In National Review, of all places, Michael Lind has good piece on “The Open-Borders ‘Liberaltarianism’ of the New Urban Elite”:
Brexit, Trump, the rise of national populism in the United States and Europe, and the crack-up of the old center-left and center-right — all of these are manifestations of larger trends in what might be called local geopolitics: the politics of place within countries rather than among them.
Lind rightly points out the increasing supervenience of cuckservative libertarianism (now the dominant ideology of NR, the WSJ, The Economist, etc.) with liberal cosmopolitanism, all to the benefit of transnational capitalism.
In its wake, particular in an era of acute political correctness, is the characterization of reactionary nationalisms as… drumroll… racist. Lind writes:
What appears to be a debate among globalists and nationalists, then, is really a debate about the structure of the 21st-century nation-state. There are real dangers associated with the coalescing elite ideology of post-national globalism or, to be precise, national-elite pseudo-globalism. One danger is groupthink resulting from the attempt by the new globalists to equate even enlightened and civic nationalism with racism. When the economist Larry Summers, nobody’s idea of a pitchfork-waving populist, tentatively called for “responsible nationalism,” he was criticized by The Economist, whose open-borders libertarianism, once eccentric, has become near-orthodoxy among the trans-Atlantic elite.
What appears to be a debate among globalists and nationalists, then, is really a debate about the structure of the 21st-century nation-state. There are real dangers associated with the coalescing elite ideology of post-national globalism or, to be precise, national-elite pseudo-globalism. One danger is groupthink resulting from the attempt by the new globalists to equate even enlightened and civic nationalism with racism. When the economist Larry Summers, nobody’s idea of a pitchfork-waving populist, tentatively called for “responsible nationalism,” he was criticized by The Economist, whose open-borders libertarianism, once eccentric, has become near-orthodoxy among the trans-Atlantic elite.
Lind predicts that the “libertarian-inspired demonization of the nation-state as a sort of racist gated community” we are witnessing will lead to an even more strident reactionary nationalism.
