On April 8th, The New York Times published an essay by David Brooks called “Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.” You can read it here (gift article). The essay stands as a powerful example of the dangerously delusional thinking that passes for astute analysis among elite political thinkers in the West these days.
[Disclaimer: Coming up with something intelligent to say about the state of the world EVERY DAMNED WEEK is something nobody should ever have to do. I can hardly put out a stammering podcast every week, much less compose essays read by millions of people eager to write sniping blog pieces like the one you’re about to read. Could I do what Brooks does? No. But you don’t need to be an Olympic diver to know a belly-flop when you see one.]
Brooks opens by saying that he’s from “a fortunate generation” that remembers a time “when the world seemed to be coming together” because the Cold War had been won. In the mid-90s, democracy seemed to be spreading, while globalization was making countries more interdependent, thus making war seem ever less likely. It was around this time that Thomas Friedman, Brooks’ colleague at the Times, came up with the famous “McDonald’s Theory.” Friedman figured that when a country has a middle class strong enough to support a McDonald's network, it would not be interested in fighting wars anymore. Too much middle-class affluence at risk.
Hooray for America! Hooray for democracy! Hooray for the Happy Meal!
There was even a best-selling book called The End of History and the Last Man, by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, arguing that the end of the struggle between capitalism and communism had ushered in “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
As it turns out, this was kind of like arguing that Metallica was the culmination of musical history, and music could never get any better. And what David Brooks wants to know is, “What happened to Metallica?”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.