The nature of property is that nobody has any unless the rest of us agree to protect it. The left-right contest is about how much we should protect an individual's claim of property. The right-wing ideologues' design for “the free movement of goods and money, but not of people” is a plan to give property (money) an unfettered superior claim. What fools we are if we agree to give up on every other claim, including a habitable place for our offspring a couple generations out.
And freedom of movement? Would you be okay if allowed to roam in a 10,000 mi radius? How about 1,000 or 100, or 100 yards?
6
When the NYT condemns Trump, it often cites Buckley's rejection of John Birch Society as an example of "sane" good old GOP.
The sad reality is that they were right! The hysterical fear of the UN was overblown but the emergence of the "global consensus" that Pres. Obama so often cited was very real.
At core, the John Birch Society accurately predicted a cosmopolitan, coastal finance system that directed money and people in a global interest, not national.
The appeal of the right is so strong because most people can SEE that their own citizens go to work day in and day out to move capital out of their backyards into the coffers of financiers.
The fact that people seem to have received such differing messages from this ...essay does not mean that it is complex and sophisticated. It means tha it is one of those too clever by half pieces that serve to confuse and divide. It is essentially disinformation passing for depth. It obscures rather than clarifies.
4
Globalization was always a republican ideal. This change is just the new phase of the same old thing they have been pushing on us since the 1980's.
1
This writer clearly has a longer memory than most commentators, who see opposition to the WTO as an exclusively right-wing issue. It's very, very important to remember and keep alive the heritage of the left-wing alter-globalisation movement. The right wing offers false solutions to a real problem: the "liberal world order" has indeed suppressed the rights of people, especially in the Third World, in order to boost the profitability of the transnationals. Workers are left behind by the current system. The only way to stop right-wing xenophobic "anti-globalism" is to return to an authentic left wing critique of the international system, rather than posturing as its defenders.
4
Well the people are a commodity: Cheap Labor.
Every president should have to take a oath stating "First do no harm." Trump is harming our country and the world. He's not remotely democratic or American. He rules by fear, blackmail and intimidation. These are not American. He likes to rile things up but that is not what you do with a country or the world. Welcome to World War III.
2
While I agree the globalization (compliments of technological advances) has gone right wing, the politics of failure provide so much of the emotional fuel of this hard turn. A very different scenario might be playing out now if the Arab Spring had not collapsed compliments of the Saudis (what a shock) among others. Had Obama listened to John McCain about Syria; Had George W. Bush not invaded Iraq while back-burnering Afghanistan; Had Operation Ajax not toppled the legitimate government of Iran; Had Truman supported Ho-Chi Minh instead of the French. These abject failures in the Right Thing to Do have stressed the post WWI world to dog-eat-dog status where the rhetoric of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are being held hostage to a zero sum game where seas of migrants risk everything to avoid the final failure because everything else has failed around them. Shows you how much we've learned from all of it.
4
What the author is struggling to define, is called 'America First'. It's is akin to the warning you get when taking off in an airplane. If a problem occurs, (which very definitely has happened since China joined the WTO in 2001)... if a problem occurs, put on your own seatbelt, before helping others. You can't help someone else, if you, yourself are dead in the water. America First, consequently, is about more than simply putting America first. In the sense that the author raises the subject, America First is about reforming the WTO.
Come on guys, get with the program!
@Rob Campbell
Since the WTO is a United States creation, then who reforms it.
The dear leader wants to have it both ways. He wants free trade when it benefits him and tariffs when it doesn't. He doesn't care about the average shopper who has to pay more for necessities, which are all made in China now. Try to buy a cooking implement that's not made in China! A pot or a pan or a napkin, or a glass vessel.
2
Isn't the core of nationhood the ability to control one's borders?
1
@Mike Livingston
No one, not even democrats are saying that we should have open borders, what they are saying is that this country needs comprehensive immigration reform. Which was the pretext Reagan used when giving amnesty to some 3 million Mexican immigrants. The republicans have had more than 6 years to fashion genuine immigration reform, that never happened.
The reason is, the only thing that the GOP has is immigration, and fear to get elected. To try and get elected by saying we're going to pollute the air, water, ground, we're going to give some 1.5 trillion in tax breaks to corporations and the rich, we're going to balloon the national debt, that we blamed Obama for, while ignoring the economic damage we've done. We want to defund education, take away your healthcare, and destroy Social Security Medicaid, and Medicare, to pay for the 1.5 trillion in tax breaks, and the you the people will get zero.
How log would a party stay in power, because that's exactly what the GOP has done. Congress, has no right to decide what or how much future generations will pay to service debt. They are supposed to contend with the here and now, not saddle generations with debt.
So what happens when the national debt comes due, they won't be able to get the money from the voter, so like the British had to do after WWI, they got it from the only people that had it to give, the aristocracy, which is why most sold off vast swaths of land. And so it will go for the billionaires.
5
The rise of the right in the US and Europe is a response to neoliberal globalization's anti-worker consequences. In the US, the working class was so desperate for someone to speak to their economic anxieties, that a large portion of them placed their hopes in the hands of a ridiculous, blow-hard billionaire.
The Democrats for over two decades have worried that any pro-worker policies they might enact would threaten the flow of corporate cash that they longed for so, as Charles Schumer reasoned, "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” A failed strategy, but they're still going with it.
That quote was from 2016 but it could as well have been from 1992 when the Democrats joined the Republicans in supporting NAFTA. For those who couldn't connect the dots, another ridiculous billionaire presidential candidate helped them out, warning of the "giant sucking sound" as jobs left the country, bound for low wage countries.
All Trump had to do was walk through the door both parties had opened, promising to bring those jobs back. The centrist Dems obliged him with their self-sabotaging response that "those jobs are gone and they ain't coming back".
Slobodian is wrong: the wealthy and their politicians aren't cherry-picking the parts of globalization that they want - they're cynically claiming to be on the side of workers.
8
Why did I, after reading a paragraph or two, mistakenly conclude that I was in disagreement with Quinn? In any case, his piece here makes sense. In short: The Trump Republicans want a right wing, white nationalist cum supremacist world. Goods and money (and rich white Republicans like Ivanka and Kushner) move (sashay) around the world, but not other people. And not democracy, human rights, decency, and ethics. According to their thinking, the old racist white prerogatives and entitlements are preserved, here and around the world. Goods and money should move to the benefit of rich white Republicans, which will be accomplished by corruption a la Russia and its oligarchs. Whenever an President Obama accomplishment can be undone or even just recreated under a Trump Republican moniker, that's all for the better. Even statements, opinions and truth would move in only one direction--outward from Trump and his cult and the other right wing, white nationalist globalists. They will say whatever they want to, however untrue, vile or silly. And the rest of us would silently slavishly abide by it. The world will be a hybrid of plantation, concentration camp, gulag, and Gilead. The rich and the white and the powerful and the males will do as they will, and the rest of us will be grateful to merely survive.
5
This beast is already here and in working order: China.
The Republicans are riding a global wave of republicanism that's been in the works for decades. This is a well-funded and scientifically designed plan that is sequentially rolling out with military precision. There is nothing accidental about this global Republican strategy.
We are experiencing a fascist Blitzkrieg. Is this not obvious?
Yet we have no plan, no strategy, and no leader. Just childish wishful thinking about being saved by the vote.
Where is the global antifascist strategy from our entitled 80 year-oldster Democrat leadership? Where is the global Democratic wave?
Is Pelosi is “working on it”?
Wake up Democrats, the current feeble Democratic leadership is leading us down the drain. “Every generation has their Fascism” (Primo Levi) — the Republicans are just doing what they do, while the Democrats do nothing.
4
It doesn't make you a right-wing blood-and-soil fascist to note that mass movement of people from one country to another is VERY different than movement of funds from one country to another.
And just as a broken clock is right twice a day you don't have to agree with actual Nazis to also note that the movement of people is all one way-into the "West". No one is seriously arguing that China, South Korea, India, Vietnam, or the myriad nations of Africa must have more diversity and multiculturalism regardless of what the various citizens of those places want.
If we don't want increasingly right-wing governments and politicians in North America, Europe and Australia, (and I DON'T!!) we must allow space to talk about immigration, legal and illegal, how much, when, and from where.
There is nothing wrong with Kenya wanting to remain Kenyan, Germany wanting to remain German, France wanting to remain French, etc. The solution to Third World problems can't be for everyone to move to Europe, Australia or the US.
4
Quinn Slobodian:
Absolutely correct, your analysis is. What many left critiques in the '90s saw in the EU, e.g., was the free movement of goods, capital AND labor, the last being the most significant insofar as the vast majority of human beings are spoken of/for in formal policy and institutional practices.
On the other hand, NAFTA was only meant to be the free movement of goods and capital, written by the leaders of the 3 capitalist states to promote the concentration of capital in North America via corporate actors. It was said then by officials in the US that uniting the three economies would be a deliberate way to compete against the European Union.
The left here said the specific political difference between the two blocs reflected a crueler type of capitalism at work in North America, than the softer capitalism of the social democracies of the EU [then]. Having recently returned from Stuttgart and a trip to Süd Tyrol, it's still true.
NAFTA was seriously flawed initially, insofar as it never cared to directly promote the interests of the vast majority in all 3 countries, viz., working people. Only foreign investors [from MX, CAN &/or US] and their capital movements were protected and promoted by NAFTA.
Yes, now the alt-right seeks global separation [really segregation, historically], via race and socio-economic status, two social constructs. Completely inane and dangerous stuff, ideologically.
3
There will be unintended consequences to any multi national, multi level contract. What if they built in safety valves that allowed for renegotiation.
