As the world moves more and more toward global interconnections, opposition comes more and more from those long identified with an internationalist view -- the left. In the process, words and forms associated with the right have been adopted wholesale, a process that PNS commentator Walter Truett Anderson finds ironic and sad. Anderson, author of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman), is a political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.

If you follow the rhetoric of the American left, you can't help noticing that a massive ideological shift is going on. Progressive writers and activists are abandoning the exuberant globalism that once prevailed on that part of the political spectrum, and showing signs of a kind of pull-up-the-drawbridges mentality that used to belong to the right-wingers.

"Globalization" has become a favorite epithet among progressives, signifying an insidious process that should be halted or even reversed. And all the trappings, agendas and slogans of old-fashioned conservatism -- nationalism, localism, sovereignty, economic protectionism, opposition to immigration, even the Pledge of Allegiance, are migrating from right to left.

You can still find conservative anti-globalists as well, of course -- Pat Buchanan comes to mind -- but nowadays the strongest invective against globalization is to be found in the editorials of The Nation, the books of William Greider, the newspaper columns of Mollie Ivins, the policy statements of Ralph Nader, the manifestos of radical environmentalists. What radiates powerfully from such sources is a general feeling that globalization is moving far too fast, that it is primarily an economic phenomenon, instigated and controlled by big business, and that national power is the main bulwark against its abuses.

So national sovereignty, so vigorously championed by right-wingers throughout most of this century, begins to look like a useful concept to invoke where there is a danger that an international arrangement such as NAFTA or the World Trade Organization might override U.S. environmental protection laws.

Nativism, once the favorite cause of American conservatives who wanted tough immigration laws to keep out inferior (i.e., non-Anglo) nationalities, political subversives and sexual deviates, now looks good to environmental leaders such as population crusader Paul Ehrlich and Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, who campaigned to get Sierra Club members to support a resolution restricting legal immigration. The majority of Sierra Clubbers rejected the resolution, but many environmentalists are dedicated to views that once would have been described -- accurately -- as isolationist.

Even the Pledge of Allegiance, that cherished ritual of American flag-wavers, has taken on a new political life. Nader is currently trying to get U.S. corporations to recite the pledge at stockholders' meetings, as a way of affirming that they are truly American corporate citizens and not placeless global entities. (The phrase "global citizen" has fallen into disfavor on the left as well.)

This is a most curious development, and quite a change from the state of affairs that prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century, when the thinkers and statesmen of the left were the globalizers. It was the liberals like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt who fought for the creation of international governmental organizations, while, out on the cutting edge of revolution, the Communists sang the Internationale and dreamed of a global order in which nation-states would wither away. And it was the conservatives who struggled against every dilution of national sovereignty, pushed through tough anti-immigration laws like the McCarran Act, gave us protectionist measures like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

Today, as the world is poised to move into the first truly global civilization, the thinking on the left of center is increasingly united in the conviction that the best way to go is back -- back to isolated communities, back to nations, back to the simple life.

There are clearly good reasons for concern about globalization -- not only the generalized fear of a borderless world, but also specific instances where free-trade arrangements are used to override national environmental protection measures. Those are in some cases persuasive arguments, but they don't justify the massive lack of active ideas and proposals about how a global civilization can be made to work, the powerful influence and popularity of the muzzy back-to-the-tribes-and-villages nostalgia that is churned out regularly by some environmental writers.

It's enormously ironic -- and, I think, very sad -- that the American left, to which we could once dependably look for daring visions and imaginative programs for the future, is now being dragged reluctantly into the 21st century.