Drawing on the theoretical resources of Gramsci and of the historical materialist tradition, Robert Cox has defined a vision of global politics in which social forces, states, and world orders are seen as organically related aspects of social reality, historically produced through processes in which material social relations and social self-understandings are together deeply implicated. Viewing the world through the lenses of Cox's Vichian historical materialism (1981: 132-35), it becomes possible to interpret relations and processes obscured from (and by) more mainstream state-centric visions of IR/IPE. Taking the stance of a critical theorist, Cox has challenged us to look for and make explicit the political possibilities latent in the social relations and dynamics of the present. In the spirit of this challenge, I will suggest that changes are underway in the nexus of relations linking the US to the global economy, changes which present possibilities for significant political reconstruction. The extent to which any of these possibilities are realized depends upon struggles in which social self-understandings and ideologies of globalization will play a crucial role. An important prelude to my more substantive discussion, then, is a brief digression on the importance of popular "common sense" for an historical materialism of this kind.
To me, the primary significance of historical materialism is that it offers critical resources for the de-reification of capitalism and its various forms of appearance (Rupert, 1995a: chapter 2). On this view, commodification of social life, and especially commodification of labor, are not natural, necessary, universal or absolute; nor, therefore, is the separation of the political from the economic which is entailed in the capitalist wage relation. Paul Thomas argues that the complex of social relations associated with capitalism - including the modern state - entails an "alien politics" which profoundly limits possibilities for communal self-determination: "The thoroughgoing denial of democracy in civil society, where the chief activities of daily life most immediately take place, is the ongoing, institutionalized counterpart to the concentration, distillation and fusion of all features of common action and collective concern within the state" (1994: xii; see also Meiksins Wood, 1995). Critiques such as these imply that the abstraction of politics from the economy and the naturalization of a civil society of abstract individuals are historical conditions which are open to question and hence potentially to transformation. This transformation would necessarily entail (but not necessarily be limited to) the re-politicization and democratization of the economy and of civil society, such that they cease to be pseudo-objective and apparently natural conditions which confront isolated individuals as an ineluctable external "reality". Rather, they would become sites for - and objects of - reflective dialogue and contestation, mutable aspects of a broad process of social self-determination, explicitly political.
Marx suggested that such a transformation might emerge out of the confluence of capitalism's endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure and the relative immiseration of the proletariat and, most importantly, the emergence of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power, heretofore developed in distorted and self-limiting form under the conditions of concentrated capitalist production (e.g., Marx, 1977). Accepting in broad outline Marx's analysis of the structure and dynamics of capitalism (e.g., 1971: 201-2), Gramsci was unwilling to embrace the more mechanical and economistic interpretations of Marx then circulating in the international socialist movement.
It may be ruled out that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions involving the entire subsequent development of national [and transnational - MR] life (Gramsci, 1971: 184).
Progressive social change would not automatically follow in train behind economic developments, but must instead be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings (1971: 164-65, 326, 375-777, 420). How, indeed whether, such change occurs depends upon struggles to delimit or expand the horizons of these social self-understandings. Thus, for Gramsci, popular "common sense" becomes a critical terrain of political struggle (1971: 323-34, 419-25). His theorization of a social politics of ideological struggle - which he called "war of position" to distinguish it from a Bolshevik strategy of frontal assault on the state (1971: 229-39, 242-3) - contributed to the historical materialist project of de-reifying capitalist social relations (including state-based conceptions of politics) and constructing an alternative - more enabling, participatory, democratic - social order out of the historical conditions of capitalism.
For Gramsci, popular common sense could become a ground of struggle because it is not univocal and coherent, but an amalgam of historically effective ideologies, scientific doctrines and social mythologies. This historical "sedimentation" of popular common sense "is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life. [It] is the folklore of philosophy..." (1971: 326). As such, it is "fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is" (1971: 419). Gramsci's project thus entailed addressing popular common sense, making explicit the tensions and contradictions within it as well as the socio-political consequences of these, in order to enable critical social analysis and transformative political practice. "First of all," Gramsci says of the philosophy of praxis, "it must be a criticism of 'common sense,' basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that 'everyone' is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making 'critical' an already existing activity" (1971: 330-31). At the core of Gramsci's project, then, was a critical pedagogy which took as its starting point the tensions and possibilities latent within popular common sense.
