The Anti-Patriot Culture of the American Left

I put up a couple of essays on patriotism and politics this last Fourth of July, for example, "Barack Obama and the Patriotism of Dissent."

The topic's endlessly fascinating as a primer on the rise of postmodern culture in contemporary left-wing politics.

Another excellent addition to the debate is found in Larrey Anderson's photo-essay from the Oregon Country Fair, "Why the Left is Unpatriotic and Why the Right Should Say So":

The Oregon Country Fair is an excellent example of the culture of the left in today's America. This is not a culture that favors middle-class capitalism or the traditional form of American patriotism. It is a culture seeking a one-world government, a primitive socialist economic system, a low-tech manufacturing infrastructure, and a religion that worships nature instead of God.

I've got more commentary on left-wing anti-patriotism here.

But for another example, see Perverted Truth, "The Problem of Patriotism."

Photo Credit: American Thinker

Obama Sees Traction in Continuing Racial Grievance

Election 2008 may be remembered for an odd counter-intuition on racial progress: For the first time in history, a black American has secured a major-party nomination for the presidency. This milestone should demonstrate America's equal political opportunity for people of color. Yet, simultaneously, the very ascendence of a black presidential nominee is forcing people to confront latent racial prejudices that seemed slowly fading as the pattern of post-civil rights integration normalized cross-racial comity and interaction.

Is Barack Obama to blame for the fraying of the integrationist consensus?

A man who advertised himself as America's postracial healer now appears to be complicit in the resegregation of American attitudes on skin color and the politics of racial recrimination.

Gallup polling, for example, finds a majority of Americans agreeing racism is widespread:

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds most Americans saying racism is widespread against blacks in the United States. This includes a slim majority of whites (51%), a slightly higher 59% of Hispanics, and the vast majority of blacks (78%)....

As on most issues involving race in the United States, blacks are much more likely to see racism as a problem than are whites. However, other questions in the poll showed that Americans remain optimistic that race relations could improve, if Americans could hold an open national dialogue on race and if Barack Obama were elected as the first black president.

Notice how black Americans are much more likely to view politics through a racial prism.

Indeed, today's Washington Post poll finds Barack Obama running strong overwhelmingly among narrow interest group constituencies sensitive to race-baiting appeals:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation's low-wage workers, but many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system, according to a new national poll.

Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics...

Yet:

Obama's standing with the white workers runs counter to an impression, dating from the primary season, that he struggles to attract support from that group. McCain advisers have said for months that they think the Republican can win a significant share of those voters because of Obama's performance in the spring.

The survey suggests it will be difficult, but not impossible, for McCain to increase his appeal.

Think about this: The Post's survey contacted people making at or below $27,000 annually - that is, the working classes. So, we are seeing lower-income whites who are favorable to the Obama campaign, but also, in Gallup's findings, only a slight majority of white Americans see society as racist.

In other words, the Obama campaign has an incentive to push racial politics as a wedge issue.

Black voters already cling to outdating notions of hegemomic racist domination of the political landscape. If Obama can sharpen racist thinking among white voters, by alleging that John McCain is exploiting racist stereotypical images of sexual predation among blacks, perhaps more white voters - who are more inclined toward electoral color-blindness, but may have debilitating white guilt - can be sucked into the frame of a racial recriminatory coalition: McCain's racist! Vote Obama!

Thus, strangely, Barack Obama has in fact no incentive to campaign on a post-civil rights platform of equality of opportunity. Indeed, Juan Williams notes that last week's outbursts might just be the beginning of racial general election campaign:

With polls showing the presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama getting closer, a question is now looming larger and larger. Is skin color going to be the deciding factor?

Just last week, Sen. Obama warned voters that Sen. McCain's campaign will exploit the race issue by telling voters that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." A few weeks earlier, he said they will attack his lack of experience but also added, "And did I mention he's black?"

The McCain campaign did not counter the first punch, but after last week's jab -- fearing that Mr. Obama was getting away with calling his candidate a racist -- campaign manager Rick Davis responded to the dollar-bill attack by saying, "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

Mr. Obama's campaign concedes it has no clear example of a Republican attack that expressly cites Mr. Obama's name or race. Yet in the last few days some Obama supporters were at it again, suggesting that a McCain ad attacking Mr. Obama as little more than a "celebrity," by featuring young white women such as Britney Spears, is an appeal to white anxiety about black men and white women.

