America is moving toward becoming a better version of itself

No it isn't.

>the local inequalities it's producing.

That's not caused by globalism.

Unfortunately many explanations look outward or cast blame on shadowy groups ("The Elites") and refuse to look at decisions made by Americans themselves. There is no consideration of voting against interests in favor of culture war issues. No discussion of the movement away from organized labor and activism. Refusal to evaluate the consequences of an "Every Day Low Price" consumerism that demands the lowest cost of products.

I'm not trying to absolve globalization of responsibility, rather I'm trying to say that it's not helpful to point the finger at it and refuse to look deeper.

As far as the wasteland heartland, I am not sure if Texas is included in the heartland, but the Texas economy is one of the biggest in the world — about as large as the GDP of Canada and larger than that of South Korea. Basically Texas is the 9th or 10th largest economy in the world. California is 5th or 6th. The state of Ohio’s economy is only slightly smaller than the entire country of Belgium.

The desolate wastelands are in the non-major cities and towns of Europe. Avignon France, for example, in the city center, has blocks and blocks of boarded up storefronts. Unemployment in Avignon is over 15% and only 35% even earn enough to have to pay income tax. Gary, Indiana, about as heartland as it gets, has a 7.6% unemployment rate — a rate that is declining. By European standards of GDP, disposable income and unemployment, Gary is a boomtown.

Don’t just consume the NPR-worthy stories of the death of the US heartland. Remember, most media outlets in the vein of the Atlantic, NPR, etc., they are typically coastal elites who have barely ever visited the heartland, let alone actually lived or worked there. They are also an echo chamber pushing an when’d a of a certain political persuasion, so it helps their narrative when “fly-over country” isn’t doing well.

This semantic drift is convenient for those who would like to equivocate between "ideologue" and "xenophobe" and pretend that they are basically the same thing, or necessarily as bad as one another.

It's fair to say tribalism has always been around. And from that perspective, the current tribalism, including left-wing identity politics, is extremely reactionary.

A few things are, if not new, at least notable in this case:

* These people aren't historically outsiders, they're "heartland" Americans.

* The cultural narrative hasn't caught up to the cultural reality yet. For example, if child of meth heads grows up to be president, he's yet another privileged white president, not an outsider who overcame adversity. "Multicultural" attitudes group him in with Warren Buffett.

* There's no language, even to describe white people short on privilege. There are certainly slurs, but nothing you'd put on a questionnaire.

* The general direction of American culture has been to include more and more, however slowly. This is certainly a regression in that respect. And it seems to be accompanied by an abandonment of the ideal of inclusion qua inclusion. Instead, we seem to have a list of historically disadvantaged groups, telling newly disadvantaged groups that they already had their chance. Again, this is nonsense to an unemployed daughter of opiate addicts.

Not sure what you're getting at with this rhetoric (no wonder you're a fan of vague, politically-correct statements -- I have no idea what the second part of your comment means). People don't like political correctness because it's a manipulation tool of policy makers, used to misdirect and to prevent unwanted discussion -- like with e.g. the illegal immigration problem, which no one dared bring up before You-Know-Who. Political correctness is also a cowardly and intellectually dishonest mode of discourse.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-twitter-mob-came-for-m...

The short summary is that he actually does not believe that abortion should be punished by hanging as you suggest. An excerpt:

"The purported reason for our “parting ways,” as Mr. Goldberg put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural piece. The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”

Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent conversation online and on the podcast indicated—to say nothing of the few million words of my published writing available to the reading public—I am generally opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation. Such provocations can sometimes clarify the terms of a debate, but in this case, I obscured the more meaningful questions about abortion and sparked the sort of hysteria I’d meant to point out and mock."

That's who you've got remaining on the right. Take a look at sane conservative writers like Jennifer Rubin at the Post. She wrote as a conservative for years under Obama, and now she's suddenly labeled a leftist traitor now that she's critical of Trump. She didn't change, her party did.

Or just look at the economy. Fox News can't find reputable economists to come on air and say a trillion dollar tax cut and increased spending by a trillion is going to balance the budget. No one will say that because it's nonsense, yet that is the policy they have to sell.

Or look at the President's legal team. You'd think a billionaire President would have the pick of the biggest DC firms to represent him in the case of the century. But he is left scraping for guys like Sekulow.

The only people willing to toe a line like that are extremists, or people who are easily duped. Not people you would label experts or competent.

It's what Brennan meant when he called the US a kakistocracy - a government by the shittiest.

I only see that online. The many, many people I engage with in real life rarely act like they are in a biased information silo. The ability to hide behind a computer screen just brings out the worst in people, IMHO.

I think reform of Islam must involve accommodating people who are considered sinners. The problem is that communicating this critique of Islam can be considered hate speech by the tribalists.

I do think the real prejudice — incapable of seeing other races / religions / sexualities as equals — is getting pushed to the fringes. Basically, if you’re truly prejudiced, the above “gentleman’s agreement” is broken. When that happens, you’re no longer seen as a gentleman but as a savage. See also the public reaction to the neo nazis in Charlottesville (confirmation bias attribution errors notwithstanding)

When the desire to maintain a common identity is based on racial or ethnic identity, and that desire excludes the possibility that races or ethnicities other than your own can, or should, be a part your community, then that desire can be accurately described as racist or at best xenophobic.

>Many of our country's rural trends are a pushback against multiculturalism, which pushes the idea that there is no right or wrong way to live as long as you don't hurt other people. Common languages, religions, norms, customs, and beliefs simply don't matter.

I don't see what's supposed to be wrong with that premise.

>But how can a sense of community form when you can't even talk to your neighbors? Why is this pushback being met with cries of racism?

It already has, and does - and that sense of community as it includes people of different races, ethnicities and religions, is precisely what is being pushed against. Talking about language is a red herring - this "push against multiculturalism" is also a push against immigrants who speak English perfectly well, and who integrate perfectly well into their communities, and are law abiding citizens, but are not considered white and may not be Christian.

Until the demographics of the country began to shift to the point that the majority status and political power of wh - sorry - people of European descent - began to be threatened, this didn't seem to be an issue. It is clearly a movement based on an attempt to normalize the redefinition of culture and community around race and ethnicity.

Because it's often couched in explicitly racist terms.

Shared values should matter more than the color of your skin, and values can (and often are) shared across cultures.

On the face of it, no, of course, wanting to maintain a sense of community in your town is not inherently racist. But there needs to be a recognition and acceptance of the fact that the identity of a community needs to change and evolve, and people arriving from somewhere else can be part of that.

I would also argue that:

> Many of our country's rural trends are a pushback against multiculturalism, which pushes the idea that there is no right or wrong way to live as long as you don't hurt other people

Is an oversimplification of both rural trends AND multiculturalism. Rural america has historically been deeply shaped by immigration and migration, and rural america was fine with it, as long as economic and social opportunity was growing. When that ceased to be the case, immigration/multiculturalism was one of many factors blamed.

A sense of community can transcend religion and race, and this is what we should strive for.