Free global markets and capital without the people part sounds like oligarch porn.
3
With either our current versions of globalism or nationalism, the loser in both is the environment. Global trade seeks to maximize national resources for transnational profits. Nationalists, like President Trump, don't care about the environment if it means we're not "winning" against other countries in jobs, trade, etc. In either case, the environment and climate is sacrificed for monetary profit and political benefit.
2
Free trade and open borders are alternative ways to achieve the same end: cheap labor. We either outsource to cheaper labor abroad through trade or bring the cheaper labor here through immigration.
But there are advantages and disadvantages of both methods.
And may depend on what kind of industries we are talking about. I think it would probably be better to keep low skill, labor intensive, polluting industries abroad. Like basic materials manufacturing or scrap metal processing or something like that you see in China and India. Or perhaps natural resource extraction (you can't really choose the geography of that though). Because all those things impose a lot of negative externalities on the local environment. Look at the smog in Beijing. And these low wage workers come here and can't command high enough wages to pay for the social services they and their families utilize. And low skill workers of course have lower education attainment and language skills and so you have additional barriers to assimilation for them and their children.
Contrast with engineering, advanced manufacturing or knowledge industry workers--bringing those people here and the country is probably better off because the imported workers will be higher income, net payers into the tax base. Plus they'll assimilate more easily as probably already studied English or worked at multinationals. These are the kinds of immigrants we need for the 21st century.
2
"Mr. Hoppe envisions a dissolution of the current world map of states into thousands of tiny units the size of Hong Kong, Andorra and Monaco without representative government and ruled only by private contract...."
I can understand why Mr. Hoppe is popular, he is actually in the ballpark as to how future societies will develop.
Think of this from the point of view of any of the various political movements enjoying popularity and power today: MeToo, Black Lives Matter on the "left" (outmoded term), and Trump-style populism, White Supremacy on the "right" (outmoded term). Are any of these democratic? If, at some future date, the entities of New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles, for example, declare independence from a white, monocultural "Middle Lands of America", would those entities tolerate dissent and organize along traditional democratic lines, with multiple political parties and a balance of power? No, they'd organize just like identity groups are now organizing, with social pressure to conform or be excluded.
What we NEED to hope for, is that legitimate, just, legal institutions will emerge to arbitrate disputes between the new wave of micro-societies, and have the power to back up their decisions.
2
Globalization has enabled the rise of the far right by destroying local economies, wages, agriculture, and jobs. It made some people very wealthy for a while, and it made millions of poor people even poorer.
4
The truly wealthy right-wing and its money operate without regard to nationality, borders, or governments. Money flows around the world in ways no government could control even if it wished to. Countries are valued only to the extent they can be exploited (usually third-world countries with natural resources) or used to protect your interests (powerful first-world countries such as the U.S.)
What makes them "right-wing" is that their only concern is to increase the upward flow of money from us to them, while defending their own interests legally, politically and militarily. They don't care in the slightest about human rights, justice, health care, voting rights etc. because they already have those things.
So when the writers observe that they "propose a departure from status quo democratic capitalism" that is absolutely accurate. They only want what is best for them and the rest of us can fend for ourselves.
17
Corporations are people. Money is speech. We won at freedom.
And all we’ve got to show for it is the next era of feudalism, and a glorified, national Prison-State. Bravo, folks.
13
Perhaps the author thinks that the despicable majority, those of us that did not go to ivy league schools are too ignorant to know that the flow of goods across borders and invasions of many 10's of millions foreigners across borders are fundamentally different events and so have very different effects on societies! What the various "right" groups that the author disparages and also 80% of people polled in developed nations have realized is that "free" movement of people across borders (interesting that anything can be justified by putting "free" in front of it), that this is nothing more than an elite mechanism to invade and conquer uppity native citizens, who know and insist on their rights, using foreigners as pawns and mercenaries that the 1% has devised to create a worldwide medievalist state.
12
People like Herr Hoppe and all the lesser adherents of private sector "government" are all unwitting dupes of people like Putin and Trump.
If successful (and they have been so far), the oligarchs have ZERO intention of codifying any rules-based "laws" for the unwashed masses. They will make sure they, and they alone, have the power to shape decision-making to suit whatever their needs are at that given moment.
When Hoppe and the rest realize "this isn't what I signed up for" it will be too late.
All you people out their tempted by a strong man leader, wake up! These men are mere gangsters, nothing more!
26
“Like Hong Kong and Singapore, these zones would not be isolated but hyper-connected, nodes for the flow of finance and trade ruled not by democracy (which would cease to exist) but market power with disputes settled through private arbitration. No human rights would exist beyond the private rights codified in contract and policed through private security forces.”
