Hanover
Now, Donald Trump, the real-estate billionaire who has pledged to end NAFTA, impose tariffs on businesses that outsource and deport millions of unauthorized immigrants, is president-elect of the United States.
His victory serves as proof that the old theories were flawed, according to academics at Dartmouth College. As evidenced by Trump, the Brexit vote and the rise of far-right nationalist political parties in Europe, globalism will not reign unchecked.
“It’s definitely not the end of history,” said John Campbell, chairman of Dartmouth’s sociology department. “I believe history was rewritten a little bit on Tuesday night.”
He added, “That was a silly idea. It sold a lot of books.”
Francis Fukuyama, the globalist scholar, in 1992 published The End of History and the Last Man, a book that popularized the concept.
Fukuyama is still around; now a senior fellow at Stanford University, he has had plenty to say about the election. In a piece published Friday in the Financial Times, he called Trump’s victory a “watershed not just for American politics, but for the entire world order.”
“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,” he wrote.
Although the votes are still being counted and the returns have not yet been parsed with certainty, Trump looks to have won thanks to support from the white working class in states that saw industrial decline while the global economy grew: Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia.
For decades, voters there and across the Western world appeared to wonder when they would get a share of the profits.
Or, as Dartmouth economics professor Danny Blanchflower put it, “Wages, wages, wages.”
The response to decades of stagnant pay, Blanchflower said, has been to vote against the elites — whether Republican or Democrat, Tory or Labour — who profited while making promises they didn’t keep.
“The ruling class really did not understand how much what they were saying was not being believed,” he said.
Blanchflower attributed much of the resentment to the 2008 financial crisis. Other scholars traced it back even further.
“Trump is just the tip of an iceberg,” Campbell said. “… There have been deep structural changes going on in the United States at least since the 1970s, when stagflation hit.”
Stagflation, a mix of high unemployment, high inflation and low economic growth, meant that America’s financial dominance began to slip, Campbell said. Japan and Germany, then later China and India, made inroads to American markets and on the world stage.
In that sense, Trump’s nationalism is unique to the U.S.
“Trump said it: ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” Campbell said. “The implication there is we have been the hegemonic power since World War II, and somehow we have lost that.”
The economics of the nationalist resurgence have played out slightly differently in Europe.
Nordic countries, as well as Germany and France, have experienced the same forces but also have embraced more robust social security nets, said Matthew Slaughter, dean of the Tuck School of Business.
“We haven’t seen to date this sort of dramatic voting by the electorate,” he said, “yet.”
Although anti-globalization forces haven’t seized power in Germany and France, both countries’ nationalist wings have grown in past years, and observers already are speculating about what the upcoming French presidential election might bring in May.
“Time will tell whether the kinds of countries that have this very strong labor market support avoid this kind of nationalist, anti-globalist outcome,” Slaughter said.
Blanchflower, a British-born economist who has opposed the U.K.’s departure from the EU, also identified dissimilarities between the Brexit vote and the American presidential election.
Supporters of Brexit sought to regain political independence from the EU, Blanchflower said, and Trump supporters, rather than strike a blow for American sovereignty, wanted to take back their economic and social standing.
Blanchflower also noted that pro-Brexit regions of the U.K. are also “huge recipients” of EU financial aid, suggesting that residents of these areas voted against their own interests.
“It’s pretty clear (that) the more likely you were to lose from Brexit the more likely you were to vote for it,” he said.
There are also differences in countries’ reactions to immigration, another key issue for anti-globalists.
In continental Europe, far-right politicians are seeing success as they align themselves against the tide of migrants and refugees arriving from North Africa and the Middle East.
The closest analog to the U.S.’s brand of anti-immigrant sentiment is in the U.K., Slaughter said, where moderately to low-skilled workers worry about competition from the European Union’s open labor markets.
In the British Isles, the proverbial “Polish plumber” exemplifies the concern: A migrant worker arrives to put wage pressure on citizens of the U.K., much like the fear for many Americans that immigrants, often those from Latin America, will take their jobs.
On the whole, however, the Trump election was far from an aberration in Slaughter’s eyes.
“If anything,” the business school dean said, “we’re the most prominent example yet of a country where, when the citizens experience widespread job loss and declining wages as a result of the effects of globalization in some sectors, they say, ‘It’s not working for us, and we’d like something different, please.’ ”
Graziella Parati, a professor of Italian at Dartmouth who studies human migration, saw the present moment as a reaction by whites against their perceived loss of standing.
“I think we are at a moment in history in which white people are very aware that their supremacy is fading, and I think that this is the — hopefully — last attempt to demonstrate that they can win over everybody else,” she said.
Although the election may have brought attention to an ignored part of the population, it also has normalized “attitudes belonging to the past,” she said: intolerance, for instance, along lines of ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality.
Still, Parati said, “I don’t think this can be sustained for a very long time, hopefully. I don’t know. The world cannot move on without inclusivity, without collaboration, without working together.”
She added later, “I see it as a snake lifting its head for the last time and trying to bite.”
In the meantime, scholars said, the U.S. may be looking at a different political order. Rather than a balance between conservatism and liberalism, voters are increasingly focusing on other dichotomies — globalism versus nationalism, elitism versus populism.
Although Campbell predicted that Trump was not a “flash in the pan,” he couldn’t say how long the president-elect could harness populist anger.
“The answer hinges on how fast Trump can deliver the goods as promised,” Campbell said. “… If he cannot deliver the goods in a timely fashion, I think the emperor’s clothes are gone and people will start looking around for alternatives.
“And maybe that would be an alternative that pulls people out of their tribes, so that maybe white working class voters look around and realize maybe they have something in common with people who are different from them.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.