George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 December 2018.]
Have you considered where you stand on the many issues that not only divide us Americans, but also people everywhere, that is everywhere they can freely speak their minds? Have you really thought it through well enough to sit down and make a list of the issues that concern you, and also your reasoned or even unreasoned, attitude about each such issue? Most people will have to answer a truthful NO, and admit that they primarily respond to such questions, as they come up, with an unexamined yet readily available emotion.
Today we are becoming more polarized as each day goes by without anyone being able to identify a meaningful patch of common ground on which we can meet and talk. The old adage of ‘don’t talk politics or religion’, when hoping to remain civil in polite company, has now become a social mandate in the carefully groomed public round. When at church or at some other club or association meeting, everyone carefully minds their mouths, and holds on patiently until they can leave and get back to more reliably like-minded folks.
While there are many things we all can disagree on – today immigration, climate change, abortion, culture, assimilation, terrorism, … remain high on the list – how we come down on each of them can usually be traced to our overall picture of the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to inherit. And for those fortunate enough to be well-read, that almost inevitably brings us to one of two kinds of worlds, which ultimately identify each of us as being in the nationalist or globalist camps. Moreover, the roads to such diametrically opposite worlds contain all the just-mentioned hurdles about which we, again, are of opposite minds.
In the short time I have, we can’t dissect the polar regions of each issue in the pursuit of common ground. Instead I want to examine a couple of critical factors that define the complex terrain of our differences, and the recognition that today’s growing divide can actually wind up changing the map of the world. The motivation for doing this is to push back on the Left’s ongoing narrative that there is no real divide in the world, save but only some ignorance on the Right that can be dismissed as soon as the correct thinking people have taken over.
But the divide is real and the literature describing it goes back well over 25 years. As an example, The Economist, that left-leaning, internationally respected British news journal started in 1843, in a recent publication takes a many-faceted look at 2019. In there, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times writes an essay titled ‘The great political divide’, wherein he describes how the “globalists and nationalists will slug it out around the world.” There he sees that “the contest between globalists and nationalists will be a central theme of world politics through 2019, fought out in different ways in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas”. Rachman does not agree with much of President Trump’s nationalist policies, but he does maintain “there is little doubt that the president identified a genuine divide in the American electorate.”
To understand the differences, globalists seek a world with one overarching and mighty government that will unite all peoples, cultures, and former nations which have relinquished their separate sovereignties to the global collective. The global common good, as then interpreted by the government’s elite bureaucrats, will rule. In opposition, nationalists seek to maintain today’s so-called Westphalian world order of many sovereign nation-states that retain their cultures and determine their own forms of governance as they participate in commercial and other forms of peaceful intercourse with the world’s nations.
Globalists see the individuals’ legitimacy and participation in society as members of identity groups for the benefit of which certain individual rights and freedoms must be sacrificed. Nationalists see the enterprising individual as society’s principal actor who enjoys freedoms and liberties guaranteed by a preferably limited government.
And, of course, there is more to all this. The globalist and nationalist political landscapes are further textured and nuanced in different ways. But the common bind for the nationalist starts bottom up with the individual and proceeds with family, and then continues on through memberships in larger socio-political units. The globalist holds that humanity’s aspirations are best achieved through the collective, which is then stratified further so as to maintain control and orderly progress toward society’s goals as outlined in the elites’ current plan.
These starkly opposite worldviews help explain why we have yet to find common ground, and every day compel more Americans to ask whether all of us can or should continue as one nation.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] Cato is the world’s mother temple of libertarian thought, and policy analysis and development. Of themselves they state – “The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank — dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues.” Progressives and those of the Left have historically dismissed Cato’s nonpartisan claim, and discounted the organization’s prescriptions as little more than rightwing propaganda.
Cato has been favorably referenced countless times in these pages, and I am a longtime supporter even though I cannot count myself among libertarians, mostly because of their isolationist foreign policy – America as a world hegemon is anathema to libertarians. Recently I was surprised to discover that there may be additional reasons for me to avoid the purities of true libertarianism. This graduated epiphany arrived in the form of Cato’s Policy Analysis #852: Walling Off Liberty – How Strict Immigration Enforcement Threatens Privacy and Local Policing.
In #852 its author Matthew Feeney argues that immigration enforcement, which includes “extreme vetting, building a wall along the southern border, cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities, and creating a deportation force”, will take too big of a bite out of our civil liberties and weaken local law enforcement. Feeney’s big concern is setting up permanent checkpoints within 100 miles of US borders that will unnecessarily harass American citizens and aliens here legally. We note that Americans are already quite used to existing border checkpoints and additional inland checkpoints set up for agricultural inspections, driver sobriety, and criminal apprehension.
As a red herring, Feeney illustrates that 2 of 3 Americans live within that 100 mile area (see figure in linked document) without a single mention that any such border security enforcements need be implemented only along our southern land border with Mexico from which the overwhelming share of illegal aliens enter our country. In that 1,933-mile-long swath live about 10M people, or only one out of 32 Americans. The proposed ‘wall’ would be extended to cover only 700 to 900 miles of that border, with several hundred miles of it already in place. The remaining length would be secured by the use of other surveillance and apprehension technologies.
What the policy document neither recognizes nor mentions is the scope of the illegal entrant problem along the southern border. There are no costs to America related to an essentially open border that will be assaulted more and more by Hispanic ‘migrants’ who claim to have the right of entry into our country. No costs are cited of ad hoc forces having to be assembled as a rapid reaction force to create horrendous scenes of physically repelling thousands of people at a time – among them politically positioned women and children. In essence Mr Feeney’s monograph is totally sanguine about the porosity of our borders, and America abrogating its sovereignty with an effectively open border between the United States and Mexico. Promoting such a policy, along with America’s withdrawal as a world hegemon, indicates that Cato is at least a passive promoter of globalism.
It is the promotion of policies like this that induced me to fashion myself as a conservetarian (q.v.), embracing an ad hoc ideology amalgamated from selected parts of conservative and libertarian doctrines.
rebanesruminations.com 
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