There’s a new scholarly journal out there called American Affairs. Eliana Johnson of Politico describes it as “a journal of public policy and political philosophy with an eye toward laying the intellectual foundation for the Trump movement.” Many people in the Trump movement purport to be in favor of “nationalism” over “globalism,” so you can imagine the journal will have some things to say about this topic. In the mission statement, the editors note the following:
We are said to live in a “globalized” world. Yet the most conspicuous global phenomenon of the present time would appear to be the resurgence of nationalism, in the United States as well as in Europe and Asia. What is the future of nations and nationalism, and what are the consequences of further separating political sovereignty from the existing political community of the nation-state? Is further “globalization” both inevitable and desirable? Can nationalism be leavened by justice—or even be essential to it—rather than being abandoned to its worst expressions?
And in the first issue, nationalism vs. globalism gets some prominent discussion. Georgetown political science professor Joshua Mitchell has a piece called “A Renewed Republican Party,” in which he talks about the “repudiation of globalism” in the 2016 election:
What term, then, should Republicans use to name the repudiation of globalism during the recent historic election? There will be a division, I suspect, along the lines we saw during the painful run-up to the 2016 election itself. On the one hand, Republicans who sided with globalists on the issue of commerce or who had a low estimation of American culture will indeed call what has happened a populist revolt. On the other hand, Republicans who think that globalism has not only been a disaster for the whole of the America but also that it is theoretically untenable will—or should—call what has happened a revolt in the name of national sovereignty, not populism.
Now, I’m not convinced that Trump really is the nationalist he plays on the campaign trail, or that his supposedly nationalist advisers are either. (The way they reach out to like-minded people in the UK, France, Germany and Russia seems kind of, well, globalist. Maybe it’s not really a repudiation of globalism they are after, but rather a different kind of globalism.)
Regardless, that’s the narrative going on right now: nationalism vs. globalism. And not suprisingly, this talking point has made the leap to a full-fledged academic fad, as evidenced by the creation of the American Affairs journal.
But what I keep wondering is: where are all these globalists that we are supposed to be afraid of? Mitchell tells us that American citizens want “their towns, counties, cities, states, and country” back. But back from whom? Who exactly has taken these things from us?