Trump, The Problems of Living Memory, and the Limits of Free Trade

North says:

Good article, quintessentially Saul and fine for that- I think you’ve felt about the outlines of the problem pretty well.

There’s no arguing that globalization has hit some groups harder than others and their resentment is easy enough to understand. That remains a genie that can’t be shoved back into the bottle and it’s anyone’s argument if it’s a genie that ever could have been kept in the bottle in the first place. The mid 1900’s we’re talking about were a curious time: a third of the world’s industry bulldozed flat by war; a third of the world’s industry locked into the stasis of command economics and the last third going flat out providing for the rest at a natural advantage. As the first two phenomena passed, and I’d question the humanity of anyone who doesn’t celebrate the fading of the scars of war or the loosening of the iron fist of ignorance and oppression, the third naturally also fades. Could the tissue of government trade policy have preserved the latter? I doubt it, the cost would have been terrific and no doubt in blood as well as treasure.

It certainly also bears noting that we’re laboring in the shadow of a historic recession of our own. Globalized economies are effected by global conditions and global conditions are fragile: The European Union is grappling (or rather failing to grapple) with the quixotic economic contradictions of their own union. In the far east the edifice of our new modern industrialized China, their low hanging fruit now consumed, is beginning to creak and groan as the times demand evolution and liberalization from a government ill designed to do either. In the Middle East the Islamic peoples appear to be headed into the maw of their own religious equivalent of the hundred years war only fought with modern weapons. Will it take a century of bloodletting before the religious absolutists of their various sects kill, discredit and exhaust themselves to the point where the great compromises of the enlightenment can take hold? It could. And the waves of disruption and refugees from that conflagration roll ever outwards shaking structures already grappling with problems of their own. Then over top of that you have the questions of ecology: AGW globally and China’s very habitability more national/locally. Suffice to say the headwinds are stiff and when economics sputter it’s always the least advantaged who suffer the most.

Into this grim environment we have our respective uprisings twins (though emphatically fraternal rather than identical) on the left and the right. On the right the uprising is strong: the rights own base ideologies and the contradictions of the GOP’s chosen tactics and strategies have fed a rage that lends their disaffected numbers and passion. On the left the uprising is passionate but weaker: the technocratic left’s establishment has been uncertain and unsatisfying but they are neither as utterly indifferent or as blatantly disingenuous as the establishment on the right has been. Thus on the right Trump’s disruptions and threat waxes while on the left the more principled and measured campaign of Sander’s is losing steam.

Are there answers? Not easy ones and not great ones. The technocratic left says “We’re wrestling with some big global problems, we have to give it time and we’ll try and help you out if we can but we can’t turn the clock back.” Not exactly a ringing battlecry to rally the troops I admit. The right, meanwhile, is roiling in near disarray, the traditional centrist right cry of “You’re tough enough to figure it out yourself and we’re just going to cut your taxes and get out of your way.” Is simply not selling. Their traditional God, Gays and Guns distraction has run out of moxie, panting on the sidelines it has little strength to lend to aid the establishment or distract the base.

So we have Trump peddling immigration restrictionism and a whole lot of empty Pablum. By itself that’s pretty thin beer but when you add in the last couple decades of the establishment right’s training their base to believe that bluster and passion is all that is needed to achieve policy victory then suddenly Trumps towering bluster and bravado gains unnatural potency particularly when measured against the naked disingenuous fecklessness of the rights’ traditional elite. The foundations are cracking on the right and the tower is swaying. I still think that the weakened grip of the establishment will win out again but I both not as certain as I once as and am entirely unsympathetic to their richly earned plight.

So we have Bernie who answers these policy problems with calls for revolution and gestures at the more social democratic market economies of the industrial west. The revolution, however, has failed to show (it didn’t even RSVP) and the social democracies of the industrial west are struggling with the same problems we are. Clinton is, as the Clintons ever have, responded with trimming; tacking as leftward within the technocratic lane as she can. This isn’t going to satisfy or even come close to satisfying those who have been hurt by globalization and who’re feeling the Bern but it displays enough empathy to reach out to the marginal undecided’s. The center of gravity in the Democratic Party sits closer to the middle than its twin center of gravity does for the right. The Democratic establishment hasn’t taken the same shortcuts or contradictory positions that the GOP establishment has and the establishment left has significant recent victories on their record as opposed to the historic fiasco’s that ooze across the paper for the establishment right. Insufficient, unsatisfying, the leftward uprising says and not without merit, but that simply doesn’t stoke the same fury that failure and defeat stokes on the right.

And so the whole thing lurches drunkenly forward and the economists and technocrats hang on with white knuckles. The hope had always been that the boons of globalization and free trade would outweigh the costs. In the roaring 90’s and the early aughts they did but natural short sightedness and some cataclysmically bad decisions (made by the right but with the craven acquiescence of the establishment left) ate up the surpluses that should have been socked away for the lean times we’re wrestling with now. Can the industrial left hold their populist impulses at bay long enough for the tide to come back in and sooth the disaffected? I hope so but I don’t know it can. I hope that the uprising on the right shatters the policy traffic jam that has paralyzed our options for palliative action since 2010. Clinton doesn’t offer solutions that will dispel our problems in the near term but she does offer band aids to ease the pain. Maybe band aids will suffice; they look better to me than any of the other options on tap.

All eyes turn to the GOP primary right now. What happens next? We will see, I suppose, we will see.Report