By Steve Sailer
07/09/2016
From The New York Times:
A Central Conflict of 21st-Century Politics: Who Belongs?Ignatieff is the grandson of a Tsarist count. His father was Canada’s UN ambassador. (Zbigniew Brzezinski would be a fairly comparable figure in American history.)The Interpreter
By AMANDA TAUB JULY 8, 2016
WASHINGTON — The trend emerged into public consciousness last year with the rise of far-right politics in Europe. It spread with Donald J. Trump’s successful campaign to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in the United States. And its consequences became unmistakable with Britain’s vote last month to exit the European Union.
What is driving this surge in anti-immigrant populism in Western politics?
Michael Ignatieff has a theory, one rooted in his research as a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and in his experience as former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party.
The younger Ignatieff, who has lived outside Canada for most of his life in prestigious academic jobs, was an unsurprisingly ineffective politician:
But his explanation is lucid:
According to his argument, what we’re seeing is, in part, an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rightsWhat I call the Zeroth Amendment to the Bill of Rights.
, and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community.
This disagreement, he said in an interview, has animated much of the backlash against immigration that is described as “uncontrolled” and a threat to receiving communities. These disagreements over “who belongs,” he said, will “define the 21st century.” …Like I’ve said, politics is basically about whose side you are on.
Big names in political history tend to be those who devised relatively lasting arrangements. For example, George Washington played a major role, first, in breaking apart the British Empire for being too big and, second, in unifying the thirteen states for being too small. Both decisions endure. Not surprisingly, Washington remains famous.
Q. Brexit took a lot of people by surprise as a specific political event, but also as an expression of some larger trends. One of those is rising nationalism despite globalization and the development of cross-border institutions like the European Union. Where are these coming from?Everything is relative. The problem has become that the Zeroth Amendment is increasingly seen as absolute, ruling over all other.A. One thought that does strike me is: Why should we be surprised?
Globalization and a borderless world have been terrific for the educated, the young, the mobile, the multilingual, the multicultural. But globalization has been really tough for people whose jobs are tied to a community, whose mobility is limited by limited education, and — more positively — whose first allegiance is to their community, their locality, their place of birth.
Cosmopolitans are perpetually surprised that, A, they’re only 1 percent of the population, and, B, most people don’t think like them. …
They feel the global, mobile, cosmopolitan world is simply out of reach. Not only out of reach, but malign, in the sense that the global cosmopolitan elite are the people who are shipping the jobs out. …
This is a story not just about nationalism. It’s also a story about inequality. The division between cosmopolitans and nationalists is going to define the 21st century. Brexit is not just a little hiccup on the path toward a bright cosmopolitan future. Nor is nationalism. Cosmopolitans continually condescend to nationalism, but my patriotic pride is your nationalism, right?
Q. But if nationalism comes from positive feelings of pride and connection to one’s community, why does that often seem to manifest in fears of immigration as a threat to that community, as it did with Brexit?
A. The issue always is: Who belongs?
In many ways, global migration is exacerbating the salience of the division between a citizen and a stranger. Citizens are saying everywhere, “The one thing that political community means to me, the one thing a nation means to me, is control of my borders and the right to define who comes in and who doesn’t.”
Brexit was an amazing spectacle in which people who are recent immigrants, Indians, Pakistanis in origin, were saying, “No more Poles.” These were citizens saying: “We’ve lost control of our frontiers. Free movement of people is simply incompatible with democracy. It’s incompatible with the self-determination of peoples.”
That’s what nationalism is: “Take back control, control of our borders. Take back control of our economy.”
The problem, in a globalized world, is that all control is relative.
… Q. Is this, on some level, driven by a conflict between democracy and globalization? If so, can that be solved?Hospitality to travelers is a big theme in the Bible and other West Asian religious traditions. But it’s limited in duration and its reciprocal.A. I do think that there’s a real disconnect between an international cosmopolitan discourse about rights — the rights of migrants, the rights of refugees — versus the way in which ordinary people in most democracies see this question.
For ordinary people, a citizen’s relation to a stranger is a gift relationship, not a rights relationship.
They think it’s up to the citizen to decide who gets in. It’s up to the citizen who decides what the boundaries of a political community are.Like I’ve been saying for years, we’ve witnessed an intellectual failure among elites due to censorship of public expression. The wisdom Ignatieff has finally stumbled upon really isn’t that complicated.That’s what democracy means to them. That’s what democracy promises them: control of borders and the handing out of discretionary gifts to those they decide belong in the community.
There are a lot of Brexiters who think a decent country is generous to strangers, is compassionate to strangers. But that’s the language of the gift. That’s not a language of rights. This is an emerging theme that a lot of liberal cosmopolitan politicians — and I have been one! — didn’t understand.
This is a key element of this nationalist turn. We’ve all been slow to see that happening, but that’s a big trend going down, the distinction between rights and gifts. It helps to understand that.
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