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One area I think that this article doesn't touch upon is that with a globalized economy it's a lot harder to have a unified "strong" and "assertive" democracy w

• rightbyte 5y ago
  Globalism made us sell out domestic strategic industries for quarterly profits and move them out of our reach. And now it is hitting back. I don't see how we need to make a more complex analysis than that.
  • ddingus 5y ago
    I don't either, but I do want to riff on your clear and simple comment. The source of wealth is labor. The people who make stuff will have an advantage because they will have leverage and position due to chronic interdependency. This is nothing new or even complex at it's core. The tangled mess is complex. And there is a big difference between using money to make more directly and using money to make more via labor of some kind. Everyone, to some degree, is accountable to others they need stuff from. This can be mitigated somewhat by mutual dependency, and military prowess, among other things. But there are limits. Should bets be called? Mostly, it ends up being quite painful to a lot of people who do not deserve it. One could say democracy carries a burden here, but that can be countered, depending on corruption, money in politics too. Was church and state causing grief in the past. Still is in parts of the world. Today it is banks, markets, big industry, very wealthy people causing it now. To be really clear, I am not intending to cast judgement, blame or the like. And yes, I oversimplified. I just want to point out ordinary people just do not have much agency in all of this. Their general preferences would be to labor to make their homeland strong, prosperous and see their government, and in the US the idea was self governance in the form of peaceful democracy being more just and true in return for some degree of personal freedom lost so that which remains may be vibrant and empowering relative freedom, --see their government perform reasonably in return. All that was decided to be better than the old world ways: divine right, bigger army, more gold, nobility... to form a reputable ruling class. Everything costs something. And the people expect to prosper for their labor and will live with decisions made by leaders they elected, again this idea checked by corruption, poor representation. And I am speaking generally here. Globalization was pitched to people and the promise of prosperity has not been fulfilled in the eyes of many, in some places, majorities. Naysayers get marginalized, ignored and the outcome today is here for all to see. People will weigh all that and I expect they see promises fall well short of the mark more than not. Where do we go from here? How does this unwind to a better state? Can it even?
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      > The source of wealth is labor. The people who make stuff will have an advantage because they will have leverage and position due to chronic interdependency. This is nothing new or even complex at it's core. “Making” order from disorder is also making stuff. A predictable society with overall working courts and trustable populations is a resource in and of itself. Hence the value of the USD, Euro, etc and foreign oligarchs parking their wealth and spending time living in developed countries.
      • ddingus 5y ago
        Ultimately, those are all dependent on basic labor and the making of things. Without them, and the wealth they bring, those made things degrade, rot from within.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I think globalism was a nice thought and now we've seen the havoc it can bring when unchecked. We need to pull back a bit and reassess depending on the likes of Russia and China for critical items like chips, natural resources, etc. By all means promote trade amongst friendlies (western and certain SE countries) but we need to be very careful of the others, and balance it out with security at an input to the system, whereas currently we depend on relatively peaceful nations. Recent belligerence points out that that can never be taken for granted. On the flip side, if we were to completely abandon trade with China that is probably a bad idea as well, as they have no incentive to not take over Taiwan, Australia, Japan, etc.
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  It doesn't seem particularly hard to enforce global rules about stuff. It's just a question about what you choose to prioritise. So if you're an American worker you'd maybe want to get tough on Chinese workers rights, while if you own Disney you probably care more about them respecting your IP. I'd say its lack of democracy in western states that lead to the tolerance of lack of democracy elsewhere. A democratic workforce isn't going to vote to send their own jobs overseas, even if the other workers are basically slaves and so 'cheaper'.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    I think you’d be surprised at just how many workers have effectively voted to send their own jobs overseas. They don’t know they’re doing it because politicians don’t call the bills the Send Jobs Overseas Act, they call it “raising the minimum wage” or “opening up the Chinese market”.
    • bandyaboot 5y ago
      How does raising the minimum wage send jobs to China? We’re talking almost exclusively about service jobs.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        Yes, that is the case now, but I’m talking about the last 50 years. Raising the minimum wage also prevents jobs from returning from China. I’m not arguing that there aren’t benefits to raising the minimum wage, but I don’t think it’s the unmitigated good that some people make it out to be.
