“Globalists” are not the enemy

There is a natural impulse in politics to identify common themes between our various opponents. This can be handy, sometimes, when one’s foes vary in order of extremity and degree, and one can attempt to tar moderates and hardliners with the same brush. Mainstream social democrats and conservatives have often tried to equate each other with the most extreme ends of their respective wings on the political spectrum. This can be effective in rallying one’s own base, or in forcing one’s opponents into denouncing others on their own side. 

But more often than not, it can lead to political mistakes. Building imaginary coalitions between people who oppose us on separate questions is not likely to help us expose those opponents’ weakest areas on each specific question. It can drive away potential allies who may agree with us on some things and not on others. It can also make us look deranged and conspiratorial to neutral observers; wingnuts on both sides of American politics have done this over the Russo-Ukrainian war. Instead, focussing on the points of disharmony among one’s opponents is almost always the most effective tactic. 

Most corrosively of all, insisting that the intersections on a Venn Diagram are actually a single circle, forces us to change the nature of the question we are asking in order to get that specific result. Politically, this can mean surrendering ideas that are rightfully our own; or at least, not entirely our opponents’. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s bungled attempt to impose tariffs on all imports into the United States, this is roughly the position that some of his supporters have got themselves into with regard to a group of people they refer to as “Globalists”. 

This seems to be especially true of many of those from outside the US who have pinned their hopes to Trump’s second presidency blazing a trail through their domestic opponents in their own countries. In order to do this, they have found neat, semi-logical fixes that allow them to wrangle their own bugbears into the same ideological paddock as Trump’s most obvious foes. In some ways, this works; Trump is clearly gunning for the EU, and his domestic agenda on immigration is likely to make politics harder for Western European politicians who want to carry on ignoring issues around mass immigration.  

In other areas, it is far less clear-cut. On trade, Trump has provided a willing ear to a previously fringe (albeit interesting) group of economic theorists who argued that America’s relatively poor performance as an exporter was a structural inevitability resulting from the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. These ideas, and their political liabilities in terms of American geopolitics, were set out in these pages by Doug Stokes. They are worthy of consideration, and are clearly compelling at a political level in large parts of the US that have seen manufacturing jobs disappear. 

However, Trump personally serves as a reminder that capitalism and free trade are not the same thing, and that one can believe in one but not the other. He is not in favour of mercantilist economics in general; he supports unilateral protectionism by the United States on the understanding that other nations won’t retaliate if they know what’s good for them. He uses the term “globalist” for his domestic opponents whom he regards as too weak-willed to break the rules of global free trade, which he regards as a constraint on the legitimate action of the American presidency. 

The term “globalist” has a murky origin story in the early twentieth century.  It was used both by anti-semites and by anti-Nazis;. In the former case, it was used in a similar way to the Bolshevik use of “rootless cosmopolitans”, and in the latter as a descriptor of the Axis’ rapacious attempt to conquer the entire world. In the decades hence, it was used frequently in American politics to criticise domestic opponents who were viewed as placing America’s obligations to the wider world ahead of its duty to its own citizens.  It has also been used disapprovingly in a variety of ways in academia, and particularly in neo-Marxist schools of thought such as world-systems theory, in which the central contention was that rich countries were systemically asset stripping poorer ones.

It is a word that has seldom been used as a self-descriptor, but over the course of the late 20th century, there was a proliferation of multilateral and international structures that were designed to coordinate policy on a global level.  Following the failure of Marxism as a political project, this kind of global cooperation became the focus of a lot of the idealism that had previously been invested in communism. A mantra developed that “global problems called for global solutions”, most obviously but not limited to climate change. This became  especially popular among those pushing for political outcomes that were unlikely to find favour with national electorates, as well as among politicians who aspired to cast a statesmanlike image on the world stage. 

