Main casualty of pandemic thus far is surely globalism

It’s a mistake to believe most conspiracy theories, but it’s also a mistake to assume they bear no relation to reality. Some are insane emanations or deliberate misinformation. But others exaggerate and misread important trends rather than denying them, or offer implausible explanations for mysteries that linger unexplained.

This is as true in the Trump era as in any other.

The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush, and since then the paranoia and the facts have always existed symbiotically. The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”

Now it’s being given new life by the response to the coronavirus, which is being cast as a pretext for some sort of one-worlder takeover — with Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci held up as potential masterminds, “test and trace” as a scheme for permanent surveillance.

These fears span the political spectrum, but because the global overclass tends to be secular and hostile to traditional religion, fears of one-world government have long been particularly strong (and flavored with end-times anxiety) among conservative Christians. And in the current moment, with church closures as a precipitating force, such fears have reached even into the Catholic hierarchy.

But unlike in the 1990s or 2000s, when New World Order paranoia exaggerated real developments and trends, in the current moment the reality is the opposite of what is feared. Instead of leading to some sort of globalist consolidation, the rule of the coronavirus is unraveling internationalism everywhere you look.

The virus has exposed global entities as either weak and politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or all-but-irrelevant, in the case of the United Nations. It has restored or hardened borders, impeded migration, devolved power from the international to national and the national to local. And it has spurred renewed great power rivalry, with “Chimerica” dissolving and a trans-Pacific Cold War looming.

Yes, some forms of testand-trace may increase tech-industry surveillance power. But in every other respect, the trends and institutions that provoke new world order paranoia are likely to emerge from this crisis battered, discredited or permanently weakened.

The same counterpoint applies to the narrower, less apocalyptic suggestion that the pandemic lockdowns are an expression of late-stage liberal cosmopolitanism, of the liberal technocrat’s obsession with physical health and state control.

That temporary negation doesn’t mean the liberal order is about to give way to a new post-liberal age, and neither does the weakness of the WHO or the EU mean globalism, ideological and institutional, will disappear. But in the post-pandemic era both liberalism and globalism may seem more like zombie ideologies, ghosts of the utopian past, than ascendant forces.

And those who fear them, even to the point of conspiracy, may come to realize they were mistaking spasms for strength, and the bitter twilight of the globalist era for a new world order’s dawn.