"The nation-state is a failing institution"

That line is from a long post that Tim Burke has recently written, The Anatomy of Anti-Trumpism: Ten Thoughts and Reconsiderations. That's in the 9th of his ten thought, “What is uniquely wrong with America?”. All ten thoughts are worth reading, but that ninth one is something of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'm going to quote it in full:

There’s some elements of legitimate American exceptionalism littered in the last year’s events, but American progressives are not going to really understand what’s going on nor effectively react to it unless or until they grasp how much of this is a global story. The deeper story is that the nation-state is a failing institution. It cannot deliver what people all around the planet believe it has promised to deliver, not in its present form. Progressive or liberal political parties all around the globe gave up on delivering social democracy in a sustained way except in a handful of northern European nation-states during the 1980s and 1990s, and generally now run on the premise that they would be better-trained managers of systems that they have no desire to fundamentally reform or change. All over the globe that has become an unconvincing, pallid electoral strategy that generally appeals only to people who see themselves as better-trained managers of their own institutions, and to the people who are their social clients and dependents. Conservative or reactionary parties have gained ground because they offer some grander vision, because they promise (however transparently falsely) to radically reform or abolish failed systems, because they cross social boundaries that progressives no longer cross. I think this is very similar to how Islamist parties made inroads in cases like the coup-cancelled 1992 election in Algeria–not necessarily because people were drawn in positive terms to their message, but because they were the only viable reformist alternatives to business as usual.

A global perspective could help progressives to understand why they are losing ground everywhere. It is not, a la Jonathan Haidt, because conservatism is cognitively natural to human beings. It is that late 19th Century institutions are not working well for 21st Century humanity. If you want to gain political ground, you have to stop incrementalist tinkering around the edges of those institutions. Progressives everywhere stick to that, even people fairly far to the left, because they are the major remaining beneficiaries of those poorly functioning institutions. We need a new set of political aspirations that take us beyond our limitations.