I suspect that it’ll take centuries for the power of nations to give way to that of larger political entities, but I can easily see it happening. My personal guess is that an overarching one-world government will eventually come to pass, perhaps preceded by large groupings of countries into mutual trading and protection blocs. Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania? But for now, we can look at things like the European Union, free-trade agreements, the freer movement of capital and, to a lesser extent, labor, as the first tentative harbingers of things to come.
And we can see the reassertion of nationalism as its natural response. People still strongly identify as Americans, Russians, Canadians, etc. and still have the sense that those nations do a better job of representing their interests than does any other form of political authority. For the time being, nation-states aren’t going anywhere, and the blithe assumption that they should be risks overreach and rejection by voters, which of course is exactly what’s happening.
Whatever the distant future holds, for now, what’s most remarkable about the increasing popularity of the Right is that the Left seems entirely incapable of self-reflection. The idea that leftist policies and agendas themselves might have something to do with their rejection by huge numbers of people and are therefore worth re-evaluating, appears to be a concept beyond the leftist pale. As with Trump, Brexit, the Canadian truckers’ strike, etc. the Left seems content to hurl expletives rather than ask basic questions about itself, its narratives and policies. That of course will hasten their marginalization by the voting public, which is what we’ve been seeing for several years, most recently in Italy.
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