Ben Shapiro: Trump’s Anti-‘Globalism’ Is Anti–Free Trade

Bryan Wooldston/Reuters

Tariffs are not just bad policy; they exemplify big-government rule by international elites.

Shortly after the United Kingdom voted narrowly to leave the European Union, Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies seized on the moment to cheer the supposed demise of the “globalists.” Trump’s Kremlin-friendly campaign manager, Paul Manafort, explained on NBC with Chuck Todd that Brexit represented the realization that “the promises that globalism is the solution, the promise that government’s going to make your life better if you just give up your freedoms, the promises that we know better than you on how to make your lives better, have been rejected. That’s what Donald Trump has identified, that’s what Brexit identified, and that’s what’s going to be the basis for the election in 2016.”

Manafort is certainly correct that Brexit stood for national sovereignty above international bureaucracy, national democracy above global governance from above. But there is one problem: Brexit’s brand of anti-globalism isn’t Trump’s brand of anti-globalism. Conflating the two is both rhetorically dishonest and ideologically dangerous.

In TrumpWorld, “globalism” has been a buzzword bugaboo for months, ever since Trump dumped it in the middle of a foreign-policy speech. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump thundered back in April. “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.”

So far, this definition of anti-globalism lines up with Brexit’s: prizing local sovereignty over a faraway, unrepresentative authority. Actually, it’s pure founding ideology — in Federalist 9 and 10, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, respectively, argued in favor of devolving most control to local governance, based largely on the ideas of Montesquieu. Internationally, the idea would be that each civilization ought to be able to control its future, something that certainly holds true for both Britain and the United States.

If that were all Trump meant by “globalist” — that we should not delegate control over our republic to Brussels or the assemblage of moral idiots at the United Nations — his critique of globalism would be inarguable.

But it isn’t.

Read the rest of Shapiro's op-ed HERE.

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