I'm inclined to extend a claim made by the political scientist
Hanspeter Kriesi from the electoral domain to the social domain.
Kriesi claims that the process of economic and cultural globalisation benefits different demographics than those who suffer from it; certain distinct groups of people are the 'winners' and others are the 'losers'. Thus, the political realignment that the west is experiencing at the moment can be seen as the 'losers' and 'winners' of globalisation mobilising to protect and advance their respective interests. For Kriesi, this is a methodology to understand why the political landscape of the west increasingly resembles a Blairite/Clintonite 'centre' on one side against a loosely defined group of nativists and nationalists who seem to cut across the traditional left/right divide.
But let's break it down into the cultural domain. Who are the winners and losers? Let's generalise the attributes of these two groups from what we see in a modest empirical analysis (there's far more than merely this, but for brevity's sake I'm being reductionist):
Winnners
- More likely to work in white-collar professions.
- More likely to live in a city or a large metropolitan area.
- More likely to be non-white.
Losers
- More likely to work in blue-collar industries.
- More likely to live in a peripheral or underdeveloped region of their nation.
- More likely to be white.
These three contrasting attributes of the winners and losers in the division are actually closely related, for what are hopefully obvious reasons. White collar professions tend to agglomerate in major population centres, which in turn typically are more ethnically 'diverse' due to their magnetism for migrants and non-natives. Also, men are far more likely to be in blue-collar jobs than white-collar ones, and also gravitate towards rural or sub-urban locales.
The winners of globalisation can be understood to be either the global ultra-poor or the western elites. In the former case, a Chadian or a Nigerian is afforded access to an increase in wealth and income through taking lower skilled work from a western country, and in the latter case, those who already have money and institutional power will find inefficiencies in the organisations they control reduced as costs of labour drop markedly. The losers of globalisation tend to be the working-to-middle class inhabitants of the western nations who are now finding that a job that once could sustain an entire family is now being moved abroad or is having its wages cut to compete with Pranay's work in Bombay.
Thus, we can see that both the winners and losers tend to have their own divergent interests and tend to compose discernible groups. We have all the makings for conflict between the two; and thus we see the cultural war that has been fermenting increasingly for the past couple of decades. It is born of the fact that white men in the west tend to be the socioeconomic losers of globalisation, whilst women and ethnic minorities are far more likely to be the beneficiaries. Culture being as it is - formulated post-hoc after socieconomic struggles - the 'war on white men' we see in the media is the product of two things:
- White men tending towards being the opponents of the economic and cultural agenda that tends to prevail in the intellectual or creative professions (seeing as they are the preserve of white collar urbanites).
- White men being an underrepresented 'other' that those in intellectual or creative professions don't encounter that often, especially white men who themselves are 'losers' and thus indulge in wrongthink (remember, the most proportionally underrepresented demographic in higher education or elite institutions is working class white men).
What can be done about this cultural war, assuming you want to minimise the suffering of the besieged demographics? There are two approaches; hope to make people aware of the underlying socioeconomic conflict and thus cultivate a degree of compassion whilst allowing the 'winners' to win, or work actively to undermine the socioeconomic process that is fueling this conflict. Given first-hand experience at the lack of compassion (and dismissive contempt) felt by many of the winners, my inclination is that the only viable option is to resist the process of sociocultural globalisation and actively work to undermine the efforts of the winners to bring about pozland.