With its dual commitments to individual rights and liberties on the one hand - including preeminently the right to private property - and, on the other, to popular sovereignty and self-government, liberalism has historically been a key element of popular common sense in the US (Arblaster, 1984: 75-79, 196-202, 309-332; Augelli and Murphy, 1988: 35-57). In such an historical context, declarations of universal liberty, fundamental equality, and democracy are potentially subversive insofar as these aspirations represent unfulfilled promises of liberal capitalism, promises which could not be fulfilled without endangering the class relations which are at the core of capitalism (e.g., by acknowledging that the economy entails intrinsically political relations, and that social self-governance therefore requires democratization of social relations previously understood in terms of private property). Thus within popular common sense divergent interpretations of the liberal legacy may be brought into explicit conflict, and challenges to the predominant understandings of liberalism - and to the prevailing organization of society - may be mounted.
Such ideological struggles have played an important role in the construction and reconstruction of American capitalism and the global hegemony based upon it. In the first half of the twentieth century, the social organization of production was being reconstructed in the manufacturing heart of the US economy: craft-based production was being supplanted by Fordist mass production, and new relations of power were being constructed and contested in the workplace. Fordism entailed increased mechanization of the labor process and the potential for heightened capitalist control over the pace and intensity of work. Emerging from a decades-long process of political struggle, the institutionalization of this system of mass production was associated with a socio-political regime which elicited - albeit imperfectly and inconsistently - the consent of industrial workers to the expanding social powers of capital. This process entailed bouts of explicit class conflict during which the socio-political conditions of liberal capitalism were opened to potential challenge: responding to liberal capitalism's valorization of individual rights, and especially the right of private property, industrial workers counterposed conceptions of "industrial democracy" and collective participation in work life in order to legitimate their new and embattled industrial unions. In the postwar context of Cold War fears and access to an unprecedented affluence (rising real wages secured for unionized industrial workers through pattern bargaining, the linking of wages to productivity growth, COLAs, etc.), such challenges were contained within the bounds of a vision of liberal capitalism as the social system best able to secure - on a global basis, and with the active collaboration of "free trade unions" - individual rights and liberties and a more generalized prosperity. On the basis of their participation in this hegemonic world-vision and their acceptance of its implied commitment to the prioritization of individual rights over collective self-determination, industrial unions were accepted by the state and capital as junior partners in the postwar project of reconstructing a liberal capitalist world order (Rupert, 1995a: chapters 4-7).
In the last decade of the twentieth century this hegemony is transforming itself. The Cold War was officially pronounced to be over as the Soviet Union disintegrated: anti-communism could no longer serve as a crucial ingredient in the ideological cement which bound together the postwar historic bloc. Further, the postwar prosperity which US industrial labor had enjoyed as a result of its participation in the hegemonic bloc is evaporating. Unions - the central institutions of "industrial democracy" in America - have been openly attacked by the state and capital, memberships are in long-term decline, and real wages have been effectively reduced even as productivity growth rebounded during the 1980s (Rupert, 1995a: 179). With the mutation of the postwar historic bloc such that transnational financial and industrial capital are increasingly predominant and industrial labor within the US is no longer a relatively privileged junior partner, socio-political relations and popular ideologies which once seems firmly grounded are now increasingly up for grabs. We might expect the latent tension between capitalism and democracy to be addressed all the more effectively in an environment characterized by long-term tendencies toward transnational production, corporate "restructuring," subcontracting and outsourcing, plant closings and layoffs, concessionary bargaining and union-busting, declining real wages, widening and deepening poverty, intense economic uncertainty and real fear among average Americans, all of which has in recent years been juxtaposed to resurgent corporate profits and happy days on Wall Street (Rupert, 1995a: chapter 8).
I want to suggest now that the liberal narrative of globalization is increasingly being contested from at least two distinct positions - one which might be described as the cosmopolitan, democratically-oriented left (a position I will call "progressive"), and another which I would refer to as the nationalistic/individualistic far-right - and that these contests over popular common sense have potentially important implications for the nexus of relations linking the US with the global political economy. In the remainder of this paper, I will sketch what I take to be the defining features of each of these perspectives, and draw out the different possible worlds toward which each points.
