Class Formation
National Globalism and Global Nationalism
Can you taste it?
The blood in the water.
All over the world, Behemoth is bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts. In Sri Lanka, in the Netherlands, in Ecuador, in Panama, and in a dozen other countries, the populace is in revolt. The tree planted by decades of mismanagement is bearing its poisonous fruit, and people are gagging as they sample it.
The WHO announces the simian PridePox as a new global health emergency, and globalpop rolls its eyes.
Trust in the regime institutions used to massage public opinion has plummeted, and with it the regime’s ability to massage. The talking heads and credentialed experts scream with increasing hysteria about climate emergencies, domestic Not Who We Are assaults to Our Values Democracy, or the threat posed to the Liberal World Order by the Hitler du Jour, but they scream impotently into a hurricane that is far louder, faster, vaster, and more powerful than they could ever hope to be.
The Liberal World Order is increasingly seen as the Liberal Occupation Government. A LOG makes for great fuel for a bonfire of their vanity.
How, we wonder, did it come to this?
No doubt they wonder the same thing.
And therein lies the answer.
We.
They.
We aren’t the same tribe anymore.
Over the last several decades, international jet travel and instantaneous telecommunications have conspired to create a global class of technocrats and managers who have far more in common with one another than they do with the people over whom they rule. While no more homogeneous (and no less so) than any other tribe, their fashions, tastes, beliefs, and values are all more or less in alignment. They eat the same food, wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, appreciate the same artists. They go to the same places for their vacations, and they congregate in the same places for their conferences. They’ve become a tribe distinct from the people over whom they rule.
Something very similar happened in Europe during the days of the landed aristocracy. While there were naturally differences between the nobilities of different countries – no one would mistake an English country gentleman for a Prussian aristocrat – centuries of intermarriage gradually led to the noble houses of different lands perceiving themselves as having far more in common with one another than they did with the peasants over whom they ruled.
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Ruling classes that perceive themselves as having a lot in common are less likely to go to war. No one really wants to kill his cousin; just as Arjuna. To be fair to the European nobility, they presided over a 19th century that, with a few notable exceptions, was one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras known by the continent.
The problem, however, is that it leads to a lack of trust.
Some of the globalists realize that. During the last Davos meeting, there was a clip of one of the worthies (Ngaire Woods of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commision) lamenting that “The good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more ... the bad news is that the majority of people trusted that elite less....”1
For all their desire to craft a Great Narrative with which to smooth talk the world into acceptance of their Great Reset, Ms. Woods’ observation demonstrates that this effort will be fruitless. The reason is simple tribalism.
By coalescing into their own tribe, the global ruling class gave up membership of the tribes that birthed them. Tribal membership is a fairly exclusive thing. To really be a member of a tribe, one must be loyal to it; one cannot be loyal to a tribe that is in conflict, or could be in conflict, with another tribe, and so one must choose. The ruling class are therefore no longer perceived as the elites of their respective countries, organically risen from their local populations to fulfill leadership roles in those national communities. Instead, they are experienced as members of a different tribe, which have been imposed upon the nations from without.
The result is something very much like foreign rule during the days of colonialism. Our leaders may, for the most part, have been drawn from the ethnic groups dominating the nations, unlike in the colonial system2, but no one really believes that they in any meaningful way members of those nations.
Foreign rule isn’t always a bad thing. There have been many empires throughout history that were perfectly stable and prosperous for centuries. The key is that the alien ruling class must rule with a light hand. Local beliefs and customs must be respected; so long as tribute is paid, levies raised, and the laws respected, locals may do as they please. The stability of any empire rests on mutual respect: subject peoples are wary of the power of the rulers, but grudgingly respect their fairness, and appreciate the stability and opportunity for commerce that stability brings; while the rulers, in turn, respect the gods of the locals, allow them to run their affairs as they see fit, and keep some reasonable share of the fruits of their labours.
What no imperial system can survive is the development of open contempt amongst the ruling class for the people they lord it over. Sadly, human nature being what it is, it is extremely easy for a ruling class, especially an alien ruling class, to fall into such contempt. Especially if they feel too secure in their power. Wise rulers understand just how fragile power is, that it ultimately relies on the agreement of the governed that, all things considered, it is best to submit ... a calculation more likely to come out in the rulers’ favour if the cost of submission is low.
Our ruling class no longer bothers to hide their contempt. They despise our customs, our traditions, our way of life, and even our very genetic lineage, and have openly committed themselves to ripping it all up by the root and imposing their dystopian new system by force. They couldn’t be more clear about this, and it is a message that has been received by people the world over. They do not perceive themselves as having anything in common with the villanous commoners, and they intend to strip away all of our old liberties, religions, and whatever scraps of wealth we’ve managed to retain, to take it all for themselves, and to leave us with pods, virtual girlfriends, cricket gruel, and pride parades.
The point is that this situation may have been inevitable. Not a conspiracy per se – after all, they publish their intentions for all to read, in white papers that go into macabre detail, and in various social media communiques seemingly composed with perfect obliviousness that anyone might object – but rather the natural outcome of a process by which the leadership caste of hundreds of countries comes to see itself as being a people apart. Once they came to see themselves as a distinct tribe, once they gained class consciousness, they were always going to begin working in their interests ... and against those of the people over whom they rule.