With all the talk of Americans sorting themselves into opposing economic and ideological groups, (Fox News on every TV in the wealthy gated community, etc.), we could try this here in the US. As noted in a Brookings article regarding the 2016 Presidential election: “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.” So let’s have 3000 feudal county-states divided between Blue and Red. Each with it’s own independent authority, if it has an authority at all. With no over-arching federal assistance, such as health care and infrastructure, Redlandia would suddenly struggle with serious social needs and the “commoners” within those states, if not actual Democrats, would suddenly start to act like Democrats, arguing for social justice and fair treatment. Back to square one.
10
I live in Arizona, I'm a citizen of the USA but I'm also a human being on the planet earth.
Globalism is a given. It's not going away. We are connected through the water table, ICBM's, Telecommunications in space, Oceans, Air, trade, etc., etc., etc.
We have common problems, we have had horrible World conflicts. We will always have self interest but we will also always have shared interests. Those shared interests are growing faster than our self interests which are highly connected to our shared interests.
Where the right gets it wrong is by destroying all norms of international law, treaties, allies, arms control, emissions controls, human rights, etc., etc., etc. it creates a huge vacuum in the areas where mutual shared interest is concerned. Mutual interest in our every increasing connected world is becoming much more important than national self interest in the ultimate peaceful survival of our planet.
We just fought a 2 trillion dollar war in Iraq over WMD's. We are on the cusp of abandoning the INF treaty. Why would we spend 2 Trillion going after WMD's and bomb Syria over chemical weapons if our intent is to embark on nuclear proliferation?
War, the end result of Right-Wing Globalization is flooding, killer storms and nuclear war. It must be stopped.
The truth is post WW2 liberal democracy has been the greatest wealth building machine in the history of the world. The Right can't refute that.
23
@HL
The right is attacking everything that made our prosperity happen because they are too greedy to see that the things they attack are what made their prosperity possible.
The most obvious is science. They attack scientists because they don't know how science works. They think that they can separate science that messes with their worldview from science that makes the gadgets they sell. It is all one science and if you undermine the integrity of science by politicizing it, then you end up with your leading scientists locked in a tower like Galileo, or forced to commit suicide like Plato. (Philosophy used to encompass all of the subjects we now specialize in including math, science, and engineering. Most of the philosophers built fortifications and war machines for a living.)
Back when the top tax rate was 70% and the corporate rate was 50% growth averaged 3.5% and peak growth was 8%, while we paid down the still record debt (as a percent of GDP), rebuilt Europe and Japan, built the Interstate Highway system, and numerous dams, brought electricity to Texas (ingrates), and most people could live a reasonable life on one salary.
Now we have cut taxes by more than half, average growth is less than 2%, and peak growth 5.1% (and that was under Obama).
But corporate mass media and centrist Democrats never mention this obvious historical argument against Supply Side Economics, pretending that this hypothesis without a cause and effect linkage, or data to back it may yet work?!
1
You make it sound so attractive to be swamped with people that don't share our values and want to collect benefits without assimilating.
6
@Ryan
When hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose first or last name was Ryan came here in the mid 19th century the result turned out pretty good!
Also, check the numbers, we're hardly being "swamped."
27
The essential difference between neo-liberal and right wing views of globalization this:
Neo-liberals dispute that globalization of goods trade will ultimately lower the wages of US workers exposed to it to the global average (roughly that of China). Their counter argument : Let workers become coders
As if. IBM has now more workers in India than in the US. The PRC is leading in A.I
Fact is that the money sent to ther PRC by the US trade has permitted her to gain the knowledge and industrial bas to specializes in any product it wishes to.
Right winged nationalists, too, love free trade, but to gain political power write conditions into trade agreement such by 2020. in 2020, Mexican made cars and trucks must have 30 percent of the work done by workers earning $16 an hour, in 2023 , 40%
There is nothing new or unexpected about the spread of tariff protection from farm products and farmers (where it has been practiced by the US since the 1920's and ifor 50 years has been practised globally) to manufactured goods and workers.
It was inevitable
Peter Drucker, founder of mangement theory predicted it in 2001.
Read
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2001/11/01/the-next-society
to learn why
3
Slobodian isn't talking about alternative globalism. He's not even talking about globalism. Embracing free finance and trade while rejecting migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality is not globalization, alternative or otherwise. Slobodian is describing an odd form of global corporatism wrapped in a nationalistic shell. Taken to Hoppe's extreme, you'd end up with a series of corporate micro-states competing for profit domination while collaborating to suppress the global labor market.
The problem of course is humans cannot manage behavioral identity in this fashion. Finance and trade are an expression of human production. They are the abstract form of what human beings do all day. You can't divorce transactional convenience from the human experience. Not without literally enslaving the entire working population of the world. Envisioning a global labor force organized into essentially one big gig economy is delusional.
9
Free movement of goods, services and capital, but not of workers, is nothing new. It was, in effect, the predominate economic ideology, from the 1920s to the 1990s, of what used to be called the "free world." Restricting migration is not at all novel; what is new about the Trump administration is HOW it is being done.
