The Progressive Dictionary: In Defense of "Global" Solutions

We actually still own this word. Think globally, act locally. Global consciousness. Global warming. Global culture. Considering things in global terms is something that comes reflexively to liberals (in fact, this habit of mind usually had a lot to do with why we became liberal in the first place). We think big. We look ahead. We see things in all their systemic complexity -- that is to say, in global terms. So what's the problem here?

The problem is two-fold. On one hand, economic conservatives have been the planet's biggest cheerleaders for "globalization" -- but they only like a very selective definition of the concept that's mainly about trade. Which is to say: moving stuff and money around the globe: good. Moving workers, government authority, courts, media, unions: very, very bad. On the other hand, social conservatives (like the Tea Party) aren't at all selective in their condemnation. They have huge problems with anything described as "global", and is doing their level best to wrest this word away from us turn this into an epithet.

The first group's reasoning is obvious; the second group's, far less so. Their reasons are long and complicated, and the history goes way, way back. Conservatives have been accusing liberals of wanting "one world government" ever since Woodrow Wilson first suggested the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I. The fear that the US (and especially our capitalist economic system) will have to submit to some kind of planetary power has animated their implacable hostility to the UN all the way back to 1947; and features largely in fundamentalist end-times theology, which posits Satan's return as a charismatic global leader who will unify the nations to resolve world-threatening problems.

(Yep, you heard that right: any leader who looks like they might be competent to fixing any part of this mess can look forward to being tarred as an agent of Satan -- if not actual Satan-in-the-flesh. Won't that be that helpful?)

In all the various conservative tellings of the tale, the basic themes remain. All "global" institutions are invariably mere vehicles through which liberal do-gooders will seize the sovereignty of free people and deliver them into the bloody clutches of a technocratic oligarchy implacably committed to enslaving all the people of the world. No, it's not entirely clear why we would want to do this. Convert the world to one religion? Not our gig. Dismantle governments so we can all swear our fealty as newly-captive corporate serfs? Again, we can think of other people -- we invite our conservative friends to check the mirror -- who seem far more hell-bent on that outcome than we are. Or is it just that we think it'll be fun to force everybody -- at gunpoint, if necessary -- to see free doctors and get free educations?

Yeah, that must be it. God, what kind of twisted monsters have we become?

OK, I'm being cheeky here. I probably shouldn't be. It's obvious that the storyline serves the interests of both groups of conservatives, which means that the issue of global governance stands to be one of the more serious conflicts we're going to have with the entire right side of the spectrum going forward. For the corporate cons, the longer they can operate unfettered by any kind of meaningful global accountability, they better they like it. As for the socons, they're quite honestly (and not always wrongly), worried about loss of American sovereignty and uniqueness in a world that's becoming ever more closely intertwined on every front.

And that's a fear that grabs them like nothing else, which is why this anti-internationalism has hung on so persistently for 90 years already. One of the core personality traits common to all right-wing authoritarians is a very low tolerance for ambiguity of any kind. The best bulwark against ambiguity is black-and-white rules and clear boundaries that define what is and what ain't. This is why they're such sticklers for strict gender roles, for example; and why they get so uptight about people who cross racial lines or whose right to be here isn't a bright-line issue. Any time things fall outside of their narrowly- assigned boxes, it forces them into a state of not knowing that can create measurable, physical fear reactions. (The full download on ambiguity as a central motivator of conservatives is a post for another time.)

Small wonder, then, that they're freaking out over this new 21st century globalized world, which sometimes seems like a dizzy, spinning kaleidoscope of ever-shifting ambiguities. People who color outside the gender lines, or who don't follow the sexual rules. Mixed-race babies. Immigrants who participate in America's economy and culture, but aren't legally Americans. New cultural influences and inventions from other parts of the world. It's overwhelming, and they can't deal with the fear it churns up, so they cling even harder to the old, traditional certainties: God, America, flag, the white race, patriarchy, and the rightness of their cause. Global-anything is a direct threat to all of this, so they reject it outright.

It would be fine if we could just leave them stewing in their own fear-soaked juices, except for one thing. It's this: it's a central tenet of systems thinking that small regulating entities can't solve big problems. The bigger and hairier the problem is, the more authority, power, money, and resources have to be brought to bear to solve it.

We saw this during both the Civil War and World War II. In both cases, the U.S. government was considerably bigger at the end of the crisis that it had been going in. It had to be -- because it had to grow long enough arms to reach around a big package of catastrophic problems, and solve them. Now we're dealing with not just one, but dozens of actual and potential global catastrophes -- climate change, ocean acidification, overpopulation, pollution, species collapse, loss of watersheds and topsoil, pirates and religious terrorists, potential epidemics that can spread around the entire world in days. It's not an exaggeration to say that if there's still a flourishing human civilization on this planet in 2100, it will depend almost entire on our ability to create and empower global governance structures that are strong enough and big enough to get their arms around our own writhing, impossibly complex tangle of global problems.

In the process, we will, unavoidably and necessarily, create not only a global economy, but also a global culture. And, yeah, over the next couple of generations, this mash-up of civilizations will probably erase the last traces of racial boundaries (which were always a farce anyway) and further obscure the lines that divide the genders. It will create a lot of people who carry two or more passports, speak more than one language, and call several countries home. It will mean we're consuming food and media that originated on every continent. We may be able to maintain most of our sovereignty; but for our own good and everybody else's, we 'll also have to accede to the authority of international boards and bodies in an ever-growing set of issues. Americans won't be something exceptional any more, but just another interesting, savory flavor in the global mix.

(And, weirdly, at the same time all this global exchange is happening, other forms of government power will be handed back to the local and regional level as localization proceeds right alongside all this. But that, too, is another post for another day.)

Unfortunately, it's inevitable that many of these new and necessary structures will look very much like the One World Government that's been core to conservative fear mongering since 1919. Because of this, no matter how obvious it is to the rest of us that our very survival depends on this level of global cooperation, the right is going to resist it with everything they have for at least another 20-40 years. (I can put a date to that, because Perlstein's Law states that conservatives do eventually come around to accept these kinds of major changes -- but only after a couple of generations, or about 40 years, have passed. At that point, they will forget they ever objected to it, insist that they were for it all along, and blame those stupid obstructionist liberals for holding the whole thing up. You can make book on this.)

So: in summary: In the short term, when conservatives hear the word "global," they hear it as a code word liberals use to signify our ultimate goal, which is to subjugate and enslave them. They also hear it as a terrifying harbinger of a world in which all manner of ambiguity and chaos are unleashed -- chaos that will ultimately suck all the order and meaning out of American culture.