        • splitstud 5y ago
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Disney's wants should never figure into a democracy's course of actions with other countries, I think we've learned that nothing good comes of politicians and corporations mingling at the same cocktail parties.
• pastacacioepepe 5y ago
  It's so interesting to see liberals slowly realize they have been imperialists all along. Suddenly globalizazion is less important, almost a crutch, because it doesn't serve well the imperialist cause anymore. What is the utility of globalization in the eyes of the imperialist, when they can't exploit economically third world countries, or blackmail them into submission? From liberalism to imperialist nationalism, the process is quick, because the imperialism has always been there. How sad that internationalism has fluorished in our society only a a tool of oppression, to be quickly replaced by nationalism, once it served its imperialist purpose.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    Is globalization a liberal cause? I’m of the impression that conservatives like how globalization affects the stock market, and presumably vote for more of it. Also, wasn’t Nixon the one who opened the market with China? Not exactly a liberal, right? I also think you’re using the word “liberalism” pretty loosely here. There’s the group of people that conservatives call “liberals” which is sort of anything left of conservative politics, and then there is the actual political ideology, and as far as I can tell you’re talking about the former. Or maybe you’re not American and thus “liberal” means something entirely different to you, I really can’t tell.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Yeah, why are liberals both omnipotent and buffoons in the eyes of conservatives? They can't possibly be both.
    • kbelder 5y ago
      Point out the absurdity, and then escalate it another step when you realize it's just as relevant of a statement when you switch 'liberal' and 'conservative'.
    • pastacacioepepe 5y ago
      Liberals and conservatives is just two teams created so that citizen can believe there is some kind of choice. Liberals hegemony is an imperialist philosophy that has been accepted and pushed by both liberals (Clinton, Obama, Biden) and conservatives (Bush). In fact, it is sad to say this but in this sense Trump really was anti establishment. He was the only one to not subscribe to this ideology, and we could see that in his foreign policy.
• toss1 5y ago
  >>take into consideration global trade and future mishaps and not just do lip service like "never again". Yes, and the way we have to take it into account includes * Recognizing that the grand and noble experiment has been done. We tested the great idea that trade and engagement with autocracies would lead to freedom and democracy for their subjects. that experiment as been a resounding FAILURE. We proved the opposite - trade and exchange with autocracies leads only to stronger autocracies. * Trade with China was a strategic blunder of historic proportions. While the West thought we were exploiting their cheap labor, CCP was exploiting our myopic focus on quarterly profits and gaining strategic technology, chokeholds on strategic supply chains, and the ability to insert corrupted tech into our supply chain. While Europe thought they were exploiting plentiful Russian NatGas to boost their economy, Russia was exploiting our myopia to gain a coercive hold on democratic governments — and so this minute, the necessary purchase of gas to heat German homes directly pays for the bombs and bullets used to kill Ukrainian civilians and children. * The arc of history has now been largely stripped of the 19th-20th century ideologies; these merely obscured the fact that the real battle is autocrats and people who want to live in self-determining liberal democracies. Now, it is clearly and deeply true that you are either helping liberal democracies, or helping autocracy. This is now really World War III, only hot in a few spots, but the question is whether democracy can survive, or we will all live under one or another autocracy. The only choice is to as rapidly as possible disengage and cut off all autocracies from all economic engagement. Yes, this will really suck for the subjects of those autocracies. Their only hope of democracy will be to escape or overthrow their govt, and for prosperity, well,the history of autocracies for long-term prosperity is not good. If we fail to rapidly cut these ties that empower autocracies, we will all soon be subjects of autocracy. Better to die standing and fighting for freedom than to live on your knees.
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  >doesn't touch upon... it's a lot harder to have a unified "strong" and "assertive" democracy when we buy oil from Russia and cheap electronics from China. The article's sentence "Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy." heads a relevant discussion. I was once shocked to learn how cozy was the relationship between the US and Nazi Germany before WW2. It ran deep. True 'Autocracy' ... 'Government by a single person having unlimited power' seldom exists without the willing support of other powerful people. From there is fairly substancial evidence that some US powers helped to enable the Nazis... materially and philosophically. That support suggests that our popular 'democracy' had already been under siege, from some powers within, for a long time. An ideal needing faith to be fully born, our well-devised 'framework of democracy' had always been and continues to be compromised by special interests. Today, all the surveillance is certainly evidence.