Trump is not replacing free migration with blocked migration, he is replacing rule of law with rule of the jungle, multilateral agreement with bullying, respect for principles with mafioso loyalty and tribalism, objectivity with deceit, respect and tolerance with crudeness and hatred, enlightenment with spontaneously exploited ignorance, consistency, reliability and transparency with never-ending Orwellian doublespeak, and the spirit of progress with crass fearmongering.
In the late 1930s, America hardly had more open borders than did Germany, Italy or Japan. Unlike them, however, it supported republican institutions and democratic mechanisms, and opposed fascism, militarism and wanton cruelty. Trump is not a fascist leader, and would not have been one in the 1930s, because he lacks leadership competence generally. He would have been, and is, a water-carrier for would-be wreckers of free institutions, freedom of ideas and expression, and respect for truth.
12
Surprise, the wealthy want it all with none of the downsides.
27
@Steven; And the downside is immigration.
There is a misnomer called “free trade.” What we really `want is free outbound, but. ContROLLED inbound.
4
Certainly fits the visible facts.
4
Welcome to the new feudalism of the future. There will be two classes of people: Those who own all the capital and control the military and the rest of us who either soldier for the haves or tend to those who do.
There will be no diplomatic corp, instead they will send the military to take what they want.
There will be islands of extreme wealth and luxury, guarded by private armies; while surrounded by oceans of misery and despair.
I don't see who that is going to work out very well.
Maybe it's just as well that we are probably going to incinerate the planet and our species in the near future.
8
This article describes a wide range of social, economic & political models currently advocated on the world stage that address globalization in positive terms from an ultra-right political perspective.
Arguably, advocates of these models may differ over the details of the reactionary utopianism each espouses but, when push comes to shove in the real world, they share an implied fallback openness to authoritarian government with quasi-fascist undertones.
9
Sounds like we don’t tax the wealthy enough. They’ve got theirs, now they want their own country, too. That way, slave wages leading to even more wealth. And since their fiefdom will be small, no need to provide more modes of transportation than is necessary to get goods and services out to customers. The rest of us aren’t going anywhere other than to work. And, if you limit your workforce to one ethnic group, it’s cheaper to control them. We all get to marry our cousins, which is a red state (I won’t go there). I’m assuming we get lots of drugs to ease our boredom - kind of like now.
These people are more than short-sighted and greedy, they are Trumpian. If Democrats do take the House, how about the first thing they do is make it easier to vote, i.e., national holiday on the weekend, fair and secure voting practices and corporations are not people.
9
There has not been the "free movement of people" within any of our lifetimes (or our grandparent's life times). Populism is in part a reaction to global overpopulation. The developing world must get its fertility rates in check. It is not the obligation of countries like Japan, Australia, the United States or Italy to mop up the excess humanity billowing from the global south.
16
@Rennata Wilson
The "excess humanity?" What callous, ugly language. God forbid that those who are better off ever say those words about you or those you love when your hour of need comes.
Whether struck with cancer or another car, surviving an earthquake or domestic abuse, struggling against hunger or warfare, we are all on the edge of death and violence. Do you think you and your grandchildren will be spared in perpetuity just because you're comfortable now? That you'll never need the aid of your brothers and sisters in the world? Do you really think that the lives of those in "the global south" (code word for people of color) don't matter as much as yours? What kind of person are you???
Your comment is shocking in its selfishness, arrogance, and cruelty. Hopefully you're not superstitious, for putting such ugliness into the universe should make you uneasy about you fate and that of your children.
So, Slobodian - A Wellesley history professor - champions the end of the West as we know it, demonizing those who want to preserve their cultures as "far right-wing". Somehow, the academics decided that wanting to keep your culture is reactionary ... if you are from the West. If you are not, then you have no responsibility to adapt because this would be cultural imperialism. Academics like this are part of the problem.
10
@Kai Culture is the servant of power. You're suggesting that somehow preserving and defending culture is the far right's purpose and there is truth in that - certainly they don't want to share or pollute "our" culture. Both the right and the left were co-opted by those whose hands are on the levers of power generations ago in the west. In the east, they have learned the lessons of both our successes and failures. Culture is just the bait.
3
It IS pesky, the way them pointy-heads look at facts and figures and draw reasoned conclusions, ain’t it?
4
This is a horrifying, inhuman vision that I believe will not be easily implemented. Is it not feudalism?
5
You seem careful in your article to avoid leaning too heavily on the term "neoliberal," but one way of summarizing your article might be that it asks the question "is Trump a neoliberal?" and answers with a resounding "yes!"
