Trump win breathes fresh life into globalism-nationalism debate

President-elect Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania, at Capitol Hill in Washington yesterday.

Many comparisons have been made linking the Trump election with the Brexit referendum and central European resistance to ­accepting Muslim mass migration as examples of populist rebellions against a cosmopolitan liberal global order. In reality, the differences between, say, Donald Trump, Britain’s Boris Johnson and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, let alone the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, are vast and many and put them on opposite sides to each other on vital questions.

For instance, Orban’s government took full-page ads in British newspapers appealing to voters to reject Brexit. That said, there is certainly one thing they all have in common: they have all provoked extraordinarily self-righteous demon­strations against the outcomes of democratic elections.

Reading The New York Times op-ed pages has been an oddly similar experience to watching the protest marches across America behind banners proclaiming “Not my President”. Both stressed the same themes, often in the same Lego-like phrases, and with the same unselfconscious assumption of their own virtue. Common to both was the unstated conviction that the problem is really quite simple: the wrong decision has been made and the voters must be persuaded to reverse it.

The BBC cry of one anguished San Francisco feminist, when she was ­informed that 53 per cent of white women had voted for the sexist monster Trump, was that we must have “a conversation”. She meant, of course, a monologue, at least until the benighted 53 per cent of her sisters throw up their hands and surrender.

The problem with this ­approach is that almost all the ­official and mainstream media and cultural institutions have been conducting a monologue with the American people on such issues as racism, sexism and xenophobia since the end of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably thorough monologue, too — with constant denunciations of the patriarchy, institutional racism (in the police), rape culture on campus, the lack of gender-diverse bathrooms, even the horrors of politically incorrect stand-up comedy.

No sin is too trivial to escape the preaching and punishment of the progressive state. Thus, the Obama administration is now waging a legal battle to compel some elderly Catholic nuns to include contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans. And this string of minor psychodramas, all carrying a progressive message, if not instruc­tion, goes out minute by minute on airwaves and digital media.

If you’re delivering the monologue, or if you agree with the sentiments expressed, you doubtless feel that all is well. But if you have a view different to that of the mono­logists, or if you merely don’t like being lectured, you will feel more and more irritated. Maybe you will think that it’s not the job of a government to keep telling you how you should behave morally, why you should exercise more, how you should arrange your financial affairs more prudently (especially since they don’t seem very good at taking their own advice.)

On the other hand, if you are the monologist and your moral ­advice is ignored, then you will ­almost certainly get angry and suggest that these foolish people don’t deserve to be let out without a keeper, namely yourself. They really aren’t up to the business of living properly. You really must have a conversation with them to show them the error of their ways. And before you know where you are, you are carrying a banner down the street in a crowd of social justice warriors shouting “Not in my name” or some such.

Why do people see these things so differently?

It’s commonly said that America is now divided into two nations, progressives and conservatives, each with its own media and conversation, neither listening to the other. That’s not entirely true. Both conservatives and progressives tune into mainstream publications, largely because you would have to be a Trappist monk to avoid them altogether.

But conservatives also pay heed to their own subversive alternative media — talk radio, Fox television, conservative magazines, websites like Instapundit or Drudge, and the WSJ editorial page — to hear the progressive shibboleths subjected to investigation, criticism and mockery by sharp clever writers such as social critic Heather MacDonald or the satirical journalists Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg.

Progressives have a snobbish contempt for the same media but rarely listen in. Most of the time that doesn’t much matter but every now and then the alternative media breaks a story that undercuts a progressive certainty, as when a Rolling Stone report ­apparently intended to confirm the myth of widespread campus rape was itself shown to be fake. And libel writs started flying.

More generally, progressive politicians such as Hillary Clinton are surprised every four years when the voters prove to be ang­rily resistant on issues that they thought had been safely settled.

That’s one of the things that happened in this week’s election. ­Issues that the mainstream media hardly covered — there were no questions about immigration until the third debate — had not disappeared from the minds of downscale voters who were hurt by it. Clinton had been “exonerated” by the FBI — which the commentators thought had ended that particular scandal — but the exoneration actually fuelled the perception that she had benefited from official favouritism.

Above all else, however, she was the symbol of a progressive politics — the personification of the monologue — that more and more voters, ­especially men, had grown to dislike as an endless series of mildly hostile and condescending attitudes towards them.