The race issue is clearly not going away.

Williams suggest that the Bradley effect may be at work, with many white voters not revealing their genuine racial sensitivties to pollsters. Therefore, Williams notes that instead of continuing crass racial appeals to further divide the electorate, Obama needs to return to his original promise of racial transcendence:

To win this campaign, Mr. Obama needs to assure undecided white voters that he shares their values and is worthy of their trust. To do that he has to minimize attention to different racial attitudes toward his candidacy as well as racially polarizing issues, and appeal to the common experiences that bind Americans regardless of color.

Obama conceded last Friday that his "dollar bill" remark sought to play the race card. Hopefully, Obama will go further and fully repudiate the politics of racial demonization.

Polls show that Americans see race discrimination as continuing, and the odd implication for the Democrats is that they can score political points by further exacerbating those racial tensions that do exist.

Maybe America will one day have a campaign judging presidential candidates by the content of their character, but it won't be Barack Obama's presidential bid that helps us get there.

See also, Betsy Newmark, "It Always Seems to Come Down to Racism."

Graphic Credit: Gallup Poll

Bush War Crimes and the Fog of History

There's an intriguing set of articles and responses online today regarding the Bush administration and civil liberties in the war on terror.

For me, one of the things that pops out is that the outrage over America's response to terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and especially the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is driven mostly by anger at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Routinely, I see suggestions that the impairments of civil liberties under Bush are the worst in American history. Much of this, even with the often super-sophisticated scholarly presentations, ends up being Bush derangement leavened with a foggy grasp of U.S. history.

We see this in Jonathan Mahler's, "The Fog of War-Crimes Trials," at the New York Times. Mahler compares the Bush administration's military tribunals to the Nazi's Nuremburg war crimes trials. He suggests that at that time the U.S. practiced a moderation of law, which stayed the hand of vengeance. It was the legal process of a civilized victory, which is meant as a contrast to the Bush administration's apparently uncivilized approach:

As civilized people, we have a natural desire to see criminals held responsible for their actions. The desire is that much stronger in the case of large-scale crimes like genocides or terrorist attacks, which seem to demand not just accountability but a reaffirmation of the moral order — a public enumeration of what is right and what is wrong — that can be delivered only in a courtroom.

The hope once was that military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay would meet this need — if not provide closure on the Sept. 11 attacks, then at least enable a collective participation in the trials of their perpetrators. There were practical reasons to opt for tribunals over the federal courts, which were not designed to try combatants captured on the battlefield: a soldier couldn’t very well be expected to read a prisoner his rights. But there was something else, too. Trying terrorists as war criminals would send a powerful message to the world.

And yet the tribunals that just opened hardly have the feel of history in the making. They haven’t merited much discussion in the presidential campaign; nor are we a nation riveted by the trial of the first defendant, a former driver for Osama bin Laden named Salim Hamdan. Instead of a landmark case, one that serves as a resonant reminder of the gulf separating us from our enemies, we have detachment and ambiguity — not just about the extent of Hamdan’s guilt but also about the wisdom of the entire tribunal process as well as many other aspects of the prosecution of the war on terror.

It has certainly not helped matters that we are now almost seven years removed from 9/11 and the trials are just getting under way, having been tied up in procedural issues for the better part of the Bush presidency. Of course, this is how adversarial systems are supposed to work. Hamdan’s lawyers were simply carrying out their obligation to provide their client with a vigorous defense by questioning the lawfulness of the system by which he would be tried. There was precedent for this. When Franklin Roosevelt convened a military tribunal to prosecute a group of Nazi saboteurs captured on American soil during World War II, their government-appointed lawyer, Col. Kenneth Royall, challenged its lawfulness before the Supreme Court, which met in an emergency summer session and ruled unanimously that the tribunal was legal.

But because the Bush administration’s detention policies were so extreme and uncompromising, they have invited numerous challenges that have yielded an expanding thicket of rulings in favor of the detainees — Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, Boumediene — which have obscured the larger question of guilt or innocence.

Note that oddity: The Bush administration's policies have been struck down in favor of the detainees? Sounds like constitutional checks and balances to me. The system's working, and the length of the process, if anything, means that we are granting more protection to suspected terrorists than anywhere else in the world. Yet, BushCo's still vilified as nearly as bad as those Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg.

The second piece of interest today is Alan Brinkley's review of Jane Meyer's The Dark Side at the New York Times.

Brinkley's essay is itself dark and melodramatic, painting President Bush as a puppet in the hand of an all-powerful vice-president. But the conclusion brings me back to this fog of history theme:

There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.

The Bush administration is not, of course, the first or only regime to violate civil liberties. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all authorized or tolerated terrible violations of civil and human rights, all of them in response to great national and global crises. In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.

Again, note here with some incredulity: George W. Bush is not the first president to mount a robust response to national crises, centralizing energy and power in the executive to meet the exigencies of the day.

Indeed, Abraham Lincoln today is widely regarded as America's greatest president, and further there's a new historical consensus (among scholars not obsessed with alleged BushCo war crimes) that the internment of Japanese Americans under the Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt administration constitutes the low point in the civil liberties history in American constitutional law - "one of the darkest chapters in American history."

This is not by any means to minimize any potential human rights violations Americans have committed these last few years. It is to suggest that the history of the Bush years is still young, and questions of state power in the age of sacred, transnational terrorism are evolving.

Finally, Rick Moran has read portions of Mayer's book, and Brinkley's review here as well, and says:

I reject the view of Cheney (or any of the others involved in the torture regime) as being dark lords of the underworld. They were, in their minds, patriots out to protect the country from a very real threat (something with which both Brinkley in his review and Mayer in her book agree). But good intentions don’t excuse immoral and criminal actions. Nor do they obviate the need to air out the truth of what has gone on in the dark places where just because no one hears the screaming it doesn’t mean the law breaking didn’t take place.

Brinkley’s review – overly and unnecessarily dramatic at times...

Moran nevertheless calls out conservative partisans to think critically about the horrendous practices carried out in our name.

He's right to remind us to think critically, and to hold members of our own party to account.

At the same time, I can't help but remember Debra Burlingame's penetrating essay on Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, the former Guantanamo detainee who upon his release returned to Iraq and killed over a dozen at Mosul in a suicide bombing attack last March.

Yes, all of this is complicated. The United States has a moral responsiblity to protect human dignity while prosecuting the legal war on terror. We also have a responsiblity to wage the fight to which we're engaged with vigor and dispatch.

Somehow I think folks like Mahler, Brinkley, as well as Jane Mayer, in their historical fog, overlook this last detail.

Obama Comments Racist, Poll Finds

As I've noted a couple of times (here and here), Barack Obama's likely to face a backlash should he continue to make allegations of racism against John McCain throughout the campaign.

This morning's release of new polling data support this conclusion.

For example, Gallup finds the race essentially tied, with Obama up 45-to-44 percent over McCain; and Rasmussen's daily tracking poll finds Obama up 44-to-43 percent.

Even more significant is Rasmussen's survey on last week's race controversy. It turns out that less than one-in-four respondents thought the McCain campaign's "Celeb" ad buy was racist, whereas a clear majority sees Obama's "dollar-bill" comment that way:

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

Not only has Obama been discredited by this data, but the findings point to a much larger challenge for his campaign through November: His Democratic supporters have had a field day portraying the GOP as "neck drooling, knuckledragging, moron[s]" who are engaged in a "nefarious" plot to plant "subconscious (or conscious) biases and evoke a particular visceral reaction," and they're just warming up.

If Barack Obama's skills as a transcendental post-partisan candidate are real, you'd think he might demonstrate a little more sway over his radical backers (who see hooded night-riders galloping around every move the GOP makes).

The Hatred of the Online Crowd

Popular culture has been transformed by new modes of online communications and social networking platforms. From Blogger to MySpace to YouTube, technology provides endless opportunities for people to make friends, share hopes and joys, and perhaps live dangerously.

One of the most disturbing manifestions of the today's online reality is the phenomenon of "trolling," which is discussed in today's New York Times:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait....

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

What caught my attention about this story is not the notion of "trolling" but the larger issue of the "hatred of the online crowd," referred as to "malwebolence."

