By Darrell Dow
For years, the “right” condemned the corruption of the post–Cold War managerial state that hollowed out America’s economy, while enriching a cloistered elite. The Biden Crime Family’s self-dealing became a symbol of this rot.
But under the banner of “nationalism,” American foreign policy is now being devised and implemented by a handful of real estate developers and financiers, whose business dealings — and family ties — overlap with the president. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff, special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, are not career diplomats, but dealmakers operating through personal networks, backchannels, and relationships forged in the world of Big Capital.
When such actors become the principal architects of foreign policy —particularly in Russia and the Middle East — the line between national interest and personal incentive is obliterated.
Economic and political nationalism was never going to abolish corruption. The promise was that corruption would be constrained, localized, and compensated for by benefits to the nation’s core population. Industrial reshoring, family-supporting wages, housing affordability, and demographic renewal were supposed to be part of the bargain. If power was to be centralized and personalized, it would at least be wielded on behalf of the people whose name it invoked.
The problem is that the bargain is not being honored.
What has emerged instead is a great deal of empty rhetoric paired with a political economy indistinguishable from late-stage asset capitalism. Real estate developers do not build nations, they extract rents. They benefit from the inflation of assets and capital mobility, not wage growth or rooted families.
What was once denounced as corruption from the other side is now excused as “outsider dealmaking.” Influence-peddling morphs into “leadership.” The managerial class is merely replaced by a narrower and more personal elite operating with even less transparency.
This is not a repudiation of nationalism as such. It is an indictment of a nationalism that never progressed beyond symbolism. The administration promised and renewal — a Golden Age — and instead delivered spectacle that masks elite continuity.
Nationalism that cannot deliver material, demographic, and cultural goods to its own people is not a governing philosophy, it’s just a grift.
Darrell Dow is a contributor to American Remnant.
