The Right’s Infatuation With Globalization
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Niall Ferguson makes an important observation that the Anglophone right, as he calls it, has been oblivious to the impossibility of pursuing three distinct goals. As Ferguson writes:
Suppose that a government can have any two of the following things, but not all three: globalisation, in the sense of openness to international flows of goods, services, capital and labour; social stability; and a small state. Or, to put it differently, conservatives can pick any two from an open economy, a stable society and political power – but not all three.
This seems true to me, which is why it puzzles me that pretty much everyone on the Anglophone right (with a few exceptions) has concluded that the things that need to be dropped are either “social stability” or “the small state” or both. If there is one fundamental area of agreement among almost all Republicans and Tories, it is that policies that support globalization must not be touched. There are quite a few people who agree that the right has to adapt to new circumstances, but very few of them are interested in altering support for policies that facilitate globalization. Bizarrely, just as the worsening of the Iraq war made the war the one unquestionable policy on the American right, the global recession has made globalization even more sacrosanct than it was. As with Iraq, the Anglophone and particularly the American right seems to enjoy embracing even more tightly something that the rest of the world and most Americans are souring on.
Dropping social stability together with a tweak of the “small state” model is what Ferguson recommends: embrace social change and support a “smart” state that will be interventionist in targeted ways. What hardly anyone on the right is interested in challenging or critiquing, much less rejecting, is globalization. As I have been saying several times this week, the things that conservatives claim to want to preserve are incompatible with globalization, just as George Grant observed decades ago that they were incompatible with the right’s embrace of technological progress (and empire). It seems to me that this vindicates one of the central insights of the “crunchy” and neo-traditionalist critique of the mainstream right, which is that when push comes to shove mainstream conservatives prize the fruits of “creative destruction” over all else. This seemed true several years ago, and the last three years have tended to confirm the claim.
MEP Daniel Hannan’s tongue-lashing of Gordon Brown has received a fair amount of attention, and certainly few deserve ridicule and scorn more than Brown, but Hannan is representative of the sort of thing I’m talking about. What was the first thing Hannan criticized? He attacked Brown’s hypocrisy for praising free trade while also having used the phrase “British jobs for British workers,” which is fair enough in that the two are contradictory, but it is telling that Hannan’s problem wasn’t simply the contradiction but that the problem with Brown’s position was that it was insufficiently globalist. Unlike Janet Daley, who has since come around to seeing the virtue of the idea of “British jobs for British workers” but still tut-tuts at protectionist measures, Hannan is a thoroughgoing globalist (and, I might add, a bit of a loon who says things like, “Israel is more than a country; it is an archetype”) and a perfect example of the sort of Conservative who would sooner defend globalization and abandon everything else if it were necessary.
Filed under: culture, economics, politics
10 Responses to “The Right’s Infatuation With Globalization”
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Why do you find this puzzling? Most conservative politicians and media outlets are funded by business interests – large corporations or wealthy businessmen. Of course they favor globalization over a small state, and politicians, conservative media outlets and professional pundits by and large reflect this bias.
Any chance you could weigh in on the fox/hedgehog talk here: http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/18953.html ? Is it indeed cautiousness that defines conservitivism?
It’s kind of interesting that he mentions “social mobility” as one of the factors that would lead us toward desiring globalization. What we have witnessed over the prior 30 years is a stratisfication of the middle class. The GINI coefficient has grown signaling less equality. As economist Ha-Joon Change argues in Bad Samaritans, technology transfer is fine for bring up the 3rd world, but free trade is terrible for bringing about greater equality.
My household was caught up today in the latest example of unfettered globalization, IBM’s Black Thursday it is already being called.
http://davescheffer.blogspot.com/2009/03/ibm-and-black-thursday.html
I’m less aggravated by a layoff completely de-coupled from role and job performance as I am that we have no portable health care program that makes our overseas challengers so much more competitive.
I can think of nothing that would unleash American productivity more than freeing people from being tethered to less productive jobs simply to maintain devolving health coverage that has more in common with developing rather than industrialized nations.
Our “social mobility” has slipped markedly since fifteen years ago. Both my wife and I fall into the “Generation Jones” slot so this is par for our entire lives.
