Alice Banchini of Alice in Texas has written an interesting post on Civilisation and its enemies. In this post she analyzes the three factions she sees: Islamofascists, Americanists, and Europeanists. Steven Den Beste wrote something a little similar to this early this year in his post Three-way Struggle. Viriginia Postrel in her book The Future and its Enemies describes the struggle between dynamists and stasists.
I think they’re all talking about roughly the same thing and I’d like to suggest a slightly different way of looking at it: tribal traditionalists, Fordists, and millenial capitalists.
Tribal traditionalists include, of course, the Arab traditionalist fantasists who envision a new Caliphate (presumably run by themselves) but it also includes the genocidists in Sudan and Rwanda. These are people playing out ancient dreams of tribal superiority with the weapons of the 21st century.
Fordists include European socialists, Iraqi Ba’athists and other Arab Fordists, American New Deal nostalgists, and opponents of globalization pretty much everywhere. For this group history has ended. They found their stop about forty years ago and they’d like to get off, please. They believe in welfare states neatly controlled by all-knowing technocrats. Just a little policy tweaking and everything will be perfect.
Unfortunately for this group Fordism is collapsing everywhere under its own inefficiencies and global transportation and communication. Even the European Fordists have recently acknowledged that in order to reach their own economic policy objectives Europeans are going to have to behave more like Americans. A quick look at the social contract commitment-to-GDP ratio for Europe and the U. S. will show you the scope of the problem (over here we refer to it as the Social Security and Medicare crisis).
Neoconservatives and neoliberals in the United States see the world a little differently. Walter Russell Mead calls it “millenial capitalism”. Thomas Barnett seems to call nearly the same phenomenon “Core integration”. Neither term is completely acceptable but for right now it appears to be the inevitable American grand strategy.
