Merry:
The election’s real political fault line.
The
pundits and commentators and pols and prognosticators will all identify
multifarious political fault lines to explain the looming epic American battle
between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – women vs. Trump; evangelicals vs.
Hillary; Hispanics vs. white, working-class Americans with no college; the LBGT
community vs. traditionalists; old vs. young. It’s all important, but not very.
Any true understanding of this election requires an appreciation of the one
huge political fault line that is driving America into a period of serious
political tremors, certain to jolt the political Richter scale. It is
nationalists vs. globalists.
Globalists
captured much of American society long ago by capturing the bulk of the
nation’s elite institutions—the media, academia, big corporations, big finance,
Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations. So powerful are these
institutions—in themselves and, even more so, collectively—that the elites
running them thought that their political victories were complete and final.
That’s why we have witnessed in recent years a quantum expansion of social and
political arrogance on the part of these high-flyers.
Then
along comes Donald Trump and upends the whole thing. Just about every major
issue that this super-rich political neophyte has thrown at the elites turns
out to be anti-globalist and pro-nationalist. And that is the single most
significant factor in his unprecedented and totally unanticipated rise.
Consider some examples:
Immigration:
Nationalists believe that any true nation must have clearly delineated and
protected borders, otherwise it isn’t really a nation. They also believe that
their nation’s cultural heritage is sacred and needs to be protected, whereas
mass immigration from far-flung lands could undermine the national commitment
to that heritage. Globalists don’t care about borders. They believe the
nation-state is obsolete, a relic of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which
codified the recognition of co-existing nation states. Globalists reject
Westphalia in favor of an integrated world with information, money, goods and
people traversing the globe at accelerating speeds without much regard to
traditional concepts of nationhood or borders.
Foreign Policy:
Globalists are motivated by humanitarian impulses. For them, the rights and
well-being of the world’s people supersede the rights and well-being of the
American populace. Indeed, as writer Robert D. Kaplan has observed, the liberal
embrace of universal principles as foreign-policy guidance “leads to a pacifist
strain…when it comes to defending our hard-core national interest, and an aggressive
strain when it comes to defending human rights.” Globalists, in advocating
foreign policy adventurism, are quick to conflate events in the Baltics, say,
or Georgia or Ukraine with U.S. national interest, but it’s really about the
globalist impulse of dominating world events. Nationalists don’t care about
dominating world events. Being nationalists, they want their country to be
powerful, with plenty of military reach, but mostly to protect American
national interests. They usually ask a fundamental question when foreign
adventures are proposed—whether the national interest justifies the expenditure
of American blood and treasure on behalf of this or that military initiative.
The fate of other people struggling around the globe, however heartrending,
doesn’t usually figure large in nationalist considerations. The fate of America
is the key.
Trade: The history of trade in
America admits of no straight-line analysis. Andrew Jackson was a supreme
nationalist, and a free-trader. William McKinley made America a global power,
but was a protectionist. In our own time, though, the fault line is clear.
Globalists salute the free flow of goods across national borders on the theory
that this will foster ever greater global commerce, to the benefit of all peoples
of all nations. Writer and commentator Thomas L. Friedman, a leading globalist
of his generation, once extolled America as the world’s role model for “globally
integrated free-market capitalism.” That was before the Great Recession and the
subsequent anemic recovery throughout most of the Obama years. Today’s American
nationalists look at the results of the kind of “globalization” extolled by
Friedman and conclude that it has hollowed out America’s industrial core.
Whether they are right or not, their focus is on the American citizens whose
lives and livelihoods have been also hollowed out in many instances. Thus has a
powerful new wave of protectionism washed over the body politic, leaving
globalist elites running to get out of the way. Globalists were too focused on
global trade and commerce to notice the horrendous plight of America’s internal
refugees from the industrial nation of old.