If that was your feeling then Donald Trump might well look like the ideal champion. He was larger than life and took no nonsense. He had serious faults, he made vulgarly lecherous remarks about women, issued almost random insults to various population groups and had almost no control over himself.

But when David Blankenhorn set out to find why people supported Trump in a tour of the American south he discovered that his supporters were not themselves vulgarians or sexists and they disliked those qualities in Trump. But they liked his candour, his contempt for political correctness — his political profanity, so to speak — and his concern for their actual wellbeing in a practical way (jobs, mainly). Above all, however, they disliked Clinton and the progressive bureaucrats who had in their view misgoverned America for the previous 30 years. Why so?

They were the invisible victims of the policies of social interventionism and control driven by identity politics — the politics of race, gender and class — that the US government has progressively imposed in the post-Reagan era. Most obviously, they are not members of the “protected” groups that benefit from affirmative action, which has spread from African-Americans to ­almost all ethnic minorities, ­including recent immigrants, plus women (in short a theoretical ­majority of the US population).

They feel themselves to be the people who sustain this structure of controls and social benefits with their work and taxes without benefiting proportionately from it. They’re not entirely right about that — they benefit from universal entitlements such as Social Security; but they’re not entirely wrong either because they’ve contributed more than other recipients to such funding over the years.

Clinton’s Democratic party has said goodbye to more and more of these voters since Reagan brought the first platoon of them over into the Republican camp. To compensate for these losses, the Democrats have constructed a party that relies increasingly on support from single women, ethnic minorities, federal and state government employees and upscale well-­educated voters. Social benefits and race and gender quotas play their part in attracting these voters (and tax cuts generally do not) but a new and more significant technique of keeping their support is to divide them into social groups that of their nature are dependent on government.

As John Fonte argues in the current Claremont Review, this is a fundamental change in the nature of American society: “Our trad­itional regime envisions American citizens working and debating through their democratic institutions and voluntary associations for the common good. Instead, the contemporary progressive world view, which has established ideological hegemony among our elites, bases its civic morality on the centrality of ascribed group identity and group consciousness, particularly race, ethnicity, and gender, thereby prioritising group interests.”

As this identity regime spreads from bureaucratic arrangements across much of employment, academic and public life to political rhetoric, some people feel left out or “marginalised” — but perhaps different people from in the past. In the words of John Marini, ­quoted by Fonte, that kind of politics “requires the systematic mobilisation of animosity to ensure participation by identifying and magnifying what it is that must be opposed” (my italics). And what must be opposed turns out to be the values, loyalties, interests and even self-regard of the non-­protected ordinary American. What explains, for instance, the leaked emails in which senior Clinton advisers sneer at the ­beliefs of traditional Catholics?

In all these cases this aggressive identity politics sets group against group and divides traditional ­social groups from those organised by the states along quasi-ethnic lines.

That said, these culture wars might have gone on indefinitely without seriously ­obstructing either America’s long-term progressive revolution or Clinton’s likely short-term election victory — America is now a society divided almost evenly on these issues — if not for a major ideological development at home and abroad. Identity politics has now crossed the floor. The Trump campaign, Brexit in Britain and the refugee row in Europe have signalled the rebirth of patriotism and popular democracy against progressive global governance and its forced transformation of societies along secularist and multicultural lines.

Yoram Hazony in Mosaic has given us the most comprehensive account of this new clash between two visions: “For 350 years, Western peoples have lived in a world in which national independence and self-determination were seen as foundational principles ... Since World War II, however, these ­intuitions have been gradually ­attenuated and finally even discredited, especially among academics and intellectuals, media opinion-makers, and business and political elites. Today, many in the West have come to regard an ­intense personal loyalty to the ­national state and its right to chart an independent course as something not only unnecessary but morally suspect. They no longer see national loyalties and traditions as necessarily providing a sound basis for determining the laws we live by, for regulating the economy or making decisions about defence and security, for ­establishing public norms concerning religion or education, or for deciding who gets to live in what part of the world.”

Who will decide such questions in the US was an underlying issue in this election. Clinton was plainly a globalist like President Obama, Donald Trump an opponent. ­Unlike the other matters discussed above, however, it is an issue that of its nature pits the democratic majority against progressive elites. And since Trump won this race, he has ensured it will be a central political issue of this still new century.

John O’Sullivan is the editor of Quadrant and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.