Whiteness, “Ambivalent Americanism,” and the Origins of the Anti-globalization Movements of the 1990s

During the 1990s, globalization emerged as central matter of public debate, as trade-oriented Republicans and centrist Democrats sparred with left- and right-wing anti-globalists. While many working-class white Americans embraced some variant of an America First vision, a surprising number joined networks of consumer, environmental, and left-wing organizations to help construct the nascent Global Justice, or “Anti-Globalization,” movement. Ultimately, that movement altered both policy and public attitudes toward transnational trade, investment, and America’s role in the world. Tens of thousands of protesters helped shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in the 1999 “Battle of Seattle.”

While some scholars and activists have cast the decade as a struggle between corporate globalists and left-wing global justice advocates – thereby positioning right-wing white nationalism at the margins of the story – this paper highlights the impact of the nationalist right in shaping the broader terms of debate. It investigates the ways left- and right-wing organizations shared key assumptions about national decline, foreign threats, and political legitimacy. While most scholarship on anti-globalization movements focuses on middle-class non-governmental organizations or small anarchist collectives, this paper considers the varied responses of working-class Americans. It traces the way working-class organizations in a wide-ranging network of labor-left, union, and small farmer coalitions adopted what I call an “ambivalent Americanism” about the U.S. place in the world. This adaptation excised the explicit racism in right-wing nationalism, yet offered an Americanism that remained firmly cast through the experiences of white “breadwinner families,” as Robert Self has termed them. Ultimately, ambivalent Americanism both challenged elements of 1990s-era conservatism, including free-trade globalism, even as it fit comfortably within the “colorblind” racism of the post-Civil Rights U.S.