Political Correctness: Given
that globalists dominate the nation’s elite institutions and often exploit
their position of power to ridicule and marginalize the so-called “Middle
America” of ordinary citizens, who also happen to be nationalists, these people
often feel on the defensive politically and culturally. And we are beginning to
understand, courtesy of the Trump candidacy, just how angry they were at the
emergence of the political correctness cadres who tell them what to think, how
to regard the political issues of the day, and how they themselves will be
regarded if they don’t toe the line (racist, homophobe and xenophobe are
frequent threatened epithets). Globalists don’t care much about this phenomenon
because it is employed largely in behalf of their views and philosophical
outlook, including their globalist sensibilities. But nationalists care about
it a lot. They send their kids to college in pursuit of betterment, and
discover that political correctness is hammering away at the views and values
they tried to teach their children as they were growing up. And their views and
values aren’t allowed to compete in any free marketplace of ideas on campus but
instead are declared inappropriate and intolerable before they are even
uttered.
Cultural Heritage:
Nationalists care about their national heritage, which they view as a
repository of wisdom and lessons handed down by our forebears in this grand
experiment that is both mystifying and inspiring. Globalists, not so much.
Nationalists seethe at the assault under way against so many giants of our
heritage, flawed though they were (as are we today). Globalists are the ones
leading the assault.
On all
of these fault lines, we see just how much pressure has been building up in
recent years while the globalist elites concluded the issues involved were
either settled or under control. Immigration—much talk about the need for
reform but nothing done while the influx continued. Foreign policy—polls
showing many Americans wary of interventionist adventurism while
interventionist adventurism remained the prevailing attitude of governmental
elites. Trade—a solid consensus among elites that free trade had no serious
opposition, while industrial America crumbled. Political correctness—a blithe
disregard for the sensibilities of non-globalist citizens. Cultural
heritage—the power of the influence class brought to bear against those who
cherish their country’s history. It isn’t surprising that the globalist class
concluded that it really didn’t have to worry about any serious opposition out
in the country.
But
they did, and Donald Trump was the messenger. He not only attacked
out-of-control immigration but did it in such a way as to signal that this was
one politician who truly intended to do something about it. Despite some of his
boorish rhetoric, or perhaps even because of it, nationalist Americans perked
up and rallied around. On foreign policy, he posed questions that nobody else
was willing to raise: Why do we need NATO as currently constituted when the
Soviet Union no longer exists to threaten Europe? Why should Americans pay for
the defense of rich Europeans when they can easily afford to protect themselves?
Why should America continue to pursue a policy of promiscuous regime change
when recent history tells us it usually produces disaster and chaos? Why can’t
the elites recognize and acknowledge the regional mess wrought by their
ill-considered Iraq War? Trump answers these questions in ways that set the
teeth of the elites on edge, but it turns out many Americans are asking the
same questions and buying the Trump answers.
On
trade, Trump isn’t exactly original in his protectionist leanings. Such thinking
has played a significant role at various times in American history—in good
times and bad. And as recently as 1988, Democrat Richard Gephardt ran on the
issue of “economic nationalism.” But once again Trump has upended the old
politics and opened up a new fault line. On political correctness, he offers a
counter-assault that is breathtaking in its political distinctiveness and
force. And on cultural heritage, he said it all when he said, “We’re going to
be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.”
Hillary
Clinton, meanwhile, is the personification of the globalist elite—generally
open borders, humanitarian interventionist, traditionally a free trader (though
hedging in recent months), totally in sync with the underlying sensibilities of
political correctness, a practitioner of identity politics, which lies at the
heart of the assault on the national heritage. Nothing reflects this Clinton
identity more starkly than the Clinton Foundation, a brilliant program to chase
masses of money from across borders to fund the underpinnings of an ongoing
political machine.
It’s impossible to say at
this early stage in the political season whether Trump, the candidate of the
New Nationalism, actually has a chance to win the presidency. But, win or lose,
he has shaken up the political system, introduced powerful new rhetoric and
opened up a new political fault line between nationalism and globalism that
isn’t going away anytime soon. For the globalist elites of America, it’s an
entirely new era.
