President George H.W. Bush’s plan for a “New World Order” with global integration of the United States’ economy has made the ruling class richer while eroding “the middle class way of life” in America, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley described how the long-held push by both political establishments to massively globalize the American economy has been at the expense of U.S. workers while the ruling class and their allies in the donor class have profited.

Hawley said:

If I have to give you a sense of the kind of vision that I think voters rejected, President Bush … gave a speech to Congress in 1990 where he talked about a ‘New World Order,’ and he was saying this of the situation in the context with Iraq, but he talked broadly about a ‘New global liberal order’ that of course America would lead, that it would involve America making the world much more like America and the rest of the world kind of blending in with America … and there wouldn’t be the need for hard borders any longer, and we’d have free trade, and we’d have great multinational cooperation, and we’d have these multinational corporations that can do business in any country, and it would be a whole new era. [Emphasis added] … Well, as it turns out — first of all, China and Russia didn’t get the memo on that — secondly, as it turns out, that ‘New World Order’ wasn’t good for American workers. And as it turned out, it didn’t protect American middle class values. As it turned out, it undermined the middle class way of life. [Emphasis added]



Hawley said the ruling class is primarily a “small group of people” from a “fairly narrow band of colleges and graduate schools” who largely agree on the most challenging issues facing the nation and oppose the traditionalism of middle American communities.

“They also tend to be the winners of this global integration. George Bush’s ‘New World Order,’ the people who have been in charge of the parties who run the media, who hold commanding heights in our culture; they win from that agreement,” Hawley said of the ruling class. “They’re doing great; they are the wealthy in our society. They are the ones who are globally integrated and global facing.”

Hawley continued:

They also tend to be skeptical of places like Missouri and of things like home and community. So they say that they value those things, but you listen to somebody … and somebody says, “I’m not going to move from this small town even though I’m having trouble finding a job because my family is here and because this is where we’ve lived for generations and this is where my friends are and I want to make a life here.” A lot of D.C. elites in both parties listen to that and they’re like, “That’s crazy.”

As Breitbart News has chronicled, free trade has helped gut working and middle class American jobs and stripped whole middle American towns of their industries and livelihoods.

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed and China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), five million American manufacturing jobs and more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of jobs due to free trade has coincided with an almost 600 percent increase in trade deficits.

In recent years, the economic recovery from the Great Recession disproportionately benefitted elite zip codes. For example, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While populations have grown in major cities where the wealthiest of Americans live, rural communities have continued to shrink.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.