“There is this trope that globalism only benefits the elites. That drives me bat shit! My parents lived very circumscribed lives," he said, noting that his father lived pretty much all of his life within five miles of where he was born. "Immigration and globalism greatly improved life for everyone in my family.”Travel=improvement. Who can disagree with that? Certainly not me.
Moreover, I agree very strong that no matter how one defines improvement, it is a fallacy that globalism benefits only the elite. It was a successful system in the Post World War II era that saw great benefits for many, many people, including travel and its corresponding cosmopolitan awakening of the masses, accompanied by widespread middle class prosperity. It is ironic now that it is all being sustained by a political movement that sees all existing order as oppression to some faction within society, and therefore needs to be radically changed and even overthrown. Here is the crux of the matter of why it is now failing, as I mentioned.
Here's the chap's final judgment on globalism:
Globalism can’t be rolled back, Elliott says: “You have some guy in Mali who can Facetime his brother in Paris and say, ‘hmm, that looks pretty good, I’m going to go there.”Here's where I differ from him. He and I define globalism completely differently. He defines it broadly. I define it more narrowly, in terms of a specific network of cooperative relationships via existing and proposed transnational and international organs and institutions, and through the extended network of informal relationships among world leaders and people of international stature and respect.
He thinks the two things are inseparable---- the fact that people in Africa and France "live on top of each other" now, and the international system of existing treaties and institutions. I think it is a fallacy to assume that they are dependent on each other. In fact, I believe the cultural situation actually makes the institutional version of globalism (my definition) to be ever more unlikely. Such institutions worked well when they were the invisible eminence grise within the galaxy of world nations who lived separate national existences within the global community. The current round of institutions and organs are crafted by plans made in a previous zeitgeist and will look stilted and out-of-touch by evolving contemporary standards of taste.
That's why all of a sudden the E.U. looks like a soft postmodern version of the old Soviet Union in its waning days, or even (and this is actually more historically accurate given its origins) what the Third Reich would have looked like, if it had survived but gotten over its racism and repudiated its shitlord past, embracing a post-Sixties German-led internationalism with ethic race mixing in such a way to turn its bureaucratic colossus into a force of social justice. After all it's just Germany we're talking about.
At some point, we will need new types of international cooperative institutions that better reflect the unanticipatable cultural shifts that are being played out. But they are not designable right now, so long as the current order exists, since the crafting of any such institutions would simply be an attempt to buttress the existing ones through a rebooting. That won't work. The E.U. may soon look like the Holy Roman Empire after Napoleon. Only when the old one is completely gone will the new one even begin to take shape. Let us hope we can impart some wisdom to the people who are in charge of it, when it happens.
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