The Transnationalists/Globalists/Universalists of the GOP Capital Class Ought to Read this Megan McArdle Piece Before It's Too Late

Too Late for them, I mean.

Her major point is that the elites of UK and Euorpe -- and, by implication (though she's delicate about it) the US -- have decided that "nationalism" is crude and kin to racism, and therefore, there is no longer any legitimate reason to favor a fellow citizen over a foreigner. To favor the former over the latter is a crude tribalism close enough to "racism" to be racism, for all intents and purposes.

The globalist/universalist/transnationalist wing of the GOP is careful to not admit this sort of archlibertarian/global socialism belief, because their fellow citizens would no longer pay them any mind if they were to announce their belief that they have absolutely no favoritism for a fellow citizen over a foreigner.

It would be like hiring a lawyer who tells you "I don't care if you win or not -- it would be tribalist to favor you. I'm just in favor of the truth." That lawyer, by telling you he's indifferent to your victory or defeat, or your opponent's victory over you, is telling you as clearly as posible "Do not take me for counsel."

Similarly, if the purported leaders of the GOP admitted their true, Arch-Randian belief that the nation-state is outmoded and all that matters is an elite citizenship in the Transnational Archilbertarian Belief system, US Citizens would know to not heed their counsel.

No one would bother listening to anyone admitting, right up front, "I'm utterly indifferent to your fate."

Yet that is in fact the hidden deep nelief of the globalists. If a US citizen and a foreign immigrant find themselves in competition -- as all things in life find themselves in competition, outside the babytalk liberal babblings that we're all on the same team -- and the foreign immigrant wins out, well, that's not really anyone's problem but the citizen who lost out. Other US citizens should not have been rooting for the US citizen to prevail, nor think it a bad thing that he lost. To harbor such Pro-US-Citizen sympaties is inherently Racist.

The globalists/anti-nationalists won't admit this, because if they did, people would naturally say "Then why in FUCK'S NAME should we follow your prescritpions? By your own admission you do not care if we win or lose; you think it would be racist to care either way."

So they continue to hide this central premise -- but not particularly well, because their disdain for their fellow citizens, and their revulsion at the disgusting racist impulse called 'nationalism," is palpable.

It used to be only the left thought this way. I routinely used to bait the left by asking them a hypothetical: if you're the uS coast guard, and can save only a US citizen or a foreign national from drowning, which would you choose? *

Liberals proudly said "I would not choose," and refuse to answer -- they considered it an article of their cult belief system that to privilege the American in this hypothetical would be racist and unenlightened. The enlightened view -- and they're all about showing off their enlightened view -- is to take a God's Eye View of the situation. God, not being American, would have no reason to favor the American life. Only a lowly human with his primitive nationalism would see things this way.

So, you know, liberals merely wish to show themselves to be the equals of God Himself as far as objectively.

So, liberals have always believed this.

But it's only been the past five or six year -- and especially the past year -- where I've seen so many "conservative" masks come peeling off to reveal how thoroughly they agre with their libera elite (???)_ brethren on this point.

Megan Mcardle delivers a warning to these people: You'd better get over your Moral Preening over the idea of favoring your fellow citizen over a foreign one, or your current crop of followers are going to fire you and find a lawyer who does not find it repulsively racist to favor their clients over their opponents:

In some ways, the modernity that we thought was supposed to wash nationalism away on the tide of history made things worse for the cause of mass migration. For the first few centuries of its existence, America had a chronic labor shortage, which eased any frictions with new arrivals. We also lacked a modern welfare state, to which low-skilled immigrants are likely to be net costs rather than net contributors. I heard the strain on the National Health Service cited multiple times this weekend as a sore spot for Brexiteers, and though the “Remain” campaign says “You’ve got it all wrong, the problem is Conservative budget cuts,” this rather aggressively misses the point: When things are hard, immigrants compete with natives for scarce government resources, and the natives don’t like the competition.

I don't know whether Britain will end up leaving the EU; based on my conversations this weekend, and the polls, I’d put the chances at slightly above 50 percent. But that’s not a very educated guess, and I wouldn’t stake anything important, like money or the future of my country, on its correctness. Even if Remain wins, however, elites will face the question of what to do next. They can decide that they’ve skated by the crisis and may now return to business as usual while they wait for the populist storms to blow over. But there’s a real danger in doing so, in Britain or in any of the other countries that are currently being swept by populist movements. The storm may indeed pass, but it may blow up into a hurricane -- and the majority may go shopping for a new elite, one they trust to take care of people like them.

She notes that at some point, it no longer matters if you largely agree with what a self-claimed elite says they believe -- if you simply no longer believe they're on your side (as the GOP base decided of its leadership this year) then you simply fire them, period, and seek out a new lawyer who's not too proud and too maroally narcisistic to make an occasional argument to defend your interests.

By the way: this is why voters turned on Liberal Democrats beginning in 1980. At some point voters got sick of the liberals constantly adding new clients higher in priority to themselves, forever subordinating their own interests to their new clients' interests.

Eventually, the public fired the liberal Democrats from the presidency. It would take a disastrous turn in 1992 for the public to risk a Democratic Presidency again. (It also took a Democratic candidate essentially repudiating liberal Democratic politics and promising to favor the middle class once again.)

The GOP elite is following the liberal Democrats down this same path to irrelevance.

At some point, people will believe you when you keep telling them you have higher priorities than looking out for their interests.

Is there a single American out there who believes the radical Randian Paul Ryan is actually looking out for Americans ?

* I remember being frustrated, because I'd designed the hypothetical to show them that, despite their protestations, they actually did favor Americans over non-Americans. I thoght the hypothetical would cause them to realize this, or that they would dodge the question/evade the hypothetical until that became obvious.

Intead, they surprised me: They didn't dodge the question at all. They straight-up declared they had no patriotic fellow-feeling for their fellow Americans -- as all thinking people naturally should not -- and would not choose between them on nationality alone. They'd rather flip a coin than knee-jerkedly favor the American.

I designed the hypotehtical to be a trap, and to expose their anti-Americanism to themselves. I was astonished to find out they already knew they were anti-American, and couldn't wait for the opportunity to proclaim that.

I'm afraid the current GOP leadership class is not quite so honest about this at the current time, as they're serving as the leadership of a party that once used to believe in a concept called "patriotism," or at least pretended to.

I think I prefer the liberals, in all honesty. At least they were straight about what they believed.

BTW: I call this an "arch-libertarian position" because, well, it is. Libertarians believe that nationalism is just another kind of collectivism, and as evil as the others.

Now, honestly, nationalism certainly is a kind of collectivism. Any fidelity to any corporate (many-body) organization is of course a kind of collectivism.

But an evil one?

I get libertarians saying this -- but not conservatives.

If you don't believe in patriotism, you cannot believe in a Just War-- for why should you favor the lives of your own fellow citizens over the lives of foreign ones?

That jibes with Libertarianism's toddler philosophy that War Harms Trees and Other Living Things.

But I cannot get "conservates" attackign nationalism/patriotism -- and at the same time agitating for war.

If patriotism is racism, then any warfare contducted by a nation-state is, by defintion, a racist war.

"Conservatives" buying into this theory seem to support war while rejecting the entire underlying premise that justifies a war -- the idea that we can, and should, favor our own lives over any foreigners who wish to deprive of our lives.

If we have no real basis, except for crude racism, to favor ourselves over any others, what the hell are we doing organizing men into divisions for?

Patriotism and the Honor of Soldiers: If you accept the basic premise that it's a good thing to favor your fellow citizens, then soldiers are honorable fighters because they're vindicating this virtuous impulse.

If, however, you reject the idea of patriotism -- which is just the polite word for nationalism; let's not play semantic games, they're the same thing -- then soldiers are nothing but thugs we hire to kill people when we have disputes with them.

I just don't see how you can claim to be patriotic, or to be "pro-miliatry," when you dn't believe in the central pillar of patriotism -- a favoring of one's fellows over any other claimants for one's loyalties or sympathies.

Tht's not the same as jingoism- you don't have to be an ultranationalist to be a nationalist, nor do you have to be a my-country-right-or-wrong jingoist to be a patriot.

But when you're routinely slurring the idea of nationalism generally, and claiming that anyone who favors one's fellow citizens over non-citizens is a small-brained provincial little racist collectivist, you're denying that soldiers are anything more than amoral mercenaries hired by one group to defend them and their interests.

I could see people slurring the "bad kind" of patriotism -- jingoism -- and the "bad kind" of nationalism -- ultranationalism. The idea that we should always, in every single case, privilege "Ours" over "Theirs," no matter how wrong "Ours" might be in a particular case, or no matter how little it would take to help "Theirs" with a minor sacrifice by "Ours."

That makes sense to me. I can see arguments on such points.

But I never thought I'd see the GOP "elite" attacking nationalism qua nationalism, that is, any amount of nationalism, any amount of patriotism, as inherently tribalist, collectivist, primitive, and a kissing cousin of racism.

But then, I'm learning a lot of about the party I thought I had affinity with lately.

I think I'm probably learning more about group-based "thinking" over actual thinking by individuals than about the party -- that is, I think I'm just relearning every single day that people are far stupider when they "think" in packs than when they think as individuals -- but I do think I'm lesrning something about the party as a whole as well.

I did not realize until the past few months that nationalism -- patriotism -- was controversial not merely among liberals (who are honest enough to brand themselves cosmopolitan transnationalists and anti-patritots), but controversial among the leaders of the alleged "patriotic party" as well.

posted by Ace at 05:26 PM

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