The Expat Delusion

Globalist Dreams, Populist Realities

As an American born and raised overseas, I was taught to think of myself as a global citizen. America was my “passport country,” even though my forbears were settlers there four-hundred years ago. I learned that borders were outdated, patriotism was dangerous, and tradition was pointless restriction to outgrow. Regular travel, international schools, and multicultural communities trained me to see myself as a product of progress, a rejection of the archaic ties that bound less-enlightened people to a specific place. In my first book, Drifts, I explored what it meant to grow up this way, celebrating this cultural in-betweenness even as I acknowledged its challenges and my evolving perspective.

While immigrants move to a new country with the intention of permanent residence and eventual citizenship, expatriates temporarily reside outside of their home country. Expats are not all the same; different people become expats for different reasons and live different lives. So this essay does not apply to every American expat, but to a subset of American expats I have observed over the years - predating Trump. These are the Americans abroad I overhear at parties saying things like, “Oh, it’s so odd going back to visit! The politics, the people, it’s just so backward.” Traveling the world, they admire the traditional cultures of other countries while simultaneously scorning their fellow citizens back home who remain loyal to their own customary ways of life.

Eventually I recognized that these ideas were the product of a very specific ideological conditioning. The rootless expat worldview was engineered in the wake of World War II, when the Western ruling class came to believe that strong national identities were dangerous precursors to conflict. The solution was to use education, media, and cultural institutions to unravel the oldest bonds common to people throughout history: ties to place, tradition, faith, and family. National pride was reframed as chauvinism, traditions became oppression, and connection to one’s own people was deemed bigotry to be replaced by an abstract commitment to humanity at large.

As N.S. Lyon writes, there was “a concerted campaign by these elites to make people feel ashamed of and ready to atone for their past, their ancestors, their traditional culture, values, ways of life, and even their inherited ethnicity. Widespread erasure of cultural touchstones, and the pervasive rewriting of national histories to scrub away any signs or sources of national distinctiveness, unity, or pride. Attempts to indoctrinate new generations into an entirely new, universalized set of more “progressive” (read: civilized) values, and to induct them into a wholly artificial pseudo-culture of cosmopolitan multi-culturalism, divorced from any coherent national geography, inherited identity, or memory.”

In the wake of this societal engineering, the elite mode of existence was cosmopolitanism, free from “old-fashioned” beliefs. The individuals inculcated in this worldview made good expats because they were comfortable anywhere and loyal to nowhere, ideal participants in a world where home was just a temporary stop on the path to professional advancement.

Critical Mass

Over the years, I watched as the worldview that shaped me and many of my expat peers, reached critical mass in America. Major institutions, from media to academia to corporate boardrooms, became ideological enforcers of a single, suffocating dogma. A bipartisan consensus between the Democrats and the Republicans meant that no matter who was in office the U.S. pursued globalization, mass immigration, foreign intervention, elite managerial rule, and an ever-expanding state apparatus that served corporate and bureaucratic interests over those of ordinary citizens.

Borders were dissolved and cultural cohesion sacrificed to bring in immigrants who would toil for low wages to the benefit of the rich and the detriment of the American worker. When I was in university, opposing globalization was the default leftist position; those of us on the left protested open borders, knowing they benefit big business while hurting the working class by driving down wages, increasing rent and crime, and dissolving cultural cohesion. But suddenly open borders was championed by the left and any opposition was dangerous bigotry. People were no longer the product of distinct cultures rooted in specific places, they were interchangeable units of production and consumption that could be swapped out at random. Today, despite overwhelming public opposition, we have had decades of unprecedented mass immigration across the West, which has transformed nations beyond recognition.

This globalized liberal order became the ubiquitous background noise of modern life, so pervasive that most people didn’t even recognize it as a distinct worldview. It presented itself as neutral, merely the inevitable progression of history, in order to obscure the fact that it is actually a system built on specific ideological assumptions intended to unmake traditional bonds in favor of a borderless world where individuals are little more than atomized economic units. For decades, its consequences were masked by material comfort and the illusion of stability, but today its resulting cultural disintegration, economic precarity, endless wars, and mass alienation have become too pressing to ignore.

Rooted Revolt

Across the West we are seeing people revolt against the entire architecture of the postwar order. In the UK there was the 2016 Brexit referendum, while across Europe the rise of populist parties are sending shock-waves through the establishment. In America, it seems that class consciousness has finally appeared, but not to usher in the socialist utopia my university professors longed for, but to send Trump to the White House for the second time. An unlikely avatar of the people’s discontent, the ideologically capacious movement that has coalesced around Trump is not about playing within the proscribed political system but about challenging its fundamental assumptions. This is why both parties, the mainstream media, and America’s elite establishment united against him.

In the wave of this political upheaval, some of my American expat acquaintances are bewildered, unable to comprehend how so many people could be rejecting the very system that has given them an aspirational life. They often retreat into derogatory classism, dismissing Brexit voters or Trump supporters as unworthy of political agency because of their supposed ignorance. These expats equate their academic credentials with superior intelligence, never realizing that the very system that awarded their degrees was designed to produce compliant functionaries of the globalized liberal order, not independent thinkers.

The rise of conservative populism in the West that so disturbs this subset of expats is, in part, a refusal to accept that the distant managerial class they comprise should dictate the future while dismissing the opinions of ordinary people as witlessness. And if national pride and localism are gaining traction, what does that say about lives built on the assumption that transience is inherently superior? This rising populist sentiment exposes a reality American expats have long ignored, which is that millions of people back home do not see our rootlessness as liberation, but as alienation.

Close-minded Cosmopolitanism

One of the great ironies of this mindset is that, despite its professed cosmopolitanism, it breeds an intellectual insularity. Many of these expats visit dozens of countries, speak multiple languages, and navigate different customs with ease, but their globalist worldview is rarely challenged. Many use their time abroad not as an opportunity for genuine self-examination but as a means of reinforcing their own sense of superiority over those back home. Rather than allowing their exposure to different cultures to challenge their assumptions, they filter everything through the same globalist framework they left with, treating their experiences as proof of their own enlightenment. They admire tradition when they see it in foreign countries but regard it as backwards when it persists in their own. They marvel at the social cohesion of nations that prioritize shared cultural heritage while insisting that any attempt to preserve such things in the West is dangerous. The irony is that their cosmopolitanism makes them less open-minded, not more. They return home not with a genuinely broadened perspective, but with an even stronger conviction that their rootlessness is a sign of progress and that those who reject it are too provincial to understand.

It could be transformative if more American expats were open to one of the most subversive virtues of their roving lifestyle, which is recognizing that outside of the West most nations highly value tradition, community, and national identity. Where Western elites frame self-negation as progress, much of the world sees it for what it is: civilizational suicide. And now the West is reckoning with the consequences.

Now, as the old order crumbles, many of my fellow expats are struggling to make sense of it. Some cling to old illusions, doubling down on the idea that the problem is not enough progress, not enough liquification, not enough liberalism. But others are realizing that globalization was not an unstoppable force of history but a project pursued by a specific class with specific interests, and that the backlash against it is not a regressive revolt of the ignorant but a long-overdue correction of the sensible. The path forward is not more engineered detachment from place and history; the path forward is a reassertion of the things that are the foundation of flourishing and which cannot be outsourced, like rootedness, belonging, and meaning. Because, in the end, people do not long for a borderless world, but for a place to stand, a history to inherit, and a worthy future to build.

Painting is Moonrise over the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich