Despite the seemingly joking use of the term “globalist” by Trump and Mulvaney, many were quick to point to the word’s unseemly past as an anti-Semitic slur, embraced in alt-right circles before spreading into broader political discourse. As the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt put it, “Where the term originates from is a reference to Jewish people who are seen as having allegiances not to their countries of origin like the United States, but to some global conspiracy.” Greenblatt said it’s “disturbing” when public officials “literally parrot this term which is rooted in prejudice.”
While the latest round of “globalist” name-calling may stem from the likes of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, the word has a history that long predates the Trump era. To understand the complex roots of the “globalist” epithet, let’s turn the clock back 75 years, to 1943.
With the U.S. deeply mired in World War II, “globalism” and “globalist” could, at least early on, be applied to Adolf Hitler’s rapacious expansionism combated by the Allied effort. Ernst Jäckh, a staunchly anti-Nazi academic who taught at Columbia University after fleeing Germany in the 1930s, published a book on the battle against “Hitlerism” titled The War for Man’s Soul. Jäckh used “globalism” to describe Hitler’s world-conquering ambitions:
Hitler … reaches out for the sun itself. He has set out to conquer the world to make the globe a German possession! He aims at more than military or economic and political conquest. He has embarked on a “holy war” as the God-sent leader of a “chosen people” bred not for imperialism but for globalism—his world without end.
Later in the book, Jäckh outlined the challenges of a “three-dimensional war” (fought on earth, air, and sea): “Thus men and countries are being shocked into the full realization of the implications of a three-dimensional war. Before it actually started, only globalist Hitler and Hitlerism were aware of its potentialities.”
But the targets of the “globalist” label—then as now—tended to be domestic ones. While Americans united behind the country’s entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Republican critics cautioned against international policies that might put national sovereignty at risk. On February 9, 1943, Clare Boothe Luce made her mark in her first speech as a member of Congress, rebuking Vice President Henry Wallace’s suggestion that American airports might give the world’s airlines free access after the war. “He does a great deal of global thinking,” she said, “but much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.”