In the article: Ideologies Have Consequences - Transnational Progressives v Democratic Nationalists, Quadrant, February 27, 2016, author John Foote, explains that:
What might be called "transnational progressivism" is the ideology for an age once thought not to need one. President Obama, for example, was hailed as 'not a doctinaire liberal' and 'centrist and pragmatic'. The truth, as eight sorry years have shown, is very different...
Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz noted that, in fact, Obama does share similarities with the pragmatist philosophers in the sense that he is, as they were, a progressive ideologue promoting a decidedly ideological agenda (think John Dewey), while masquerading as a rational non-partisan “pragmatist” committed to “what works” rather than to a progressive utopian vision of the future...
Foot observes how modern politics has been fragmented into a quagmire of identity politics - groups competing for a share of the political power once considered the domain of mainstream America. He notes that this fragmentation has been dramatically advanced by the Obama Progressive administration:
Whether one examines national health care, immigration, racial and gender politics, LGBT rights, executive orders, aggressive “diversity” initiatives promoting “substantive equality” throughout the federal government in education, housing, energy, defence and elsewhere, judicial appointments, and foreign policy openings to Iran and Cuba—after seven years, it is clear that the current American President is the most ideological since Ronald Reagan. After all, the stated goal of the Obama administration is the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America”, which suggests neither a “centrist” nor “pragmatic” agenda.
Obama’s ideology is progressivism, an American branch of a global ideology that could be described as transnational progressivism or global progressivism. The American wing of progressivism (sometimes confusingly called liberalism) shares a broad worldview with the Western Left generally.
Foote describes how the ideology of transnational progressivism is strongly infused among Western elites...
At home, global progressives focus on promoting what they call “marginalised” groups, such as women, LGBT people, racial minorities, linguistic minorities, immigrants, particularly Muslims. For example, the Western Left calls for “gender parity” (imposed proportional representation) across the board in all institutions of civic life, by fiat if necessary (violating the tenets of a free society)...
These new (post-1960s) fault lines are based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration, language, religion, globalism and other issues that are even more divisive for national cohesion than traditional class struggle...
Abroad, Western Leftists promote (in varying degrees and where politically possible) what they call “global governance”, meaning the building of supranational institutions and policies that diminish the role of the nation-state, including the democratic nation-state. The ultimate goal of this grand ideological project is the creation of an increasingly integrated global order with laws and institutions that are superior to those of the nation-state...
Western progressives appear to approach external and internal politics with sharply different mindsets. International relations are viewed through the prism of “win-win”...
On the other hand, the progressives view domestic politics as strictly a zero-sum game. Their opponents at home, Western conservatives, are often excoriated as racists, xenophobes and reactionary retrogrades...
Foot notes that this ideological struggle highlights one of the most important political questions facing Western civilization: Who should govern?
First and foremost, in the West today, an intense ideological struggle is raging non-stop over the most momentous issues of world politics, including the singular, primary political question: Who should govern? The current migrant crisis and the ongoing issues of mass immigration, multiculturalism and cultural assimilation highlight this ideological conflict throughout Western politics.
Who decides immigration policy: democratic nation-states or hundreds of thousands or millions of migrants on their own? Who accommodates to whom: host nationals or newcomers? What principles determine policy: government by consent of the governed or evolving concepts of global human rights? If the latter, who decides what those universal human rights are?...
...principled democratic nationalists, whether Reaganite-Thatcherite or Gaullist, have more in common with each other than with their leftist opponents who emphasise identity politics...
What is at stake in determining refugee-immigration-assimilation policy (which must be seen as one interdependent issue) is the right of societal preservation and societal reproduction: Does a free people have the right to perpetuate its way of life or not?...
Do the French, British, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Americans and Australians have the right to decide for themselves whether or not to perpetuate their cultures, institutions and ways of life? Or will these questions be decided for them (and against their will) by transnational elites (through ideologically partisan interpretations of global human rights) and/or by millions of migrants from the developing world “voting with their feet” and arriving without the consent of the host nation’s citizens?...
Western civilization is at a turning point. The nation-state is under attack both from within via the Progressive agenda and from without via mass immigration and the trans-national corporatist agenda of globalist elites. The paramount question indeed is: Who should govern?
Related book
Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others?, by John Fonte
ISBN-10: 1594035296, ISBN-13: 978-1594035296