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4/07/2003 10:52:00 PM | Timothy

Transnational Progressivism
The National Review has this article on what those craxy lefty academics are up to now:

Another school of radicals does some imagining of its own. It envisages an international political monolith with which to replace America and indeed all of liberal democracy in the West. These yearnings are embodied in a doctrine called “transnational progressivism,” which is gaining prominence in law schools, for example, at Princeton and Rutgers. As John Fonte of the Hudson Institute points out, professors in this camp argue for the establishment of a new transnational regime, or world government, that is post-liberal democratic and, in the American context, post-Constitutional and post-American. Within such a regime the key political unit would not be the individual citizen who voluntarily associates with fellow citizens but the racial, ethnic, or gender group into which one is born.
I got this from Tapped which wisely notes: "Tapped don't know about this whole 'transnational progressivism thing,' which from her description sounds goofy and marginal. But we do know that Princeton doesn't have a law school. Actually, it all makes sense. Given that the horrors of liberal academia have ascended, in the hands of conservatives like de Russy and David Horowitz, to the status of myth, it only makes sense that a thing like 'transnational progressivism' would thrive at a place that doesn't actually exist. " Matthew Yglesias has these conclusions:
1. There is no such thing as transnational progressivism.
2. There is no such place as Princeton Law School.
3. The nonexistent ideology of transnational progressivism is not being taught at Princeton’s nonexistent law school or any other (real or fictional) place.
4. The National Review is lying to you.
The National Review is certainly lying. How can you trust them to describe a lefty doctrine when they claim it comes from a law school that does not exist. But Matt is not quite right either. There is something like 'transnational progressivism" in academia, but it is not called that, and it is not like how the national review describes it (it's absurd to say that your ethnicity suddenly becomes "the key political unit"). What is in academia are attempts to figure out how to deal with globalization and increasing interdependency. It is a question we will have to deal with more and more: if the domestic political state is less able to affect a lot of the decisions that matter to citizen's lives, how do we build fair international institutions. Unless you are a protectionist who wants to stop free trade (Matthew says he most definitely is not), or someone happy with the current WTO/IMF arrangement (I do not think anyone will defend them on democratic lines), academics are reasonable to think how we might deal with this. One way to look at this is how to have a political response to economic globalization. There are a lot of varied responses to this problem, some just starting to bloom, and only in that sense can there be "transnational progressivism." The term is absurd when you consider that the other alternative is Jesse Helms style defense of sovereignty, or a world in which key decisions affecting our lives across borders go entirely unregulated. Another way to look at this is consider Habermas' essay The Postnational Constellation, arguments about global civil society, and what might be described as attempts to build regional and eventually world-wide federalism. Chris Brown in Britain had a book on Sovereignty, Rights, and Justice that just came out on how to approach these problems. Brown's earlier book in 1992 opened me to looking at how political theory has often taken place in the context of the nation-state, when it is not clear there should be such a separation between international relations and political theory. (of course, this is all simplistic.. more on this when time permits.)



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