in immigration flows will lead to higher incomes for productive factors that are complementary with immigrants, but lower incomes for factors that compete with immigrants."
"With plausible assumptions about factor supply and returns to scale, we show that immigration produces net economic gains for the native-born."
The National Academies Press, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration
"Immigrants with advanced degrees boost employment for US natives. This effect is most dramatic for immigrants with advanced degrees from US universities working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields."
"Temporary foreign workers – both skilled and less skilled – boost US employment."
"The analysis yields no evidence that foreign born workers, taken in the aggregate, hurt US employment."
"Highly educated immigrants pay far more in taxes than they receive in benefits."
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Immigration and American Jobs
"Some observers question whether a reduction in the number of unauthorized workers would benefit or harm U.S.-born and other permanent resident workers. Model results suggest that wages would rise (relative to the base forecast) in some lower paying occupations where unauthorized workers are common, decrease slightly in many higher paying occupations, and decrease on average."
USDA, Immigration Policy and Its Possible Effects on US Agriculture
"One way to quantify immigrants’ contribution to the U.S. economy is to look at the wages and salaries they earn, as well as the income of immigrant-owned businesses, as a share of all wages, salaries, and business income in the United States. For the United States as a whole, immigrants’ share of total output was about 14.7 percent over 2009–2011. Note that this is actually larger than immigrants’ 13 percent share of the population."
Economic Policy Institute, Facts About Immigration and the U.S. Economy
"Immigrants are a critical part of the U.S. workforce and contribute to productivity growth and technological advancement. They make up 15% of all workers and even larger shares of certain occupations such as construction, food services and health care. Approximately 40% of Ph.D. scientists working in the United States were born abroad."
Council of Economic Advisors to George W. Bush, Immigration's Economic Impact
I searched for over an hour for a legitimate paper on US Immigration that showed a negative outcome for our economy, jobs, and wages, and I could not find a single one. If you find some, please leave a comment – I am anxious to see more evidence.
This is utter bologna. Silly arguments like this make statistics look like physical constants. Immigrants make up 12–15% of the total population of the United States. Chances are, your ancestors immigrated to America – I hope we can be proud they did.
Perhaps immigration was not the most rigorous foundation for the Trad Worker Party to base their grievances on. It was decidedly one-dimensional, which made it tempting to write off completely. It had faulty assumptions about globalism, immigration, and trade. We're left with a drivel of white-supreme identity politics masking itself in economic camouflage made of pink slips.
The real problem is not immigration – it's far deeper and more insidious than that. The Trad Workers made a rather clumsy and simplistic reference to the real problem when they cited "the contemporary union of global capitalism and New Left Marxism" as the catalyst for economic exploitation. At the risk of slapping a too-precise word over a fuzzy idea, you could call this Neoliberalism, and I believe you'd find few supporters of Neoliberalism in the narrow straight we're navigating.
Critiques of Neoliberalism fall across the spectrum between critiques of Nationalism and Globalism. In a certain sense, Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Libertarianism all fall into a narrow spectrum of thought, bearing the gifts of the free market and dressing in the style of the particular natives they're proselytizing. The nation we live in is the prophet of Neoconservative foreign policy, Neoliberal economics, and (on a limb here) Libertarian social policy.
Here's what I wish the Trad Workers had said:
We, the undersigned, are: economically hamstrung, our ambitions frustrated by forces veiled and unvotable; socially disenfranchised, driven from our communities by rising rents and stagnated wages; and pitted against each other, our differences used as pawns by a political machine we did not ask for and which does us no right.
We demand the opportunity to forge our own path in our local communities. We seek the freedom to be unharried by unreasonable restrictions, and the liberty to create and provide for our communities without involuntary dependence on outside interests.
With such demands, we will march in protest and solidarity.
The Not-Racist Trad Workers
There is a local-centric, globally-connected future that is diverse, abundant, and allows for freedom of movement between communities. We can imagine a future that leverages global infrastructure to connect and distribute goods amongst relatively self-sufficient local communities – but we can't imagine that future if we are stuck in the primitive, violent fantasy of distributed, local fascists.
I encourage anyone critical of globalism and its peers to consider the possibilities of a localist future that encourages immigration and Freedom of Movement. I believe there is power there.