Michael Barone on Transnational Elites

By Nicholas Stix

I just came across a U.S. News essay, “Spurning America,” by Michael Barone on transnational elites that appeared in last October 24’s issue. I was googling under “transnational elites” and “Samuel Huntington,” because I had tied Huntington, as well as the late Christopher Lasch, to the term in a draft of something I was working on, and wanted to confirm that I was right to do so.

Transnational elites are well-to-do, powerful people, who feel no loyalty to their fellow Americans, and in fact feel loyalty to foreigners, though the foreigners in question differs, from one transnational elite to another. George W. Bush, for instance, feels more loyalty to Vicente Fox and Mexican businessmen than he does to the families of men dying in Iraq. Conversely, Hillary Clinton and her ilk feels more loyalty to the brown wave communists of Latin America.

Barone gently chided the transnational elites who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, as being out of step with the American people.

… not all of us cherish ties to past traditions. “America's business, professional, intellectual, and academic elites,” writes Samuel Huntington in his 2004 book Who Are We? have “attitudes and behavior [that] contrast with the overwhelming patriotism and nationalistic identification with their country of the American public. . . . They abandon commitment to their nation and their fellow citizens and argue the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large.” He believes that this gap between transnational elites and the patriotic public is growing. Huntington knows whereof he speaks: He's been at Harvard for more than half a century.

New elites. This gap is something new in our history. Franklin Roosevelt spoke fluent French and German and worked to create the United Nations, but no one doubted that his allegiance was to America above all. Most Harvard professors in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s felt a responsibility to help the United States prevail against its totalitarian enemies. But in the later stages of the Vietnam War--a war begun by elite liberals--elites on campuses began taking an adversary posture toward their own country. Later, with globalization, a transnational mind-set grew among corporate and professional elites. Legal elites, too: Some Supreme Court justices have taken to citing foreign law as one basis for interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

This gap between transnational elites and the patriotic public has reverberations in partisan politics. Americans in military service and those with strong religious beliefs now vote heavily Republican. Americans with strong patriotic feelings are more closely split between the parties, but the growing minority with transnational attitudes vote heavily Democratic. Which doesn't necessarily help the Democratic Party….

“A nation's morale and strength derive from a sense of the past,” argues historian Wilfred McClay. Ties to those who came before--whether in the military, in religion, in general patriotism--provide a sense of purpose rooted in history and tested over time. Secular transnational elites are on their own, without a useful tradition, in constructing a morality to help them perform their duties. Most Americans sense they need such ties to the past, to judge from the millions buying books about Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers. We Americans are lucky to live in a country with a history full of noble ideas, great leaders, and awe-inspiring accomplishments. Sadly, many of our elites want no part of it.

The odd thing about Barone’s essay, is that he is himself a member of the transnational elite. He tries to make the issue of the new elite a partisan Republican/Democrat issue, but it isn’t. Transnationalism of one brand or another is powerfully represented in both parties: In the GOP by the neoconservative/libertarian supporters of open borders, cheap labor, and global labor arbitrage’s absolute advantage, and by the transnationalism of racist Third Worldism in the Democrat Party. Michael Barone is in fact a member in good standing of the GOP’s transnational elite, which exploits the Party’s conservative, nationalistic base. And so, one must ask whether Barone seeks to fool his readers … or himself.