The old elite, Lasch wrote, had a sense of obligation to country and community. But the new ruling class, more merit based, brainy and mobile, congregates on the coasts and puts patriotism far down the list in hierarchy of values. Indeed, said Lasch, "It is a question of whether they think of themselves as American at all."
In 1939, in his book The New World Order, H. G. Wells wrote: "Countless people will hate the New World Order... and will die protesting against it... we will have to bear in mind the distress of a generation of malcontents..."
Well, Mr Wells, we are your malcontents. But we're not going to die protesting your New World Order; we're going to live fighting it. And Seattle may just prove to be the Boston Tea Party of that New World Order. "I believe globalism is inevitable," Mr Clinton told Larry King at last year's end. Well I don't!
My vision of America is of a republic that has recovered every trace of her lost sovereignty, independence and liberty, a nation that is once again self-reliant in agriculture, in industry and technology, a country that can, if need be, stand alone in the world.
Early in the 1970's, Zbigniew Brezinski, later Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, wrote:-
"A global consciousness is for the first time beginning to manifest itself... we are witnessing the emergence of transnational elites... composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries; their perspectives are not confined by national traditions.. and their interests are more functional than national."
The one big force that can derail the rise of this new elite, warned Zbig, is the politically activated masses, "whose nativism could work against the cosmopolitan elites."
Brzezinski knew that the creation of any New World order would have to proceed by stealth. As Richard Gardner, Carter's ambassador to Italy wrote in 1974:-
"The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than an old fashioned frontal attack."
Advancing on little cat's feet, they have done their work. By 1992 Mr Clinton could appoint as Deputy Secretary of State his room-mate from his Oxford days, who openly welcomed the death of nativism and the coming of world government. Wrote Strobe Talbott:-
"All countries are basically social arrangements. Within the next hundred years, nationhood, as we know it, will be obsolete. All states will recognise a single global authority. A phase briefly fashionable in the mid 20th century, citizen of the world, will have assumed real meaning at the end of the 21st."
Last year in Istambul, Bill Clinton declared himself "a citizen of the world."
This then is the millennial struggle that succeeds the Cold War. It is the struggle of patriots of every single nation against a world government where all nations yield up their sovereignty and fade away . It is the struggle of nationalism against globalism, and it will be fought out, not only among nations, but within nations. And the old question Dean Rusk asked in the Vietnam era is relevant anew: Whose side are you on?
My vision is of a republic, not an empire, a nation that does not go to war unless it is attacked, or her vital interests are imperilled, or her honour is impugned. And when she does go to war it is only after following a constitutional declaration by the Congress of the United States. We are not imperialists; we are not interventionists; we are not hegemonists; and we are not isolationists. We simply believe in America first, last and always.
And we don't want to be citizens of the world, because we have been granted a higher honour - we are citizens of the United States.
- excerpts from a speech made by Pat Buchanan to the Boston World Affairs Council in Boston, Massachusetts 2000
On reflection, the transnational, supranational-wannabe elites are trying to recreate the world of the eighteenth century, before Napoleon's use of the "people's army" to prosecute "people's war" forced the crowned heads of Europe to appeal to nationalism in order to support their armed efforts against him.
Now that Napoleon and Hitler and the Communist International are gone, educated and elite people who see themselves as "rising above" and organizing their fellow-citizens by a Nietzschean or Darwinian right, don't want to be bothered with citizenship ties any more. Such ties, and their implied claims, threaten to impede their reproletarization of their human resource base.
"Efficiency" is just a codeword for the same old dispensation: more for me, less for you.