By Darrell Dow
This election cycle has seen numerous “Black Swan” events, including the conviction of former President Donald Trump, his near assassination, and, after the first presidential debate, the removal of President Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee for a second term.
Then, of course, Americans witnessed the rigged presidential debate between Trump and the new Democrat nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Abortion, immigration, and the economy were among the subjects discussed. Yet even though Trump selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who rose from humble origins in rural America, to be his vice president, Trump didn’t raise one issue: the devastation that has wracked Middle America for at least half-century.
As the 1950s dawned, Rust Belt cities were among the most prosperous places in America. Today, a new set of leftist coastal elites centered in the Imperial Capital and Silicon Valley are the “economic heartbeat” of the country, earning in some cases almost twice the median American income of $74,580. Large areas of the once-thriving American heartland are hollowed out, empty of good factory and other blue-collar jobs. Millions of Americans are without hope. These are among the most important developments that both political parties have ignored.
But ignore them for much longer we can’t.
A Trip Through A Near-Dead Land
In the 1960s, Michigan, where I was born and raised and attended college, had the sixth largest economy in the United States, besting Florida and Texas. Detroit drew comparisons with Paris. In 1963, 50 percent of the state’s GDP was from manufacturing.
But decades of financialization, union-busting, cheap immigrant labor, and free trade that included the mass importation of Japanese cars, has deindustrialized the state. Detroit collapsed long ago and whites fled. Once a city of 2 million residents, it now has 630,000. Time was, Motor City was part of the arsenal of democracy, the global center of automotive production and innovation. Since, 2000, the number of workers building cars and auto parts has halved.
Overall, manufacturing in general has shrunk to 18 percent of the state’s gross domestic product.
No wonder people left home for greener pastures. I was one of them. After graduating college in 1993, I unsuccessfully pursued employment and eventually was forced to move to the Washington, D.C., suburbs to find a decent job. I didn’t realize it then, but I was part of the depopulation of the Midwest.
In 2016, I went home for a funeral. I drove through areas of northern Indiana and southern Michigan that I hadn’t seen in decades. Being a late adapter to smart phones and driving with only the aid of MapQuest printouts, I got lost numerous times, meandering around Niles, South Bend, and other hollowed-out towns. “What happened here?” I wondered.
Making my way through Plainwell, Michigan, I noticed an old paper mill. Paper mills were ubiquitous in parts of Michigan going back to the 19th century. My university had a “Paper Science Department,” and the smell of the Kalamazoo River on hot August afternoons reminded one of their presence. The mill had employed up to 500 locals and provided nearly a fifth of the town’s tax base. But now the hulking old mill stood vacant. Once Chinese paper hit the global market, domestic production was no longer profitable. Mills in places like Michigan and New Hampshire shut down.
That same summer, we borrowed an RV and headed to the Upper Peninsula. Driving deeper into rural Michigan, what I’d noticed elsewhere was clear; other than touristy areas around the Great Lakes, conditions were bad. Donald Trump signs and flags were everywhere. The elites were missing something big because of their indifference to the hoi polloi they so clearly despised. Economic deprivation would cause a political backlash. Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton.
In his postmortem of the 2016 GOP primary, Alienated America, Tim Carney theorized that the breakdown of civil society and disintegration of social institutions, augmented and reinforced by the economic and demographic devastation wreaking havoc on the working class, was the breeding ground for the populism that produced Trump. He argued that populism was the future of the GOP — and America. Recently, 200 former neoconservative aides to George Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain endorsed Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard are on the trail for former President Trump. The winds of change are in the air.
Last year, my family moved to a rural community in Iowa. We have returned to the Midwest to live in a beautiful town founded in the 1840s by Dutch emigres fleeing persecution. But I often find myself in less prosperous areas. I recall those trips through my home state. Once more, I notice the Trump signs and flags. Middle America is still struggling and still looking for a tribune. But now I live here, too.
