Similar to the antebellum South, the current economy of the United States is built upon servile labor, although of a different racial composition from what the Southern plantations of old had.  One speaks of the millions of Chinese workers in innumerable industrial plantations who have their labor sold in bulk for pennies on the dollar by CCP bosses to Western multi-nationals. These poor souls prop up our modern synthetic American economy, which the CCP virus has bared for all to see.

As in the agricultural plantations of the South, this servile labor is directed toward the enrichment of a treasonous oligarch class.  The reliance upon servile labor inevitably leads to problems of great import.  In the South these interlocking issues were (1) slave uprisings (and the fear thereof, which was always present even in the most outwardly serene of times) and (2) the authoritarian nature of a society nominally democratic (e.g., the use of slave patrols, the use of intrusive domestic surveillance to enforce laws against the education of slaves and the corrosive anti-republican lessons taught as a master wielded tyrannical power over his slaves).

Our specific sort of servile labor presents its own peculiar interlocking issues, which are (1) the pernicious pauperization of the American worker and his family (the building block of bourgeois society and of "the conservative order") and (2) the stranglehold of the CCP (an unrepentant enemy of the United States) over key parts of the American economy and its ability to use that economic power to further its insidious foreign policy goals within and outside America via economic blackmail.

Let us begin by stating something that for decades on the right has been intentionally misunderstood, undermined, and ridiculed, which only until recently under the temporary reign of the Trumpists is slowly and awkwardly being grasped yet again (see Ahmarism and its variants).  It is as follows: it should be the overriding concern of the conservative movement to prevent the obliteration of the bases by which the metaphysical values of a conservative order are able to materialize within society.

To put it much more simply, the goal of conservatism is to maintain and defend the building block of the bourgeois society or "the conservative order," which is the American family.  It is neither the atomized individual nor the corporation that represents the building block of society, but the "individual-in-society" — that is to say the individual who is an active part of the small platoons of society, foremost among them the family.  The American working man along with his wife and children in their local community represents the soul of America.

We must come to understand (contrary to political habit) that rootless world capitalists are the flip side of the coin to international Marxists.  The conservative movement has been (rightly) trained to attack the latter but has been lulled into not only benignly accepting, but even defending the former.  Both sorts of men are "citizens of the world" who disdain passports and feel absolutely no allegiance to their home countries.  Their eyes (and those of their ideological sympathizers) have lost that discriminatory ability to tell the difference between a citizen and a foreigner.

These "Davos men" (whether they have Ds or Rs next to their names) have allowed the CCP to sink its poisonous hooks deep into the commanding heights of American society.  On the domestic front, Hollywood now routinely self-censors its blockbusters to placate the CCP bosses in its pathetic attempt to be allowed to profit from the Chinese film market, and American universities are haunted by Chinese professorial spies and give aid and comfort to "Confucius Institutes" (not to mention lesser known but more insidious joint ventures like transnational training programs) in the name of internationalism.

Our multi-national corporations all across the board are enmeshed so deeply within China that every once in a while, the CCP bigwigs in Beijing yank their dog leashes so overtly that you can see it happen in real time in grotesque detail (e.g., the NBA and Hong Kong).  On the foreign front, Hong Kong is deemed an olive branch to give the CCP, Taiwan an indefensible nuisance, and never-ending Chinese cyber-attacks are "the new normal."

This is what we have given up in exchange for "Eastern scrap[s] of metal" and "half-rotten imported foodstuff."  It is therefore essential that the modern conservative movement move beyond the worship of gold and not only "against the dead consensus," but beyond it.  The free market is a means to an end, not an end in itself.  American citizens must be united by more than corporate bonds, and a political community exists to do more than make men rich.

Ernesto J. Antunez is a conservative columnist residing in Miami.  He can be reached at ernestoantunez@live.com or via Facebook at facebook.com/ejantunez or Twitter at @ejantunez.