Michael Lind: The Five Worldviews That Define American Politics
[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."]
Does it often seem that many American politicians and pundits are talking past each other? That is because they really are. The frustrating nature of public debate arises in large part from the fact that Americans do not share a single worldview.
A worldview is a more or less coherent understanding of the nature of reality, which permits its holders to interpret new information in light of their preconceptions. Clashes among worldviews cannot be ended by a simple appeal to facts. Even if rival sides agree on the facts, people may disagree on conclusions because of their different premises.
Both the conservative and liberal camps include people with different and sometimes incompatible worldviews. American public debate is arguably dominated by five significant political worldviews: neoliberal globalism, social democratic liberalism, populist nationalism, libertarian isolationism and Green Malthusianism.
Neoliberal globalism: This is more or less the official ideology of the political and corporate and financial establishments, shared by centrist New Democrats as well as by most Republican conservatives in their practice as opposed to their preaching. Shared by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton with George W. Bush, neoliberal globalism combines moderate conservatism in economics with the idea of beneficial U.S. global military hegemony.
In the minds of Democratic and Republican neoliberals, their orthodoxy was validated by three events in the early 1990s: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic crisis of Japan and the Gulf War of 1990-91. The collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted to mean the superiority of capitalism to socialism. The prolonged stagnation of the Japanese economy was interpreted to be, not an omen of similar bubble economies in the U.S. and elsewhere, but rather proof of the superiority of the Anglo-American version of capitalism to more statist kinds of capitalism in East Asia and Europe. The swift victory of the U.S. in the Iraq War, at a relatively low cost in American lives, was interpreted to mean that the Cold War had been succeeded by "unipolarity," in which the U.S. could maintain unquestioned military dominance at low cost on the basis of its gee-whiz military technology. This premise led to the mistaken assumption that technology would permit the Iraq and Afghan wars to be as quick and cheap as the Gulf War had been.
Neoliberals continue to believe that at home governments should provide basic public goods like infrastructure, healthcare and security by "market-friendly" methods, which in practice means vouchers, tax incentives or government contracts for for-profit corporations. Because trade by definition is supposed to be a force for progress, neoliberals see little role for government in trade beyond promoting trade liberalization, providing a business-friendly infrastructure and educating citizens to equip them to compete in the supposed global labor market of tomorrow (in reality, most Americans now and in the future will work in the nontraded domestic service sector, immune to direct competition with foreign workers)....
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Does it often seem that many American politicians and pundits are talking past each other? That is because they really are. The frustrating nature of public debate arises in large part from the fact that Americans do not share a single worldview.
A worldview is a more or less coherent understanding of the nature of reality, which permits its holders to interpret new information in light of their preconceptions. Clashes among worldviews cannot be ended by a simple appeal to facts. Even if rival sides agree on the facts, people may disagree on conclusions because of their different premises.
Both the conservative and liberal camps include people with different and sometimes incompatible worldviews. American public debate is arguably dominated by five significant political worldviews: neoliberal globalism, social democratic liberalism, populist nationalism, libertarian isolationism and Green Malthusianism.
Neoliberal globalism: This is more or less the official ideology of the political and corporate and financial establishments, shared by centrist New Democrats as well as by most Republican conservatives in their practice as opposed to their preaching. Shared by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton with George W. Bush, neoliberal globalism combines moderate conservatism in economics with the idea of beneficial U.S. global military hegemony.
In the minds of Democratic and Republican neoliberals, their orthodoxy was validated by three events in the early 1990s: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic crisis of Japan and the Gulf War of 1990-91. The collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted to mean the superiority of capitalism to socialism. The prolonged stagnation of the Japanese economy was interpreted to be, not an omen of similar bubble economies in the U.S. and elsewhere, but rather proof of the superiority of the Anglo-American version of capitalism to more statist kinds of capitalism in East Asia and Europe. The swift victory of the U.S. in the Iraq War, at a relatively low cost in American lives, was interpreted to mean that the Cold War had been succeeded by "unipolarity," in which the U.S. could maintain unquestioned military dominance at low cost on the basis of its gee-whiz military technology. This premise led to the mistaken assumption that technology would permit the Iraq and Afghan wars to be as quick and cheap as the Gulf War had been.
Neoliberals continue to believe that at home governments should provide basic public goods like infrastructure, healthcare and security by "market-friendly" methods, which in practice means vouchers, tax incentives or government contracts for for-profit corporations. Because trade by definition is supposed to be a force for progress, neoliberals see little role for government in trade beyond promoting trade liberalization, providing a business-friendly infrastructure and educating citizens to equip them to compete in the supposed global labor market of tomorrow (in reality, most Americans now and in the future will work in the nontraded domestic service sector, immune to direct competition with foreign workers)....