They Hate
You. By Victor Davis Hanson| 12/16/18.
Against what or whom is the
contemporary Western public pushing back?
The French non-Parisians
against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern
European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The
Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?
The British masses against
both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the
will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against
outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?
The common target of all
these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a
set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the
majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to
environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.
In a word, the Ivy League,
Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on
a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward
state-managed social justice if you will—to end up as a sort of global Menlo
Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or
Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the
fated, but sometimes stalled, process along.
Like
Aristocrats of Old - Voters in consensual societies are often assumed too ignorant
of the world beyond their borders, too encumbered with traditional racial,
ethnic, gender, religious, and nationalist prejudices, and too ill-informed to
know what is good for them. No wonder that sometimes hoi polloi must
either vote repeatedly until they get it right, or follow executive and
judicial fiats issued from their betters on high. In the globalist mindset, Brexit
passed not because it was felt to be good by a majority or even advantageous
for the United Kingdom, but because racists, xenophobes, nativists,
protectionists, and chauvinists deluded the clueless public into thinking a
pre-EU, and more racist and sexist Britain was somehow superior.
A postelection depressed Hillary Clinton had to
travel all the way to Mumbai, India to find a more enlightened audience that
would appreciate her insight that the ogre Trump had beat her because:
If
you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle,
places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places
that own two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic
Product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse,
dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign,
Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people
getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that
Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am
going to solve it.
The globalist elite is
certainly transnational and is sickened by localism, traditionalism, and
autonomy. Monsieur Macron shares much more in common with Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, or Justin Trudeau than he does with rural Frenchmen. It is almost as
if in 2019 our elites are emulating the interlocking aristocratic families of
late 19th-century Europe, but instead of being common descendants of Queen
Victoria they are the godchildren of Menlo Park, Brussels, Strasburg, Davos,
and Wall Street.
Donald Trump’s efforts to
deregulate the U.S. economy, demand reciprocal trade with China, Mexico, or
Germany, rout ISIS, open up federal lands for natural gas and oil exploration,
build pipelines, lower taxes, and grow the economy at best are seen as
misguided parochial boosterism and at worse the sort of selfish nationalism
that ignores expert global and world-is-flat consensus. In either case, the
common denominator is that the world community can ill afford another U.S.
president who has not been stamped, vetted, or audited by an Ivy League law or
business school, a prior Washington D.C. federal office, or Wall Street firm.
Angela Merkel—who recently
pronounced that nations must be “prepared to give up their
sovereignty”—and
her ilk are representations of the same sort of values as those of Hillary
Clinton’s circle. Elites do not see their fellow citizens in exceptional terms
of the affinities of a common language, shared history, or sovereign geography.
Instead, they envision themselves as Socratic citizens of the world. They are
an international siblinghood with common blue-chip educations, wealth, and long
service in the administrative state. The anointed alone “see” and “grasp” what
is really going on with the world, and therefore what really needs to be done
right now, at all costs, regardless of the opposition from what Hillary wrote
off as “all that red in the middle.”
International
Crusading - Globalism is both an ideology and a culture of behavior. The creed
is that the Western world, given its colonial and imperialist past, has a duty
both to make amends to the former third world through magnanimously lending the
global community elite Western expertise—whether through Kyoto- or Paris-like
climate accords, foreign interventions guided by Western humanitarian
principles, asymmetrical trade agreements, open borders, or U.N. mandates.
The globalist alone knows
how global warming threatens us and how the ignorant masses must sacrifice to
cool things down, how nationalism supposedly causes world wars, how sexism,
racism, and homophobia have warped Western, but non-necessarily non-Western,
society, and how human nature can be modified to avoid these pathologies
through greater coercion, more relevant social education, improved material conditions,
and greater secular ecumenicalism—a far better religion than calcified
Christendom. The Western consumer—fat, “lazy,” played out—surely does not need
any more affluence or income. His nation, therefore, can afford to subsidize,
through his superfluous lifestyle, far nobler international crusades for
mankind.
The nation-state then is
passé. Transnational organizations, the larger and more powerful the better,
tame mindless Western chauvinism, while enhancing and making invaluable
alternative post-Western paradigms. The Secretary-General of the United
Nations, the chief executive officer of the World Bank, the Secretary-General
of NATO, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, a Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate, the President of the Council of Foreign Relations, the
president of CNN Worldwide, all these are certainly to be listened to in a way
an elected senator from Kansas, the nuts who stirred up the gilets
jaunes, the unhinged Poles and Bulgarians who wanted to build fences on
their borders, or renegade British MPs pushing for Brexit should not be.
Globalist penance for past
sins is accomplished in a variety of ways. Non-Westerns are not to be held to
symmetrical value systems. Islamic countries can destroy churches, Western
nations consider mosques sacrosanct. Illegal immigration force feeds diversity
onto a tired and exhausted Western public in dire need of having its horizons
expanded by the other. Dumping, patent and copyright theft, and technological
appropriation are sins only for wayward Westerners.
The elite must never be
subject to the sometimes unfortunate ramifications of their own ideologies—any
more than a laboratory scientist need be singed when he recklessly puts the
wrong volatile ingredients into his beaker mix. Open-borders architects in the
U.S. need not put their children in schools overwhelmed by illegal immigrants.
Walls are useless on borders but effective around Malibu and Napa estates. The
elite need not live in neighborhoods where European languages are rarely
spoken; others less liberal need such exposure and enlightenment. French
citizens must pay high gas taxes for their huge carbon footprints, French
elites fly private jets to conduct profitable business in the carbon-rich Gulf,
India, and China.
“Noble”
Ends, Unethical Means - Globalists generally assume that their own privileged material
conditions are pitiful wages for the greater good they do and so justify their material
hypocrisies, as if they were wounded wild fawns forced to rely on rich
artificial shrubbery of suburban gardens. They often share the greatest disdain
for the rural and muscular classes of their own countries who lack the
sophistication of the elite and the romanticism of the distant poor. If worse
comes to worst, such impediments can simply die off and be replaced by more
fertile, more energetic immigrants from the former Third World happy to have a
shot at Western material conditions and the general welfare state, and who are
at least thankful and appreciative of their benefactors and so more than
willing to be receptive to globalist, transnational, and redistributive
bromides.
Globalism ultimately is an
offspring of elite progressive universities, think tanks, foundations,
government institutions, and borderless corporatism. All the old progressive
boilerplate—anti-trust legislation, prohibitions on monopolies, product
liability—ceases when vast multibillion-dollar tech fortunes put their money into
progressive causes, and thereby remind us that sometimes noble ends justify
unethical means of obtaining them.
Facebook, Google, and
Twitter have a perfect right to monopolize, to warp political expression, and
to censor free speech if they devote their billions to enacting global climate,
political, or social justice change, in the manner that here at home the
Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and NSA—at times in conjunction with
their foreign counterparts—justifiably had to monitor, use informants, and
spread libelous smears on reckless Cro-Magnons like Donald J. Trump, who would
harken us back to an embarrassing nationalist and sovereign past. Illegality
has its uses.
Whom do the globalists
despise? The carbon spewing Winnebago
owners, the snowmobilers, the jet skiers, the Glock packers, the Elks Clubbers,
the lathe workers, the 101st Airborners with molôn labé tattooed
on their arms, the 7-11 owners, the nutty Brit who speaks reverentially of
Churchill, the dumb grubby French guy on a tractor who has no clue that his
diesel engine must soon be replaced by three-hour batteries, the wacko Greek
who cannot appreciate a boatload of noble Libyans landing on the beach below
his ancestral olive grove in Crete, the limited Czech who clings to the hokey belief
that residents in the Czech Republic should still speak Czech—in other words,
all the autonomous cranks, and odd ballers who did not get the message, are not
yet on board, and should have been by now long past woke.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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