Are patriotism and corporate multinationalism mutually exclusive concepts? In an age where socialism, despite its disastrous historical track record, is more popular than capitalism among Millennials, that question can no longer be ignored. Yet as columnist Steven Chapman, who extols capitalism as the “most dynamic force for economic progress in history,” further warns, “economic systems have to retain their moral and political legitimacy if they are to last.”

Political legitimacy is a loaded term. Barack Obama’s administration had a penchant for politically legitimizing certain industries and companies that aligned with its ideological agenda, even when it proved utterly disastrous for Americans. Taxpayers were left holding the bag for “clean” energy companies like Solyndra, and nothing drove up the costs of health care — and insurance company profits — more than ObamaCare.

The Trump administration also plays the political legitimacy game, but in a different manner. His America First agenda may be equally intrusive, but it smacks of the moral legitimacy to which Chapman refers. While the 2016 election was about many things, what helped push Trump over the top were “flyover country” Americans disgusted with corporate multinationalism, a.k.a. globalism. These were the Americans whose jobs were outsourced and their futures marginalized, even as they endured bicoastal elitist lectures about the “net plus” of such a system.

While this was occurring, members of the nation’s globalist-dominated Ruling Class also made it crystal clear that they are calculatingly indifferent to both the ravages of illegal immigration and unchecked legal immigration. As recently as last week, 146 suspected illegals were arrested at the Fresh Mark meatpacking plant in Ohio. The same plant was sued — in 2001 — for knowingly hiring illegals.

E-Verify has existed since 1996. Last June, the latest effort to make it mandatory for every employer was rejected by the GOP-controlled House after members bowed to the “concerns” of the agricultural lobby that claimed it would produce a worker shortage.

A combination of higher wages and conditional welfare for able-bodied Americans to address that shortage? Not part of the equation. Moreover, businesses willing to hire illegals seemingly have a government ally: According to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), there were as many as 39 million cases where names on W-2 tax forms did not match corresponding Social Security records — meaning millions of Americans have had their identities stolen, potentially by illegal aliens.

This gargantuan level of mismatches occurred during the last four years of the Obama administration, and one is left to wonder whether the Social Security Administration was grossly inept — or quietly complicit.

The legal immigrant part of the equation? While Bernie Sanders’s muddle-headed “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act,” (Stop BEZOS Act) would force companies like Amazon to fully fund federal welfare programs used by their low-wage workers — ultimately incentivizing those companies not to hire anyone from low-income families — it cannot be ignored that the retail giant has been one of the foremost champions of H-1B visas, importing more foreign tech workers in 2017 than Facebook and Google combined. And while American STEM workers languish, research by the Seattle Times reveals that 71% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign born.

In stark contrast to Obama, Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order has limited the use of H-1B visas. No doubt by sheer “coincidence,” America’s warehouse workers, including those who toil for Amazon, have won a 9.7% wage increase between February 2017 and April 2018.

Regardless, the globalist agenda, and the seeming lack of patriotism that attends it, remains alive and well. Last May, shares of Boeing Airlines dropped when Trump announced America was withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran. The company had a $20 billion deal to sell jetliners to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Boeing claimed the deal would support 100,000 American jobs.

Providing America with jobs and cheap consumer goods, along with the idea that we can de-escalate tensions, is the rationale behind trading with communist China — while tolerating its tariffs, currency-manipulation, and intellectual property-stealing proclivities. That rationale is a globalist-minded status quo Trump is addressing, much to the globalists’ consternation.

And well he should. In 2017, America’s trade deficit with China was $375 billion. In 2018, an increasingly belligerent China’s military budget is $175 billion. Money is certainly fungible, cheap consumer goods are attractive, and additional jobs are welcome. But is any of it a “reasonable” tradeoff for what amounts to facilitating a suicidal national security policy?

The innumerable benefits of One World-ism in general, and free trade in particular, have been communicated to Americans with an almost religious fervor. Shouldn’t the potentially disastrous pitfalls get an equal hearing?

Americans should also be more fully informed about behind-the-scenes corporatist machinations. Those wondering why a company like Nike would potentially alienate half of its American customers with its Colin Kaepernick branding campaign might be surprised to learn that Nike fits in with Apple, Starbucks, and Boeing as being among a number of multinational corporations that could have as much as $158 billion at risk in a trade war with China. That would be the same China “increasingly using North Korean factories to take advantage of cheaper labor across the border,” Reuters reports.

Nike’s potential loss of American customers is nothing compared to the loss of a supply chain that includes slave labor. Moreover, Levi-Strauss has jumped on a customer-alienating, anti-gun bandwagon, just as the NFL has jumped on an equally antagonistic anti-police bandwagon. The common thread? To defeat the Trump trade reset by supporting anti-Trump domestic policies that obscure that horrible PR optics openly siding with China would engender.

Who abets the multinational elitists’ efforts? “At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness,” writes columnist Victor Davis Hanson, who rightly holds the nation’s censorship-abetting tech titans, and their corporate media allies to account. Hanson further notes that “some $3 trillion in global capitalization is pledged to ensure that the nations’ computers, pads, and smartphones will not be polluted by traditionalist thinking.”

Few things are more traditional than patriotism.

“Despite origins steeped in sovereign favor and national interest, the modern corporation has increasingly seen its capacity for civic duty and engagement diminished,” columnist Yishai Schwartz explains. “Over time, concern for the national interest has been squeezed out by the twin forces of profit maximization and cosmopolitanism.”

Cosmopolitanism? A lack of moral legitimacy that fuels increasing calls “fundamental transformation” is more like it. A lack of moral legitimacy that has produced repugnant reactions. “Fear of nuclear war, violent revolution and pandemics has seen San Francisco’s finest start commissioning multi million pound underground bunkers in New Zealand,” The Sun reports.

Better post-apocalyptic isolation than rediscovering patriotism and morality? If that contemptuous worldview doesn’t change, it won’t be the communists or any other external enemy that hangs capitalists with the rope they’ve sold them.

More likely they’ll be hanging themselves.