Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Poster (CC BY-SA 3.0)
“Torn between national feeling, the last refuge of the emotions of the old world, and transnationality, springboard of the new world, football [soccer] fans and all those who gravitate round this sport suffer from a veritable schizophrenia. Its extreme complexity provides a perfect illustration of the ambivalence of the world in which we all live.” –Pierre Brochand, translated from the French by Eric Hobsbawm
Extremely patriotic people tend to be on the conservative side, while people who express discomfort with patriotism tend to be politically left of center. I trust that this claim squares with your own life experiences. In fact, you might counter that this claim is so banal that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Conservatives are the defenders of nationalist sentiment. Leftists are more oriented towards global-universal themes. It’s a truism of well established conventional wisdom. To this, however, I would counter with an observation. The pressures of ‘globalization’ (and the neo-nationalist backlash against those pressures) at the beginning of the 21st century are throwing into crisis the very terrain that this conventional wisdom is premised upon, and people on the right and the left no longer seem to be sure exactly where they fit. We find ourselves living in a time of great political-ideological schizophrenia. At any rate, this what I hope to convince you.
Consider the following. Patriotism as we understand and express it today arose with and is closely linked to the rise of the modern, territorial nation-state. The ancient world certainly knew the patriot–a person loyal to the patrius, that is, the city, the familiar (family) place, and the authority of the father (patriot and patriarch have a common etymological origin in patrius). However, patriotism (i.e., the ‘-ism’) appears to be a neologism of 18th century Europe. One of its first expressions was in A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism written in 1736 by an English Tory blowhard called Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke.
Consider also that in roughly this same timeframe (some 300 years ago or so) Europe entered its famous Age of Enlightenment. And although John Calvin had already established by proclamation the Republic of Geneva in 1541, it was the Age of Enlightenment that really inaugurated the era of the constitutionally-limited democratic republic. The first instance was in 1776 (the American Revolution) and the second was in 1789 (the French Revolution).
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries the constitutional republic and the nation-state really took off. By the end of the 20th century the resulting liberal world order had grown so dominant that, as I pointed out elsewhere, in 1989 a foolish member of Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration (a fellow named Francis Fukuyama) prematurely claimed that it had effectively “ended history” by permanently vanquishing its ideological competitors, fascism and communism. This is, of course, the very same liberal world order we see crumbling before our eyes today.
Finally, consider this: what if, instead of the end of history a la Fukuyama, we’re experiencing the end of a historical epoch spanning roughly from the Age of Enlightenment to the end of the 20th Century? I don’t mean the end of “modernity” at the hands of some bullshit irrationalist/reactionary postmodernism (a notion familiar in academic circles since the 1970s). I mean this: what if the basic political unit of social, political, and economic activity, and the locus of both collective cultural identity and the exercise of human rights and freedoms of the past three centuries was crumbling under the technological and economic weight of globalization? To put it simply, what if we’re witnessing the twilight of the territorial nation-state?
To put it simply, what if we’re witnessing the twilight of the territorial nation-state?
The British historian Eric Hobsbawm already argued quite forcefully in the first decade of the 21st century that the eventual failure of the territorial nation-state was a fait accompli. We’ll examine some of the reasons why this might be the case in greater detail, but suffice it to say for now that they are reasons that any person paying even a modest amount of attention to world events in 2017 will find quite familiar. For now I want to note that if Hobsbawm is correct then patriotism, nationalism, constitutional republicanism, Western liberalism, and the whole edifice of universal moral and political ideals associated with the Enlightenment (including especially human rights) should be placed on the endangered species list as well. You ought to find this very concerning, by the way (I use ‘ought’ in the full-bore morally prescriptive sense here). I certainly do.
This is a large “can of worms” I’m opening here, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I’m going to unfold my exploration across two installments. In this first essay I’ll begin with a brief account of conventional attitudes towards patriotism and nationalism on the right and the left. I’ll then ‘map’ the terrain of these attitudes to current globalist and neo-nationalist themes to illustrate how these conventional attitudes have become blurred and confused, leaving us in a state of what I’m calling ideological schizophrenia. In the second installment I’ll examine the very serious challenges that globalization poses for the territorial nation-state, the fate of constitutional democratic republicanism, and the world at large–challenges for which our conventional political and ideological beliefs and commitments are alarmingly ill-equipped.
The Dogmatic Patriotism of the Right
In addressing left and right attitudes concerning patriotism I’m going begin with the right simply because the topic of patriotism is much more straightforward and uncomplicated for conservatives. I’m painting in broad strokes here. I realize there are nuances in conservative politics, some of which fall outside of a treatment according to ideal types.
That said, generally speaking conservatives embrace patriotism dogmatically. For the conservative there is little need to offer up defenses and apologies because patriotism is a given. Patriotic feelings are considered a perfectly natural extension of the feelings of love, affection, and partiality that a person has for his or her own family, friends, and community. Asking someone why she loves her country is as unthinkable as asking her why she loves her father and mother, her siblings, her spouse, or her own children.
For many conservatives the moral value of patriotism is so dogmatically obvious that the very act of questioning it is considered highly offensive–a morally contemptible lack of respect not only for the country (the nation) but for those (especially military veterans) who’ve made grave sacrifices for it. Insufficient patriotism is akin to expressing a lack of gratitude towards your parents for raising you.
Patriotic feelings are considered a perfectly natural extension of the feelings of love, affection, and partiality that a person has for his or her own family, friends, and community.
This unquestioning dogmatism risks placing patriotism beyond good and evil (“my country right or wrong”) in a way that’s ripe for criticism. However, criticism of this sort already misses the point by dragging patriotism from the realm of natural, familial-style, unconditional love to the realm of morally-conditioned rational reflection. If your son does something terrible, up to and including murder, that doesn’t mean you cease to love him. This is true even if you conclude that he’s not exactly a very good person. Patriotism functions in much the same way for conservatives. Thoughts of morally tempering one’s love and loyalty simply don’t arise. Nor does the thought that extending traditional family and kinship obligations to the modern territorial nation-state might actually be a fairly recent historical convention. In its strongest form–in the United States for example–patriotic feelings function as a kind of nationalist fundamentalism replete with quasi-religious overtones.
Given that patriotism is accepted by its defenders as natural and sentimental rather than rational, there is sadly a dearth of strong arguments in its favor. We shouldn’t conclude from this, by the way, that patriotism is incapable of being defended on its own merits. The point is rather that for conservatives the onus of proof is almost always assumed to be on that of the critic of patriotism who by the very act of questioning is already highly suspect, already a hater.
The Skeptical Cosmopolitanism of the Left
I hardly need to explain to you that people on the left aren’t big flag wavers. If conservatives are dogmatic about patriotism, those on the political left are skeptical. Patriotism actually makes them quite uncomfortable. Again, I’m painting in broad, archetypal strokes here. In this case, because it’s the modern tradition of Western liberalism I’m focusing on I’m going to limit my treatment to the liberal left rather than, say, Marxists or other species of leftists.
A further point of clarification: in America many left liberals identify themselves as progressives, but in general Americans refer to left liberals simply as liberals (with no qualifier). This is confusing given that traditionally American conservatives are also liberals (e.g., Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan). To avoid confusion, I’ll call left liberals either “progressives” or “the liberal left”.
For the liberal left, embracing patriotism isn’t simply a matter of assessing one’s feelings (do I love or do I hate?) on their own merits. The subject of patriotism is as much a matter of the mind as of the heart. They engage in a rational assessment, weighing patriotism against universal moral demands. Their discomfort arises from their struggle to reconcile the two.
If conservatives are dogmatic about patriotism, those on the political left are skeptical. Patriotism actually makes them quite uncomfortable.
The universal morality in question is modern and rational and in many ways different from culturally organic traditional morality (what Hegel called Sittlichkeit) that patriotism evokes. It’s the modern morality of the Age of Enlightenment itself (what Hegel, referring to Kant, called Moralität). It’s also the morality that normatively underpins Western liberalism (which is itself a child of the Age of Enlightenment). It’s well expressed in the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), the US Bill of Rights (i.e., the first ten Amendments of the US Constitution, 1791), and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Central is the requirement that moral considerations regarding liberty, equality, justice, and especially human rights be applied universally and impartially to everyone. This universality by definition recognizes no national or territorial limits.
The suspicion that progressives harbor towards patriotism–which stem from the very origins of liberalism–is that it’s a pretense to run roughshod over morally inviolable human rights and freedoms. Passionate patriotic or nationalist sentiments threaten to prejudice people’s moral judgement to favor national interests over properly universal moral interests. This is more than a little worrisome for progressives. The national partiality patriotism fosters divides a universal humanity into tribe-like adversaries (i.e., patriotism is essentially chauvinism). This adversarial nature, in turn, often fans the flames of animosity, conflict, and war (i.e., patriotism is essentially jingoism). If patriotic bonds are as natural (Sittlichkeit) as family bonds, like conservatives often claim they are, progressives would have you remember the fate of the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Mapping to Globalization
As you well know, since the global economic crisis sparked by the Great Recession, there has been a growing backlash against globalization, and especially the economic policies and practices of global capitalism in its current neoliberal form. The predominant form that this backlash has taken is that of ultra-nationalist right-wing populism. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine LePen in France, UKIP in the UK (which drove the Brexit movement), and of course Donald Trump in the United States are prominent examples.
We might be tempted to try to neatly map the political left and right attitudes towards patriotism I just presented to, respectively, the pro-globalist camp and the ultra-nationalist camp. The pro-globalists, on this mapping, are your cosmopolitan progressives and the ultra-nationalists are your patriotic conservatives. Indeed, since the last American election cycle this is how political rhetoric has painted the political landscape in the U.S. (and for that matter, also in Europe). The prevailing narrative looks something like this:
Fans of globalization and global neoliberal economic policy are those who’ve tended to benefit from those policies (even if it’s been at the expense of others). These people tend to be your educated, urban/coastal liberal elites. Their worldview is cosmopolitan. Regarding their commitments to a progressive emancipatory project, they’re social justice warriors, where ‘social justice’ is understood through the ideology of identity politics rather than socio-economic class. Their candidate was Hillary Clinton, the progressive liberal/pro-global neoliberalism candidate with the Wall Street war chest and the $225,000 Goldman Sachs speeches. She was the (anti-)Democratic party’s heir apparent to replace progressive liberal/pro-global neoliberal President Barack Obama, who fought mightily (but failed) to pass the pro-globalist Trans-Pacific Partnership before his term ended.
The ultra-nationalist right-wing populist backlash camp, according to the prevailing narrative, is a mixed bag of nostalgic conservatives, Evangelical Christian traditionalists, protectionists, working class whites, and xenophobic nativists, with a healthy sprinkling of scary ethnic and racial nationalists and white supremacists. What they all have in common is that they love America. They’re patriots, every one. They wave the flag and stand for the pledge of allegiance. Their candidate was Donald J. Trump, the conservative/populist, nativist, ultra-nationalist (America First!), anti-immigrant islamophobe who takes counsel from the white nationalist Steves (Bannon and Miller). He advocates trade protectionism, breaking international agreements, restricting immigration, shaking down liberal democracies for protection money, and building a ridiculous wall along the US-Mexican border.
The pro-globalists, on this mapping, are your cosmopolitan progressives and the ultra-nationalists are your patriotic conservatives.
These rather unflattering characterizations are already quite sanitized and polite. Stated in the crude, cynical. polemically charged language of partisan propaganda media outlets on the right and the left, we might summarize them thusly (forgive me for “going there”):
On one side there are a bunch of rich liberal elites who ‘white shame’ the struggling working class about their white privilege while buying $4 avocados at Whole Foods; rootless cosmopolitans who hate America; cultural and moral (Sittlichkeit) degenerates who obsess over “bathroom rights” but are more than happy to economically fuck decent, hard working Americans in the name of freedom, justice, and prosperity for the few.
On the other side are a bunch of intolerant, flag-waving knuckle-draggers; ignorant, flyover state moral (Moralität) degenerates; gun-toting racists, homophobes, and mean-spirited religious bigots who think that post-World War II style prosperity will be restored as soon as we build a fence around the country and kick out all of the brown people.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Exploding the Map
As neat and convenient as it looks, this polarized mapping of progressive liberal universalist to globalism and conservative patriot to ultra-nationalism is not nearly as clean and precise as it looks at first blush. This isn’t to suggest that there’s not a lot of truth to these characterizations (particularly if we describe them in terms a bit more generous and less unflattering and cynical). However, they’re also quite deceptive in ways that I think do not serve us well as we face contemporary geo-political challenges.
It is simply not the case that a commitment to morally universal liberal principles leads inexorably to a full embrace of economic globalism (especially in its current global neoliberal capitalist form). Similarly, it is not the case that conservative patriotism commits a person to extreme forms of nationalism and right-wing populism. A few simple observations will demonstrate these points.
First, consider that in 2011 Occupy Wall Street, with its signature slogan “We are the 99%”, launched a populist left backlash against financial elites and global neoliberal capitalism. This backlash was fueled by outrage at the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute any of the corrupt and greedy financial players responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, and also by outrage at Obama’s neoliberalism-friendly Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s insistence upon bailing out Wall Street rather than Main Street. Clearly many (perhaps even most) of the Occupy protesters were progressive liberals. As such, it’s not surprising that they also were not patriotic nationalists (we didn’t see many American flags waving in Zuccotti Park). They were, however, radical critics of global neoliberal capitalism.
The same point can be made with Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential bid. Despite his ownership of the label “socialist”, Sanders is solidly in the progressive liberal left camp. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky and others have noted, Bernie Sanders–darling of the Occupy movement and a staunch critic of economic globalization–is basically an old school New Deal Democrat. That is to say, he’s an advocate of the sort of mixed economic “embedded liberalism” that fueled post-World War II prosperity in America and is now primarily associated with Scandinavian style “democratic socialism”.
It is simply not the case that a commitment to morally universal liberal principles leads inexorably to a full embrace of economic globalism (especially in its current global neoliberal capitalist form).
Second, the conservative Tea Party movement was born out of an outrage that was essentially the inverse of that of the Occupy movement: namely outrage over newly-elected President Barack Obama’s plans to offer financial assistance to bankrupt homeowners in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This populist movement of the right purposefully avoided potentially divisive conservative social issues associated with the culture wars (abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, etc.) to focus instead on a fiscally conservative commitment to limited government and, as the movement’s allusions to the Boston Tea Party suggest, a general disapproval of taxation. “Bailing out” bankrupt homeowners, their reasoning went, would further bloat an already outrageous national debt and leave taxpayers to foot the bill.
What’s important to note about this tea party backlash is that their movement’s platform comes right out the playbook of global neoliberal capitalism. To be clear: their platform is pro-globalization. Their aversion to debt and taxation and their advocacy of limited government is identical to the austerity demanded by market fundamentalism. Don’t believe me? Simply compare Tea Party demands to the ten essential economic policy prescriptions of the infamous Washington Consensus that are generally regarded as the fundamental principles of global neoliberal economic policy.
Similarly, it is not the case that conservative patriotism commits a person to extreme forms of nationalism and right-wing populism.
What exactly is going on here? How can liberal left “cosmopolitan universalists” be anti-globalists? How can patriotic conservative “nationalists” who sometimes dress in kitsch patriotic attire (colonial tri-corner hats festooned with tea bags) be pro-globalization? To sort this out it’ll be helpful to look briefly at the history of neoliberal economic policy in America. Before we do so, let me also acknowledge that neoliberalism is a term that’s frequently thrown around without very clear definition. This has been generating some confusing commentary of late. To (hopefully) be clear, my understanding of neoliberalism comes from economics. It’s summarized very briefly in the neoliberal category page of In Dark Times. The ten policy provisions of the Washington Consensus I mentioned above is also a good reference. Finally, if you’re interested, I’ve listed some suggestions for further reading at the bottom of this essay.
The Neoliberal Turn in American Politics
The suggestion that conservative American patriots are anti-global (ultra)nationalists fails to acknowledge the extent to which the architects and current defenders of the global neoliberal world order were and are American conservatives. This influence begins with none other than Republican demigod Ronald Reagan who, together with his UK consort Margaret Thatcher, is arguably the most influential political architect of neoliberalism.
As a caveat, it’s extremely important to bear in mind that credit (or blame) for neoliberalism is not attributable to Republicans alone. This has been a joint effort of Democrats and Republicans for a generation. It began not with Reagan but with Jimmy Carter’s first attacks on the New Deal (which oddly makes Nixon and Ford that last New Deal presidents) by deregulating transportation infrastructure and installing Paul Volcker as FED Chairman. Volcker attacked 1970s stagflation by abandoning Keynesian economic policy (which took full employment as an economic goal) in favor of Milton Friedman’s monetarism (which aims at limiting inflation regardless of political cost).
Things really took off, however, with Reagan’s “trickle down economics” (the euphemistic sugar pill used to sell the economic policies that would come to be called market fundamentalism or neoliberalism). The term “trickle down economics” is essentially a piece of political marketing-speak designed to convince voters that a program of massive wealth redistribution from the poor and middle classes to the rich was actually “a rising tide that lifts all boats.” Despite how devastating it’s been to the American middle class, it’s become a fundamental ideological component of American conservatism. Consequently, even American voters whose economic prospects have been damaged by it continue to support trickle down ideology (i.e., global neoliberal economic policy) to this day. Many of them do so while simultaneously engaging in a populist, ultra-nationalist revolt against its consequences (i.e., they display ideological schizophrenia).
This has been a joint effort of Democrats and Republicans for a generation.
This certainly isn’t the only instance of market fundamentalists manipulating middle class middle Americans into voting against their own interests. We might also examine conservative Republican attacks on organized labor. Given the intertwined history of labor unions and 19th and early 20th century socialist and communist movements, conservatives have long been opponents of organized labor. Nevertheless, from the end of World War II to 1981 unions exercised incredible political clout in the United States. Their funding and support constituted the backbone of the Democratic Party. Then in 1981 Reagan began to turn the tide on American support for unions by breaking the air traffic controller’s (PATCO) strike.
From the Reagan revolution through the culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s working class voters increasingly began to identify as conservative Republican rather than liberal Democrat. Consequently, attacks on labor unions under the guise of “right to work” ideology received increasing support from the very working class voters whose interests unions were created to protect. Republican Governor Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin and Republican Governor John Kasich’s victory in Ohio are two noteworthy recent examples.
Whether they do so knowingly or unwittingly, by supporting “right to work” legislation conservative working class voters support the very economic globalization their populist-nationalist revolt claims to oppose. Dismantling organized labor is an indispensable part of neoliberal orthodoxy. As David Harvey explains in his A Brief history of Neoliberalism, “…the neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation. Independent trade unions or other social movements […] which acquired considerable power under embedded liberalism, have therefore to be disciplined, if not destroyed, and this in the name of the supposedly sacrosanct individual liberty of the isolated labourer.”
“…the neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation.” -David Harvey
Once the collective bargaining power of organized labor is destroyed, it becomes possible to establish an efficient, profit-maximizing, global labor market. Noticing the way in which mid-20th century right to work legislation in American southern states siphoned work (at lower wages) away from the unionized northeastern and rust belt states, savvy working class Americans might have predicted what would happen when this economic strategy went global. As corporate profits soar from “market efficiencies”, first world workers with first world expenses are forced into a race to the bottom as they compete with cheap labor from places like India, China, and Bangladesh.
On a final note in this brief account of the neoliberal turn we should also mention the Democratic Party’s full and final capture by Wall Street market fundamentalists under President Bill Clinton. Partially due to their own abandonment of the working class, and partially due to the Republicans’ ability to break the back of the DNC’s union base of support, the Democratic Party of FDR’s New Deal was toast by the 1980s. However, the New Democrats under the leadership of Bill Clinton completed their neoliberal transformation by embracing global free-trade (Clinton signed NAFTA into law) and further undoing New Deal welfare state protections through austerity (e.g., Clinton “Ended welfare as we know it”).
Right Libertarianism: Thinking Outside of the Left/Right Box
Global neoliberal capitalism is neither a utopian ideal of the progressive movement (left leaning liberals) nor of the traditional American conservative movement (right leaning liberals). If global neoliberal capitalism is anyone’s utopian ideal, it’s a libertarian utopia. I’m referring here to the right libertarianism familiar in American politics.
Famous libertarian exemplars on the American political scene are former Texas congressman and Libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul and (in a much less ideologically pure sense) his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (named after notorious Russian émigré novelist, libertarian apologist, and pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand), but also billionaire political financiers Charles and David Koch (i.e., the infamous Koch brothers). Their economic orthodoxy is founded primarily in the works of the Austrian School of Economics’ Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek who, together with the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman, are the founders of neoliberal economic theory.
American libertarianism is instructive inasmuch as it simply does not fit within the progressive liberal v. conservative nationalist account of American patriotism I offered earlier. In some respects libertarians look like conservatives. For instance, when libertarians participate in American two-party politics they tend to run as and vote for Republicans. Their disdain for “big government,” their opposition to social programs, and their support for transferring economic control from public (government) to private (market) players aligns them with “fiscal conservatives.” And yet their advocacy of globally unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism and their defense of human rights as universal natural rights gives them a cosmopolitan-universalist outlook similar to that of the liberal left. Moreover, when they’re being ideologically true, libertarians also have no problem with multiculturalism, religious pluralism, and gay marriage.
If global neoliberal capitalism is anyone’s utopian ideal, it’s a libertarian utopia.
More importantly for our current purposes, libertarians are not nationalists, which means that unlike other “conservatives” they’re not very interested in patriotism. Indeed, it goes further than this. Libertarians have healthy contempt for the state itself. This animosity is so strong that in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick had to go to lengths to articulate and defend a version of a libertarian minimal state to distinguish libertarianism from individualist anarchism.
It’s important to note that like progressive liberalism and traditional American conservatism, libertarianism is a species of liberalism. As such, its disdain for the state is neither unique nor new to the tradition. It goes all the way back to the classical economic liberal theory of John Locke and continues through the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith.
Liberalism’s Problem with the State
In his Second Treatise of Government (1689) Locke established a natural law theory of private property rights (‘improve’ nature by mixing in your labor and it’s yours!) and the market (the problem of spoilage requires trade–no shit). Specious though these arguments are, liberal revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson were strongly influenced by them. They established private property and free trade as universal human rights prior to and independent of the artifice of the state.
For Locke the state is legitimate only on the basis of the free consent of property owners for the purpose of protecting private property rights, adjudicating legal disputes, and providing for external defense (sound familiar?). However, states are also inherently dangerous because they have a penchant for abusing the monopoly on violence invested in them to overstep their mandate and tumble into tyranny. Elaborating on this foundation, Hume and Smith also note that governments are expensive and inherently profligate. They’re prone to unconstrained debt spending, excessive taxation, and fiscally irresponsible military escapades. For Adam Smith, all of this made the state a necessary evil at best (but necessary all the same). In his book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, political economist Mark Blyth describes this scenario as the “can’t live with it, can’t live without it, don’t want to pay for it problem of the state in liberal thought.”
Mark Blyth describes this scenario as the “can’t live with it, can’t live without it, don’t want to pay for it problem of the state in liberal thought.”
This attitude regarding the state, transformed into the market fundamentalism of libertarianism, results in what Eric Hobsbawm aptly describes as “an ultra-radical laissez-faire critique of the state which holds that the role of the state must be diminished at all costs.” This entails a rabid desire to completely gut the services and functions that the territorial nation-state has historically provided for its citizens via austerity, tax cuts, and privatization. According to this economic ideology, there are very few things that states do that the market cannot do better. Evoking neoliberalism’s other name (market fundamentalism), Hobsbawm notes that this conviction is argued “with more theological conviction than historical evidence.”
Ideological Schizophrenia
Much of this market fundamentalism has been internalized as Republican party orthodoxy–and I’m not simply talking about the mainstream GOP that is currently reviled by right-wing populists. It can be found in the tea party movement, which is itself a mash up of conservative, libertarian, and populist interests, and was initially funded by libertarian billionaires David and Charles Koch. It’s also reflected in the House Freedom Caucus, a caucus of conservative and libertarian Republican members of the US House of Representatives with sympathies for the Tea Party movement. Finally, let’s not forget people like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Consider what this deeply internalized pro-globalist market fundamentalism means for traditional nationalist conservative patriots, or for that matter, ultra-nationalist right-wing populists a la Donald Trump. The object of their undying patriotic love (the nation) is under attack by pro-globalist, anti-state neoliberal conservatives in the form of an all out assault on the modern territorial nation-state. In very many cases, the patriotic defender and attacker of (neo)nationalism, and the proponent and opponent of globalization are one and the same conservative person. This is ideological schizophrenia. It hopefully goes some way towards explaining how “the people,” as expressed in Trump’s right-wing populism and represented (poorly and secretly) by the Republican controlled Senate and House of Representatives, make impossible demands such as “please protect and revoke my health care!”
Globalization and the Future
At this point we’ve seen how the pressures of globalization have created a kind of ideological schizophrenia in American political culture. Among the liberal left we see deep ideological divisions between a pro-global neoliberal DNC establishment (Obama, Clinton) and a populist left backlash against free trade agreements and global capitalism (Occupy, Bernie Sanders). Among conservatives we see similar ideological divisions between a pro-market fundamentalism (neoliberalism) GOP (and tea party movement), and a right-wing ultra-nationalist populist backlash (Donald Trump and his supporters) that advocates protectionism and trade restrictions over a global laissez-faire capitalism.
Where there are divisions there are also unlikely alignments. The DNC establishment and the GOP establishment are largely (although not completely) aligned in their support for global neoliberal capitalism as expressed in the Washington Consensus. And populists on the ultra-nationalist right and the progressive left share a common contempt for the harsh consequences of that same global neoliberal capitalism. Globalism, like politics itself, makes strange bedfellow.
Where does this leave us? The short but harsh answer is that it leaves us all very confused, self-contradictory, and poorly equipped to address the challenges of 21st century globalism. We are, as Pierre Brochand puts it in the opening quote of this essay, ambivalent about the world in which we now find ourselves, which is a position we can ill afford. At stake is the fate of the territorial nation-state, the constitutionally-limited democratic republic, and ultimately the human species itself. The very real existential threats posed by nuclear war and global warming are just two examples of predicaments that require global clarity, consensus, and decisiveness. I’ll be diving into these topics in part two.
Suggested for Further Reading
- Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism, By Eric Hobsbawm 2007 Abacus
- A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey 2005, Oxford University Press
- Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, by Mark Blyth 2013 Oxford University Press
- Two Treatises of Government, by John Locke 1689
