In short, while globalization is indeed undermining national political institutions and thus national identities and loyalties, what appears to be replacing the national is not the “global” political identity that “cosmopolitical” dreamers have long aspired to, but rather a return to localized identities rooted in clan, sect, ethnicity, corporation, and gang. In literary terms, this future has more in common with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash than it does with Gene Rodenberry’s Federation utopia in Star Trek.

The ultimate losers in all of this, of course, are the middle classes—the people who “play by the rules” by going to school and getting traditional middle-class jobs whose chief virtue is stability. These sorts of people, who lack the ruthlessness to act as criminal insurgents or the resources to act as plutocratic insurgents, can only watch as institutions built over the course of the 20th century to ensure a high quality of life for a broad majority of citizens are progressively eroded. As the social bases of collective action crumble, individuals within the middle classes may increasingly face a choice: accept a progressive loss of social security and de facto social degradation, or join one of the two insurgencies.