Tag: Globalism

2024 Election, Globalism vs. Nationalism, Nationalist Theory, Politics

2024 American Nationalist Voting Index – Political Philosophy

Bob Claude |

This is the seventh of a series examining the issues in the 2024 presidential election. To see previous articles, click on the “2024 Election” category under the “Politics” tab above.

Score

Harris -2.5 Trump +.5

Presidential campaigns should be informative discussions about the issues that face our country. Many historians believe that the 1912 election between Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and William Howard Taft was among the most intellectual and consequential in our history. Unfortunately, this campaign so far is sorely lacking in those qualities.

However, presidencies often are defined not by the issues raised in the campaign, but by crises that were totally unforeseen. Think George W. Bush and 9/11 or Donald Trump and Covid. Both risks were “known unknowns” discussed only in academic circles and were never campaign issues. Nevertheless, they happened and required fateful decisions by the president on behalf of the nation that became right or wrong.  Since we don’t know what the crisis will be, we lack any indication of how today’s candidates may deal with it. There is only one indication of how they might – their political philosophy or ideology.

In a recent series on this website, I argued that the most relevant ideological divide in politics was between globalism and nationalism (see the category under the “Politics” tab above). Globalism believes that national borders should be irrelevant. Leaders and elites should have obligations not just to their own peoples, but to the entire world. Nationalism believes that individual communities represented by nation states are natural and legitimate actors in the world.  National leaders owe primary allegiance only to their respective peoples. The two ideologies actually break down into four subsets – socialist globalism, corporate globalism, ethnic nationalism and the progressive nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt. If we can place a candidate’s ideology on this spectrum, we can make an intelligent guess about their approach to future issues.

Kamala Harris‘s rhetoric and past issue positions place her squarely in the camp of socialist globalists. As she repeated in these clips from past interviews, Harris believes government should insure that everyone “end up in the same place”, regardless of circumstances. While she is clearly correct that people do not start in the same circumstances, her goal is not equity (equal opportunity) as she claims, but an empirical equality that is inherently impossible in a free society.  Moreover, her past positions on issues like immigration enforcement suggest that this desire to achieve empirical equality extends to the rest of the world as well.  Thus, when confronted with a crisis, her response will likely be to cater to the rest of the world, even to the detriment of the American people. She thus rates a -2.5 on the globalist side of the ledger.

Donald Trump is more difficult to pin down. While he campaigned in 2016 on a nationalist platform that included progressive ideas, his administration adopted policies dear to the corporate elite. His 2018 tax cuts reduced taxes on business and higher earners while widening the budget deficit and stoking inflationary pressures. His immigration policy successfully limited and deterred illegal border crossings, but it was often justified on ethnic rather than economic grounds. He has also favored increasing the number of higher skilled immigrants to compete with American tech workers, even to the point of “stapling green cards” to foreign students’ diplomas. His new alliance with consummate corporate globalist Elon Musk is also worrisome.

Thus, Trump may simply be a corporate globalist masquerading as an ethnic nationalist. Nevertheless, there are three groups that could pull him back to the nationalist side.  First and foremost is his voter base, which is ardently (and sometimes dangerously) ethnic nationalist. He will be loathe to cross them after their past support. His embrace of RFKJr. also introduces a progressive nationalist influence that will be more difficult to dismiss in a new term. Finally, his vice president JD Vance is a professed foreign policy nationalist.

Needless to say, Donald Trump is a mercurial and strong-willed candidate who has ignored outside advice in the past.  When all of these influences are taken into account, he is best rated as plus .5. In other words, he will tend to react to a crisis as a nationalist, but exactly to what extent will depend on the particular nature of the crisis.  Since we cannot know what those particularities will be, we can only hope that his nationalist side will prevail.

I recognize this analysis is based on guesswork, though it is leavened as much as possible with the facts. Trying to predict a person’s future decision on an unknown matter can easily degenerate into a form of divination. However, TR teaches us that avoiding such decisions can have worse consequences and the unpredictability of today’s world requires that a decision be made. I hope the four ideological categories I cited earlier are at least helpful in telling you where you stand, and then aiding you in determining where your candidate will stand as well.

General, Globalism vs. Nationalism, Nationalist Theory, Politics

Socialist Globalism and the God of Equality

Bob Claude |

Source; Library of Congress

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, they were reacting to the wave of globalization that came with the industrial revolution of the 19th century. The cartoon above from the British magazine Puck graphically showed the toxic political results of the resulting despair. It shows a boar of corporate greed sowing the seeds of the socialism that Marx & Engels advocated. Their response was a radical form of equality that believed “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”. It closed with the famous phrase “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains”.

Thus, socialism began with a cry to abandon national identity for international class identity and struggle. The Socialist Internationale was organized as a cross-border movement of similar political parties in various European nations. As resistance to its goals stiffened, the movement turned ugly with the rise of the anarchists, whose tactics of assassination and violence eventually reached the U.S.. Theodore Roosevelt never forgot he became President due to the bullet of the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley. It sparked his own commitment to fighting corporate greed and concentration and the exploitation it created, but within a free market system.

