This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.
Turning Point: Britain votes to exit the European Union, sending shock waves throughout the world.
In
Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an
overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive
here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business —
and become very rich in the process.
For
almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature,
human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by
accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our
ancestors and traditions. So it should not be surprising that in today’s
globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and
social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if
they are better off materially.
Of
course, globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the
2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did
not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven
Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing
countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the
percentage of children born in developing countries who died before
their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5
percent by 2016.
Yet
statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many
people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost
regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the
expense of rich countries’ working-class communities. And from a
cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across
national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of
doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but
for others it is a threat.
This
disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American
power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped
since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback,
both against the United States and within the nation.
Modern
political systems are labeled liberal democracies because they unite
two disparate principles. Liberalism is based on a rule of law that
maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right
to private property, which is critical for economic growth and
prosperity. The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of
communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole.
Over
the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the
democratic part of this equation against the liberal one, underlined
most strikingly two years ago by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
when he asserted that his country sought to be an “illiberal state.” In
2014, his Fidesz party won most of the popular vote and a supermajority
in Parliament and began modifying the Constitution to centralize power
in Mr. Orbán’s hands. Orbán subsequently cracked down on critical media
outlets and nongovernmental organizations that he did not control.
In
doing so, Mr. Orbán was imitating Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world’s
chief practitioner of illiberal democracy. Mr. Putin has become very
popular in Russia, particularly since his annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He does not feel bound by law: Mr. Putin and his cronies use political
power to enrich themselves and business wealth to guarantee their hold
on power.
In
nearby Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president and
long-dominant political leader, also received a strong democratic
mandate from voters in 2014. An attempted coup two years later became an
excuse for him to target thousands of civil servants, military
officers, journalists and academics whom he suspected of disloyalty.
Mr.
Orbán, Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan all came to power in countries with an
electorate polarized between a more liberal, cosmopolitan urban elite —
whether in Budapest, Moscow or Istanbul — and a less-educated rural
voter base. This social division is similar to the one that drove the
Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise in the United States..
Mr.
Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because
he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy. He
validated himself through popular support, but his entire career has
been spent trying to bypass inconvenient rules — like the requirement to
pay his own subcontractors. Much of his popularity rested heavily on
his willingness to break existing customs about political correctness.
This seemed politically bracing at first, but quickly became worrisome
when Mr. Trump suggested that as president, he would “open up our libel
laws” to initiate civil suits against his media critics. His pitch to
the American voter was “I alone” can fix the country’s problems through
sheer force of personality, and not through a reform of the country’s
institutions.
That
Mr. Trump expressed admiration for Mr. Putin, and that Mr. Putin
returned the favor, should come as no surprise. Like Mr. Putin, Mr.
Trump seems to want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks
and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be
an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain
political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once
in office. And like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump was able to create alternative
narratives that often went unchallenged by his supporters.
But
the balance between liberalism and democracy has been shifting in other
nations as well. The citizens of India and Japan have elected
nationalist leaders who many say they believe champion a more closed
form of identity than their predecessors. While these leaders have
observed the principles of liberalism more scrupulously than the Orbáns
or Erdogans of the world, their critics suspect that they are quietly
fostering intolerance among their supporters.
How
far will this trend toward illiberal democracy go? Are we headed for a
period like that of the early 20th century, in which global politics
sank into conflict over closed and aggressive nationalism? The outcome
will depend on several critical factors, particularly the way global
elites respond to the backlash they have engendered. In America and
Europe, elites made huge policy blunders in recent years that hurt
ordinary people more than themselves.
Deregulation of financial markets
laid the groundwork for the subprime crisis in the United States, while a
badly designed euro contributed to the debt crisis in Greece, and the
Schengen system of open borders made it difficult to control the flood
of refugees in Europe. Elites must acknowledge their roles in creating
these situations.
What
is surprising is not that there is populism today, but that the
populist upsurge took as long as it did to materialize. Now it’s up to
the elites to fix damaged institutions and to better buffer those
segments of their own societies that have not benefited from
globalization to the same extent.
Above
all, it is important to keep in mind that reversing the existing
liberal world order would likely make things worse for everyone,
including those left behind by globalization. The fundamental driver of
job loss in the developed world, after all, is not immigration or trade,
but technological change. The American manufacturing sector has seen
something of a rebirth over the past decade, even as it has shed jobs in
its highly automated factories.
We
need better systems for buffering people against disruption, even as we
recognize that disruption is inevitable. The alternative is to end up
with the worst of both worlds, in which a closed and collapsing system
of global trade breeds even more inequality.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment