Why can’t we just get along? This is a question that I have been working on in my new book, Divided: Colliding Ways We See the World. This series of blogs looks at five worldviews that each have defining characteristics. Understanding the five worldviews—indigenous, traditional, progressive, globalized, and transformative—is a necessity in this complex and rapidly-changing world. The next several weeks I will be examining the traditional worldview, an often misunderstood and demonized worldview. I would like to share with you some ideas that I have been exploring.
“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.” ― W. Somerset Maugham
The Populist Right, Part 4
Globalizers, Republicans and Democrats, have been very supportive of immigration the last several decades. Immigration has added many pluses to American society by making it more diverse, interesting, and dynamic. But the influx of immigrants has also helped the globalization agenda by providing cheap labor for its enterprises and attracting the brightest workers from around the world to the tech industry in Silicon Valley.
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The populist right is firmly against illegal immigration, especially those who breach our southern border. The left seems more ambivalent about immigration, many taking a more open-border stance and muddying the difference between illegal and legal immigration, and asylum seekers.
Trump has sworn to stop illegal immigration. Populists cheer when Trump brags about building a wall to further separate Mexico and the U.S. They want to curtail 
illegal immigration and “round-up” and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, especially if they have a criminal record.
This means approximately 11 million or more illegal immigrants, probably a number too large and costly for deportation efforts. Actually Democrats and Republicans have passed the immigration issue down the line for too long and are largely responsible for the current impasse. Trump appears strong and decisive in talking and acting on an issue the two parties have avoided for decades, while the Democrats timid decisions and confusing language about immigration make them look weak and vacillating.
About the Author
Dr. Denise R. Ames is a long-time educator, grade 7-university, author of seven books, and president of an educational non-profit, Center for Global Awareness, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. CGA provides books, resources, and services with a holistic, global- focused, and perspective-taking approach for their three programs: Global Awareness for Educators, books and resources for educators and students grade 9-university; Gather, Global Awareness Through Engaged Reflection, a self-organizing study and conversation program for adults focusing on seeing different perspectives of pressing global issues; and their most recent program Turn, Transformative Understanding and Reflection Network, which encourages lifelong and transformative learning to help us arrive at a place of personal and global well-being using a seven “path” approach.
Please email info@global-awareness.org or visit www.global-awareness.org for more information.
For more about worldviews see Dr. Ames’ book Five Worldviews: How We See the World. $9.95
On the right, populism had a new leader: Donald Trump. He was different, both ideologically, psychologically, and emotionally, from the other Republican candidates. Spouting populist rhetoric, he pledged to smash through the ideological divide and to “Make America Great” again. It sounded good and enough people believed him to catapult him to the highest office in the land, despite his crass outbursts and lack of experience. At the time of this writing, Trump seems intent on dismantling the levers of liberalism and the checks and balances on his power. He is carrying out a populist agenda point by point.
Their wages have stagnated for decades and opportunities for well-paying jobs with non-technical skills have also stagnated.
progressive media, academics on the left, and left-leaning highly-educated professionals.
groups in the United States. These forces are in-part powering the rise of the Populist Right (and the left to a lesser degree). I will summarize four factors below that I have found have adversely affected those who hold a Traditional/Populist Right worldview.
automation, has resulted in the decline in the income of working class men, both black and white. As a result, historic levels of income inequality and concentration of wealth at the very top and among the upper twenty percent, the highly-educated professional class have occurred.
bolster profits and as a bulwark against unions. Unclear and confusing immigration laws along with other reasons have adversely affected a shrinking middle and working class who have experienced stagnant wages and fewer job opportunities.
rather than local/national agenda has resulted in a disruption of shared, core values revolving around a common love of country. Along with this decline in patriotism and a fraying of the social fabric that binds the country together, greater incivility among competing factions has occurred.
These traditions include the importance of a two-parent family, marriage as an institution, religious organizations that provide social norms and mores to guide moral human behaviors and curb impulsive destructive actions. Although conservatives do not reject all change, in their view it should be gradual and moderate. Scruton states that the “philosophical burden of American conservatism has been to define those customs and traditions and to show how they might endure and flourish from their own inner dynamic, outside the control of the state.”
heralded a populist right form of conservatism that held few of the principles of the old traditional conservative coalition. Even the globalist, who had latched on to both the Democratic and Republican parties with a firm grip, were diminished with the populist storm.
Although many self-styled conservatives still adhere to neoliberal policies, today many are questioning the benefits of this system and turning to other economic forms. Today, many are advancing the economic ideas of the populist right in which they speak out against the neoliberal, globalized economic system and favor a more local, regional, and national system. I will cover the supporters of a globalized type of economy in a later blog.
After the war, a group of conservatives, collectively known as the “New Conservatives,” gained national attention by admonishing New Deal progressive economics, a mushrooming military-industrial complex, and rampant consumerism.
Buckley worked tirelessly to define conservatism as a political movement in which American religious and social traditions have a central voice and ideas have a leading role. He also sought to distance conservatism from Antisemitism, and racism, an association that unfortunately continues today. He firmly believed that all Americans should be included in upholding religious and social traditions, as well as the institutions of government as the Founding Fathers, as he believed, conceived them.
