The Clash Within Civilizations

The World has Gotten Smaller.  As Pogo said it:  We have met the enemy, and it is us.

The conflict between civilizations is only part of it.  The real problem is the conflict within civilizations.  Some people are slipping behind.

Foreign affairs experts think about the "Clash of Civilizations", the notion that there are great fault lines in the world separating "the West" from the Islamic world, from Latin America, from China.  The political campaigns of 2016 focused on this, with Republican candidates pointing to Islam as a religion and ideology that leads to terrorism because they hate us.

Great international civilizations, ripe for conflict

Samuel Huntington's formulation of regions back in 1992 seemed prescient after the 9-11 attacks and the America voter was very receptive to messages of we vs. them, with them being "radical Islam."  Every GOP candidate mined that vein, with the purest example being the Marco Rubio ad, "Civilization" which said it was America vs. Islam itself. 

The most successful practitioner was, of course, Donald Trump, who shocked the GOP establishment with a call for an outright ban on Muslims entering America.  Paul Ryan called it "textbook racism" and Trump's reward was to gain popularity.  In the map above "the West", in dark blue rubs against the light blue Orthodox civilization of Russia and the Balkans, and is adjacent to the green Islamic world.  We may trade oil, consumer goods, and armaments with one another, and their kids may come to school here, but the Huntington thesis is that cultures are really about religion and language and the customs inside families, not money.  There are fault lines based on culture and businesses don't really tie us together, they create more points of potential friction. We are doomed to struggle with them, he said.  A great many Americans agree.

Trump's insight was to realize that there was another politically meaningful split happening in America.   It was not between nations.  It was within nations, between average people and the elites, between the educated people who thrive under globalism and the less educated who frequently are squeezed by it.  Trump, more than any other Republican, criticized the split between working people and elites.   Trump was tribal in his language--you are my people and I talk your language; Bernie Sanders was primarily economic in his. The frustration with the elites was bipartisan but Hillary was poorly positioned to exploit it.   Trump was perfectly positioned. The two charts below show what has happened to Democrats and why there was such a ripe audience for Trump.

First, four maps of Ohio: 1996, 2004, 2012, and 2016.

Ohio was the traditional bellwether state.  Note that the 8 point loss for Hillary should not have been a surprise given the trend, which was obscured by Obama's personal appeal.  A process had been underway since Bill Clinton had won the state back in 1996.  The counties that did not contain major cities were moving red, with 2016 being a real collapse.

From Real Clear Politics

Rural Drop-off.  This second chart below is complicated but very instructive.   It divides the election results in Ohio among different size cities.  From left to right we chart the results in rural areas, small town, larger towns, small cities, and large cities.  The bars represent the votes for Democratic presidential candidate, from Dukakis up through Hillary.   Starting at the right notice that Hillary did about as well as Obama and Bill Clinton in the large cities and was competitive with them in smaller cities.  There was a huge drop-off for Hillary in the three segments of smaller towns, falling well behind everyone, including Dukakis.  Look at the brown line in each set of column.  That was the margin of victory in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and the electoral college.

Real Clear Politics.

The Democratic base has shifted to a certain kind of person within the state.   Hillary Clinton did not have a voter problem in big cities and their suburbs.  Her problem was in the rural areas.   Something has happened in America between the election of 1988 and today.  Democrats became the party that represents knowledge workers, technologically adept people, people in finance and services, people involved in global trade and global businesses,  people who ride buses and subways and who live in proximity to each other to facilitate headquarters communication.   It represents office workers, most often women.  If anything Hillary increased support among those people--and even more so among the people in the "mega-cities" of more than 5 million people in the surrounding area. (NY, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, etc.   Ohio has no city at that scale.  If it did, Hillary might have won, as she did in Minnesota, where the Minneapolis-St.Paul city is very large in relation to the rest of the rural state.)

People in smaller communities, are somewhat left out of the global economy.  There is a fault line within  the US and other countries of the West which showed up in support for Trump here, for Brexit in the UK, and for the political challenges happening now in the E.U. as citizens are voting more nationalistic and anti-immigrant.

