The word “globalism” has become a—perhaps the—shibboleth of our age. Whatever the issue, globalism is the theme. The 2016 U.S. presidential election stands out for Americans, of course. A woman whom many saw as the living embodiment of well-connected extralegalism, transnational personal enrichment, and self-serving truckling to all and sundry checkwriters from Abu Dhabi to Wall Street—principles and conscience be damned—was locked in mortal combat with a man who proudly claimed to be a citizen of just one country, and not of the whole world. The contest came down to globalism vs. anti-globalism, all of the other considerations notwithstanding.
Indeed, as the undergirding of America falls apart while jet-setters keep racking up more and more records of excess, globalism has only grown in salience as a political sticking point. My ramshackle home in Alabama may be mortgaged to well above its chimneytop, but mansions along the Pacific Coast Highway and apartments on Fifth Avenue are trading hands for hundreds of millions of dollars. “Working-class unemployment” is no longer a paradox or even an irony but a permanent feature of the post-industrial heartland. Hecatombs of opioid overdoses gut rural communities—a much grittier side of drug abuse than for the celebrity in a hundred-thousand-dollar stint at a resort for rehab. And for those who can't afford private schools, public education has been almost wholly abandoned to squads of political stormtroopers whose symbol should be, not the polished red apple, but the hand grenade. Americans who ride the globalist jetstream get rich; Americans who stay home and work for a living get the shaft.
This is hardly exclusive to America. Globalism as the separator of, well, maybe not the sheep from the goats, but certainly of the schmucks from the Gotrocks, is, as might be expected, a global phenomenon. In Hungary, for example, home of uber-globalist (and Hillary supporter) George Soros, globalism has become so unwelcome that its offshoot ideologies are banned in the public square. Hungarian universities no longer teach gender, for instance. And with good reason. When hardline communist Béla Kun became leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, one of his first acts was to appoint militant Marxist György Lukács as Deupty Commissar for Culture. Lukács's first act, in turn, was to make the teaching of gender ideology mandatory, beginning with kindergarten. Thus confused, Lukács and Kun reasoned, Hungarians would be unable to resist the onslaught of globalism non pareil, namely, the Comintern (Communist International), the vanguard of Leninist socialism sweeping away tradition and stability in its wake.
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