A Tale of Two Worlds

Until recently, “globalization”--the integration of a country’s economy and public policy with other nations--seemed like gravity, something inexorable and automatic. But the sudden devaluation of Southeast Asia’s once-”miracle” currencies, which struck Hong Kong last week and triggered stock-market declines around the world, hinted that matters weren’t quite so simple.

Then, without warning, U.S. thinking about things global turned bizarre.

The Sierra Club announces a vote on whether immigrants should be viewed as a form of toxic waste. Vice President Al Gore, father of four, blames El Nino and other weather disturbances on Third World overbreeding. A Democratic White House, reelected with unprecedented labor support, abandons the working class in favor of radical free-trade and air-quality agendas. Washington bureaucrats and economists, steadfastly maintaining that foreign commerce could never be used to police overseas labor, human rights or fair-market behavior, immediately invoke import controls to enforce U.S. health standards when a “bad” batch of berries from Mexico makes Americans sick. Liberal environmentalists castigate liberal union activists for opposing a global-warming treaty targeting U.S. industry. Labor criticizes environmentalists for doing nothing about the Clinton administration’s “fast track” trade initiative while development-induced fires immolate rain forests and cast an apocalyptic pall over Southeast Asia.

Two decades ago, as Europeans confidently planned their unification, globalization had an unanticipated political consequence. As established nations ceded power to new, regional bureaucracies, ethnic fervor was reignited in places like Scotland and Catalonia, and neo-fascism in France, Germany and Bosnia.

In the United States, globalization is having an equally unexpected effect, reawakening class conflict in ways that scramble old alliances and long-cherished political certainties.

More than liberals versus conservatives, the nation’s politics are evolving toward a future first imagined in the 1950s by the late Isaac Asimov. He wrote of two increasingly polarized societies battling to control space exploration. One was a technologically sophisticated, rabidly isolationist, sparsely populated community whose most refined citizens, the Solarians, abhorred “filthy” human contact and lived alone on vast, ecologically balanced estates maintained by thousands of robots. The other was a decidedly low-brow, overcrowded, urbanized Earth populated by short-lived, disease-ridden, but far more dynamic people than the pampered Solarians.

To a surprising extent, Asimov’s fictional world describes modern America. Wealthier, suburban, no-growth, anti-immigration advocates who, like Solarians, think the country should be a giant Idaho, increasingly do battle with poor, urbanized, entrepreneurial, immigrant classes whose social ideal is industrial L.A. or Houston.

The global-warming controversy, for example, is incomprehensible except as a struggle between America’s new Solarians and the country’s poorer classes. It’s an open secret that the proposed treaty will not reduce greenhouse emissions. By exempting 130 “developing” countries, including China, all Latin America, India and Indonesia from any proposed controls, however, it will shift polluting industries from the heavily regulated First World, and particularly the United States, to the utterly unregulated Third World.

But if poor countries deserve an environmental break, why not exempt impoverished, work-hungry Americans from the same restrictions? If fashionable “environmental justice” concerns--that pollution sources like factories not be concentrated in U.S. minority communities--have any validity, how can environmentalists champion a treaty that would shift the world’s dirtiest industries to the most disadvantaged nations? Why transfer the most dangerous environmental problems to countries that have the least ability to solve them?

The reason is that global warming is really about global NIMBYism, the international expression of the “not in my backyard” elitism that masquerades as progressive politics in upscale, neo-Solarian enclaves like Marin, Malibu and Manhattan. The sophisticated denizens of such communities care little if ugly factories and brutish manufacturing migrates overseas; they can, after all, import what they need. If Third World governments are powerless to prevent the occasional ecological catastrophe, that doesn’t affect the sunset over Mt. Tamalpais.

These same sensibilities explain why environmentalists are joining forces with nativist ideologues and infusing a legitimate debate about immigration with increasingly repugnant overtones. Just as Asimov’s Solarians feared that uncultured Earthers would overrun their pristine world, America’s privileged prefers its poor as permanent supplicants rather than hustling entrepreneurs who might one day buy the mansion next door. Hence: the neo-liberal whispers that immigrants strain “our” resources or foster “inappropriate” jobs that, as one UCLA professor recently opined of the garment industry, properly belong in “Sri Lanka.”

Why is it illegitimate for today’s immigrants to compete for resources and improve their lives, while architectural magazines applaud lucky baby-boom descendants of earlier immigrant waves when they build lavish homes in the forests and wetlands of Sundance or Seattle? What possible moral logic justifies forcing jobs from Los Angeles to Guatemala, where the same work, by the same people, pays just a fraction of the U.S. minimum wage?

The answer is that aspiring immigrant classes upset the aristocratic lifestyles that America’s fortysomething neo-Solarians think are their due. In the newly divided world of U.S. globalization, it’s more tasteful to isolate the poor and upwardly mobile, and the pollution they cause, somewhere other than in one’s own country.

It is difficult to reconcile such isolationism with pro-labor and working-class policies. Amid the growing conviction that blue-collar work is an unseemly vestige of a bygone industrial era, urban NIMBY activists, backed by Washington’s astoundingly ideological environmental agencies, pursued zoning and environmental policies that transferred all but a few white-collar occupations from cities into the less regulated hinterland. The result has been stratified communities like New York, where a financial-services elite trumpets its “comeback” amid a 10% unemployment rate caused by the deliberate de-industrialization of the outer boroughs.

Globalization takes this process one step farther. As elitist liberals and conservatives alike press for environmental restrictions at home, and the “free” flow of goods and capital abroad, “backward” manufacturing and allied industries move out of the United States into lower-wage, less environmentally protected countries. The federal government is expected to restrict the flow of human capital, and insist on uncompromising health and safety standards for imports, but do little about the use of near-slave labor or lack of political freedoms in nations that profit handsomely from the U.S. market.

What can possibly explain this agenda? Assuring the quality of imported food and products is important to America’s neo-Solarians because they actually eat and buy such goods; foreign-labor or human-rights abuses do not directly affect their interests. “Liberal” activists in well-heeled communities willingly trade away working-class jobs for cheap, plentiful imports, especially if they can slow or stop the kinds of manufacturing growth and lower-class expansion that impinges on the sanctity of their own lives.

The stark class conflicts that globalization is producing will likely affect Democrats and progressives far more than conservatives, because they sharply pit two bedrock liberal interests--environmentalism and bread-and-butter economics--against each other. To a traditional left primarily concerned with improving the lot of wage earners and the poor, the anti-human elitism latent in upper-crust environmentalism smacks of hypocrisy, the hijacking of a political movement by one privileged group--”latte” liberals--for the purpose of hectoring another--corporate Republicans. That’s one reason why left-wing journalists are pillorying once-sacrosanct liberal icons like the Sierra Club.

It may be that Americans do value clean lettuce above working-class wages and think the world’s aspiring classes will seek opportunity elsewhere. As globalization progresses, however, it is virtually certain that once-unthinkable class conflicts will intensify in the United States. The question is whether America can maintain its open character in the face of such challenges, or if, like Asimov’s petulant Solaria, it will choose oblivion over accommodation.*