Contested future: What next for the west?
Globalisation has, for many, undercut wages and jobs — and fuelled populism. Can three new books unpick an issue that so divides us?
Edward Luce
16 HOURS AGO
What’s the matter with the west? Your answer will largely depend on what you mean by “the west”.
If you are Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished but controversial Ivy League economist, the west has been a productivity machine that gave the world the industrial era and now the digital age. The west’s half a millennium of dominance is now closing. Sachs’ perspective, in other words, is technical and somewhat bloodless. If you are Pankaj Mishra, a London-based India-born writer, the response is very bloody indeed. Mishra’s west gave the world colonialism, destruction and slavery. It is now sinking under the weight of its greed and hypocrisy. He too sees western hegemony coming to an end. If you are Thomas Frank, a Washington-based journalist and historian, your horizons are essentially American. The heyday of America’s spirit came in the populist era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and during Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal. America’s only hope is to recover the egalitarian temper of those times.
Whichever view you take, the fate of the west is also on the ballot in the coming US general election. One candidate, Joe Biden, promises to revive America’s western alliances. The other, Donald Trump, would continue to put “America first”. There are reasons to be sceptical of whether the voting public cares deeply either way.
Were you to poll the average American, Frank’s perspective would come closest to reflecting their worldview. The rest of the world barely rates a mention in his new book except where globalisation is treated as elite project. The People, No is nevertheless a rousing book — part history and partly a call to arms against the plutocratic elites of both America’s main parties.
Frank’s real strength lies in his energetic optimism, which is a rare commodity nowadays. He makes two cases, the first highly semantic, the second central to the challenge of our times. His first is that the word “populism” has been hijacked. The term, an American original, now stands for what used to be meant by “Jacksonian” — resentful of those above you (the bankers and intellectuals) and cruel towards those below (the slaves and native Americans). In fact, Frank reminds us, the origins of US populism were very different. The prairie populists of the 1890s were in favour of racial integration, women’s emancipation and opposed to the robber baron capitalists. They gave birth not only to the term “populist” but also to the People’s Party, which briefly threatened to realign US politics. Its legacy carried into the progressive era that helped tame American capitalism, enshrine fiat money, create income taxes and launch trust busting.
https://www.ft.com/content/8a4dfeef-eb91-4ab5-b1f2-073373baee78
