When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism

And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.

 .. Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way.
..I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order.
.. first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations.
.. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.
.. the existentially stressed state of mind is the source of discrimination and hostility against out-groups.
.. The word “cosmopolitan” comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitans embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability… Monbiot’s claim that patriotism is indistinguishable from racism illustrates the universalism that has characterized elements of the globalist Left in many Western nations for several decades.

.. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways

.. The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.

.. But the globalists are concentrated in the capital cities, commercial hubs, and university towns

.. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil

.. Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.

.. So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements

.. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.

.. When they read that Americans are changing in ways that make them more similar to each other, authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others. But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the “authoritarian dynamic” kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant.
.. Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies.
.. Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender.
.. But as soon as you speak up to voice those concerns, globalists will scorn you as a racist and a rube. When the globalists—even those who run the center-right parties in your country—come down on you like that, where can you turn? The answer, increasingly, is to the far right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, and to Donald Trump
.. She contrasts her theory with those who see an unstoppable tide of history moving away from traditions and “toward greater respect for individual freedom and difference,” and who expect people to continue evolving “into more perfect liberal democratic citizens.“ She does not say which theorists she has in mind, but Welzel and his World Values Survey collaborators, as well as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, seem to be likely candidates.
.. The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance [emphasis added].
.. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.
.. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners.
.. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.
.. we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness…. Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes.
.. nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation.
.. globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.

Zero-sum Trump: What you learn from reading 12 of Donald Trump’s books

For Donald Trump, calling someone a loser is not merely an insult, and calling someone a winner is not merely a compliment. The division of the world into those who win and those who lose is of paramount philosophical importance to him, the clearest reflection of his deep, abiding faith that the world is a zero-sum game and you can only gain if someone else is failing.

.. On the core issues he cares about the most — international trade, immigration, foreign policy — he’s strikingly consistent. He’s always been anti-immigrant, always been protectionist, always been fiercely nationalistic on matters of war and peace.

More generally, he’s always believed in the fundamental zero-sum nature of the world. Whether he’s discussing real estate in New York, or his ’00s reality TV career, or his views on immigration and trade, he consistently views life as a succession of deals. Those deals are best thought of as fights over who gets what share of a fixed pot of resources. The idea of collaborating for mutual benefit rarely arises. Life is dealmaking, and dealmaking is about crushing your enemies.

“You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” he writes in Think Big and Kick Ass, co-authored with Bill Zanker of the Learning Annex. “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.” To “crush the other side and take the benefits,” he declares, is “better than sex — and I love sex.”

.. In Manhattan real estate, wealth is not created by offering new products that make consumers’ lives better.

.. Manhattan real estate is a zero-sum game.

Precisely, it’s an area of business characterized by what economists call “rent-seeking.”

.. The result, as Adam Davidson has astutely noted, is that Trump’s “whole worldview is based on a rent-seeking vision of the economy, in which there’s a fixed amount of wealth that can only be redistributed, never grow. It is a world­view that makes perfect sense for the son of a New York real estate tycoon who grew up to be one, too.”

.. even if there were some losers, you could simply raise taxes and redistribute some of the gains to them.

.. he appears to sincerely believe the proper way to evaluate whether a policy is working out for the US is to examine not whether it makes the US better off than it was but whether it leaves the US better off relative to other countries. The “great” in “making America great again” is “better than the rest,” not “better,” period.
.. Over the medium term, both the US and Chinese economies have been growing, but China’s has been growing a lot faster. Overall, both countries are much richer than they were 20 years ago. This is not how Trump sees things.
.. As the general election begins in earnest, it’s natural to expect Trump to do what most general election candidates do: pivot to the center and become a more normal politician. But Trump’s writing suggests that on the issues where he diverges most markedly from the political mainstream, his views are deeply held and strikingly consistent — much more so than either his critics or his supporters recognize.
.. His core philosophy is that cooperation is folly and America cannot thrive unless others fail.
.. Take the very first paragraph, in which Trump describes deals as a kind of art. His life is a creative enterprise, about joy and self-expression, rather than making money for money’s sake:
.. He sees getting attention as helpful, even if it’s bad attention. He might look bad in the short run, but notoriety increases his influence and thus helps him make deals — the ultimate marker of success.
.. bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all,” he writes. “Controversy, in short, sells.
.. Living without trying to “win,” Trump says, is barely worth living at all.
.. Trump’s xenophobia is not an opportunistic invention. It’s core to his political identity.
.. But it’s exactly the book you might expect the Donald Trump ofThe Apprentice to write: ruthless, impatient, and committed to dealing harshly with people less as a matter of tough love than to prove he simply can’t be bossed around.
.. So he started thinking more positively and dreaming up the next wave of deals. When he marched in to tell his weary accountants about his big plans, he writes, “they thought I had cracked, that maybe I was beginning to hallucinate from the pressure.” But in his version of events, the accountants’ balance sheet realities were simply less powerful than the sheer force of his will.
.. Never Give Up is fascinating as an insight into the sort of person for whom it works: someone who can make his own reality by changing his mindset. Trump enthusiastically endorses bluffing, but, he insists, “I’m not pretending in any sense of the word.” It’s perfectly believable. Trump is simply acting like a winner until the bout of self-doubt passes and he remembers he’s been a winner all along.
.. The problem with these sections is that when your conception of the presidency is “making deals” and “cheating foreigners before they cheat us,” it’s hard to apply that frame to the federal budget or to health care reform.
.. The problem is that the issues he is passionate about aren’t the issues that stir Americans’ souls.
.. For his zero-sum view of the world to apply to domestic policy, he needs internal enemies he can negotiate against. By the start of the 2016 campaign, when he called Mexican immigrants rapists and suggested that Muslims be banned from entering the US, he’d finally found some.
.. “If you do things a little differently,” he writes of the media, “if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you.” The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. “When,” he asks “was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!”
That sort of marketing claim — what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls“bullshit,” a deliberate falsehood that nonetheless doesn’t truly rise to the level of a lie — is part of what Trump calls “a mutually profitable two-way relationship with the media”
.. The important proposition of the book is simply that America is broken and Trump has the business skills to fix it. He’s not going to tell you exactly how it’s going to happen. He’s not even going to promise you that the things he says are 100 percent accurate (rather than calculated for political effect). But he’s a guy who gets things done. So trust him. Just look how serious and determined and angry he seems on the cover.

We’re Better Than That

Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation — by race, religion and trade. His philosophy, the rant of a besotted boob making things up in public, is anti-American at its core. In rejecting our former colonial masters, we threw off monarchy, the class system and a state religion. We opened our doors to all nations, all religions, all opinions.

The Moral Economy of Tech

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis.

.. Approaching the world as a software problem is a category error that has led us into some terrible habits of mind.

BAD MENTAL HABITS

First, programmers are trained to seek maximal and global solutions. Why solve a specific problem in one place when you can fix the general problem for everybody, and for all time? We don’t think of this as hubris, but as a laudable economy of effort. And the startup funding culture of big risk, big reward encourages this grandiose mode of thinking. There is powerful social pressure to avoid incremental change, particularly any change that would require working with people outside tech and treating them as intellectual equals.

.. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It’s a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability.

.. Google Ventures, for example, is seriously funding research into immortality. Their head VC will call you a “deathist” for pointing out that this is delusional.

.. Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing.

.. Many of you had to obtain a US visa to attend this conference. The customs service announced yesterday it wants to start asking people for their social media profiles. Imagine trying to attend your next conference without a LinkedIn profile, and explaining to the American authorities why you are so suspiciously off the grid.

..  All of the major players in the surveillance economy cooperate with their own country’s intelligence agencies, and are spied on (very effectively) by all the others.

.. Try to imagine this policy enacted using the tools of modern technology. The FBI would subpoena Facebook for information on every user born abroad. Email and phone conversations would be monitored to check for the use of Arabic or Spanish, and sentiment analysis applied to see if the participants sounded “nervous”. Social networks, phone metadata, and cell phone tracking would lead police to nests of hiding immigrants.

We could do a really good job deporting people if we put our minds to it.

.. That this toolchain for eliminating enemies of the state is only allowed to operate in poor, remote places is a comfort to those of us who live elsewhere, but you can imagine scenarios where a mass panic would broaden its scope.

.. Or imagine what the British surveillance state, already the worst in Europe, is going to look like in two years, when it’s no longer bound by the protections of European law, and economic crisis has driven the country further into xenophobia.

.. Or take an example from my home country, Poland. Abortion has been illegal in Poland for some time, but the governing party wants to tighten restrictions on abortion by investigating every miscarriage as a potential crime. Women will basically be murder suspects if they lose their baby. Imagine government agents combing your Twitter account, fitness tracker logs, credit card receipts and private communications for signs of potential pregnancy, with the results reported to the police to proactively protect your unborn baby.

.. When we talk about the moral economy of tech, we must confront the fact that we have created a powerful tool of social control. Those who run the surveillance apparatus understand its capabilities in a way the average citizen does not. My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country.

What we’ve done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.

..  I am very suspicious of attempts to change the world that can’t first work on a local scale. If after decades we can’t improve quality of life in places where the tech élite actually lives, why would we possibly make life better anywhere else?

.. We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation.

.. The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it.

.. This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

There is also prior art in attempts at achieving immortality, limitless wealth, and Galactic domination. We even know what happens if you try to keep dossiers on an entire country.

If we’re going to try all these things again, let’s at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.