We are near 100 years after I’ll Take My Stand emerged into the zeitgeist – a salvo at the leviathan hyper industrial economic system rapidly encroaching into all regions of the United States. The 12 Southern authors could perhaps divine what level of societal destabilization would happen by the year 2030 at the trajectory in 1930, but I’d wager modern reality is worse than their worst expectations. Hundreds of books and studies could dissect our modern evils, but I assert most of these evils’ inception lies in mass industrialism. In all regions within the US, society in various ways tells us that economic output is the sole metric for our innate human value. Society tacitly declares that anything that gets in the way of our economic output must be eradicated – family, self-fulfillment (outside of your job of course – see the Hustle Culture), faithful and self-sufficient communities, and so on. The banality of the mercantile world has remained unbearable long after the 1999 movie Office Space was released.
I recognize the scope of this essay is broad, where each topic deserves its own commentary, but I hope to cast a wide net to shed light on how overarching is the current threat of the economic trajectory we are in. As economist John Maynard Keynes stated of the German economy before World War I, “The German machine was like a top which to maintain its equilibrium must spin ever faster and faster ” (also referenced in I’ll Take My Stand). This quote is equally applicable to the American economic system. Everyone feels this in the daily grind, or climbing ever taller corporate ladders, or pushing for quarterly or annual growth. For our system to keep moving forward we must work faster and more efficiently every day. There is no rest. There is no salvation without growth. The economy means everything. As an aside, we all see the impacts of this ever spinning top: our products are worse by the year, services are worse, you have more commercials every other month on all your streaming services, every business must pull in more revenue every year, for eternity, in order to keep growing – or else we all die. Or something.
Frank Lawrence Owsley in The Irrepressible Conflict describes a similar sentiment for our modern need for speed which is applicable in our technology crazed era – technology is invented, causes problems, then requires even more technology to solve those problems ad infinitum. Some would call it a vicious cycle, it could also be called a pyramid scheme.
On that note, we must recognize we are in a new phase of the industrial revolution: fungible labor phase.
I am an amateur historian with an MBA, but I am no scholar to analyze sub phases of the industrial revolution through today. I am astute enough to know that somewhere in the last 30 years a new phase of the industrial revolution emerged that threatens to not only fully destroy a Southern sentiment of agrarianism, but also threatens to erode Southern culture in our own lands. This phase I am calling fungible labor – where big business and big government connive, against us, to import anyone who will work for a decreasing value of wages. It is the logical conclusion of moving from an agrarian society, where people work their land while inherently developing a culture and civilization, to a fully industrial society, where all waking effort is placed into feeding the company you work for while your kids spend most of their time at school, your spouse works a separate job, and the aggregated time spent together pales in comparison to the time apart.
Both sides of the political spectrum are comfortable with this new fungible labor phase. For decades the political right passively asserted that the reason for a nation to exist is to increase the economy. The economy is all that matters. America is an economic zone that must import anyone that could contribute to the bottom line. Legal immigration, even in large numbers, is lauded. The left purports to be against big business but so many of the founders, CEOs, and executives are leftists. The left today certainly does not care about Americans in our lands. These Americans, us, caused so many of the world’s problems after all. Anyone who arrives on our shores is immediately an American that needs the largesse of our welfare. Matt Walsh captures this idea when he posted, “White Americans are invaders in America even after 500 years. But the third world illegal migrant who got here last Tuesday is just as American as anyone else and if you call him an invader you’re racist.”
Both sides have no issue with big business and big government conniving when it suits their needs. Both sides want fungible labor from anywhere in the world, although for different reasons. One side for aloof economic reasons, and one side for potential future votes. It’s all fungible labor psychology.
British historian and archeologist Ian Morris in his 2010 book Why the West Leads – For Now claims there are ‘5 Horses of the Apocalypse’ referring to societal harm or collapse: Climate Change, Famine, Migration, Epidemic and State Failure. We are currently staring straight down the barrel at migration. Mass migration, specifically foreign mass migration, will erode our culture. I challenge the reader to find a historic mass migration event that did not destabilize the recipient society. Can the South absorb many of these people into our culture? Sure. Can the South culturally absorb millions of foreigners who arrived nearly all at once? Unlikely – but possible. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia wrote about this in his excellent book Born Fighting referring to the Scots-Irish general openness to outsiders joining their clans. But were the Scots-Irish ever in a position to absorb millions of people who did not intend to assimilate – or even if they did intend to, could they?
The current reality leaves us with a few options. We can vote for policies that dissuade mass migration like border control and restricting state welfare to citizens, we can try to hire American workers, we can buy products from businesses that don’t knee jerk react to importing H1B workers when the slightest need arises, and so on. But to do these things, aside from voting, is often unavoidable in our current economy for various reasons. Our economy seeks the lowest paid workers from wherever. There is no indication that wage increases or the welfare of the American worker is at the core of any business activity today. It is the era of global fungible labor. America is an economic zone that you happen to be born in. Our ancestors created our economic and political system, but now the world gets to benefit when our businesses, facilitated by our government, need cheaper labor – across all industries.