This probably seems jarring to a certain benighted stratum of American politicos who may still be struggling to integrate the term "neoliberal" into their political vocabulary after having first encountered it during the Clinton vs. Sanders contest in 2015-16, in which the Clinton camp's concern-trolling about racist/sexist "Bernie bros" was identified with neoliberalism. So just to clarify, yes, it's true that neoliberalism corresponds to a long tradition of essentially right-wing thought dating back to midcentury thinkers like Hayek (whose most famous book "The Road to Serfdom" was recently making the rounds again in the US as a fixture of Glenn Beck's Tea Party reading list) as well as Wilhelm Röpke, the postwar German economist who vehemently defended South African apartheid as a necessary bulwark against the socialistic redistribution of wealth.
In short, when we leftists talk about neoliberalism in the context of ostensibly "progressive" or center-left politicians like Clinton, part of what we mean is to argue that such politicians have more in common with Trumpian racism -- in particular, a strong shared commitment to the racially loaded ideal of a "global division of labor" -- than they might care to openly admit.
3
The basis of the Right is bully-boy ego and a will to violence. Physical, I'm gonna kill you and your children, too, violence.
We are there. Its just our namby-pamby President has not yet summoned the nerve to implement. He has, however, put the bones of the machine in place, and introduced the rhetoric that will make it seem to make sense.
Economically, the same.
Trump and his Right-wing would-be totalitarianist cronies are for free trade as long as they think they're in charge.
As soon as someone else, some other country, gains a clear advantage, even in a limited sector, there will be conflict.
Trump thinks he and everything about him is the best, the invincible, the inevitable and so, of course, he endorses the law of the jungle.
But he will never fight. If he can't convince some gullible general, some lunatic political movement to fight for him he will, first, resort to his bought and paid for courts or, failing that, his flaccid legislature for relief.
Failing that, he'll wall himself up in the Trump compound and continue harassing independent contractors. Failing that, he will try to run away but, I suspect, find no welcoming refuge in a world civilized enough to respect the putter like Trump.
This Uber-Right 'Globalization' isn't an economic idea, it isn't a system, its a demand for the world's lunch money.
7
American corporations didn't move production of goods overseas - or shift to using foreign made components in production - because they compassionately sought to boost employment in those countries. The idea that globalization ever had a rosy hued humanist element is patently absurd. It's always been this - a way for big business to work outside the system, exploit people, and maximize profits while minimizing costs.
The US government has been enabling it for decades. What Reagan teed up, Clinton knocked out of the park.
And of course immigration is part of all of this - it's far more profitable for domestic business interests if a significant percentage of the immigrant population is here illegally, hired illegally, and too frightened by an anti-immigration social climate to even think about reporting egregious violations of federal labor laws.
27
Spot on
3
@Januarium
Thank you for pointing out that both Reagan and Clinton created this disaster.
Democrats the first step to bragging Republicans is to stop filtering the Clintons who sold us out and made Democrats take responsibility for Republican disasters.
This started with NAFTA, which most Democrats were against and which Republicans now blame you for.
So under this new system would people be confined to the country (or even the state) in which they were born? Would there be no tourism industry, only those in charge of trade agreements and shippers allowed to go between these Singapore type enclaves? And the majority of people kept in a virtual slave type existence? Takes me back to the phrase from a song of my childhood: "Don't fence me in!"
3
"Mr. Hoppe envisions a dissolution of the current world map of states into thousands of tiny units the size of Hong Kong, Andorra and Monaco without representative government and ruled only by private contract...."
In other words, a new corporatist-styled globalized feudalism. And the vast majority of the population reduced to some new dystopian construct of peasantry. Of course, if we're in the full throes of dystopia - for here we surely are - the planet is faced with multiple crises of environmental degradation, dwindling resources and wars of conquest. And no global structure in place to resolve any of this.
Part of the big problem with right wing-styled libertarianism: it doesn't deal well with large-scale events like extinction. In fact, it's utterly oblivious to them.
41
@Chris
Another thing is missing, tiny states are the perfect cauldron for permanent warfare of neighbours against neighbours. This phenomenon is perfectly depicted in the History of Europe.
21
@jmsegoiri Yes. And the war profiteers love that idea.
2
"The formula of right-wing alter-globalization is: yes to free finance and free trade. No to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality."
There is no new form of globalization here. This is exactly the formula for the corporate-led globalization we have seen since the 1980s: free flows of goods and money, but not people. The only new twist here is the abandonment of multilateralism, which was always intended by the global top 1% as a means to subvert democracy: put in place a system of global rules that no individual government can violate, even if the vast majority of its people want it to, because corporate globalization is literally killing them. Trump and the Republican party, now wholly owned by a handful of multi-billionaires, simply want to impose their own rules on the world economy, and not have to rely on multilateral rules that occasionally favor competing groups of multi-billionaires. The so-called populist masses around the world are simply being taken in by the reactionary ideology that is always used to divide and rule: scapegoat the "others," whoever they may be in any given situation.
24
Quinn Slobodian: "The formula of right-wing alter-globalization is: yes to free finance and free trade. No to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality."
