@plainoldme,
Populist nationalism: Populist nationalism in the U.S, as in Europe,
tends to combine an inherently exclusive, ethno-religious definition of American identity as "Western" (that is, European or white) and "Christian" with a distrust of elites and a spirit of egalitarianism among the members of the "authentic" American Volk.
In the realm of policy, populist nationalism tends to
favor restriction of legal as well as illegal immigration to protect the "core stock" of the tribe-state from "dilution" by different races, ethnic groups or religions. Populist nationalism also tends to favor protectionist policies that shield American workers and businesses, particularly small businesses, from foreign competition.
With its ethno-religious nationalism, its anti-elitism and its economic protectionism, populist nationalism is antithetical to the neoliberal celebration of diversity, meritocratic elitism and globalization, so it is small wonder that neoliberals direct most of their denunciations at populist nationalism rather than at other rival worldviews.
Libertarian isolationism: Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy.
Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated "military-industrial complex."
If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms.*
Green Malthusianism: This worldview synthesizes mystical versions of environmentalism with alarm about population growth in the tradition of the Rev. Thomas Malthus. The Green Malthusian perspective holds that the Industrial Revolution ended humanity’s allegedly harmonious prior relationship with Nature, permitted an explosion of the human population beyond the alleged carrying capacity of the planet and threatens to produce runaway global warming, along with pollution, resource depletion and mass species extinction. In order to restore balance between humanity and the ecosystem, human numbers must be dramatically reduced.
Green Malthusians disagree about whether restoring harmony with nature requires abandoning modern technology or using "appropriate" technology, a blend of pre-modern and modern machines and techniques that minimize the human "footprint" on the earth. Even though its lack of carbon emissions makes it an obvious tool for combating global warming, Green Malthusians generally oppose nuclear energy because of its toxic byproducts, and perhaps also because it did not exist in the premodern past that they idealize. Many Green Malthusians attribute virtue to the technologies and landscapes of the First Industrial Revolution -- the railroad, the trolley, the streetcar city -- and bitterly denounce as wicked the technologies and landscapes of the Second Industrial Revolution -- the car, the truck, the plane and the suburb and edge city.
If this is an accurate description of the most important worldviews that provide the basic assumptions that Americans bring with them into public debate, it would explain a number of puzzles.
To begin with, it would explain how the term "progressive" can be applied, at the price of great confusion, to members of all of the groups other than populist nationalists. Self-described "progressives" include libertarian isolationists and neoliberal globalists, Green Malthusians and social democratic liberals. This taxonomy explains why social democratic liberals can share the concern of national populists about possible wage-lowering effects of excessive immigration, while despising and repudiating national populist obsessions with maintaining the supposed purity of the American racial, ethnic or religious "stock." It explains why populist nationalists and libertarian isolationists often agree on isolationism but not on tariffs or immigration. And it explains why pro-technology, pro-market neoliberal globalists who think they are devout environmentalists frequently discover that they really share little in common with other environmentalists who are ascetic, anti-modern Green Malthusians.
Most important, this explains why there is so little fundamental difference between the policies pursued by centrist New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Republicans in power, like George W. Bush.
Neoliberal Democrats like Clinton and Obama run for office by posing as social democratic liberals; once in power, they carry out the neoliberal globalist agenda favored by America’s financial and corporate elites.
Republicans do the same, pretending to be national populists or libertarians on the hustings, and then governing as the right wing of neoliberalism, sharing assumptions with Clinton-Obama Democrats about free trade, deregulated capitalism and the need for some sort of minimal safety net -- preferably a means-tested, voucherized, privatized one that requires Americans to pay brokers and insurance companies.
Half a decade or a decade of economic stagnation and global economic turmoil might eventually discredit the neoliberal globalist consensus, in the way that the crises of the 1970s undermined the earlier social democratic liberal consensus.
So far the Great Recession and its aftermath have not been sufficient to force either neoliberal Democrats or center-right Republicans to reconsider their faith in the neoliberal creed. But alternate worldviews continue to find adherents, the century is young, and history is seldom kind for long to establishments and orthodoxies.
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."
*POM's footnote: There are some folks who are not of the libertarian isolationist camp but who have their essential grounding in science and technology who are looking ahead to what they call the "post-industrial world" who see this scenario combined with Green Malthusianism as the only way humans will survive the collapse of oil.
