Globalism or Globaloney?

 Globalism or Globaloney?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) March 4, 2023

            Globalism is a fairly simple study. Merriam-Webster dubs it the practice of considering the entire world as one’s sphere of operations. Economically globalism refers to free trade plus any other international agreements that lead to benefits for all participant nations. This sounds reasonable enough. Some nations have cotton; other nations have oil. All nations need clothes and all need fuel, so deals are made.

            Somehow over the centuries globalism became complex. Though Queen Isabella and Columbus are sometimes called the world’s first globalists, ancient nations dealt with each other and explored the potential of international economies long before 1492. Globalism’s long path has led to good things and bad, some of the bad things being politically contemptible and morally reprehensible.

            Think about it. Who are the biggest promoters of globalism currently? America’s globalists are typically super wealthy men who prefer to be called internationalists and who seemingly have meager if any devotion to the land of their birth and their raising. Typically their sympathizers are intellectuals, liberal professors, and college students who have been fed the globalist message and have swallowed it whole. Generally they eschew such mottos as “America First” and grow ill at chants of “USA! USA!”

            Talk about “fly-overs”! Literally and figuratively globalist activists fly over us as they go from nation to nation, palace to palace, board room to board room and conference to conference to preach their gospel. They are quick to take with them an older child or teenager who is prodigiously well-spoken and can thunder like a Billy Graham or a William Jennings Bryan. Their child star of the moment is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish protestor and provocateur who doubles as a devout globalist and a climate change agent. This young lady who no doubt has the gift of eloquence can screw up her face and swish her hand in the air at adults as effectively as an old-fashioned schoolmarm coming down on her third graders.

            Anyone who reads newspapers regularly knows who the fly-over ideologues are. The most famous is Al Gore, Jr. The younger Gore (my dear deceased Tennessee father-in-law and mother-in-law championed his senator father) was raised in Tennessee but is as much Tennessee as I am Vermont. His message is still that the end is near. Like the politicians who clamor for open borders and sanctuary cities yet live in gated communities, Gore, Jr. flies privately hither and yon to tell his audiences that emissions from airplanes must cease. Globalism, thy name is hypocrisy. Having dropped the cry of global warming, as have all the full time environmentalists, Gore has broadened his sermon title to climate change. While climate change is his focus, globalism is his broader context.

            There are definitely certain benefits of globalism. Nations need to talk with each other just as neighbors do. They need each other’s products. But its negative aspects cannot be denied. For the most part globalism has hurt the little man. Globalism allows the USA to sell its goods to Mexico, Europe, and China but it can and does hurt small local businesses. How can a Mom and Pop hamburger joint compete with transnational McDonald’s? For Americans globalism means loss of jobs when corporations move jobs to low cost countries. Cheap labor that produces an ongoing underclass doesn’t seem to bother the highly paid corporate globalists who consider the entire globe their orbit. What do CEOs care about East Palestine, Ohio or Coldwater, Kansas or Fitzgerald, Georgia?

            Globalism isn’t just about economics. It’s about socio-politics, culture, and values as well. Are we to fault the world’s little people or its middle class who fear losing their ability to keep their souls, to view their own land and culture as special, to cherish their language, and to pass on to their children certain values that other nations do not hold to? Have America’s globalist-elites not noticed that free trade with China has not led to democracy in China but has led to China’s ownership of property in America?

            Globalism has led to shuttered American factories, to downward pressure on the wages of unskilled laborers, and to outsourcing. It has diminished the virtue of citizenship. After all, “We are the world. We are the people.” As beautiful as that song is, its message has been faultily applied.   

            John Lennon’s song, “Imagine,” may be the most beautiful song ever written. Its words, “Imagine there’s no countries,” are both haunting and wistful. I for one also long for a world with no borders, but I have to remember that right now that’s not possible and that it was the Almighty Himself who confused our language and spread us out and about in the first place.