World without boundaries: The ideas behind Obama's new world order

Citizenship in the world without borders is defined not by affiliation with family or religion, tribe or nation, but by shared ideas. Openness, tolerance, freedom, diversity, equality, opportunity, there are the elements of the universal liberal creed to which Obama subscribes. They are all wonderful things. Just don’t get caught between a liberal and his actualization of one of these ideals. Orthodox Catholics and members of other traditional faith communities, critics of immigration, opponents of affirmative action and advocates of the color-blind Constitution, skeptics of narratives of progress, conservatives in general, all are targets for approbation and demonization, all must be repressed if men and women are to be made free.

Obama is also wrong to suggest that the only laggards in our journey toward a wall-less world are the tyrannous, the theocratic, and the ignorant. There are plenty of losers in this race to the top: the victim of late-term abortion, the child without a father, the single mother who struggles economically, the high-achiever of limited means whose race is a demerit on a college application, the low-skilled worker whose job has been outsourced to China or insourced to migrant labor, the independent contractor saddled with government regulations, taxes, and mandates, the violator of liberal speech codes and other institutes of political correctness, the gas guzzlers and gun owners, the addicted, the broken, the lonely. All these are left behind in a borderless world, handed transfer payments and told fortune-cookie aphorisms on equality and democracy, and every so often given a glimpse of the super-lux world inhabited by their rulers.

I am speaking of course about the global elite, the world-travellers and conference-goers that have benefited the most from the information revolution and the creation of what Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick call Chimerica. Right below them in this new hierarchy are the liberal upper- and upper-middle classes, the bobos and educated elites, that with the super rich make up the caste that benefits from low prices and low wage services and inhabits a shared universe of opinion unmatched in its arrogance and impenetrability.