Split off from the Calgary Municipal Election thread.
Trump. Brexit. The rise of the neo-nationalism in Europe, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. Populist movements are overturning the status quo all over the world. The free flow of capital and labour, the rise of the knowledge and economy, and rapid technological change are fueling a sense of social and economic insecurity, and a sense of betrayal.
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Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski
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The two are related. Those who who stick close to their place of birth and extended family, who don't see the appeal of big cities or new ways, are going to lose out on economic opportunity. Cultural sophistication and economic opportunity go hand in hand today.
And this cultural anxiety about modernity isn't only a white thing. You see it all over the world. Conservative Islam is largely a reaction against a modern world that is seen as morally corrosive and incompatible with traditional religious virtues. Turkey has rejected secularism. In South Africa, mobs attack immigrants. Hindu nationalism is resurgent in India.
We have to stop pretending these reactions are only about bigotry and ignorance (though obviously they're at play). Globalism has winners and losers. Rapid change is welcome to those equipped to seize its opportunities, terrifying to those who aren't. The winners have a duty to mitigate the harm done to the losers and treat their grievances seriously.
I highly recommend this book on the subject:
The Retreat of Western Liberalism
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“We are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society’s economic losers, and complacency about our system’s durability”. - Edward Luce
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From the NYT review:
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Luce does not see Donald J. Trump or populist nationalists in Europe, like Marine Le Pen, as causes of today’s crisis in democratic liberalism but rather as symptoms. Nor does he see President Trump’s victory last November as “an accident delivered by the dying gasp of America’s white majority — and abetted by Putin,” after which regular political programming will soon resume.
Instead, he argues in “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” Trump’s election is a part of larger trends on the world stage, including the failure of two dozen democracies since the turn of the millennium (including three in Europe — Russia, Turkey and Hungary) and growing downward pressures on the West’s middle classes (wrought by the snowballing forces of globalization and automation) that are fomenting nationalism and populist revolts. These developments, in turn, represent a repudiation of the naïve hopes, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that liberal democracy was on an inevitable march across the planet, and they also pose a challenge to the West’s Enlightenment faith in reason and linear progress.
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Globalism - Winners and Losers