The contested meanings of globalization in the US have surfaced most explicitly in the intense public discussions surrounding recent agreements fostering further international liberalization, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). I want to suggest that NAFTA is important not just as an agreement to create a continental free trade area, but as an occasion for political argument in which the central tension of liberal capitalism - long submerged beneath the terms of the postwar hegemonic order - was once again represented in public discourse as an open question and a terrain of active socio-political struggle.1
A powerful phalanx of social forces has arrayed itself behind the agenda of intensified market-led globalization: academic economists, major corporations and corporate associations such as the Business Roundtable, and the mainstream press all vigorously supported NAFTA as part of a larger project of continuing global liberalization (Rupert, 1995b: 664-9). There were two primary themes which consistently emerged from their pro-NAFTA representations. First, it was claimed that NAFTA would encourage greater specialization according to comparative advantage, that this specialization along with intensified continental competition and greater economies of scale would result in significant efficiency gains, and that in these ways NAFTA would produce lower prices for consumers and, in the long-run, more jobs and higher incomes continent-wide. These economic benefits were expected to be relatively greater for the smaller Mexican economy and more modest for the larger American (see e.g. Dornbusch, 1991; Hufbauer and Schott, 1993-94; Krugman, 1993). Second, influential newspapers such as the New York Times (November 17, 1993) and the Washington Post (November 16, 1993) editorialized in favor of the pact on the grounds that failure to enact it would represent not just a lost opportunity but a (potentially catastrophic) US abdication of its historic role as promoter of international liberalization, peace and prosperity, a giant step backward into the era of isolationism and protectionism. Generally portrayed as promising economic benefits to the American public and serving the national interest by sustaining a more open and liberal world, NAFTA received predominantly favorable press coverage and was editorially endorsed by numerous papers large and small (Rupert, 1995b: 667, 687 n. 11). Sandra Masur, of Eastman Kodak and the Business Roundtable, explained that the US corporate community supported the pact for the immediate business opportunities it would present, but also as part of a larger global agenda: "The companies of the Roundtable are seeking across-the-board liberalization of trade in goods, services and investment" (Masur, 1991: 102). This perspective was aggressively promoted to the public and to Congress by major corporate supporters and lobbies such as USA*NAFTA (Rupert, 1995b: 668-9).
The agenda of increasing liberalization of trade and investment and the global integration of the US economy has not gone unopposed, however. NAFTA in particular prompted vigorous opposition from a constellation of labor unions, consumer groups, environmentalists and citizen activists who represented the trade pact as augmenting the power of multinational capital relative to workers, unions, local communities and citizens more generally. Beginning to frame an alternative vision of global political economy based on democratic self-determination and transnational linkages among working people and citizens - rather than allowing unfettered markets and the criterion of private profit to determine social outcomes - they counterposed the common sense value of "democracy" to liberalism's traditional valorization of private property. These progressive NAFTA opponents thus aimed at a central tension in liberal common sense in order to attempt to develop an alternative political agenda to that of corporate capital.
Left-progressive critics found common ground not in a strategy of protectionism and closure, but in a vision of a more participatory global order and a strategy of "fair trade" - the negotiation of common labor, health and safety, environmental and social standards which would prevent a race toward the lowest common denominator ("downward harmonization"), enforced by intensified market competition. Unionists believed that NAFTA would enable corporate employers to use enhanced capital mobility and transcontinental competition ("whipsawing") between countries, plants and workers to undermine actual or potential solidarity among workers and communities, and to intensify exploitation throughout the continent (AFL-CIO, 1991; UAW, 1992; Moody and McGinn, 1992). While acknowledging that closer economic ties with Mexico were likely whether NAFTA was approved or not, AFL-CIO officials argued that it was "neither inevitable nor desirable" that "economic integration [be] based on an international division of labor in which Mexico supplies cheap labor and lax enforcement of health, safety and environmental standards, the United States supplies the consumer market, multinational corporations derive the profit, and US workers face further wage cuts and loss of their jobs" (Friedman, 1992: 27).