These trends coincided with an era of steadily increasing international trade. Regional, multilateral and international platforms were used as vehicles to harmonise approaches to cross-border exchanges of goods and services. At a global level, this was manifested in the WTO, but regional organisations such as the EU, ASEAN and NAFTA had a far greater impact on the way that national economies slowly merged into one another, and the ways that this impacted on the ability of elected politicians to act independently.   In the post-ideological age of the 1990s and 2000s, lobbyists, single-issue campaigners and pressure groups realised that this ecosystem of international regulatory bodies was the most effective arena in which to fight for policy, above the eyeline of regular voters. 

This acronym soup of supranational organisations and intergovernmental clubs speaks the language of free trade, but more often that not can be found applying conditions on which they will tolerate the free exchange of goods and services across borders. In many cases, they can point to examples where they have protected consumers, or the environment, or workers, from defective goods or exploitation.  And they can also demonstrate a track record of protecting producers from foreign rivals who may be the beneficiaries of unfair state aid. But whilst they can be effective at preventing certain nations from engaging in state aid in most circumstances, they have been woeful at preventing others, particularly China, from doing so. And across the Western world but especially in Europe, they have been instrumental in applying costs and rules on the supply side at a regional level, which have put producers at great disadvantage compared to rivals from emerging markets. 

“Globalists”, as a term, is so ill-defined that it can be applied to almost anybody … involved in international commerce or finance

There would be great political mileage in a populist leader, especially an American president, who was prepared to force these institutions to hack away at the thickets of restrictions and burdens that have been imposed on industry in the developed nations over the last 30 years. Donald Trump occasionally shows signs that he might have been that person, and is very happy to pose against these institutions when it suits him. Certainly, they are all staffed by the sort of people who cannot stand him. In reality, though, many of these supply-side issues are a far bigger problem for Europeans than they are for the Americans, and our own governments have gone far beyond what is stipulated by the acronym soup of world trade clubs. 

“Globalists”, as a term, is so ill-defined that it can be applied to almost anybody involved in these organisations, or anybody involved in international commerce or finance.  At a senior level, these people are always urbane and university educated, and they inevitably sign up to whatever political and social views are obligatory among that class of people at any given time. On social media, rainbow flags can be found next to the globe emojis by their names, often accompanied by a Ukrainian or an EU flag. But this is all very much vibes-based stuff, and a level-headed political movement ought to be able to separate such individuals’ outward displays of belonging to their social tribe from their real economic interests. 

It may be that America is absorbing an unsustainable quantity of the world’s surplus in goods, and that blue collar American workers have lost out to their white collar professional compatriots during the era of globalisation. China may be engaging in a trade war designed to engender dependence on itself, which it will ultimately attempt to leverage for strategic purposes. None of this justifies punishing Canada for having its crude oil refined and shipped out via Texas rather than British Columbia. And there is no reason at all why anybody in Australia or Britain or Germany should feel the need to support this, even if they had hoped that Trump’s re-election might herald an era in which national sovereignty could be restored, and the excesses of leftist social extremism could be throttled.

There are, to put it mildly, massive political risks associated with conceding the entire edifice of free trade to one’s political opponents. During our working lives, the individual exists as both producer and consumer, and the overwhelming purpose of production is in order to consume; either ourselves or for our families. Yes, there is dignity and purpose and self-realisation to be found in our employment, but fundamentally we do it to put a roof over our heads, to put food in our bellies, and to build up reserves of material security. An economic strategy which insists that we incur some kind of defeat by buying anything as opposed to selling it is fundamentally at odds with that reality.  

Trump ultimately baulked because he knew that his political base would only tolerate a limited economic shock in terms of prices and inflation, and he lacked a compelling narrative to get them to go any further.  Other than those who owe him their monthly pay cheque, nobody is compelled to share in this political misadventure. Yet this definitional category of “globalists” has deluded people, including in countries that were on the intended receiving end of the tariffs, into believing that it was the beginning of a long march against the Cultural Marxists who run Goldman Sachs. Or something like that. 

This isn’t to be dismissive of the idea that there are dangerous and subversive political forces who have wormed their way into positions of extreme influence in the multinational private sector and intergovernmental institutions. But those groups can be opposed on their own terms. The Right must learn to distinguish the parasite from the host.