Globalism-Uniting Left and Right

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “He’s right about that.  We’re stuck in these paradigms where if you are a leftist, then your global citizenry comprises and consists of importing as many people that aren’t like you from other places on the globe into your sphere.  Of course, you don’t actually want to live with them.  They need to go out and live among the little people, but you’re happy they’re here.  You did your job as a globalist.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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. . . American conservatives promoted economic deregulation. Liberals endorsed cultural deregulation. All of this made a great deal of sense. Reaganism opened up an overly constrained and government-dominated economy. Our brutal system of state-sponsored racial discrimination needed to be dismantled. Rigidly patterned male and female roles were overthrown as well, and sexual morality was relaxed, perhaps with less justification. For good and ill, the momentum of deconsolidation carried things forward.

All of this took place against the background of the Cold War, which produced a counter-pressure of patriotic consolidation. We had to gather ourselves to resist Soviet imperialism. Then came the mother of all deregulations: After the Berlin Wall fell, the world was able to take up the metaphysical dream of ever-greater openness and fluidity. The end of history was upon us.

“Globalism” is the best term for the post-1989 expression of this metaphysical dream. Like all dreams, it is impressionistic. But the outlines are well known at this point. The free flow of capital, goods, and labor brings universal prosperity. A global technological revolution relieves man’s estate. A scientific, pragmatic consensus puts the old ideological quarrels behind us, allowing for consensus-driven problem solving. The emerging human rights regime guarantees human dignity. In a word, we’re evolving in the direction of a more peaceful, more productive, and more just world, precisely as the old consolidating and limiting powers of religious belief, moral tradition, and national loyalty recede.

Today, globalism, in one form or another, unites the establishment left and right . . .

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Mike:  He’s right about that.  We’re stuck in these paradigms where if you are a leftist, then your global citizenry comprises and consists of importing as many people that aren’t like you from other places on the globe into your sphere.  Of course, you don’t actually want to live with them.  They need to go out and live among the little people, but you’re happy they’re here.  You did your job as a globalist.  If you are a “USA! USA!” right-wing globalist, then your globalism comes from exporting American exceptionalism, of making the rest of the world just like the misery that you live in.  Doesn’t everyone want to live in the form of bliss that Americans live in?  Doesn’t everyone want to partake of – [mocking] “Mitter Church, please.  Everyone wants the American dream.  Eskimos want it.”  That’s right, everyone wants the American dream.

On the one hand, there’s an export of Americanism and an export of our view of globalism.  It comes along with a couple MOABs and cruise missile bombs and drone strikes.  Ignore that.  On the other hand, there’s the let everyone in – you know what I saw yesterday?  I was on some website and a news video popped up.  It was either Fox or CNN.  This news video popped up that showed these imbeciles, useful idiots standing there wielding placards.  I guess they were outside the White House or somewhere where Trump was going to be, wielding placards that said: Immigrate / Import more Muslims now.  The people that were wielding the signs and chanting didn’t look like Arabian Muslims.  I’m watching this thinking: You know the Muslims that are watching this on international television are going: What a bunch of useful idiots they have in America.  We are going to take these guys down without firing a shot.  Global useful idiots.

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Today, globalism, in one form or another, unites the establishment left and right. This fact explains why Trump elicited bipartisan opposition during his campaign, and still does. (The same holds for recent European elections.) The political establishment quarrels over a great deal, but it shares the metaphysical dream of a more open and fluid world. The left leans in the direction of multiculturalism, where political correctness operates as an obligatory ideology of inclusion. The right tilts in the direction of free markets, even to the point of describing national citizenship as rent-seeking. But the root idea is the same. When in doubt, open things up!

The metaphysical dream that has dominated the West for decades is being challenged. People don’t weep because of tax proposals. But a temporary ban on travel from a few Muslim countries evokes anguish. That’s because it’s a direct assault on a central tenet of globalism—the belief that “openness” and other deconsolidating motifs will midwife a better future.

A quite different metaphysical dream now runs counter to globalism. It prizes loyalty and wishes to re-consolidate around something solid and tangible. Trump’s political genius was to recognize this desire. He fed it with vivid rhetorical flourishes. Building a wall may be a silly policy proposal, but it’s a powerful image of national reconsolidation . . .

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Mike:  He’s right about that.  Who was on the show a couple weeks ago and said – it was Kevin Gutzman: I don’t view the wall as something physical, Mike.  I view it as something metaphorical.  It doesn’t actually have to be a wall.  It just has to work like a wall.  If it works like a wall, then the challenge has been met and the policy has been accomplished here.  Think about that.  You don’t actually have to deliver on a campaign promise, for example.  If you’re in the political class, you only have to make it look like you delivered on it.  It’s part of the new nationalism, the new “USA! USA!”  Let me ask you, are there signs of new nationalism in county life?  Do you see people rallying around building walls around their county or their town or their parish as it once existed?   You don’t have to actually physically build a wall.  You simply identify that this is where I live.  This is who I live amongst.  This is good.  This is true.  This is beautiful.

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That’s because they feel that the social and economic bases for national unity are dissolving. It’s an altogether sensible worry. The eroded middle class and loss of solidarity in our society are plain to see . . .

Conservatives must always ask themselves what they seek to conserve.

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Mike:  I started asking this question a decade ago.  You call yourself a conservative.  What are you trying to conserve, dude?  Can you quantify it?  Can you write it down?  Does it have a motor?  Are they the good, the true, the beautiful?  What are you trying to conserve?  The legacy of Reagan’s tax cuts?  That’s awesome.  What are you trying to conserve?  The flag.  [mocking] “Mitter Church, we just want the flag to fly high and proud.”  A flag is an inanimate object the last time I checked.  It can’t be proud.  It can’t fly proud.  You might have pride in flying it, but the flag itself can’t be proud.

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Conservatives must always ask themselves what they seek to conserve. In 2017, our goal must be to conserve democratic self-government, which is the basis for political freedom.

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Mike:  I’m going to stop right there and disagree.  Even though Reno writes at First Things and is thought to be a very traditional conservative guy, I don’t think preserving democratic self-government is the basis of political freedom.  You haven’t asked the philosopher’s question, though, Mr. Reno.  You’ve assumed that political freedom has led to paradise.  You’ve made the leap here, without proving it, that political freedom is a common good.  There was political freedom to establish communism in Cuba.  There was political freedom to overthrow the old order that the Kaiser was trying to protect.  There’s political freedom that kicked out the royal families of Europe in place of Lenin and Stalin and communism and fascism and socialism.  That was political freedom.  Democratic political freedom is not a necessary ingredient –

Ladies and gentlemen, truth be known, is there such a thing as self-government that’s defensible?  When you think self-government, you think the founding fathers standing around a table in Philadelphia on the 4^th of July 1776 getting ready to sign the Declaration.  That’s self-government; right?  What about the field in Runnymede back in 1214 when the barons and the noblemen told King John I: How about a little freedom?  The Magna Carta was written.  Could the Magna Carta have been proposed if there wasn’t political freedom?  Nobody asks these questions anymore.  Even the wisest and most sagacious among us don’t ask these questions.  Why?  They haven’t trained their brains with the need for creed.  They haven’t studied or bothered to study philosophy.  Specific, not Kant, not Hegel, not Marx, not Freud or any of the other fraud that have screwed up the modern world.

End Mike Church Show Transcript