Fears of a continental, hemispheric, or global political economy dominated by the institutionalized power of corporate capital brought NAFTA's labor critics together with environmental activists, consumer advocates, and others (e.g., Cavanagh et al., 1992; McGaughey, 1992; Nader et al., 1993). Anti-NAFTA coalitions formed which stressed the potential degradation of environmental, health and safety, and consumer protection standards, in addition to the pact's likely effects upon labor. Progressive critics feared that such protections might be directly attacked under the pact as non-tariff barriers to trade. Further, they warned of the indirect effects which the treaty would have upon the ability of communities and political jurisdictions to maintain regulatory standards. In the absence of strong institutionalized protections, the pact could facilitate "social dumping" in which the exploitation of Mexican workers, communities and their environment would enable MNCs producing in Mexico to undercut producers based in the US and Canada who are subject to more effective forms of social regulation. In this way, competitive pressure would be brought to bear upon the ability of citizens and communities to regulate producers anywhere within the free trade zone. In full page advertisements which ran in leading newspapers, a group of twenty-five environmental and citizen activist groups denounced NAFTA as a scheme to empower and enrich corporate capital at the expense of workers, citizens, and their capacity for democratic self-determination:
Promoted as a boon to all of us, the true purpose of NAFTA is to help large corporations increase their profits. NAFTA does this by undermining laws and standards (in the US, Canada and Mexico) that inhibit uncontrolled corporate freedoms. Freedom to circumvent democratically created environmental, health and safety laws. Freedom to set poor working conditions and keep wages low.... NAFTA will seriously stifle representative democracy by making local, state or national laws subject to an unelected NAFTA bureaucracy that citizens cannot control (New York Times, November 15, 1993).
Some progressives framed the basic issue directly and explicitly in terms of democratization. In the words of John Cavanagh, "The key to genuine democracy in this decade will be the struggle by communities and citizens' organizations to control their own destinies, to take control of their own lands and natural resources, to collectively make the decisions that affect their futures. The free trade agreements that are currently on the table appropriate these decisions and toss them to the private sector" (Cavanagh, 1993: 6-7). The journalist William Greider argued that to achieve meaningful democracy in the US will require a reorientation of popular thinking in which neither xenophobic nationalism nor a globalism based upon the individualistic ideology of market competition will suffice. Instead, he argued, the future of domestic democracy depends upon an internationalist world view directly addressing relations of global political-economic inequality and domination:
For ordinary Americans, traditionally independent and insular, the challenge requires them to think anew their place in the world. The only plausible way that citizens can defend themselves and their nation against the forces of globalization is to link their own interests cooperatively with the interests of other peoples in other nations - that is, with foreigners who are competitors for the jobs and production but who are also victimized by the system. Americans will have to create new democratic alliances across national borders with the less prosperous people caught in the same dilemma. Together, they have to impose new political standards on multinational enterprises and on their own governments (Greider, 1993: 196).
Greider's prescription strikes me as quite remarkable insofar as it crystallizes some of the themes more or less explicit in various progressive critiques of economic liberalization and seems to resonate with the Gramscian historical materialism sketched above: he directly addresses popular common sense and calls for the de-reification of conventional boundaries separating politics/economics, state/society, and domestic/international, in order to negotiate a more democratic global economy. And he was not alone in constructing this kind of strategic perspective (Brecher, Childs and Cutler, 1993; Browne and Sims, 1993; Cavanagh et al., 1992; McGaughey, 1992; Moody and McGinn, 1992; Nader et al., 1993).
