Monday, November 7, 2016

Americans Support Globalization

Despite a year of Bernie and Trump bashing trade deals, a solid majority of Americans thinks globalization is generally good for the U.S. Even among enthusiastic supporters of Trump, 49% support globalization. The same survey found solid majorities supporting our involvement with NATO, fighting terrorists in the Middle East, and limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. It seems like a sound repudiation of "let the world go to hell" nationalism and just about everything Trump ever said about foreign policy. The only foreign policy issue that produces a big divide between the parties is immigration, including the potential danger presented by refugees.

Politically, Americans are partisan; ideologically, we were mostly in the mushy middle, not enthusiastic about the status quo but not supporting radical changes, either.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

"The only foreign policy issue that produces a big divide between the parties is immigration, including the potential danger presented by refugees."

This is disingenuous. There is no potential danger of any significance.

These are war refugees - women and children, sick and elderly, poor and desperate, people whose homes and lives and families and loved ones were torn apart by a conflict we had a direct hand in creating.

And we turn them away, the same way we turned away Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime leading into the second world war, employing the exact same false arguments that they were a threat to us and our way of life - that they couldn't ever be integrated into our culture, that they would steal our jobs and our livelihoods, that they would inevitably contain an unknown number of secret villianous evildoers who would actively work to destroy our nation and our values from within.

And thus it is no longer enough that we already required these starving, homeless, friendless, penniless wretches to face incredible scrutiny to be allowed into our country, underoing some of the strictest vetting processes in practice anywhere in the world. No, now we seek to deny them refuge entirely - leave them to die in a ditch somewhere, anywhere else, just so long as it isn't here. Because somehow the only way we here in the greatest nation on earth can protect ourselves is by forsaking our own humanity and decency.

Land of the free, home of the brave, denying people freedom out of a cowardly fear of what they might do with it.