Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Right’s Infatuation With Globalization

Posted in by Illuminated One | Edit
The Right’s Infatuation With Globalization
Posted on March 25th, 2009 by Daniel Larison


Niall Ferguson makes an important observation that the Anglophone right, as he calls it, has been oblivious to the impossibility of pursuing three distinct goals. As Ferguson writes:

Suppose that a government can have any two of the following things, but not all three: globalisation, in the sense of openness to international flows of goods, services, capital and labour; social stability; and a small state. Or, to put it differently, conservatives can pick any two from an open economy, a stable society and political power – but not all three.

This seems true to me, which is why it puzzles me that pretty much everyone on the Anglophone right (with a few exceptions) has concluded that the things that need to be dropped are either “social stability” or “the small state” or both. If there is one fundamental area of agreement among almost all Republicans and Tories, it is that policies that support globalization must not be touched. There are quite a few people who agree that the right has to adapt to new circumstances, but very few of them are interested in altering support for policies that facilitate globalization. Bizarrely, just as the worsening of the Iraq war made the war the one unquestionable policy on the American right, the global recession has made globalization even more sacrosanct than it was. As with Iraq, the Anglophone and particularly the American right seems to enjoy embracing even more tightly something that the rest of the world and most Americans are souring on.

SOURCE: amconmag.com

FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE FOR YOUR MIND