When the stock market cratered in 2008, America’s ruling class bailed out Wall Street — and Europe — at the expense of Main Street. In 2016, Britain voted 52% to 48% to leave the EU. For the last three years, that vote has been ignored. Also in 2016, the American public decided they’d had enough of an increasingly unbearable status quo and put a political novice in the White House. That status quo was globalism, which remains the primary threat to the well-being of our nation.

In a highly insightful column, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk illuminates what ordinary Americans are really up against, courtesy of transnational elitists whose see countries, patriotism, and a significant portion of their fellow Americans as anachronistic, or beneath contempt. Globalists are “citizens of the world,” and if their profits and “principles” are served by hollowing out middle America, or accommodating the Chinese military while snubbing our own, so be it.

Buskirk explains the origins of their mindset. “All of us share a rich heritage that is under attack by a pernicious idea as old as human history,” he writes. “It is the idea with which the serpent tempted Eve, it is the idea that man can be his own god.”

He goes on to identify the chief characteristics of this megalomania. Globalism is an “advanced form of secular liberalism” that is “messianic” and “dehumanizing.” Those who challenge its supremacy? They are “shamed, deplatformed, ostracized, and often made unemployable,” he adds.

Yet the most revealing part of the globalism centers around its “materialist, man-centered nature.” Why? Because that nature makes globalist elites “overtly hostile to Biblical religion and the family, both of which represent competing power centers and must therefore be degraded or destroyed.”

Thus, “bitter clingers” who have the temerity to resist making cakes celebrating same-sex weddings must be sued — and sued again — even after the Supreme Court rules in favor of First Amendment religious protections. Public schools must embrace the transgender agenda, even at the kindergarten level, while teaching American students to hold their own nation in contempt. Alternative lifestyles, are promoted as being equal, if not superior, to the nuclear family, even as the nuclear family itself has been eviscerated by the Nanny State.

Moreover, the rise of another pernicious concept, “identity politics,” is no accident. Keeping the “peasants” distracted by race, gender, and sexual identity is designed to keep “the wage-earning classes, meaning, almost everyone — from focusing on the fact that real wages have stagnated for nearly 50 years while the price of the three largest expenditures in life (housing, education, and healthcare) have soared,” Buskirk explains.

The peasants’ primary supporter? The concerted effort by the globalist-run, Democrat Media Complex to convince the nation that President Donald Trump is a racist has been unrelenting. And because it hasn’t worked out quite as well as expected, he is now a “white supremacist” — a term not only applied to Trump but to everyone who voted for him. That leftists can say this despite the reality that many of those same voters opted for Barack Obama — twice — is indicative of the utter contempt they have for the average American’s ability to notice such monumental hypocrisy.

That contempt is driven by the globalist reduction of humanity itself to economic terms, whereby people become nothing more than interchangeable cogs in the globalist machinery. They also become expendable. Note the globalist antipathy toward Trump’s effort to reform an intellectual property-stealing and militarily belligerent China via tariffs, despite the reality that its government stands on the verge of crushing populist dissent in Hong Kong. Globalists are no doubt concerned — but only with the economic implications.

Make that economic implications directly related to their own interests. By stark contrast, columnist Pat Buchanan reveals what three decades of globalism have wrought economically for ordinary Americans: “$12 trillion in trade deficits and a loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs.”

Social costs have been egregious as well: “more divorces, more consumer debt, more children raising themselves because their mother is forced to work outside the home to make ends meet, and a declining fertility rate,” Buskirk explains. “Across Europe and the United States, citizens are not having enough children to replace themselves.”

The globalist “solution” to decreasing domestic populations? Rather than incentivize child-bearing, globalists embrace unfettered immigration, both legal and illegal. Anyone who disagrees is “bigoted” and “xenophobic.” Ironically, the same globalists talk about the ascension of job-killing artificial intelligence, and yet again the “solution” they propose for that problem isn’t limiting immigration. It’s Universal Basic Income, absent any concern for the dignity-sapping implications it engenders.

After all, what “interchangeable cog” wouldn’t be content with “free money?”

Buskirk believes the time is ripe for a wholesale assault on the status quo, and the keys are reviving the institutions that used to form the bedrock of the nation. They include family, religion and real life friends as opposed to the orchestrated diminishment of friendship wrought by social media. He also proposes the abolition of post-war globalist institutions that were founded by the United States but “have become destructive and actually undermine the peace and prosperity of the American nation and degrade human life here and abroad.” It’s hard to argue with the two examples he cites, namely the United Nations and the European Union.

His boldest proposal? Breaking the two-income family “trap” by proposing a “‘Family Deal’ that will reorder the American economy in a way that allows a family of five or six to be solidly middle class on a single income and that emphasizes growth through innovation rather than financialization,” he asserts.

These are excellent ideas, but the bet here is none them are attainable until we recognize one of the most serious problems this nation has ever faced: We now have at least two generations of Americans who are virtually unable to make the distinction between real life and cyberspace — or at the very least, willing to give both an equal measure of importance.

As result of this unprecedented development, a metastatic level of social dysfunction has taken hold, manifesting itself as “look at me” narcissism, pathological “copy-cat-ism,” and sexually debilitating isolationism, even as the tech companies engage in what Buskirk defines as “surveillance capitalism” that for all intents and purposes keeps people in line in a way that makes George Orwell’s 1984 seem benign by comparison.

In short, this nation must address what the tech elitist-driven wholesale destruction of privacy is really doing to the human psyche, no matter how many dopamine-inducing “likes” ultimately end up on the ash heap of history. Restricting the access of social media to those over the age of 18, much like we restrict access to alcohol, is a great way to begin. More important, a law restricting the tech titans from accessing a minor’s data, much like Google currently does with impunity in America’s classrooms, should also be enacted.

In short, globalism is totalitarianism with better PR. If America is to remain a sovereign nation it must be thoroughly repudiated.