What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.
~ Christopher Caldwell

via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024

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The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.
~ Christopher Caldwell

via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024

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Wolfgang Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.
~ Christopher Caldwell

via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024

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Abounding in minorities, the left is increasingly attentive to hierarchies of respect and vigilant about monitoring them. Abounding in intellectuals, it is increasingly — and mistakenly — inclined to view democracy as a search for truth rather than as a search for consensus; it is prone to cast those who disagree with it, no matter how numerous, as democracy’s enemies and even as authoritarians.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times

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The dollar is probably the most valuable strategic asset the United States has. We exercise a degree of control over the world economy because the world, for trading purposes, allows its transactions to pass through our currency. This leaves us with cheaper transaction costs and lighter financial burdens.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times

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Europe is different. Europeans are mostly not aware that they have been enlisted in a project that has as its end point the extinction of France, Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe’s historic nations as meaningful political units. Brussels has been able to win assent to its project only by concealing its nature. Europe’s younger generation appears to have seen through the dissembling. We are only at the beginning of the consequences.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times

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