Slobodian's views are quite fascinating on this problem. In fact it's quite fascinating to ask what would occur today if nations were to become even dangerously far right as in the 1930's, but unlike the 1930's we were to have more of them, a true multipolar situation, and of course to have these nations armed with WMD, yet they would ostensibly be committed to free finance and free trade and not declaring outright war on each other.
Obviously these nations would be a nightmare from perspective of migration, democracy, and human equality, but might they have a rough multilateralism (which free finance and trade roughly implies) and be prevented from outright war, and eventually be such a fierce and forward driving economic clash to point that despite all their right wing trends they drive the world up into plenty and innovation which solves many outstanding problems today such as climate change, and eventually they loosen up to act more along line of left wing globalization dreams today?
Or will such a right wing trend eventually be the 1930's again but this time a terrible WW3? I guess the big question is whether we can tell if the world will swing too far right or left for that matter or if we are sensible enough to swing this way and that in uneven climb to eventual success of us all.
2
Mr. Slobodian's is a very insightful article, and you can see the influence of Bannon and the Alt-Right on Trump in this regard, and how Trump fits into this paradigm in his relationships with NAFTA, the WTO, the EU.
3
Like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, only with borders.
4
Trump and his ilk are NOT "Populists"!
See definition below. Language matters! Why does the press persist in repeating this utterly inaccurate term?
Whatever we think of the likes of Trump and Le Pen, etc., they are not "Populists"!
pop·u·list
/ˈpäpyələst
• a person who holds, or who is concerned with, the views of ordinary people.
• a member of the Populist Party, a US political party formed in 1891 that advocated the interests of labor and farmers, free coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, and government control of monopolies.
They have no REAL interest in "ordinary people", they're demagogues. And Trump's policies (healthcare, taxes) HURT "ordinary people." As for "graduated income tax, and government control of monopolies".... we know how he feels about that!
63
@NYer Yes language matters, but dictionary definitions never exhaust words. 'Populist' has also come to mean, unjustly or not, someone who claims to speak for 'the people' in some unmediated and undifferentiated sense. So not a variety of groups, not ordinary people, but 'the people' in the homogenized way that Slobodian discusses.
I don't expect to be able to change your mind in a few lines here, but would suggest Jan-Werner Muller's book, What is Populism? for something far richer than an older definition (but still short). I don't know if this hyperlink will be scrubbed but: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15615.html
4
@NYer
Think about the people who were and are attracted to Trump rallies.
A significant nmajority of White Americans (who consider themselves to be "real" Americans) want to take our country back and to make America great again.
These are the people who voted for Donald Trump.
Authoritarian leaders often gain power on the basis of popullist messaging.
@NYer
I echo the comments of Evans. Trump isn't ideologically sophisticated enough to offer solutions that are wholly populist, and at the end of the day, he has to rely on the Republican party establishment to create legislation. His campaign, however, was a populist campaign for sure, even though this paper and many other media outlets were insistent on calling it fascist and racist... most certainly because too many of our journalists are not knowledgeable about history and has no idea what a populist was.
2
"The formula of right-wing alter-globalization is: yes to free finance and free trade. No to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality."
So, where does Trump fit in all of this?
Yes to free finance.
Yes to free trade if Trump and the wealthy can get their cut.
A big NO to free migration...even legal immigration.
A big NO to democracy with republican lead voter suppression and vote rigging with electronic voting machines, along with propaganda meant to influence elections with fake news.
A big NO to multilateralism as Trump does not believe in working for anyone's benefit but his own.
And a really big NO to human equality as Trump believes no one is his equal.
So, you should not be surprised that Trump doesn't have a super duper health care plan for the nation as he doesn't care about your health.
Trump talks about jobs, but no infrastructure program because Trump doesn't care how well the country operates.
And Trump talks about immigrants of color as an "infestation" because he is a white supremacist seeking a false purity.
When will we learn that diversity is strength. True in nature...true among humans.
VOTE OUT ALL REPUBLICANS
60
So the distinction being proposed is between global mercantilism vs. global (what? altruism? friendliness? whatever is the opposite of xenophobia?). While it's hard to justify opposition to global mercantilism in modern times, obviously there is a dark human impulse to fear and fight foreigners, however foreign is defined. Must be a sibling or close cousin to scapegoating - blaming the foreigner for deficits that are more likely domestic. Both dark impulses seem ameliorated by education and cosmopolitanism -- the latter likely helped by global trade relationships. So there is some connection.
We have a real problem in figuring out how to stop amoral fascists like Trump from exploiting the dark human impulses of xenophobia and scapegoatism to gain authority and power -- and we really must wage that fight without giving up on democracy. I suspect there are deep psychological and sociological insights (see Jonathan Haidt) that we have not yet attained.
13
Trump and the far right want to keep the free movement of goods and money, but not of people. That's RIGHT and that's GOOD!
8
@Nreb The corporate elite donor class, particularly the Republican donor class, don't really want to cut off the flow of cheap labor. They just want to turn them into underground serfs instead of green card holders who can ask for higher wages when the labor market is tight.
