To be a globalist means almost nothing — even “Davos Man” has to trundle home somewhere after the annual forum draws to a close. Rex Tillerson is as much a globalist as Samantha Power. Ditto for John Bolton and John Kerry, Charles Koch and George Soros, Mike Pompeo and Julian Assange. A term that embraces opposites has almost no explanatory power.

To be an anti-globalist, on the other hand, does specify something. It means someone who is convinced that serious business is transacted at conferences like Davos or Bilderberg or Munich, and that 500 or so people run the world at the expense of everyone else. It means the notion that American prosperity would be well served by a return to a Smoot-Hawley world of punitive tariffs and other beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies. It means the suspicion that Americans whose cultural and geographic horizons are broader than America’s borders are deficient in patriotism.

In short, anti-globalism is economic illiteracy married to a conspiracy mind-set. The dark truth about Davos isn’t that it’s sinister or significant. It’s that it’s booooring.

With Cohn’s departure, Trumpworld may have lost the last person who knew what hokum anti-globalism is — and was willing to say so directly to the president. Re-reading the Mulvaney tweet, what’s striking about it isn’t the possible hint of anti-Semitism. It’s its toadyism, as if he’s bidding simultaneously to replace Cohn at the National Economic Council next week or work for him in the private sector next year. Who in the White House is left to tell the president he’s nuts when he tries to pull out of Nafta?

Maybe it’s time now to make “globalist” mean something after all. An earlier generation of globalists — they called themselves internationalists — had learned the lessons of the 1930s and understood that the U.S. could not cut itself off from the world and expect to remain safe from it. Successive generations of Americans — military and foreign-service officers, businessmen and teachers, humanitarians and entertainers — went out into the world and sought to make it a better place.

In 2016, the State Department estimated that as many as nine million Americans lived abroad, which is more people than live in Virginia. Even more so than the free trade champions at the Cato Institute or the foreign policy hawks at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, these expats are our real globalists, representing the things that make America great: adventure, engagement, commerce, openness to new ideas, and a love of America honed by a combination of critical distance and a new depth of appreciation.

The White House could use those same virtues. Too bad globalists need not apply.