Disclaimer: This interview was produced in 2016 by the Institute For Humane Studies, prior to Students For Liberty's acquisition of Learn Liberty. The opinions of this interviewer are his own and are not that of SFL.
“There’s this big shuffling of the deck going on in most western democracies,” says Professor Steve Davies, on the global political realignment of globalists vs. nationalists.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Steve Davies: Conservatives are going to have to decide, "Well, okay. What is more important to you? The cultural conservatism and the nationalism, or the free markets and the individualism?" If you're on the left, you have to decide, "Well, okay. What am I really more interested in?" ... Since about the 1970s, the big argument in politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly here in the US, has been between one group of people who are economically interventionists and egalitarian but socially liberal, versus another group who are pro free market but socially and culturally conservative. That's been the big division.
What I think we're now moving towards is a situation where the divide is between one group of people who are broadly free market, broadly individualists, globalists, perhaps a bit more egalitarian than the classical liberals would like, but broadly liberal versus another group, which is the national collectivists I mentioned earlier, who are actually economically interventionists, pro welfare state but very culturally conservative, quite authoritarian, anti-globalist, anti-cosmopolitan. That's the new division we're seeing in politics everywhere.
What that means is that a lot of the existing groups are going to split up. Conservatives are going to have to decide, "Well, okay. What is more important to you? The cultural conservatism and the nationalism, or the free markets and the individualism?" If you're on the left, you have to decide, "Well, okay. What am I really more interested in?" If you're one of the Identitarian, anti-globalist left, you actually may find yourself thinking, "Well, actually, I, now I've, I've probably got more in common in some ways with this kind of new emerging Hamiltonian nationalist politics."
If on the other hand you really value individual liberty and globalism, openness to the rest of the world, then you're going to find yourself making alliances with these other people who were formally your opponents. I think there's a big shuffling of the deck going on in most western democracies.
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