Thad Guyer has been generally more hopeful about the potential for Trump's presidency than I have been.  But his comment below addresses a real problem within America and one that post-election commentators have addressed, especially on the left and especially by people who liked what Bernie Sanders had to say.   How come Democrats lost touch with working people?  Globalism works for some people and it is a slow death for others.  What kind of city they live in is a proxy for who is on which side of that clash because it is a proxy for the kind of work they are prepared to do.

Guyer has a comment, and it is uncomfortable for Democrats.   He observes that Trump, not the Democrats, have a diagnosis and a solution.  The cause is immigrants and too much globalism in trade and the solution is to stiffen the borders, manage the trade, and adopt the nationalism that is already present in China and Russia.

This post is long so I will not debate the points of European history with Thad here.  But let me simply observe respectfully to the children and grandchildren of Europeans who fought and died during WW2  that in fact this blog is well aware of the high price paid by Europeans in blood in that struggle.  I see the war as an American and the son of an American soldier in the Third Army, but I am fully aware that the greatest number of casualties, both military and civilian, were endured by the countries in whose land the war was fought, both against Nazi Germany and with it.  Europeans did not sit out the war.

Guest Thad Guyer

Guest Post by Thad Guyer--Confusing Cures with Causes

Today’s outstanding UpClose post posits that surrendering national self-interests to international alliances was a cornerstone to recovery from WWI and WWII—the cure. I agree. But Trump is right that American and European globalism has become so untethered from the interests of its non-elites and member nations that globalism itself now threatens a new world war—the cause.
Bilateral wars would stay just that but for global alliances sucking other nations in. WWI might have stayed just between Austria and Serbia had it not been for the two international alliances to which each was party. Instead, alliance partners were compelled to wage war for their side. International alliances were also at the heart of WWII, as ally and axis nations escalated the bilateral and regional into the global. The prescription of “an attack on one is an attack on all” is what many historians attribute as a “cause” of WWII—i.e., “join somebody else’s war now or we’ll be next”.  

America’s internationalist “domino theory” and French internationalist colonial conquest got us into Vietnam . Neo-conservative globalist ideology got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, and we promptly demanded a global “coalition of the willing” to join us. NATO says if Russia rolls into Poland then America joins a new world war. Never mind that the military effectiveness of NATO has never been tested.

Our views of our global interests cause us to join other people’s wars and initiate them ourselves. “Isolationism” and “neutrality” make America far less likely to be ravished by war than by globalism. Indeed, the U.S. has never been invaded in war. Pearl Harbor was a foreign outpost, Hawaii akin to a colony but not a state, until long after WWII. Colonization, the terrible legacy of which still plagues the world, was our founding globalism.
Britain joined the E.U. but never the euro. Switzerland hosts the UN but never joined the E.U.. Both are intent on protecting their economies and job markets from internationalist overreach, and their borders from the mass uncontrolled “irregular” immigration that destabilizes the E.U. Call it isolationism or neutrality, but it's Britain first and Switzerland first.

The E.U., where I have lived and still do work, is obviously not just in decline, but in meltdown. If Greece and Turkey decide to open their borders and empty their migrant detention camps, the waves of Muslim and African immigration will collapse the E.U. in short order. That will be the failure of globalism and internationalism, not of isolationism or nationalism.

Trump and his cadre of economic, law enforcement, border and foreign policy experts (who advised him throughout his campaign but were ignored by the media), have warned the E.U. that its open borders are dangerous, and its anti-nationalist rhetoric is counter-productive. The Trump regime warns that the E.U.’s brand of globalism has become irresponsible, and that the E.U. should not count on our blind NATO endorsement of “an attack on one is an all” given the E.U.’s gross failure to meet its NATO milestones for military spending as a percentage of GDP.  As in WWII, the E.U. itself does not expect to do most of the fighting; it expects the U.S. and Britain to. Trump says think again, since demographically the spilt blood would be that of his depolarables, not the children of educated elites from New York and San Francisco.

Russia and China are as economically and militarily nationalistic as they come—it is ideological. The current E.U. and U.S. globalist ideology is an ever poorer match for China First and Russia First.  The E.U. flag, once central as a “cure” to WWII now presents as a likely “cause” to WWIII. In my opinion, America First is a necessary first step in preventing the globalist pendulum from swinging too far—domestically and internationally.