Opposition to NAFTA was not univocal, however. There were sectors of the anti-NAFTA movement which explicitly rejected free trade in favor of protectionism, and which continue to organize against globalization. These far-right groups, who sometimes identify themselves as "Patriots," are often dismissively labeled in the mainstream media as "paranoids" and "loonies," as if their perspective on politics and globalization might be explained away by some shared psychological defects. On the contrary, I want to suggest that far-right resistance to globalization is understandable as a response to changing socio-economic circumstances, a response which draws upon the cognitive resources available in popular common sense to understand a complex and changing world in a way which maintains a stable identity. Far-right anti-globalists tap the most individualistic strains of American common sense - often but not always articulated with religious or racial identities - in order to construct an image of American exceptionalism, a quasi-religious faith in the superior wisdom of the original US Constitution and of the founding fathers as protectors of God-given individual liberties. This faith has led a segment of the American public to interpret globalization as an alien tyranny engulfing the US through a treacherous conspiracy and relentlessly eroding individual rights and liberties. On this view, globalization is profoundly threatening, and acts of resistance ranging from ideological struggle to mass violence may be justified in these terms. In a context where working people and large segments of what used to be thought of as the "middle class" are experiencing chronic socio-economic degradation unprecedented in postwar experience, and in which formerly hegemonic ideologies increasingly appear threadbare, reconstructions of popular common sense which seem to explain a reality otherwise seemingly inscrutable, and which point toward urgent political action, potentially pose far more serious socio-political issues than the widespread image of ridiculous dementia suggests.
Viewing social life from within the limits of a rigidly individualistic ontology, the organic intellectuals of the far right suggest that "...there are really only two theories of history. Either things happen by accident, neither planned nor caused by anybody, or they happen because they are planned and somebody causes them to happen" (Abraham, 1985: 9). As a consequence of this world view, they are unable to envision, explain or critique the inter-related structures and processes which left-progressives see at work in the nexus between the US and the global economy; such explanations are dismissively equated with belief in "mysterious and unexplainable tides of history" (Abraham, 1985: 9). The only apparent alternatives, then, are a view of history as essentially random, accidental, a string of implausible coincidences, or a view which looks for "cause and effect" in terms of the purposeful - and morally significant - actions of individuals and groups. In this way, conspiracy theory and its manichean construction of the world elevates itself to the status of scientific analysis of cause and effect (Abraham, 1985: 7-16; also North, 1985: x-xi; Robertson, 1991: 8-9).
Far-right ideology generally takes it as axiomatic that the American system of government is properly understood as a republic and not as a democracy: the latter is seen as dangerous insofar as it subjects individual rights and liberties to the will of the community. As one subscriber to a Patriot listserv wrote, "Democracy is...the foundation of communism" (USA-Forever, 6/16/95; see also Welch, 1986). The republican system of government which the US founding fathers designed to protect individual rights and the economic liberty which flourishes in such a context - i.e., strictly limited government and the "free enterprise system" - are divinely inspired and the best possible social arrangement (Abraham, 1985: 31, 84; McManus, 1995: 91, 99-100; North, 1985: x-xi, 246-9; Robertson, 1991: 59, 203-5, 239-47). If something is terribly wrong in America it can't be due to flaws intrinsic to the social system, it must be that somebody somewhere is corrupting our political legacy.2 John F. McManus, President of the John Birch Society - long the most influential source of conspiracy doctrine on the far right (see Mintz, 1985: chapter 7; Diamond, 1995: 51-58, 140-60) - exemplifies this kind of reasoning and points toward "treasonous" and "satanically inspired" forces as the cause of America's ills (1995: 12, 70; see also Robertson, 1991: 9):
...most Americans know something is eating away at the foundations of this great nation. Unemployment, national and personal indebtedness, economic slowdown, loss of faith, declining national stature, a vaguely defined "new world order," broken families, and much more have stimulated worries from coast to coast.... Sadly, we witness the presence of powerful forces working to destroy the marvelous foundations given us by farseeing and noble men 200 years ago (McManus, 1995: ix-x).