This creates an insurmountable problem for them. The first and highest function of a ruling class is to ensure stability and prosperity for the people over whom it rules. A ruling class that has ceased to do so, that rules in its own interests because it does not see itself as an elite from the people but an elite other than the people, will invariably lose the Mandate of Heaven. Following this, the only thing that reigns is chaos. Poverty, crime, war, plague, and famine rage across the land. And, well, look around. The globalist system is creating nothing but catabolic system collapse. We’re in the early stages but we can all see the storm approaching.
I like to think of globalism as national globalism – an ideology in which the nations should be operated as franchises of a global system, subordinated under the management of representatives who operate the franchises in the interests, not of the people who live and work in them, but of the shareholders and the board of directors. Just as with the franchise model in the corporate world, it produces a numbing homogeneity. Everywhere becomes anywhere. And, just as with the corporate model, decision-making power is withdrawn from the economic periphery: workers and managers both do little more than follow the manual written by central office, over which they have no say. Finally, the result is that economic prosperity is strip-mined from the localities in which the franchises operate, as the profits generated by the franchises are funneled towards the central corporation rather than remaining to circulate in the local community.
To this model we can oppose global nationalism. This is essentially the multipolar vision espoused by Putin and Xi Xinping, and finding increasing enthusiasm among periphery nations such as Brazil, Iran, and Hungary. In this model, nations are fully sovereign; while they may cooperate with one another to achieve mutually beneficial economic goals such as constructing continental rail systems or pipelines, that cooperation is always the result of decisions made by the local leadership, rather than being coordinated and imposed by international bodies that exist independently and above that leadership (such as the UN or the EU), and over which national leaders have no influence whatsover. It is a world of nations as household industries, rather than nations as franchises.
It’s no accident that Putin, Xi, Bolsonaro, etc., to say nothing of Trump who is very much in alignment with their basic philosophy, are seen as threats by the globalist powers that be. Those men are not men of the globalist tribe; they see themselves as the leaders first and foremost of their own peoples, with their participation in the ‘international community’ very far down their list of priorities. To them, their own countries are their tribal identity, and the international community a mere practical necessity; it is quite the reverse for the franchise managers imposed by national globalists. As a result, globalists instinctively understand that they cannot be trusted. They, like us, the people over whom the globalists rule, are other. And therefore they cannot be tolerated.
It’s also no accident that, in stark contrast to Western countries, none of whose ruling classes enjoy anything even approximating widespread support and trust, men such as Vladimir Putin are extraordinarily popular with their own peoples. People understand at a visceral level the difference between a leader who is fundamentally one of their own, whom they can trust to do what is in their own tribal interest, and a leader drawn from a foreign tribe that regards them as nothing more than an economic asset as best, and an annoying obstacle at worst.
We’re on the verge of an epoch-defining conflict between these two visions. It doesn’t look good for the national globalists. Everyone hates them, most especially including sizable majorities of their own populations. People don’t fight for people they hate. Worse, globalist vampirism has weakened the real economies of their host countries, many of which now produce little of tangible value. For all that Western economies supposedly dwarf the Russian economy, for instance – with regime loyalists crowing that the Russian economy is smaller than that of Texas or Italy – evaluation of the real economy, the economy of steel, wheat, oil, and chip fabs, as supposed to the fake economy of services and financial derivatives, demonstrates that the global nationalists are much more formidable than Wall Street’s creative accounting would suggest. The blowback from the attempted Russian sanctions, which only strengthened Russia, while having a catastrophic effect on the Western economies that imposed them, has made that clear as a cut crystal lens to the planetary population, whether those still trapped inside the globalist franchises, or those languishing on its periphery.
It’s bad enough when the ruling class are aliens who despise you.
It’s worse when they’re not even good at their jobs.
There’s blood in the water.
And it’s delicious.
Addendum: I meant to reference Chris Bray’s interesting piece Class Formation Psychosis, from which I cribbed the title (just in case you were thinking I was original), in which he points out that the mass formation that crippled our planet over the last three years has primarily manifested amongst the regime and its loyalists, leaving normal people largely untouched. That’s an important observation, and it just goes to demonstrate that the national globalists aren’t just cruel and incompetent, they’re also insane. Who the gods would make destroy, they first make mad.
It took a surprising degree of google-fu to track that clip down. I don’t wanna say Davos Man wanted it scrubbed, but...
Although a perusal of the Indian and Pakistani names suffusing the upper echelons of British politics shows this is not always the case,
I am so happy to read your piece as it makes sense and gives us reason to be optimistic. You explain a lot here John and I appreciate the note that they are doomed to fail, and why that is so.
Exactly right. Shit is going to get real and we'll probably go through some trying times before we come out the other side of this process, but the incompetence and insanity of the globalist ruling class and external threat posed by Putin, who does not share their delusions or ideology, are grounds for hope that ultimately their "agenda 2030" will not succeed.
Your analogy of WEF-aligned governments to the franchise model of corporatism is perfect. Whatever comes next, I think localism -- local culture, local supply chains, local governance, local businesses, etc. -- is going to be very highly prized. We've learned our lesson the hard way about globalism. Old Ross Perot's warnings in 1992 proved too accurate.