11
Karl Marx wasn't right about everything. He was wrong in thinking that people were good-natured-enough to be willing to work for equal wages. But, he was spot-on about class struggle. The rich and powerful strain every sinew to get richer and more powerful.
If we put on our Marxist glasses while reading your article, the motives of our leaders become crystal-clear. It's about making the rich and powerful richer and more powerful. And, until we freely acknowledge the existence of a class struggle in America, we regular citizens are going to be aiming at secondary targets.
72
@Voter Frog
The class struggle in America is between the Progressives and the Democrats. That is, between the old and the new, the past and the future, the old and the young, the rulers and the ruled, democracy and fascism, the People and corporations.
Republicans are the militant arm of the Democrats, they are important but secondary targets. We have to first go through the Democrats to get to the Republicans.
1
@Voter Frog - all the secondary targets brought into focus as identity politics. Great comment, Frog, right on the money.
@Voter Frog
Yes, I am not against markets or money. These things are useful and not
going away.
But the global .1% are still doing what they have been doing for ten thousand years: waging class warfare against the other 99%
The royalty used to tax the poor and give to themselves. That is why Robin Hood was a hero to the masses.
Then we had a revolution so that the rest of us could tax the rich and invest in our children and our infrastructure.
That is exactly what the Constitution says that we are supposed to do. Read it.
But the global mega rich are unhappy with any system that is not designed to make them richer at our expense, so they bought the politicians and they bought the media.
And these politicians and media have convinced a whole lot of people that the rich are the job creators, while they fire everyone, and they are the wealth creators even though the workers actually do the work that creates the wealth, while the rich take risks with our retirement money.
A real rugged individualist is a hermit, alone and disconnected from the grid.
A CEO of a global bank getting free cash from the federal Reserve is not a rugged individualist, they are semi useful parasites sucking cash from the financial veins of our economy. If you fire a CEO from a car company, it can still make cars, but if you fire the workers, it can't.
Markets are good, but capitalism puts the owners of machinery above the people that do the work.
Adam Smith was against this and so am I.
1
I urge, again, some supervisor who ACTUALLY reads the op-eds before publishing them.
In this ediorial i haven't to go longer than first paragraph to read that mr. Trump and republicans are cherry-picking their own kind of globalism where goods an money are free.
That, is. not. true.
First globalism is something that has to do with a free circulation of people and goods ( money are included in my view within goods by necessity, unless you're thinking about a primordial society founded on exchange of good for good ) AMONG many countries.
There wasn't ever a call for globalism in history because there wasn't such massive partecipation from countries.
What you had in the past was bilateral or trilateral accord ( like NAFTA; recently renmed USAMCA ) over negotiated goods.
Globalism won't do that by negotiating single cases, but only for general cases ( all diary, all automotive, etc.. )
Regardless that, it's been since mr. Trump's election that this presidency has imposed restrictions over goods coming from China, recently it has mined the Pan-pacific accord with asian countries, imposed tariffs on steel trade with Europe, and the list goes on and on.
It's appalling, to say the least, that everything was shut down and narrowed to only the last few days data only ( that is only to consider the 100bls tradi with saudis.. in a vacuum! )
Maybe the author is not aware of the meaning of the word cherry-picking, but he is an expert of the word horse-viewing.
4
@Alex p
Its a opinion piece. The author is entitled to his opinion; you are entitled to disagree. Its not an "editor" issue.
You'll be alright.
3
The "free movement of goods", when it encompasses imports from poorly regulated, authoritarian countries with no history of labor rights and with little regard for the stewardship of God's green earth, has exacerbated our climate calamity and is bringing right wing nativists, with dangerous ideologies, to power all over the developed world. But the bankers & their friends in Washington and Manhattan remain willfully blind.
38
If this is true what is up with the trade war? It is about goods and services and money. Unless the Internet is coming down it will always move things in the direction of consumers and empower the movement of goods and money but do little about the movement of workers.
1
Your main point: "The idea that openness is under attack is too vague. The formula of right-wing alter-globalization is: yes to free finance and free trade. No to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality."
And I am assuming that saying no to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality is bad, in your opinion. And I am assuming that you believe both finance and free trade can exist along side free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality.
To preserve our basic values, if indeed these are an examples and I am assuming they are, we need to work harder at not simply settling for "free finance and free trade", which are far easier to achieve if you dispense with these basic values. We used to fight for human rights, we sought to be a nation that practiced democracy as a role model for the globe, and we hoped to make progress every year on improving human equality. Never perfect, but striving to abide by these values as a nation.
Openness under attack is a critique that is too vague. Is you point that we sacrifice these values to quickly, and at our moral peril, if we settle for that as adequately clear and direct.
I hope that is what you are saying. I agree with you. And with our vote in November we can begin the process of protecting these basic values.
2