Much of online communication is pseudonymous, and thus in the absence of fear of consequences we see the proliferation of the most horrendously depraved behavior from what is, essentially, a tech-savvy, un-lumpen web-prowl-etariat.

We know the dangers: tragedies like Megan Meier's MySpace suicide, the mysogynistic death threats to tech-writer Kathy Sierra, or the demonization of conservatives bloggers like Jeff Goldstein.

The intensity of the hatred itself is not new. What's novel is the unprecedented volume and retrievability, which is accelerated by the liberation of unaccountability.

I haven't been the subject of a social networking demonization campaign, although last week I was introduced to the term "cobag" by those friendly nihilists at Sadly No! (and I get "fair and balanced" malwebolence from extreme right-wing hate bloggers as well, who allege I'm RINO for speaking out against racist blog rings (as seen, for example, here, here, here, and here).

My wife sometimes worries about my safety, as I don't blog pseudonymously.

Much of this hatred is defended in terms of the First Amendment, and the legal protections against online demonization aren't so robust, as the Times indicates:

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech...?

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients ... like ... Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well....

Many trolling practices ... violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

That's probably as good a description of the issues as we're going to get (although I'd be interested to read some legal and scholarly articles on this).

Read the entire New York Times article here: "The Trolls Among Us."

Barack Obama and Racial Preferences

One of the more important issues raised by Stanley Kurtz in his essay on Barack Obama's "lost years" in Chicago politics is the candidate's hypocrisy on racial preferences in affirmative action programs.

It turns out, in contrast to Obama's frequent claims to offer a transcendent post-racial sensibility, the Illinois Senator boasts an aggressive record of pushing racial preferences in minority and women's enterprise programs, in minority construction contracting, and in riverboat casino-gambling. As Kurtz notes:

Obama's intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's the United States of America," most Americans took him to be advocating a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama's words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay published in 1988 entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City," Obama tried to make room for both "accommodation and militancy" in black political engagement. He wrote,

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and board-room negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

However his views may have evolved in the ensuing 20 years, Obama surely knew that the King-like rhetoric of his keynote address would be taken by most Americans as a repudiation of the kind of race-based politics he and his closest allies have consistently practiced throughout his electoral career. It's difficult to gauge the extent to which Obama may have consciously permitted this misunderstanding to take hold, or the extent to which he still believes that the opposition between "integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy" is a false one. Neither alternative is particularly encouraging.

Kurtz's research represents the essential story on Obama's civil rights record, much of the which the mainstream press has blown off.

It's all the more noteworthy, therefore, that the New York Times offers a new, in-depth look at Obama's delicate path on class politics and racial preferences:

In 1990, as his fellow students rallied to protest the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action. The campus was in an uproar over questions of race, and Mr. Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand.

Mr. Obama said he had “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.

“The success of the program speaks for itself,” he said of the law review’s affirmative action policy in a letter published in the school’s student newspaper.

Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it “absolutely necessary” when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the United States Senate. But in his presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting that poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.

His ruminations about shifting the balance between race and class in some affirmative action programs raise the possibility that, if elected in November, he might foster a deeper national conversation about an issue that has been fiercely debated for decades. He declined to comment for this article.

“We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more,” Mr. Obama said last week in a question-and-answer session at a convention of minority journalists in Chicago.

During a presidential debate in April, Mr. Obama said his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, “who have had a pretty good deal” in life, should not benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if they were competing for admission with poor white students.

While Mr. Obama’s biracial background in many ways makes him an ideal bridge between racial sensibilities, the issue remains politically treacherous, especially with race taking an increasingly prominent role in the campaign. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s comments have already begun resonating in the long-running dispute over affirmative action, emerging as three states consider ballot initiatives that would ban racial preferences altogether.

I seriously doubt that racial preferences constitute an issue that Obama wants to embrace as a main campaign plank.

There are few other programs in American public policy that fail as badly on the merits as contemporary affirmative actions programs. The U.S. is now committed to equality before the law - and equal protection for all people. To discriminate in favor of one group, or sets of groups, at the expense of a "privileged" white hegemonic class makes a mockery of notions of color-blind justice.

