Globalism? In this economy?

Tariffs as Ideological Project

It’s long been my contention that you can understand Trumpism as the synthesis of two ideological currents, which were long dormant and marginal in the American political scene, and then came roaring to prominence. One is radical libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism, articulated most fully in the thought of Murray Rothbard, and the other is national populism, represented by the writings of Samuel T. Francis. The Trumpian juggernaut lurches from one pole to another: in the beginning of the administration was the radical state destruction project of DOGE and now we are in a nationalist phase with the onset of the trade war, which the mega-industrialist Musk apparently deplores. Taken together, these camps form what I believe to be a distinctly American form of fascism, a contradictory and unwieldy project held together by the charismatic leadership of Trump. But I also think the internal contradictions between these projects can sometimes be overstated : they often have consonant goals. For example, the destruction of USAID has both a libertarian and nationalist rationale: destroying a part of the administrative state and a national-populist xenophobic turn inward.

While I was researching my book, I came across a little volume published in 1991 by the United States Business and Industry Council called America Asleep: The Free Trade Syndrome and The Global Economic Challenge. It’s full of essays directed against free trade and for protectionism, with contributions from Pat Buchanan, Boone Pickens, the New Republic’s John Judis, and Samuel. T. Francis, among others. of Of course, back then the big bete noire of protectionism was Japan, not China.

A word about the book’s corporate sponsors. The USBIC was formed in the early 1930s by small and medium manufacturers to lobby against the New Deal, labor unions, and minimum wage laws. In the 1980s, it came under control of Roger Milliken of Milliken & Co., a major Southern textile manufacturer. Milliken had essentially bankrolled the conservative movement: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, National Review, and the Heritage Foundation were all benficiaries of his largesse. He convinced Strom Thurmond to become a Republican and built up South Carolina’s Republican Party. But as U.S. manufacturing faced increasingly heavy competition from abroad, Milliken had trouble convincing his friends in the G.O.P. and the conservative movement to break with their free trade stance. So, he began to form alternate, protectionist institutions, with the USBIC at their center.

For me naturally, the most interesting essay in America Asleep is Samuel Francis’s, entitled “American Conservatives and the Globalist Challenge.” It’s by far the most sweepind and grandiose in its ideological vision and I believe gives the clearest anti-democratic vistas that animate Trump’s people. Francis begins by writing that in the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union America is facing it’s own type of collapse: “[the] United States itself is encountering a profound challenge to its very existence as a sovereign and independent national state and to the continued integrity of its national, political, and cultural identity.” This is because of the insidious presence of the ideology he calls “globalism:”

Globalism, though historically characteristic of the political left, is today common on the right as well as the left and is expressed in such slogans as the “New World Order,” the “first universal nation,” the “global economy,” the “global community,” “Spaceship earth,” or “the global village",” and it champions a foreign policy aimed at the promotion of “global democracy”
and “human rights” rather than the national interests and security of any particular nation. Globalism projects a cosmopolitan or universalist ethic that rejects or demotes the concrete and historic institutions, norms, and identities by which human beings discipline themsleves, while supporting an abstract an universal norm of “humanism” under which the universal attributes of human nature take precedence over the norrms of nationality and traditional culture (as well as those of specific religious profession, region, class, ethnicity, and other sources of particularistic norms.)

According to Francis, globalism is the ideology of “trasnational elites” who benefit from its political economic and structures through organizations that are “increasingly disengaged from the national and cultural soil they are rooted in.” International trade and the agreements to facilitate it are political weapons of this “transnational elite:”

The construction of a transnational apparatus for the regulation of currency, trade, economic development, and environmental problems thus complements and enhances efforts to build a transnational political apparatus. The emergence of such globalist economic and political arrangements is facilitated by the increasing “denationalization” of economic forces themselves—the disengagement of corporations annd their managements from the national economies, societies, and cultures in which they are physically located. Unrestricted free trade among nations and investments in operations in a variety of different nations and regions by multinational corporations encourages this disengagement andd contributes to the erosion of national identities and loyalties.

You don’t need a PhD from the Frankfurt School to pick up on some coded antisemitism here, but it’s not quite reducible to antisemitism either: Francis conceives of globalism as a cosmopolitan project with origins in Greco-Roman culture, albeit its imperialist and universalist side. Basically, the problem is humanism as such: Francis mocks the very notion of shared “humanity” as a sentimental illusion in the service of an imperialist global technocracy.

In the end, trade and economics gets relatively little attention from Francis compared to the amount of time he spends complaining about other parts of “globalism.” For instance, he castigates the Reagan administration at length for giving in to the globalist “democracy” and “human rights” framework and adopting sanctions on apartheid South Africa and its support for the U.N. Convention on Genocide. And he spends a great deal of time on “the cultural disintegration” caused by the mass migration of “Third World” immigrants to the United States.

What Francis allows us to see is that trade is just one part of a totalizing ideology that views the world as made up of necessarily hostile particular groups. These groups are implicitly or often explicitly racialized: they are framed as biological “stocks” that can be depleted or contaminated. In this worldview, trade saps national strength. The political is primary: the economy will be made subservient to the volk. And what if you’re just a Regular Joe and Jane and stand to lose out in this economy? Maybe you weren’t really American after all?