A NEW NATIONALISM: Joel Kotkin: Foreign threats demand a muscular domestic response.
War, or the threat of war, should awaken nations from their dogmatic quarrels. So too should concentrated economic threats and assaults on our political system from unfriendly powers. It is not so much a matter of good global intentions but the embrace of hard-headed national interests, not only in the realm of energy and manufacturing, that will be key in responding to the autocratic challenge.
In the end, it’s only the nation state—in alliance with other similarly minded states—that can stand up to the threats now coming from our primary adversaries, China, and Russia. NATO does not build planes and failed to counter Russian threats; the UN has not exactly stamped out aggressive wars. Meanwhile the global economic hegemons have backed policies on energy and manufacturing that have made our autocratic enemies, and their allies like Iran, stronger. . . .
Successful nationalism lies in tapping the power of our productive economy—real products, not just digital ones—as occurred under Franklin Roosevelt and successive presidents. America’s rise to global predominance in the last century, and its creation of a vibrant middle class, had its roots, notes economic historian Robert Gordon, in great investment in physical infrastructure and production. In contrast, our current focus on digital technology and social media has resulted in a slow and diminished productivity and growing social inequality. This has been made worse as by what one analyst describes as “the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent seeking monopolies.”
Rather than amplify social media and oligarchic privilege, we need to realize that it will be largely in the “real economy” that the struggle will be determined. This starts, particularly in reference to Russia, with restoring our control of our own energy supplies. The “net zero” climate policies adopted by President Biden and most of his party have worked to reduce energy investment, with new regulations making it harder to build new fossil fuel plants, which has contributed to soaring energy prices. In this he has been buttressed by our corporate elite, which has taken the “net zero” pledge and even now frets that the invasion of Ukraine may distract us from an obsessive focus on renewable energy sources.
Russia’s adventurism may be passionately denounced by the virtue signalers from Wall Street and the New York Times to Hollywood, but the decisive answer to the Asian partnership rising against the woke West will come from the workers and managers of west Texas, the Great Plains, the logistics hubs on the West Coast, and the industrial Midwest. Right now, the greens basically offer little more than permanent economic dislocation. The green aristocracy’s plans to cover much of the countryside with solar panels and windmills are bitterly opposed by residents who might not see much advantage in scarring their backyards to salve the consciousness of the global Greta Thunbergs.
Yes, woke morons need to be removed from power everywhere.