If Obama truly is America's post-racial candidate (and potential savior) he must abjure a politics of racial recrimination, reparations, and set-aside redistributionism. Should he not, he risks becoming just the latest black candidate of ethnic grievance and racial parochialism.

Obama will be seen as "all talk" if he can't help the nation rise above the peculiar divisions of our past: Personal responsibility? That's just for conservative traditionalists. Educational achievement? That's a "white thing." Yo, my man, the black community needs "progressive" programs and "social justice"!

Indeed, what may happen is that Obama ends up as serving as the set-aside savior for groups such as ACORN, La Raza, NAACP, NARAL, and Now.

This would be a tragedy.

The U.S. is ready for the post-racial transcendence that Obama's original campaign rhetoric promised. Family responsibility, educational opportunity, minority enterprise and capitial formation, universal programs in market-driven health care and taxes - and a considerable role for efficient government. These alternatives promise a much better avenue of color-blind uplift than does racial-preference divisiveness.

**********

UPDATE: See also, Just One Minute, "The Time To Lead Is Later," which points out the Times' description of how Obama might "foster" a deeper national conversation on race, while Obama refused at the same time to be interviewed for the article:

Obama is so eager for a national conversation on affirmative action that he won't talk to the Times about it...

You can't make this stuff up!

The Tragedy of Doha

In a 2005 essay, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills noted:

It is no exaggeration to say that the Doha Round could do more to stimulate the global economy and to alleviate world poverty over the next quarter century than any other policy initiative the 148 WTO member governments could undertake together.

This is why last week's collapse of the Doha world trade negotiations is such a disaster for the global economy and the international developmental agenda.

The experience of America and the world since the end of World War II has been of expanding prosperity in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds. The growth of international trade has made the United States vastly more affluent and has lifted an estimated 375 million people out of extreme poverty since 1985.

Today, while the U.S. unemployment rate is edging up, trade exports have bouyed manufacturers and kept American workers in the employment sector.

I noticed some serious misunderstanding as to the causes and consequences of the collapse of trade among prominent commentators in the blogosphere (here and here). For example, the U.S. is generally not to blame for the failure of the Doha round. The developing nations, especially China and India, flexed their muscles and missed an opportunity to consolidate the current free trade regime, notwithstanding its longstanding flaws in American and European agricultural protection.

That said, as the New York Times reports, the collapse of Doha may signal a shift in world power:

Over the last two decades, China has managed to turn the forces of globalization into the most successful antipoverty project the world has ever seen. So how does one explain the fact that when the latest round of global trade negotiations blew up for good last week, ending seven years of talks to lower tariffs and free up trade around the world, it was China with a hand on the detonator?

The answer has a lot to do with how the world — and China in particular — has changed, and a lot to do with how the Chinese see the world that’s coming. In that world, countries like China and India will have much more clout at the bargaining table because they have much greater economic power than in the past.

It is not that the Chinese think the great era of globalization is over. Far from it. The glistening Beijing of today was built on dollars, yen and Euros earned around the world, and now being lent back to the United States.

But the era in which free trade is organized around rules set in the West — with developing nations following along — definitely appears over, and few are mourning its demise. Even in America, where for years free trade advocates assumed their own country would be the biggest winner, advocates of the system are on the defensive.

This is still incomplete, I would add.

Another way to think about it is that the developing nations, especially India, may not have realized that the U.S. is still in the driver's seat in terms of market power. American negotiators resisted India's demands for agricultural protection. The intransigence in New Delhi may have cost the Indian economy years of growing prosperity, for the price of satisfying domestic farming interests.

But here's how the Financial Times puts it:

The collapse of Doha ... speaks to the failure of both sides to own up to the world as it is. On the side of the rich countries, particularly the US but no less many European nations, there is a refusal to acknowledge that globalisation no longer belongs to the west. In previous trade rounds, the rich nations set the rules and the rest could take it or leave it. No longer.

Equally, the new powers now give the impression – and you see this as much in India as China – that they want to be free riders. They are happy to profit from the rules, but unwilling to support the architecture of the system. Doha, in this respect, saw both sides in blindfolds.

International trade is based on the notion of mutual gains. If parties to negotiations are captive to powerful interests and protectionist policies, further trade expansion cannot take place.

This is the trajedy of Doha.