From “grooming scandals” in the UK, and Christmas market massacres in Germany, to border invasions in the U.S., the perennial question is: Why are Western leaders seemingly acting against the interests of the people they lead?
Until World War I there was an explicit assumption that national leaders, broadly speaking, acted in the national interest—that not only monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers, but leading intellectuals, and captains of industry made common cause with the people in their own countries. But in the aftermath of the world wars, we saw not only the emergence of ever more supra- and inter-national regulations and institutions, but also a new kind of elite.
Modern managerial meritocracy has saddled us with elites who are far more alienated from and disdainful of the people they presume to rule than any ancien régime aristocrat. And rather than adhering to the traditional credo of noblesse oblige, they truly believe their power derives from merit. Consequently, they don’t think they owe the plebeian masses they rose above anything. This isn’t just true in economic terms, but also in social and moral ones. This new elite identifies itself far more with other elites in Washington, London, and Hong Kong than they do with their own compatriots. Why was that?
The obvious answer is globalism—the idea that a modern interconnected global market, powered by standardized shipping and telecom, has rendered national borders, identities, and parochial interests irrelevant. And that is true, as far as it goes. But it’s neither new nor universal.
To state the obvious, the major economic player on the contemporary board, China, does not act according to that logic. Instead, it behaves like an overt supremacist Han ethnostate. Russia, in its own way, does eschews this view as well, having its own long history of aspirations to becoming a multi-ethnic empire, but having consolidated into an overwhelmingly Russian national state following the dissolution of the Soviet superpower. The West may have abandoned the nation state idea, but most of the rest of the world still exist in a great power game of competing national interests.
The anti-national elites in the West and the Anglosphere are, in the end, simply satraps—provincial governors, working for an expanding American Empire. Their efforts no more advance an abstract globalism, than the Herodian kings of Judea or the later Ptolemies in Egypt served anything but subjugation to the power of Rome.
What obscures this simple point is the obfuscated nature of the American empire, which superseded the British under cover of dismantling it, just as the other winner of World War II, the Soviet Union, was also an empire wearing the cloak of anti-imperialism. Any contemporary American decline is only relative to rising powers like China. Measured against the rest of the West to whose power it succeeded, the UK, Germany, France, and Canada, the U.S. is as dominant as ever it was.
And empires inevitably become something other than nation-states. The British Empire was not run on behalf, or to the profit of, the average working class Briton, but instead advanced the perceived interests of the people administering it and the ones influencing them. It’s partly due to how circumscribed the real freedom of political action in the client states has become, but also within the American polity itself, that words are continually being redefined in our postmodern world. For example, consider what they have done with “democracy.” It’s now used to signify a desired outcome from the elite perspective, not a process. And if the will of the people expressed in elections differs that is now a “threat to democracy.”
So many institutions that seem to be hewn from bedrock principles turn out to be based on unspoken assumptions everyone simply took for granted when those institutions were created. As John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” And it’s arguable that even this takes for granted the inherited culture of that population. But over time the very conditional high Enlightenment rhetoric of the Constitution made way for a very literal and universalist interpretation and a liberal creed much more amenable to an imperial project, both at home and abroad.
“Who would support” mass immigration, “unless they hate the native population?” is the perennial question. The answer is: The ones profiting in some way from it—groups of people who don’t identify with the native population, and the middle managerial classes they encourage to despise their kin.
And in this they can appeal to oikophobia. People have a nasty tendency to look down on their own relatives and countrymen, to mark themselves out as superior, part of a global enlightened elite. These are the people who proudly call themselves “citizens of the world.”
True right-wing politics—and it has become ever more obvious that this is not synonymous with “conservatism” or laissez-faire capitalism—could never be completely severed from the nation while retaining any social heft. And following World War II the U.S., wielding the dogmatic club of anti-racism, set about crushing every last glowing ember of national and regional distinctiveness into the ashes of equality around the world among its allies, or rather its vassals, as well as in its own heartlands. Having fully internalized this dogma Britain, for example, has now devolved into a fully fledged fanatically anti-racist tyranny.
From an American perspective the muddle becomes even muddier. On the one hand, the current system favours U.S. hegemony, rule over Canada and the annexation of Greenland. On the other hand, this expansion doesn’t really profit the American middle class; just as the average Welsh coal miner, or Staffordshire potter, gained little from the British Raj in India. And the imperial ideology of importing slave labour to work the “latifundia” of the Roman magnates, and the H-1B-visa indentured servants of tech moguls, hits the imperial heartlands just as much as the provinces.
Going all the way back to arch-conservative and militaristic Sparta in Ancient Greece, right-wing thinkers have grappled with the inevitable subversive effects of empire on society, while also being the apotheosis of martial will to power; just as the American right has to do, particularly now that—for the first time in generations—it’s actually organically setting the terms of political debate. This cuts across the heart of the right, as indeed it does so many of the men in the meme daydreaming of Rome, as well as America’s founders, who intellectually admired the virtues of the Roman Republic, but emotionally and aesthetically yearned for the might and majesty of the Empire.
Despite some warmed over, and purely cosmetic, Leninist rhetoric decrying “imperialism,” the progressive left, on the other hand, has no fundamental quarrel with empire. In fact, it’s rather the opposite, that the nature of empire fits hand in glove, or mailed fist, with leftism. The logic of globalism and that of empire are largely the same. Open borders are the key foundation of economic globalism and neoliberalism, with the fundamental equality of man, being the social one. All men are equal and all men are interchangeable. So what price empire?
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