I recently attended a farmer’s market in Knoxville, Iowa. A small town of 7,500 (fewer residents than 1950), it is the county seat of Marion County and home of the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame & Museum. As we set up our booth in the town square a number of things stood out. Immediately behind us was an H&R Block, cheek by jowl with the nicest building on the block, a Wells Fargo bank — living testaments to the Byzantine American tax code and ongoing domination of America by financiers and usurers. It is seldom discussed, but the financialization and digitization of the American economy have brought the culture of Silicon Valley and Seattle to the heartland via the homogenizing tendencies of finance capitalism. But finance capitalism has also locked arms with multiculturalism and the globalism underpinning both has flattened local cultures that once sprouted organically. And, of course, it wages war on common decency and its white employees.
Down the block was a Mexican restaurant and Chinese Buffet. It seems we have sold our children’s birthright for cheap ethnic eateries, literally a bowl of pottage. A few paces over stands an old theater closed for repairs. The last time I’d been by, Bad Boys: Ride or Die was on the marquee. Evidently Hollywood’s Golden Age is long past. Movies are now made for Chinese audiences. If patriots ever reclaim cultural power, by God’s grace we’ll see a return of the production codes and leave behind the dreck from Marvel and Lucas studios and endless remakes of films that were bad the first time.
Built in 1896, the stately county courthouse fills the center of the square, an example of a time before public buildings took on the trappings of utilitarianism, turning men into machines. It stands in contrast to the insurance salesmen, bail bondsmen, and coffee shops surrounding it.
But even on the square itself stand memorials to the triumph of stages of the revolution that morphed America from yeoman republic into managerial polyarchy and brought her to ruin.
On the northwest corner of the courthouse square is a statue that was “Erected to the memory of the soldiers, sailors and marines of all wars.” Dedicated on Veteran’s Day, 1920, a Union soldier stands atop the shaft. Another memorial honors local men who died in WWI and WWII, the great civil war among the European nations that destroyed the last bastions of Christendom and solidified the rule of the faceless, nameless technocrats and managers who rule us people with a velvet-covered fist. The memorials tell a story of history that empowers its Ruling Class, but there are other stories, too.
Lobotomized America
Knoxville was also once home to a large VA hospital. The 160-acre complex opened in 1892, serving the area until it closed in 2009.
In 2013, the Wall Street Journal revealed that nearly 2,000 World War II soldiers who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder received lobotomies. Documents shared with the Des Moines Register depicted the practice in Knoxville.
Lobotomization is a good metaphor for the ceaseless lying and brainwashing to which we are subjected.
Example: the recent obsession with “misinformation” and “disinformation,” a smokescreen designed to hide the fact that our rulers have always peddled official lies. Now, endless waves of information, mostly false, is a primary mechanism against the threat that the people will arise from their collective lobotomization and the false consciousness it created for them. The illusion of prosperity resulting from cheap credit and dual incomes hides economic decline. Our subscriptions to Hulu, Netflix, and Peacock anesthetize us to cultural dispossession. News blackouts hide the impact of demographic transformation and rising crime.
A few years ago in a chat group, I wrote that I was shocked that young men don’t take to the streets, readying the guillotines. “We don’t know who to blame,” came the response of a wise young friend. Indeed, the Ruling Class is a vast administrative apparatus consisting of government, corporations, the academy, nonprofits and the leftist mass media. It is a fully integrated organism. Who created the world I described above? Who is responsible?
Honest liberal Glenn Greenwalled recently offered an answer on X:
The US has no functional president and has not had one for months, and it’s barely noticeable and barely matters because there’s a permanent unelected machine that runs the government.
The same can be said for the big banks, industry, agriculture, business, and education.
Even if we have the time to conserve and restore the freedom and dignity that once defined American civilization, we must first find the will and common purpose to break the chains of our oppressors, to see the world as it is. It is not what our hand-held computers show us.
We must preserve those things from our past that are good, true and beautiful.
And take a hammer to the rest.
Darrell Dow is a contributor to American Remnant.
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