In the end, the nineteenth century call for international worker solidarity perished in the trenches of World War I as each nation’s proletariat willingly marched to war not against the rich, but against opposing enemy nations. The pull of national identity proved to be more powerful than class identity.  The Soviet and Chinese Communist attempts to build a globalist socialist movement resulted in further oppression and eventually adopted nationalist themes to spur their people to defend themselves from foreign foes. While western European socialist parties saw limited success in the interwar period, the U.S. turned to a conservative isolationism and during the New Deal of FDR, a brief progressive nationalism.

Modern socialist globalism is no longer the province of some small Western political parties, but is now officially advocated by the foreign policy of the majority of the Global South that still sees itself as victims of colonialism (see this previous post). In the US, the call to class identity is joined to similar calls to ethnic and gender loyalty fueled by a strange combination of victim psychology and guilt. They consider themselves victims of oppression by the rich while also being guilty of oppressing other nations simply by being American. In foreign policy, this leads to either liberal interventionism to forcibly spread “freedom” or subordinating legitimate national interests to other nations as a way of appeasing the god of equality. Domestically it creates a destructive race to the bottom as risk-taking declines and social jealousies feed on themselves.

TR spent his political career fighting not only the boar of corporate greed, but also the siren song of victim psychology.  He called Americans to remember their heritage as leaders of a new social experiment.  This was the basis of his nationalism.  As we move to explore the nationalist response to globalism, we will first consider another, more basic form of national identity and how it can go wrong as well.

Next; Ethnic Nationalism and the Gods of Blood and Soil

General, Globalism vs. Nationalism, Nationalist Theory, Politics

Corporate Globalism and the God of Efficiency

Bob Claude |

We all have heard of Adam Smith and his theory of the invisible hand of the free market. Few know the name of David Ricardo, a nineteenth century British economist who developed the theory of comparative advantage that is the basis of the current system of international trade. It has since morphed from a mere economic theory to an ideology used to justify corporate and elitist power. It’s fixation on efficiency has shamelessly fueled inequality and ignores its own weaknesses in explaining the real world of today’s economy.

Ricardo’s theory posited that countries should specialize in producing goods in which they have a comparative advantage in either labor, capital or land costs. The classic example is a difference in labor costs. If a country could produce a good at a lower cost because of lower wages, then other countries should trade with that country for good and concentrate on producing others. When countries specialize based on comparative advantage, global production increases, leading to more efficient resource allocation and lower consumer prices.

Comparative advantage formed the basis of the growth of international trade over the last decades of the 20th century. However, it remained only an economic theory until New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman began championing the process in a series of books that quickly became the gospel of corporate globalism. In his book “The World is Flat”, Friedman regaled his readers with how Asians were lifting themselves out of poverty by performing low wage jobs in the new “flat” world of free trade. At the same time, he unwittingly demonstrated the dangers of this trend when he told the story of New London, Connecticut, and its transformation in the new world. An economy once based on shipbuilding and defense work declined to become a gambling mecca with a small elite pharmaceutical research center. Friedman celebrated this decline in an eerie echo of Ayn Rand when he wrote

Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new; change is important. Work gets done where it can be done most effectively and efficiently. That ultimately helps the New Londons, New Bedfords and New Yorks of this world even more than it helps the Bangalores and Shenzhens.

Here are the tenets of corporate globalism for all to see,  The American Dream, national strength, and family income security are all offered in sacrifice to the god of corporate efficiency and income. Indeed, Friedman said it should be a primary goal of public policy to foster this trend and improve the lives of everyone around the world, despite the impact on its own citizens and national security. 

In the process, Friedman and corporate globalists glossed over the real world weaknesses of this socioeconomic model. First, it assumes markets are in perfect competition and there are no trade barriers, a practical impossibility in a world distorted by the mercantilism of Chinese and other countries. Comparative advantage also assumes that externalities such as environmental pollution are confined to the country that elects to endure them. Carbon emissions know no such boundaries and so developing countries and China can power their economies with coal while exporting the climate costs to the rest of the world. 

A more recent economic theory highlights the real hypocrisy of corporate globalism.  Known as the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, it admits that comparative advantage increases national wealth and efficiency but shows that the benefits of this wealth flow mainly to holders of capital and land at the expense of labor, especially in developed countries.  Hence, corporate elites have an economic incentive to promote international trade at the expense of wage earners.  They then can exploit national differences in taxation and regulation to further enrich themselves.   

As Theodore Roosevelt pointed out, corporate greed and power can be as much of a threat to freedom as the government. In a world of multinational corporations often subsidized by foreign states, it is an even bigger threat.  National governments are often a more effective check on this power than the imperfect market of international trade. In the late nineteenth century, contemporaries of Ricardo (and Roosevelt) tried to address these problems with globalist methods that, in the end, failed and ended up creating new methods of exploitation instead.  

Next: Socialist globalism and the god of equality