The basic conspiracy theory which circulates widely on the far-right holds that cliques of evil individuals have been scheming to subjugate and exploit the world at least since 1776, when Adam Weisshaupt, a Bavarian scholar, formed a secret society known as the Illuminati. Allegedly plotting to "overthrow...civil governments, the church, and private property" (Robertson, 1991: 67) and to supplant these institutions with their own power and control, the Illuminati infiltrated European Freemasonry in order to insinuate themselves into elite networks of social power. This sect of Illuminated Freemasons, including the fabulously wealthy Rothschild family, are said to have been associated with the French Revolution and the Terror, and subsequently to have provided the model - and the funding - for the Marxist-Bolshevik conspiracy for global domination. "All Karl Marx really did was to update and codify the very same revolutionary plans and principles set down seventy years earlier by Adam Weisshaupt..." (Abraham, 1985: 41, also 91; and Robertson, 1991: 67-71, 115, 180-185, 258). Far-right intellectuals are able to assimilate Marxism into a global elite conspiracy because they do not recognize meaningful distinctions between political ideologies of "left" and "right"; rather, they see the world in terms of a continuum which stretches from complete and anarchic individual liberty on one end to total government domination on the other. The most desirable point on the spectrum is the "Constitutional Republic", that is, just enough government to avoid the extremes of anarchy but not enough to destroy individual liberty or to constrain the "free market". Monarchy, socialism, fascism, and elite-dominated and government-supported cartel capitalism are not seen as significantly different, but as forms of the same anti-individualistic monopoly of power (Abraham, 1985: 32; Perloff, 1988: 44-6; Robertson, 1991: 71, 183).
So it is not inconsistent for far-right intellectuals to claim that international bankers and the super-rich are also part of the conspiracy to undermine individual liberties and their republican-free market sanctum. And indeed the second major tentacle of the conspiracy involves the rise of a clique of international bankers, whose almost unfathomable wealth allows them to grant or deny credit to governments, manipulate economies, extract super-profits and exercise world-historical power. Advancing the conspiratorial design first laid out by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, and their agents are said to have institutionalized their financial powers through the creation of a US central bank in order to control the money supply and directly manipulate the macro-economy, and to facilitate the creation of credit-money and the expansion of private and public debt. They were the driving force behind the establishment of an income tax through which taxpayers' income might be extracted to pay for public debt and fill the coffers of the mega-bankers. And they are alleged to have bankrolled the Bolshevik revolution, providing an "enemy" against which the governments of the West would have to defend themselves, further deepening public debt, expanding the scope of centralized government activity and laying the basis for comprehensive social control by the financial elite (Abraham, 1985: 43-87; Perloff, 1988: 19-48; Robertson, 1991: 61, 65, 71-73, 117-43).
The third major tentacle of the conspiracy has involved the fostering of an international "establishment" which would serve as the basis for a "New World Order," the comprehensive political unification and socialization of the world under the domination of the elite conspirators, "a one-world government that scorns individuality, personality, nationhood, and even private property" (Robertson, 1991: 156). In 1891, the Rothschilds and Cecil Rhodes allegedly established the Round Table - "a semi-secret internationalist group headquartered in London" (Perloff, 1988: 36) - as a vehicle for promoting their global agenda. The Round Table then spawned both the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the US. The CFR was putatively dominated by the American members of the Round Table group and associates of the Rothschilds such as J.P. Morgan - and, later on, by the Rockefellers. This international establishment has had members in influential posts in government, business, law, journalism and academia and has quietly but profoundly influenced the policies of the world's most powerful states. In the aftermath of WWII, they promoted the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the entire institutional infrastructure of postwar world order. More recently, the CFR has worked in parallel with the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberger Group towards the globalist agenda (Abraham, 1985: 89-108; McManus, 1995: 1-24, 61-3 81-2; Perloff, 1988: 3-38, 71-4, 81-6; Robertson, 1991: 33-58, 65-7, 95-115). McManus makes it clear how some Americans may perceive that individual liberty requires resistance to this global agenda, and thus how far-right ideology fuses individualism with nationalism:
The world government sought by the architects of this new world order would mean an end to the nation we inherited, and the destruction of the greatest experiment in human liberty in the history of mankind. World government would also establish socialism in place of the free market system, a certain route to conversion of this nation into another Third World deadend. ...The stakes are nothing short of a future marked by national independence and personal liberty (McManus, 1995: 70, 103).
Preserving an individualistic, capitalist, Christian (and for some, racially homogeneous) USA in the face of an insidiuous transnational threat is the necessary condition for avoiding the destruction of individual liberty, limited government and free enterprise, and religious freedom and their replacement by the unlimited power of global monoploly-socialism and its Godless humanism.
