by Serban V.C. Enache, The Duran:

In a previous article of mine [The Neo-Malthusian New Deal], I linked to Wolfgang Streeck’s review essay on ‘Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism’ by Quinn Slobodian. By condensing and summarizing the arguments of these two scholars, and giving my own thoughts on these grave matters, I hope to make the reader understand who contributed the bricks & mortar for the scheme known as globalization and how the left and right strive to achieve the same thing, the Feudal Dominion of International Shareholders.

From the very beginning, the ideological ambition was global and universal; the distinct, the particular, the unique, like customs, nationhood, and sovereign states, was and still is considered a threat to the grand design of a Weltwirtschaft [world economy] without borders, which was expected to restore the golden age of unfettered 19th century liberalism. The empires of free trade fell in 1918 and were replaced by a host of sovereign and potentially democratic nation states, which carried the prospect of ‘economic nationalism,’ a dangerous virus in the eyes of the globalists. After 1945 decolonization started and the introduction of majority voting in the UN General Assembly was introduced; these two anti-liberal political architectures, together with the Keynesian gospel of national self-sufficiency, threatened not just economic progress but the ‘open society, human freedom, and dignity,’ so it was claimed…

The new culture in which the globalists planted their seeds of ambition was called neoliberalism. This ideology was both opposed to nation states, and, at the same time, dependent on them for its very existence. It opposed the sovereign nation state as a vehicle for change, for such a vehicle has inherent tendencies to contain and or distort markets [the market being a creation of the state, though they would never admit it openly]. On the other hand, neoliberalism is dependent on the sovereign’s capacity to fend off and suppress the public’s demand for social security, which would de-liberalize the economy. I can think of no better example of such ideological thinking than Alex Jones. When referring to the New Zealand shooter’s “responsible markets” demand in his manifesto, Jones equated the adjective “responsible” with “controlled,” in his attempt to paint the criminal as a socialist, a left-winger. Going back to neoliberalism, its purpose was and is to weaken the nation state as an instrument of mass, popular will, while strengthening it as a bulwark against the ‘illiberal dispositions’ of the public – in other words, to paraphrase James Madison, the state’s role is to protect the opulent few [the rent-seekers] from the rest of humanity, from the well-organized majority to be more precise.

Democracy spreads the expectation of a more or less egalitarian outcome, some sort of real socio-economic gains for the many [likely in detriment to the ultra rich minority] – therefore, democracy had to be implemented in such a way as to prevent its entry into the realm of the economy. The state was to only patrol and enforce the institutional limits. Beyond those limits, democracy couldn’t enter – otherwise no chance for a free market; and of course, their free market idea was a bastardized version of Adam Smith’s, because Smith was referring to “free” as in free from rent-seeking. In the same spirit of sophistry, what’s commonly referred today as Keynesianism is actually the bastardized version of Keynes’ theory, popularized by Paul Samuelson and his ilk.

Friedrich Hayek cooked up constitutional designs for a democracy that couldn’t touch the economy. Mayhaps ridiculed at the time, Hayek’s institutional views of [pseudo] free markets and castrated nation states prevailed. Today, we hear the old, liberal rhetoric of the centrist-globalist factions alongside their mass media outlets, which rails against the evils of populism [ideas that resonate with ordinary people] – evil populism that will subvert the neoliberal market and the ‘freedoms’ which come with it. These freedoms are: 1) the free flow of goods, 2) the free flow of services, 3) the free flow of [financial] capital, 4) the free flow of labor. John Maynard Keynes maintained that the unrestricted [unregulated] flow of international capital endangers the self-governing experiment we call democracy. This the globalists knew and schemed for…

The globalists always knew that capitalism with democracy would result in state intervention, a majority of the population desiring to point the economy in a certain direction. They understood that democracy, inevitably national, can coexist with capitalism so long as democratic politics is restricted to the realm of traditional beliefs and customs, not accompanied by clear-cut interests of class or country. Cultural warfare was fine and desirable, as long as free trade and private property remained sacred. Neoliberalism didn’t mean disconnecting the state from the market, but, as Slobodian observed, “encasing” capitalism in state-policed institutions, where democracy had no access. In other words, an ideological and institutional bubble was created, a perpendicular realm erected on top of a society powerless to act or react to this realm.

Slobodian describes the history of neoliberalism, of its doctrine and politics, as that of a group of extraordinary people — the globalists, thoroughly ‘networked’ in an era in which networking had not yet been invented. Renewing itself over three generations, the group held together from the end of WW1 (1918) to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s, the new peak or return of the former zenith of international capitalism.

The globalizers were both academics and business men, but academics who understood that a theory can become historically true only if it is connected to the commanding heights of politics and the economy. In Mont Pelerin, Hayek assembled his sponsors and followers for his battle against Keynesianism and social democracy. Slobodian refers to these men as the ‘Geneva School,’ who sought to infiltrate the ranks of institutional power, mass media, and public awareness in their quest to make the world liberal again. The globalists took the long view and didn’t break when they faced ridicule, opposition, or failures. They were a peculiar group, slowly turning into a church of so-called organic intellectuals. During the ’70s, international capitalism began dismantling the post WW2 economic architecture. This architecture – ugly to the globalists due to things like government buffer stock policies, government owned public utilities, jobs programs, and a regulated financial system – produced the following results in the United States, as noted by Marriner Eccles in 1951.

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