The five worldviews that define American politics

By Michael Lind
Salon.com

Does it often seem that many American politicians and pundits are talking past each other? That is because they really are. The frustrating nature of public debate arises in large part from the fact that Americans do not share a single worldview.

A worldview is a more or less coherent understanding of the nature of reality, which permits its holders to interpret new information in light of their preconceptions. Clashes among worldviews cannot be ended by a simple appeal to facts. Even if rival sides agree on the facts, people may disagree on conclusions because of their different premises.

Both the conservative and liberal camps include people with different and sometimes incompatible worldviews. American public debate is arguably dominated by five significant political worldviews: neoliberal globalism, social democratic liberalism, populist nationalism, libertarian isolationism and Green Malthusianism.

Neoliberal globalism: This is more or less the official ideology of the political and corporate and financial establishments, shared by centrist New Democrats as well as by most Republican conservatives in their practice as opposed to their preaching. Shared by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton with George W. Bush, neoliberal globalism combines moderate conservatism in economics with the idea of beneficial U.S. global military hegemony.

In the minds of Democratic and Republican neoliberals, their orthodoxy was validated by three events in the early 1990s: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic crisis of Japan and the Gulf War of 1990-91. The collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted to mean the superiority of capitalism to socialism. The prolonged stagnation of the Japanese economy was interpreted to be, not an omen of similar bubble economies in the U.S. and elsewhere, but rather proof of the superiority of the Anglo-American version of capitalism to more statist kinds of capitalism in East Asia and Europe. The swift victory of the U.S. in the Iraq War, at a relatively low cost in American lives, was interpreted to mean that the Cold War had been succeeded by "unipolarity," in which the U.S. could maintain unquestioned military dominance at low cost on the basis of its gee-whiz military technology. This premise led to the mistaken assumption that technology would permit the Iraq and Afghan wars to be as quick and cheap as the Gulf War had been.

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