Domestic Conflicts Cripple U.S. Superpower Claims, Says Chamber Speaker

Abortion debates and other diverse domestic political conflicts are damaging the nation’s superpower status and reputation worldwide, consultant Ian Bremmer told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.

Bremmer told the chamber’s 2022 Global Forum:

The way [the United States] projects [the themes of] rule of law, legitimacy, consistency, and leadership around the world is no longer an American superpower, and the faster that American leaders — political leaders — are prepared to recognize that, admit to it, and address it. the better off we’ll be.

Bremmer cited the expanding debate over abortion because the Supreme Court is reportedly willing to return the debate to state legislatures some 50 years after the court tried to solve the issue by itself in Washington D.C

The abortion debate used to be “much less politicized,” Bremmer said, adding:

Now you get justices and they’re only voted on by people from one party as opposed to the other and they’re seen as political actors. And it used to be for the last decades, you didn’t have to have abortion as a political issue in the state. Now, [in] all of those states, it’s going to become a tribal issue. Going forward, it’s going to rip apart and make even greater division.

The diverse political divisions are making it difficult for U.S. leaders to negotiate and enforce consistent international policies, he said:

So we know what you have is a country where Democrats and Republicans increasingly see each other as the principal adversaries that they have — even more so than international adversaries in many cases. And that means that when a new administration comes in, a new party comes into Congress, they do everything possible to undermine and destroy that domestic enemy and to undo everything that has been done — good, bad or indifferent by the previous administration.

How can you possibly talk about long-term, constructive strategic policy in that environment? No, you can block stupid things from happening, but you cannot take on a strategic proactive agenda.

The non-diverse state of China is better able to decide and enforce international deals under its authoritarian leaders, according to Bremmer:

And this is where [Chinaese president] Xi Jinping is effective. Because he’ll say, “When you talk about climate change, look, you know that if I say I’m going to do by 2060 Net-Zero [carbon policies], I’m going to do Net-Zero by 2060. You have no idea what the Americans are going to do from one administration to the next.”

I hate to say it, because I’m no fan of the Chinese political system, but he’s right on that issue. And it’s hard for the Americans to be coherent.

[We] Americans say we’re gonna do an Iranian nuclear deal, and then we back off of it. Now we don’t know if we can do it again, or [the] Paris Climate Accord, or World Health Organization, or Trans-Pacific Partnership. I can go on and on and on.

Bremmer cited abortion but did not tag the deeper U.S. domestic conflicts over economic divisions and the extraction migration.

Bremmer may have been quiet about those topics because the U.S. Chamber strongly supports the profitable economic strategy of extraction migration.

The policy of extraction migration is also backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-led empire of diverse, competing, and resentful identity groups.

“We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA), told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he insisted.

Similarly, one of the New York Times‘ top editors, Jia Lynn Yang, views immigration as a way to discard Americans’ European-centric culture. She wrote in her 2020 pro-migration book, titled One Mighty and Irresistible Tide:

For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong.

“There are no peer analogues for the United States’ current political divisions,” said a January 2022 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

[There are] a number of features that make the United States both especially susceptible to polarization and especially impervious to efforts to reduce it. One such feature is the durability of identity politics in a racially and ethnically diverse democracy …  the United States is perhaps alone in experiencing a demographic shift that poses a threat to the white population that has historically been the dominant group in all arenas of power, allowing political leaders to exploit insecurities surrounding this loss of status.

Yascha Mounk, another university progressive, has been widely praised by progressives for cheerleading for the political transformation of the once-coherent United States. But in an April 19 podcast interview, he admitted that diversity imported by progressives makes it difficult to preserve the democracy that progressives claim to support:

So, there’s actually something about the basic mechanism of democracy that does make it harder to sustain diversity. In other ways, the principles of liberal democracy are the right solution. And so, obviously, my vision for the future is that of a diverse democracy. But we shouldn’t be at ease about the ways in which democracy can sometimes inflame ethnic and religious tensions as well.

Mounk is a German-born progressive academic at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C.

The underlying problem is universal human psychology, not rhetoric or politicians, Mounk admitted. “One of the things that make it difficult to make diverse democracies work are the fundamental elements of human psychology [including] the fact that we have a very strong tendency to favor the in-group and discriminate against the outgroup.”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s group of progressive deputies favored the inflow of more than one million economic migrants through the southern border in 2021, despite popular laws requiring the outsiders to be detained until their pleas for asylum are decided.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland and southern states.

An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore young people and despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The policy is hidden behind a wide variety of excuses and explanations, such as the claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants” or that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees. But the economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, splits foreign families, and extracts wealth from the poor home countries.

Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of foreign contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan,  rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.