FT: US against the world? Trump’s America and the new global order- Francis FukuyamaInteresting FF notices the Trump win is similar to the Brexit vote? Couldn’t help but notice that myself.
"We appear to be entering a new age of populist nationalism, in which the dominant liberal order that has been constructed since the 1950s has come under attack from angry and energised democratic majorities.The manner of Trump’s victory lays bare the social basis of the movement he has mobilised. A look at the voting map shows Clinton’s support concentrated geographically in cities along the coasts, with swaths of rural and small-town America voting solidly for Trump. The most surprising shifts were his flipping of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, three northern industrial states that were so solidly Democratic in recent elections that Clinton didn’t even bother to campaign in the latter one. He won by being able to win over unionised workers who had been hit by deindustrialisation, promising to “make America great again” by restoring their lost manufacturing jobs.We have seen this story before. This is the story of Brexit, where the pro-Leave vote was similarly concentrated in rural areas and small towns and cities outside London. It is also true in France, where working-class voters whose parents and grandparents used to vote for the Communist or Socialist parties are voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Front. But populist nationalism is a far broader phenomenon than that. Vladimir Putin remains unpopular among more educated voters in big cities such as St Petersburg and Moscow, but has a huge support base in the rest of the country. The same is true of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has an enthusiastic support base among the country’s conservative lower middle class, or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, who is popular everywhere but in Budapest"
Fukuyama plays the ‘social class’card. But presents it in a way that suggests the lesser educated are ill informed- Au contraire- The lesser educated are the lesser indoctrinated and more likely to understand what is truly important- Family. Community. The ability to support that family and have a succesful community- I’m not speaking of the identity politics community- I’m speaking of the physical community- Where you live.
FF: “Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries. This, in turn, is driven directly by globalisation and the march of technology, which has been facilitated in turn by the liberal world order created largely by the US since 1945"
At least FF talks about the liberal world order for what it is! It is NOT truth, justice and human freedom for the identity politics indoctrinated.
FF: “When we talk about a liberal world order, we are speaking about the rules-based system of international trade and investment that has fuelled global growth in recent years. This is the system that allows iPhones to be assembled in China and shipped to customers in the US or Europe in the week before Christmas”“But as everyone is painfully aware now, the benefits of this system did not filter down to the whole population. The working classes in the developed world saw their jobs disappear as companies outsourced and squeezed efficiencies in response to a ruthlessly competitive global market.
This long-term story was hugely exacerbated by the US subprime crisis of 2008, and the euro crisis that hit Europe a couple of years later. In both cases, systems designed by elites — liberalised financial markets in the US case, and European policies such as the euro and the Schengen system of internal migration — collapsed dramatically in the face of external shocks. The costs of these failures were again much more heavily borne by ordinary workers than by the elites themselves”
Why didn’t this anger manifest earlier? FF asks that question too.
FF: “The costs of these failures were again much more heavily borne by ordinary workers than by the elites themselves. Ever since, the real question should not have been why populism has emerged in 2016, but why it took so long to become manifest”
My answer would be because the masses have had their small minds distracted by their enter-entrainments- iphones & video games. Along with their ability to pile on debt thanks to extremely low interest rates- remaining hopeful that the elite classes would right the wrongs- fools! It also seems to me that the pushing of extremist identity politics and political correctness were factors in the masses finally manifesting their disenchantment.
FF: “In the US, there was a political failure insofar as the system did not adequately represent the traditional working class. The Republican party was dominated by corporate America and its allies who had profited handsomely from globalisation, while the Democratic party had become the party of identity politics: a coalition of women, African-Americans, Hispanics, environmentalists, and the LGBT community, that lost its focus on economic issues”
Clinton played the identity politics card repeatedly and openly- employing divide to conquer strategy
FF: “The failure of the American left to represent the working class is mirrored in similar failures across Europe. European social democracy had made its peace with globalisation a couple of decades ago, in the form of Blairite centrism or the kind of neoliberal reformism engineered by Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats in the 2000s.But the broader failure of the left was the same one made in the lead-up to 1914 and the Great war, when, in the apt phrase of the British-Czech philosopher, Ernest Gellner, a letter sent to a mailbox marked “class” was mistakenly delivered to one marked “nation.” Nation almost always trumps class because it is able to tap into a powerful source of identity, the desire to connect with an organic cultural community. This longing for identity is now emerging in the form of the American alt-right, a formerly ostracised collection of groups espousing white nationalism in one form or another. But even short of these extremists, many ordinary American citizens began to wonder why their communities were filling up with immigrants, and who had authorised a system of politically correct language by which one could not even complain about the problem. This is why Donald Trump received a huge number of votes from better-educated and more well-off voters as well, who were not victims of globalisation but still felt their country was being taken from them. Needless to say, this dynamic underlay the Brexit vote as well”So what will be the concrete consequences of the Trump victory for the international system? Contrary to his critics, Trump does have a consistent and thought-through position: he is a nationalist on economic policy, and in relation to the global political system. He has clearly stated that he will seek to renegotiate existing trade agreements such as Nafta and presumably the WTO, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he is willing to contemplate exiting from them. And he has expressed admiration for “strong” leaders such as Russia’s Putin who nonetheless get results through decisive action. He is correspondingly much less enamoured of traditional US allies such as those in Nato, or Japan and South Korea, whom he has accused of freeriding on American power. This suggests that support for them will also be conditional on a renegotiation of the cost-sharing arrangements now in place.The dangers of these positions for both the global economy and for the global security system are impossible to understate. The world today is brimming with economic nationalism. Traditionally, an open trade and investment regime has depended on the hegemonic power of the US to remain afloat. If the US begins acting unilaterally to change the terms of the contract, there are many powerful players around the world who would be happy to retaliate, and set off a downward economic spiral reminiscent of the 1930s"
This is where I will end this post. You can and should read the rest at FT’s- Link posted at the beginning of this post- It's certainly thought provoking.From about an hour ago... maybe a bit longer: