BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

SuperJail Warden wrote:

majority

SuperJail Warden wrote:

majority

SuperJail Warden wrote:

majority

SuperJail Warden wrote:

18th century election system

Last edited by Shahter (2016-11-09 10:18:59)

War Man wrote:

Ty wrote:

This is going to be an interesting few months.

Didn't you think Trump was going to lose? How do you feel now?

Ty wrote:

War Man wrote:

Ty wrote:

This is going to be an interesting few months.

Didn't you think Trump was going to lose? How do you feel now?

I don't believe I ever made a prediction. Now I feel like my trust in rationality and logic have taken a hit but it's not as if that hasn't happened before. Ultimately it's not my problem anyway.

There are good reasons for the seemingly irrational fixation on where you happen to be born. Geography matters because, as the economist Branko Milanović has shown, the best predictor of your income is not your race or class but your birthplace. Trump was, for once, speaking the truth. Where in the early 19th century only 20 per cent of global inequality was owed to the difference between countries, from the mid-20th century onwards ‘the place where we were born or where we live’ has determined ‘as much as two-thirds of our lifetime income’. However, although location has been the chief determinant of global income differentials for half a century, during the past twenty years, and most especially since 2008, the balance has shifted. There have been substantial increases in real income for the top 1 per cent and also for the middle 50 per cent of the global population, but little or no gains for those in the 75th to 90th percentiles. Given that those percentiles represent most of the population of Western Europe, North America and Japan, the data appears to confirm what many suspected: the top 1 per cent of the global population has enriched itself by organising the transfer of production away from the old industrial nations to middle-income countries on their periphery and in Asia.

These shifts in global inequality explain a lot about the changing nature of political struggle over the past two hundred years: the class politics of the 19th century and the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th, but also the current rise in populist and nationalist movements in Europe and the US. At a time when the long heralded decline of the West is finally becoming an objective reality, the ‘lower middle class of the rich world’ stands in an ambiguous position. Geography still counts for almost everything, and in global terms that class consists of privileged rentiers living well on what Milanović calls ‘citizenship rent’ (the increased income you get from doing the same job in one country rather than another). But if these trends continue, citizenship rents will decline further, and citizenship itself will be devalued as an asset.

This helps to explain why citizenship has suddenly gained more salience than class. Class differences within countries explain very little when it comes to global inequality. So potential gains from intranational class equalisation would be quite modest compared to the possible losses from levelling the playing field between countries. That is why freedom of movement was such an issue in the Brexit referendum, and why Trump’s call to build a wall along the Mexican border is intelligible to so many. It is perhaps only in this context that the otherwise bizarre phenomenon of ‘birtherism’ makes sense. In a world where geographical location is the best predictor of economic outcomes, being indigenous counts for a lot, and the natural-born citizen clause attached to the presidency of the US provides a model. If the presidency is not open to immigrants, why should other jobs be?

Of course, the new nativism feeds off ingrained forms of racial prejudice. But it is conceptually distinct, not least because in terms of global income distribution race is (as would-be migrants are well aware) far less predictive than location. You don’t have to be a racist to be a xenophobe, for as Levinas commented in an essay on Heidegger, ‘attachment to place’ is itself a ‘splitting of humanity into natives and strangers’. What makes the current moment unique is that the ontological decline of the West has fallen into step with the decline in income differentials, and attachment to place isn’t just a matter of becoming indigenous and making yourself at home in the world, but of stubborn attachment to a particular position in the global economic order. For anyone living in the West who is not in the highest 1 per cent of global income, there is an economic incentive to think in Heideggerian terms; to stand firm on native soil and claim citizenship rent.

When Heidegger realised that the Nazis were going to be less receptive to ‘spiritual National Socialism’ than he had hoped, he gradually retreated from the political fray. But he nevertheless vowed to ‘remain in the invisible front of the secret spiritual Germany’, one of ‘the future ones’ who would stand ‘simply, silently, relentlessly and deeply rooted’, preparing the transition to the other beginning. The future he anticipated is now. Whole nations are acknowledging their plight and waiting to see if greatness will be thrust upon them.