CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says tariffs never work. But for nearly 150 years—from the inaugural US President until 1934, when Roosevelt assumed the power to negotiate trade relations—American ran on protectionism. Alexander Hamilton outlined the imperative in his Report on Manufactures, submitted to George Washington in 1791. Before the federal income tax, established in 1913, most revenue generation for public use derived from external sources, mainly through tariffs. Hamilton understood that a just world trading system recognized comparative advantages, hence the need to protect domestic industries and citizens from foreign competition and dependency on other nations. The American System Hamilton designed transformed the United States into an industrial powerhouse.
Zakaria, often described as a racial centrist, is opposed to nationalism. He is indeed a transnationalist. Transnationalists advocate free trade knowing that globalization breaks down the system of sovereign nation-states that is replaced by a one-world government directed by a global oligarchy comprised of transnational corporations (TNCs). Transnationalization is the next logical step after imperialism, incorporating imperialist practices and raising them to a higher level. Zakaria is an organic intellectual of this capitalist class fraction.
Imperialism negates comparative advantage by duplicating industries in the First World in Third World countries to pit workers in the Third World—the global South—against First World workers to depress the latter’s wages and thus undercut their political power. The strategy, masked somewhat by the importation of cheap foreign commodities, has devastated the American working class. The strategy also undermines local economies in the Third World, corrupting local cultures. This was the real function of agencies such as the Agency of International Development (USAID). Free trade is thus destructive to the First and Third Worlds. In fact, imperialism created the Third World.
The global system has developed to the point where not only is capital portable but so is labor. This prepares workers of the West for integration with the transnational economy. A crucial piece of this is undermining national integrity in the First World, achieved through mass immigration emphasizing Third World immigrants. Prior immigrant flows to the United States were from Europe, the people bringing with them culture compatible with ours, allowing for assimilation within a generation or so. Now immigrant flows are from African and Asian countries, regions whose cultures are not only incompatible with the West, but stubbornly resistant to assimilation. Intrinsically linked to transnationalization is multiculturalism, which portrays assimilation as a racist practice (same with nationalism).
This is by design; the goal of globalization is to weaken national and cultural integrity by importing alien cultures—this to advance the deconstruction of the interstate system rooted in the principle of independent and sovereign nation-states. National integrity can survive by assimilating compatible cultures; it cannot survive the importation of cultures antithetical to Western civilization with an explicit policy of cultural pluralism. Globalization has already drastically, perhaps permanently, altered European civilization. The situation of the United Kingdom and Continental Europe is a preview of coming attractions. Had Democrats secured another four years of control over the Executive, they would have irreversibly altered the United States. If they get into power again, this will be their objective.
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