You’re right, M.Z. Stratification here and in the developing world is the result. The mobility Ferguson refers to doesn’t apply to most people, but mainly to a percentage at the top. Blond makes a related point in his Red Toryism essay:
I visited Taiwan several times in mid-60s. Once got caught in a monster traffic jam during a parade celebrating the old Generalisimo’s 80th birthday. Huge placards with picture of Chang, Roosevelt and Churchill around a table with an indulgent Chang sitting at the head of course. Cab driver translated script as “of all the great leaders, only Chang is still leading his people.”
In contrast to the “Cultural Revolution” soon to overtake the mainland, Taiwan was relatively safe, free and prosperous. In Asian cultures, that was about all that could be expected at the time. Only ideologues would judge societies against some dreamlike fantasy inhabiting their feverish minds.
” Only ideologues would judge societies against some dreamlike fantasy inhabiting their feverish minds.”
Okay, you’ll get no argument from me on this score. I assume you think this has some bearing on what we’re discussing here. I have no idea what that might be, but perhaps you can elaborate.
I was in Taiwan last year, and the wonders of globalization have made sure that Taiwan is becoming ever-more dependent on the mainland as more and more companies set up shop on the mainland rather than in Taiwan and as China becomes more important to Taiwan’s economy. All of the distinctive things that have made Taiwan so admirable have been steadily undermined for decades by the very process I’m criticizing. At some point, Taiwan is going to be absorbed by China thanks in no small part of the economic boom that we in the West have been fueling with our consumption, assuming that it isn’t dragged down first by the problems in China’s economy during this recession.
“This seems true to me, which is why it puzzles me that pretty much everyone on the Anglophone right (with a few exceptions) has concluded that the things that need to be dropped are either “social stability†or “the small state†or both. ”
As has been pointed out already, the corporate sector doesn’t give a flying (beeeeeep) about a small state. And most of the rest of the right dumps that alleged principle in the trash as soon as it interferes in something they want.
BTW – there’s a difference between ‘conservatism’ and ‘the right’. When you’re engaged in a radical restructuring of society, ‘conservative’ is not the correct term. I say this because when one starts saying ‘the right’ instead of ‘conservatives’, things become much clearer; many supposed contradiction are gone.
Daniel,
I agree with your critique above about the irreconcilability of real conservatism. I also agree with your 06 critique of Hannan’s apparent enthusiasm for democratic, popular and revolutionary despotism.
However, I write to make a different point, that I think your 06 piece, and its implicit sympathy for Royalism, Stuarts and Toryism, shows the substantial limitations of paleoconservatism (even as I identify as one) owing to the dominance of Catholic and, in your case, Orthodox writers, whose theological (and thereby political) sensibilities are, frankly, alien to the historic American Anglo-Protestant experience.
Writers at Chronicles, particularly Dr. Fleming, similarly execrate Whigs. But America was founded in Revolution as, effectively, a Whig nation. That certainly present difficulties for a paleoconservative view of history, at least one that is consciously Catholic in worldview (and maybe the present dominance of Catholic writers means that there is no other form of paleoconservatism.)
There certainly were members of the Founding Generation who were deeply skeptical of the revolutionary optimism and “leveling” first seen in the “Roundheads” era and later in the French Revolutionary era. However, they were a minority (as seen in Adams declining influence in comparison to Jefferson.) Few if any of the “Founding” generation were actually levelers, of course, but there is little question that their sympathies would be more toward the Whig/”Parliament” side than Royalist. And there is also little question that “leveling” began early in the Republic’s history, even prior to Lincoln’s actions.
I’m not necessarily endorsing sympathy with Whigs–although I have no sympathy for the Stuart line, particularly in its consciously Catholic iteration in the Jacobite form, which was in itself revolutionary in seeking to usurp the predominant Anglo-Protestant culture of England and Scotland.
It is more a reflection that paleoconservatism isn’t an effort really to restore an “Old Republic”, except in the political structure of the federal and states, I suppose. It is rather a disposition toward human nature and societies that is not specifically American.
That probably also raises the question whether, apart from ad hoc policy issues, it could ever hope to be substantially influential in an American society that has been in its popular culture for at least 100 years, consciously Whig and leveling. While paleoconservatism can serve (as were the writers/thinkers identified by Kirk in his Conservative Mind) as trenchant critics of the dominant culture in the US. However, with sympathies that are ultimately alien to the predominant American experience, I’m not sure it can have presence beyond.
Sorry, the first sentence, first paragraph should “with globalist ideology.”