Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

A quiet provocation is doing the work here: Korten is calling out a category error that he thinks has seduced the American left. By pairing "internationalism" with "economic globalization", he’s not splitting hairs; he’s drawing a moral boundary. Internationalism evokes solidarity across borders, shared obligations, maybe even a cosmopolitan humility about what the US owes the world. Economic globalization, in Korten’s usage, is the corporate and financial architecture that treats borders as friction to be eliminated, labor as a cost to be minimized, and democracies as obstacles to "efficiency."

The intent is strategic: give progressives permission to be pro-world without being pro-NAFTA-by-default. That matters because, for decades, mainstream US liberal politics often bundled global openness with virtue and treated skepticism as provincial or reactionary. Korten is trying to pry those apart, recoding opposition to certain trade regimes as principled rather than xenophobic.

The subtext is also an indictment of how language launders power. "Globalization" sounds like an inevitable weather system; "internationalism" sounds like a choice. He’s inviting progressives to notice who benefits from that confusion: multinationals, finance, and the professional class that can surf a borderless economy while others are told to "retrain."

Contextually, this sits in the long aftershock of post-Cold War triumphalism and the later backlash - deindustrialization, inequality, and the political opening that let nationalism claim the anger. Korten’s line reads like a course correction: keep the empathy, ditch the corporate script.