The statistics on welfare recipients of these migrants should give you pause. From the Center of Immigration Studies’ article Welfare Use by Immigrants and the U.S.-Born, 2024 written February 2026:
- The 2024 [Survey of Income and Program Participation] SIPP indicates that 53 percent of households headed by immigrants — naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants — used one or more major welfare programs. This compares to 37 percent for U.S.-born households.
- The rate is 59 percent for non-citizen households (e.g. green card holders and illegal immigrants).
Not only are your communities receiving mass migration, but you are funding, to some degree, 59% of them. It is a net drain. I won’t even be discussing the interpersonal and cultural assimilation challenges of mass migration in this post. Remember though, the migrants are human beings created equally in the eyes of God. However, they are being used as tool by our malevolent system.
Behold the new and perhaps final era of the industrial revolution: you pay the government to facilitate your own destruction. You pay taxes to be immersed by foreigners while you pay for their living and then compete with them in the job market. You spend an increasing percentage of your income to pay for your 30 year mortgage, utilities, daycare (after all, two spouses often both work – that top must keep spinning!), federal taxes, state taxes, county taxes, city taxes, taxes on money you earn, money you spend with that money you earn, taxes on property and assets you own that you paid for with the money you earned that was taxed, and then taxed again when you purchased said property…and so on.
The adoption of mass industrialism has also brought other pains like the erosion of purchasing power and arguably declining birth and marriage rates, although the familial issues are more likely both economic and religious. But do not all economic systems impact religion and vice versa? That’s for another day.
We received the one-two punches of the 1913 adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing federal income tax, and the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank (of which it is none of those three words) through the passing of the Federal Reserve Act. This 1913 blow was the breeching action of our economic leviathan before the insatiable tentacles of the industrialists could reach a defense population. Then in 1971 Nixon moved the US economy off of the gold standard to fiat currency. For anyone who enjoys statistics doomscrolling, read The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin analyzing the Federal Reserve Bank, then look at this blog charting all the drastic changes following the wake of the US moving away from the gold standard in 1971.
What is worth noting were the promises of economic stability because of these so-called advances in economics against what actually happened (not an exhaustive list):
Depression of 1920-1921
Great Depression: 1929-1939 (what was the Federal Reserve Act passed for again?)
1973-1975 Recession
1980-1982 Recession
Savings and Loan Crisis: 1980s-1990s
1987 Black Monday
Dot-com Bubble 2000-2002
2008 Great Recession
Covid-19 Recession
Granted, economic turmoil will happen anywhere for many reasons, but our leviathan government and economic overlords will say anything to keep growing, to keep that top spinning. A federal income tax would have been absurd to any of the Founding Fathers. And as the top spins faster our families pay the toll. Let’s look at marriage rates over time in the US.
Marriage rate per 1,000 population:
1925: 10.3 per 1,000 (CDC)
1955: 9.3 (CDC)
1975: 10.0 (CDC)
2025: 6.0-6.5 (Census)
Now birthrates in the US:
1925: 106.6 per 1,000 women (VisualCapitalist)
1955: 3.5 births per woman
1975: 1.8-2.0 births per woman (replacement rate is 2.1)
2025:1.75 births per woman (below replacement)
Purchasing Power (from In 2013 dollars):
2025: $1 = $1 1975: $1 ≈ $5.80–$6 1955: $1 ≈ $11–$12.
1925: $1 ≈ $18–$19.
And the housing market: In 1925 a new house cost could go around $11,600, 1955 for $20,000 (Dqydj), 1975 for $40,000 (Census), 2025 median home price $410,000-$425,000 (Fred.stlouisfed).
You get the idea. Our great great or great grandparents were told industrialism would be better and more stable. That entering the money economy, as many of the 12 Southerners would call it, offered benefits of not being tied to our land, to have a little extra cash for luxuries. But in many cases industrializing was practically unavoidable. And now we are nearly all in this money economy with no obvious way out. The USDA states 1-2% of the US labor force today is employed in farming. In 1900 it was 38%-40%. And now we are in the fungible labor phase, where Americans did not spin the top fast enough to keep growing so our overlords demand more people, from anywhere, to spin the top faster. Sovereignty, family, and culture be damned.
We have to ask ourselves what the purpose of working is. If it’s merely to feed a system, for survival, for self-actualization – or some form of all three. Why live in the hustle culture if the hustle culture promises to limit or erode the family and our culture? One only needs to glance at The Hind Tit by Andrew Nelson Lytle or Robert B. Heilman in Spokesman and Seer to get a sense that we lost the plot. That work, work on our own land, was something in and of itself good, and allowed family and culture to flourish. The Jeffersonian ideals, ideals that were already in practice before Jefferson wrote them down in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1787, were captured because he saw the agrarian way of life as noble in and of itself. It was sufficient, and it was good for the individual, the family, community, and the faith. Across the pond and a century later G.K. Chesterton, not a practicing agrarian – like the author of this essay, recognized this sentiment in 1910 when he wrote What’s Wrong With The World, outlining his distributist proposition. Perhaps a return to agrarianism is a necessity to preserve ourselves. Or some larger percentage of agrarianism to keep the balance. As it took generations to industrialize, so could generations gradually revert to agrarianize. But this topic will be explored later.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
