Sometimes the worse thing you can do to a politician is give him a second term, and this is one of those times. Obama knows this. He didn't look like a winner on this campaign, and he didn't on victory night. His facial expression was, 'What the hell have I gotten into?'. Likewise, many an American voter will wake up tomorrow and say, 'What the hell have we done?'.
The problem is that Obama is out of ideas, and the economic and political problems which were there, at the start of the election, haven't gone away and won't go away. What will he do about unemployment? Anaemic growth? The weak dollar? Rising costs for food staples, oil and other commodities? Perhaps he'll try a program of 'stimulus', fuelled by public works and deficit spending - no, that's been done. Or devalue the currency some more: QE4, QE5, QE6... But that's been done.
The only thing left for Obama to do, when it comes to the economy, is to hike taxes - on income tax, capital gains, dividends, estate tax - and remove the tax loopholes on the Alternative Minimum Tax. Obama desperately wants this because of 'fairness'. But the House of Representatives isn't controlled by the Republicans, so, he won't be able to do that. He's the closest thing to a dead man walking: a lame-duck president who has a four-year term to sit out. Obama's second term will be 2008's mouldering corpse. Eventually - it will take a couple of days - even the dimmest liberal media commentator will see this...
(As we know, the big cuts on dividends, capital gains, income tax, etc., were introduced by Bush Jr., and they are set to expire - that is, be replaced by higher tax rates - in January 2013, unless Congress acts. If the higher rates take effect, it will be the biggest tax increase since Herbert Hoover's in 1931 - the tax hikes which, the supply-side commentators argue, caused the Great Depression. The markets are understandably jittery about such a prospect. With any luck, the legislators will muddle through, and come up with a compromise, as they did late last year. But it's just possible that Obama will get the 'fairness', i.e., the tax hikes, he's been asking for, simply because of the fiscal cliff).
Many reasons are being put forth as to why Romney didn't win. The supply-siders, such as John Tamny, will say that Romney didn't endorse a return to the gold standard (in fact, he did promise to set up a Gold Commission, which was more than Obama did); the 'liberal' Republicans - which is about 98% of the party leadership - will say that Romney should have reached out more to Mestizo voters (despite the fact that Mestizo voters didn't cast the deciding vote); American nativists, Far Rightists, racialists, white nationalists, will say that Romney should have campaigned against illegal immigration and thus 'energised the base' of white Republican Party voters more. Some blame the trade unions, and others make dark mutterings about taking the vote away from women, who, supposedly, voted for Obama in droves.
I don't have the answer. Except that I observe this: Afro-American voters vote for Obama because he's one of them - he's their man. The mainstream media notes this, and more or less acknowledges that the Democrats, and Obama, will take the black vote for granted. This is even though the Afro-Americans are suffering under Obama. (Similarly, black South Africans will vote for the ANC, even though life, for them, is bad under ANC; Mugabe's tribe voted, and continues to vote, for ZANU-PF...). Whites, though, are held to a different standard of morality: they aren't mean to vote for a Romney because he's white. No, they are morally obliged to vote for Obama.
In contrast to the liberal media, the right-wing media tells white Americans (and Hispanics and Afro-Americans) to vote for Romney because Romney and the Republicans will 'restore the republic as intended by our Founding Fathers', because they restore 'liberty and free markets, as intended by our Founding Fathers', and similar such nonsense. In other words, they are meant to vote 'conservative' on the basis of abstract and universalist principles. In reality, Afro-Americans, and Mestizos, don't abide by such principles. They play by the rules of tribalist politics, identity politics.
Supposedly, the white nationalists are meant to abide by a tribalist, ethnicist politics. By that reasoning, they should have endorsed Romney. The leaders of white nationalism and American Far Right nativism should have told their followers - and they do have a sizable following - to do all they can for Romney, to get out there and vote for their man Romney, and despite the fact that white Americans won't necessarily be better off under Romney.
But these leaders (and I won't name names) didn't. They smirked, they sneered, they talked Romney down, they told their following that 'Voting changes nothing', 'America and the white race are doomed', 'Things have to get worse before they get better', 'Democracy and politics are a farce', and on and on.
AFRO-AMERICAN: Votes for Obama because he's black;
WHITE NATIONALIST: Don't vote for Romney, he's not pure enough, 'Voting changes nothing', 'Romney and Obama are the same', race doesn't matter.
To repeat: Afro-Americans are suffering under Obama. They are suffering under his economic policies, and his immigration policies - immigrants are consistently snapping up most of the jobs created under the Obama Administration, and taking them from white and Afro-Americans. But they vote for their man. I can think of one or two of Romney's policies which would have had a positive effect on the lives of white Americans, but that's besides the point: someone who's white, and who promulgates racialist, ethnicist and identity politics, should have endorsed Romney, and done everything in their power to get him elected - because he was white.
Quite a few white American 'conservatives' vote Republican because of dog whistle signals - they pick up on, subconsciously, the fact that the Republican Party is the party of the married white person who owns a home or has a mortgage (as Steve Sailer points out). I'm sure that there's an enormous anger, among that segment of the American population (which is quite sizable), against the Obama voters and supporters: the college students, the Jewish-American hedge fund managers, the fat cat public sector unionists, the hipsters, the Hollywood actors and directors, the rock stars like Bruce Springsteen, the stupid soccer moms, the homosexual journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post... Were I a white American 'conservative', my first impulse would be to approach one of these Obama voters and say, 'F*ck you, for making my life, and the lives of my countrymen, that little bit harder for the next four years'. The same goes for all the Australians, Canadians and Europeans who support Obama.
But really, I can't castigate these Obama-supporters: they are, after all, voting according to type, just as much as the African-Americans, who want their 'Obama phones', are. No, it's the white nationalists, the movement purists, in America, who deserve the anger.
White nationalism really is a contrived, ahistorical, abstract and universalist ideology. In a way, it's a form of Christianity: one is obliged to unconditionally love one's brethren, simply on the basis of their race, and ignore any unique ethnic, national and regionalist features. Such an enterprise is doomed to fail, of course, and historically, has never been enacted. Perhaps this is why white nationalism is so purist and aloof from the doings of the real world. Because it is so abstract, and doesn't take into account political realities, it counsels its followers not to engage in politics, in any shape or form.
America is a weak country under Obama, and for that, European nationalists should be grateful. Had Obama the gumption of a Franklin Roosevelt or a Winston Churchill, he would have invaded Greece and Hungary by now to 'stop fascism' by stamping out the Golden Dawn and Jobbik; he would have also loudly remonstrated with Germany and told it to stop bullying its fellow European nations (or perhaps, solicitously, offered those bullied nations some Marshall Plan-type aid - to get them on their feet again). But America (and Israel) have lost all interest in Europe, and will only pay attention if and when Germany starts inclining on the same path as Greece and Hungary. But by then it will be too late. We nationalists can pray and hope.
As for the American whites, well, they'll have to start looking at the political possibilities - outside of libertarianism, conservatism and white nationalism.
