The amero conspiracy

Since he began his presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney has held more than 125 "Ask Mitt Anything" town hall forums, and the people who have shown up for them have done their best to make the events live up to their name. There have been questions about medical marijuana, about abolishing the income tax, about Romney's Mormonism and his potential vice president.

Of course, certain topics come up more than others. One is healthcare. Another is Iraq. A third is the North American Union.

The North American Union is a supranational organization, modeled on the European Union, that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit. The details are still being worked out by the countries' leaders, but the NAU's central governing body will have the power to nullify the laws of its member states. Goods and people will flow among the three countries unimpeded, aided by a network of continent-girdling superhighways. The US and Canadian dollars, along with the peso, will be phased out and replaced by a common North American currency called the amero.

If you haven't heard about the NAU, that may be because its plotters have succeeded in keeping it secret. Or, more likely, because there is no such thing. Government officials say a continental union is out of the question, and economists and political analysts overwhelmingly agree that there will not be a North American Union in our lifetimes. But belief in the NAU - that the plans are very real, and that the nation is poised to lose its independence - has been spreading from its origins in the conservative fringe, coloring political press conferences and candidate question-and-answer sessions, and reaching a kind of critical mass on the campaign trail. Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul has made the North American Union one of his central issues.

As fears of the mythical NAU grow, they appear to be subtly shaping more mainstream debates about immigration and trade. Paul's fellow Republican congressman Virgil Goode introduced a congressional resolution early this year to block the creation of the NAU and the "NAFTA Superhighway System." Similar resolutions have been introduced in several state legislatures - in Montana's case, the resolution passed nearly unanimously. And back in July, the US House of Representatives easily approved a measure that would cut off federal funds for an existing trade group set up by the three countries.

The NAU may be the quintessential conspiracy theory for our time, according to scholars studying what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the "paranoid style" in American politics. The theory elegantly weaves old fears and new realities into one coherent and all-encompassing plan, and gives a glimpse of where, politically, many Americans are right now: alarmed over immigration, worried about globalization, and - on both sides of the partisan divide - suspicious of the Bush administration's expansive understanding of executive power.

The belief in an imminent North American Union, says Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida and author of a 2001 book on conspiracy theories, "reflects the particular ways in which Americans feel besieged economically, powerless politically, and alienated socially."

. . .

As a social anxiety, the NAU's roots run deep. Global government and elites who secretly sell out their own citizenry have long been staples of conspiracy theories, thanks in part to the Book of Revelation's warning that world government will be an early indicator of the Apocalypse. Over the centuries, the world's puppeteers have been thought to be, in turn, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons, the pope, the Jews, international bankers, the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Rockefellers, and the Communist International.

For most of the 20th century, American conspiracy theories tended to focus on communist infiltration of the upper echelons of the US government. The founder of the John Birch Society, a leading source of such imagined schemes, accused President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, among many others, of being communist agents.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the one country that has actually challenged American global preeminence in the postwar period, forced a conceptual adjustment among the conspiracy-minded. In the past two decades, the United Nations and trade groups like the World Trade Organization have figured more prominently in their dark visions. "In the 1990s in particular, with the militia movement, you had all the rumors of black helicopters and jackbooted UN troops," says Chip Berlet, an analyst at the liberal, Somerville-based think tank Political Research Associates. "There was this sense that the secret elites behind the UN were the same secret elites who had been behind the Soviet Union."

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