The Demise of the Nation State; Surging Tribalism; Competing Empires

I am suspicious of the emergent rightwing nationalism exemplified by Trump. It strikes me as mostly a raging, anxious, incoherent tribalism. The nation state seems to be fading in significance and power in relation to two more powerful forces: surging tribalism and the competing empires. The Trump phenomenon is, at its worst, a tribal, white identity politics, fueled by alienation, fear, frustration, anger, suspicion. (At its best it is a populist Christian resistance to liberal totalitarianism; but that is not our train of thought here.) The Democratic Party has become in large part an alliance of disparate tribes: black, gay, labor, transgender identities that mimic authentic, traditional tribal legacies and collaborate with the hegemonic liberal/professional elite. Globally we see the outbreak of tribal-ethnic conflicts everywhere: the Sunni-Shiite war throughout the Middle East, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, Ethiopia, Kurdistan, and so forth. Politics always has been and always will be competition between and cooperation with waring religious/cultural/ethnic tribes.

At the same time, however, we are witnessing unending international war between competing empires: Communism (in various national forms, but especially Chinese), Shia law (in the alternate Shia and Sunni expressions), secular liberalism (the West), and Christianity (expressed expecially as Catholicism and Pentecostal-Evangelicalism). A fifth force, populist nationalism, is emergent around the globe, notably in Russia, but is of its nature self-restricted, even when expansive and aggressive, and not imperialist in its essence in the way the other four empires are. Liberal Christianity, as in mainline Episcopal and other Churches, in its endorsement of sexual liberalism is, in my view, not an authentic branch of the Christian empire but the chaplaincy of secular liberalism.

Our own country has become so polarized that it is no longer a UNITED States of America. It is divided in heart. It is no longer coherent as a Christian/Liberal Empire. It is decadent and in decline. Increasingly, it seems to me, our allegiance goes to our local, actual tribe (in my case, ethnic, urban, working class and poor Catholic) and the overarching Empire we support (again, for me Catholic.) The Catholic-America romance of the post-War period is over. We grieve it for all the good it advanced. But we move on into the new world order.