Viewed from this kind of perspective, the significance of a free trade agreement such as NAFTA far exceeds its economic costs or benefits, as the following statements demonstrate:
NAFTA creates an economic union among Mexico, Canada and the US, a step paving the way for political union - a favored route to world government (McManus, 1995: 85).
Today, it is obvious that NAFTA is part of the overall plan for the "New World Order." ...Today, the operating plan is a step-by-step progression to the final goal of ownership and control of all natural resources and every square inch of land and everything on it by a consortium of international supercapitalists: a gigantic holding company, a super-Bilderberg Society of mega-plutocrats (Carto, 1993: 22).
Variants of this anti-government, anti-globalist conspiracy narrative - more or less explicitly anti-semitic and/or racist - circulate within and among the following communities:
Although estimates vary widely, Berlet (1995) suggests that there may be as many as five million persons in the US who are influenced by far-right movements and their conspiratorial anti-government and anti-globalist ideology. And the world-view of right-wing populism is making inroads into mainstream politics through the growing influence of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition (Durham, 1995; Lind, 1995), members of the Republican Congressional majority who are sympathetic with far-right ideology (Stern, 1996: 128, 212-14) and Pat Buchanan's right-populist presidential campaign (Bennett, 1995). Buchanan has described NAFTA and globalization in terms of the narrative of elite perfidy and the destruction of national identity and individual liberty:
Though advertised as "free trade", [NAFTA] is anti-freedom, 1,200 pages of rules, regulations, laws, fines, commissions...setting up no fewer than 49 new bureaucracies...it is part of a skeletal structure for world government (Buchanan, 1993).
Real power in America belongs to the Manhattan Money Power, the one power to which neither party is any longer able to say "No!". [Treasury Secretary Robert] Rubin said, "There must be a broad understanding that we really and truly are in a new world where we are dependent on other nations in ways that we never were before." That is the authentic voice of Goldman Sachs, and regrettably, of our own Republican elites. They are saying, all of them, that America's sovereignty, independence and liberty are things of the past. ...We must all accept our dependency on the New World Order. ...But we never voted our sovereignty away. If it is gone, they sold us out; they traded it away, without our permission (Buchanan, 1995).
To protect individual liberty and enhance national competitiveness, Buchanan (1993) called for "free markets at home, protected by a high tariff wall, and a minimal "Night Watchman State", a golden age recipe he represents as the historic "foundation of American prosperity".
I contend that popular common sense in the US is currently being contested and that these struggles have important potential implications for the relation of the US to the global economy. The world-view of neoliberal internationalism - in which states and corporations create the rules for global economic integration - is facing challenges which emphasize different aspects of popular common sense in order to envision alternative possible worlds. Drawing on the democratic strains of popular common sense, what I have called the left-progressive position would construct a world in which the global economy is explicitly politicized, corporate power is challenged by transnational coalitions of popular forces, and a framework of democratically developed and enacted common standards provides some social accountability for global economic actors.
The antiglobalist position of the far-right, on the other hand, envisions a world in which Americans are uniquely privileged, inheritors of a divinely inspired socio-political order which must at all costs be defended against external intrusions and internal subversion. This latter vision also entails a challenge to corporate power, but it implicitly constructs this challenge from within the bounds of capitalism's structural separation of politics and economics. Unable to understand capitalism in terms of historical structures and the progressive possibilities they may entail, the far-right offers instead a reactionary vision which implies a reversal of processes of capital concentration and the transnational socialization of production which have been central to the historical development of capitalism. Insofar as it seeks to preserve capitalism while reversing its central processes, we might anticipate the ongoing frustration of the reactionary vision, and an attendant intensification of scapegoating and hostility toward those seen as outside of, different or dissenting from its vision of national identity.
I have no way of knowing whether either of these ideologies of globalization will be able to sustain a serious challenge to the orthodoxy of neoliberal internationalism, but I would suggest that the restructuring of the postwar order is creating conditions which are increasingly favorable for reconstructions of popular common sense. In this more fluid context, it will be important for a progressive political movement to define itself not only in terms of its opposition to corporate power and neoliberal internationalism, but also clearly and explicitly to distinguish its democratizing vision from the reactionary individualism-nationalism of the populist right.
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