One result of the New Political "Dark Age" is that globalisation is once again much in the news. Yes, we are once again re-living the 30-year old, asinine debate over whether trade, openness and integration are good for us or not. My own answer to this is “yes, obviously”. The more important political question is how globalisation occurs, who manages it and who benefits from it. I think it would be hardly surprising for a progressive to answer that the answer to those questions are “undemocratically, by existing elites and largely for their own private benefit”. Both sides of the globalisation debate mistake a desirable end state [globalisation] with a particular set of policies [i.e. the neoliberal, free market consensus]. It suits globalisation's advocates on the right to argue that their policy prescriptions are the only way to reach that end goal [it isn't]. Equally, opponents of the neoliberal consensus often mistakenly make the argument that it is globalisation per se that is bad [it isn't].
In this context, a number of commentators, including reputable press outlets, have begun talking about political divides in contemporary democracy as a fight between “globalists” on one side and “nationalists” on the other. The former are characterised by a default pro-globalisation stance, the latter by the opposite. Let us put aside, for now, the fact that this language is often used as an anti-semitic dog-whistle by the alt-right and enthusiastically exploited by the Trump campaign. Is is a valid way of constructing a political spectrum?
On the intellectual front, my friend @AriSharp wrote a prescient piece on this in November of last year. Ari’s basic case is that the globalist/nationalist divide does away with the traditional differences between left and right, and creates a new alliance between the nationalist left and nationalist right opposed to globalisation. Ari argues that political parties must pick a side, since an internally-consistent policy platform cannot include both positions. Ari's position strikes me as a form of 'radical centrism': the type of politics that argues that cosmopolitan leaders like Turnbull, Clinton and Macron are always preferable to Sanders, Corbyn or Melenchon, regardless of their other policy positions or merits, merely because of their relative cosmopolitanism.
A similar piece of work is currently being promoted by the Australian National University and the Fairfax papers in Australia: the Political Persona Project. Arguing that old political labels are rapidly changing, the researchers divide Australians into seven ‘new political tribes’ which they argue better model political preferences (complete with cutesy, Facebook-shareable cartoons). For example, my left-wing friends on Facebook generally fall into either the ‘activist egalitarian’ or ‘progressive cosmopolitan’ ‘tribes’. Let’s give the researchers the benefit of the doubt, and presume that these tribes are based on relevant research and describe real clusters of political personality in Australia. Is this a useful typology? Is it more salient than my own libertarian/authoritarian and progressive/conservative framework (See Chapter I of "Politics for the New Dark Age")?
First of all, let’s dispense with the trope of a left-right nationalist coalition as yet another instance of the tired political caricature that left and right are somehow similar and that the political spectrum ‘curves around’ at its extremes. I address the so-called ‘quadratic hypothesis’ or ‘horseshoe hypothesis’ and debunk it in Chapter I of my book.
Secondly, let’s also note that trying to split your political adversary’s coalition is a political strategy with a tried and true pedigree. Certainly, if I were running a left-wing political party at the moment I would be exploiting the divide between more neoliberal conservatives and anti-establishment nationalists for all it's worth. And let’s not forget that conservatives have been trying, often successfully, to wedge the left on trade for longer than I’ve been alive. This is old news.
Thirdly, it should also be acknowledged that the labels of globalist and nationalist are not, as far as I’m aware, seen perjoratively by the people to whom it is applied. Advocates for globalisation are proud of their elite status and the self-evident benefits that they are able to access as connected global citizens. Indeed, being pro-globalisation is a mark of a tribal identity. Likewise, the new nationalists see their retreat intro "blood and soil" tribalisms denoted by narrow markers of race and religion as both rational and moral. The globalist-nationalist dichotomy is a useful tool for both sides to distinguish themselves from their opponents and shape the boundaries and content of their own political tribe.
Yet despite the conceptual flaws, there may be real ideological differences here, and the question we have to answer is whether these are ideological differences, or something else pretending to be ideology. There are valid reasons one might hypothesise a motivational basis to these tribes. Cosmopolitan elites are much more likely to be satisfied with the current status quo in highly developed nations, and thus resistant to impulses towards either progressive or conservative change. And cosmopolitans may be more open to new experiences and more comfortable with uncertainty than either right-conservatives or left-centrists.
Looking again at the Political Persona Project, the obvious non-ideological difference between "activist egalitarians" and "progressive cosmopolitans" is class. Progressive cosmopolitans are far more likely to have a tertiary income and live in the cities; a person earning more than AU$90,000 is twice as likely to identify as part of this tribe than someone earning $50,000 (which is still well above the median wage). Ari similarly argues that nationalists are more likely to be manufacturing workers, those on low-incomes and self-funded retirees. A developmental and contextual understanding of political personality could certainly suppose that environmental differences between social-economic classes have an influence on political preferences. The process of globalisation has created winners and losers, and the latter have greater claims to be frustrated by the status quo.
So I would argue that we’re actually seeing a frame being placed around class differences in political outlook, and calling that an ideological divide. In other words, an argument that class preferences trump a more comprehensive ideology - an argument from identity. But the divergence in political behaviour between elites and non-elites is not a novel observation. Class membership is only one factor shaping political alignment, which otherwise shows significant individual and cultural variation. Thus, it's not clear to me that the globalist/nationalist divide really is highly salient to understanding modern politics, as Ari suggests. Rather, it seems that those issues 'explained' by the divide are the ones that tribalist elite political commentators (on both the 'globalist' and 'nationalist' sides) are most preoccupied by (such as trade, migration and climate change), but which affect the daily lived experience of relatively few people in the short-term.
In the end, I don't think the globalist/nationalist divide is a framing with any utility. It goes without saying that political strategies, for either side of politics, that are not predicated first and foremost on the construction of broad ideological coalitions across class identity lines are doomed to failure. For their part, the peddlers of the globalists/nationalist framing have no interest in or capability to get us out of the New Political Dark Age: rather they appear intent, either by accident or design, on keeping us there.