The best critique of Trump is not that he is making his billionaire friends rich (they’re the ones losing eye-watering amounts on the sharemarket, or in Elon Musk’s case, watching their businesses tank). It’s that he doesn’t understand the roots of American power, and is handing wins to China at almost every turn. It’s that he thinks a declining power can reassert itself by will and force, and that the world won’t simply begin to find others to rely on.
This is, in spirit, Brexit on a global scale. That, too, was a case of a population voting, knowingly or otherwise, to make themselves less wealthy in order to “Take Back Control”. That too, was therefore not merely economic: Brexit promised its own sort of liberation day, in that instance from European diktat. And that, too, came amid the pangs of decline, in that case the now-comprehensive decline of the British Empire and the existential questions that raises about what Britain is in its wake.
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That’s why both these phenomena are ultimately projects of national sovereignty. They are tied to greatness because they hark back to an era where being a great power meant the power to dictate terms. With that comes a mythology that more sovereignty means more power. That is to say, a mythology that paints globalisation – with its logic of interdependence – out of the picture.
Each, then, is captured by the “globalisation trilemma” famously identified by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. Put simply, Rodrik argues you can’t have globalisation, democracy and sovereignty all at once – you can only have two. Sovereignty and globalisation works, but only if the government forces it on the people against their will, by having open borders, for example. Democracy and sovereignty works, but only if you opt out of globalisation and retain the control to enact the will of the people. And globalisation and democracy works, but only if the people get to vote directly on the global institutions that influence their lives, which would in turn make the nation state less relevant and erode its sovereignty.
The trouble is we’ve spent decades pretending this isn’t so; that you can have all three. We’re here because this could never hold. Eventually, the forces of democracy and sovereignty gushed forth. And because they’re doing so in a globalised economy, the economic results will be painful.
Brexit has definitely harmed the British economy – the only real debate is to what extent. Goldman Sachs now puts the chances of a US recession at 35 per cent in the next 12 months, to say nothing of the possibilities of a global economic downturn.
But to critique all this on economic terms is to miss a large chunk of the point. Sovereignty and control are things people tend to value in their own right. And they’re especially potent for people who feel they are losing their status. People like citizens of mighty nations that are now shining a little less brightly.
As the economic consequences become real, some believers will no doubt waver. But a great many will remain because in the end, we’re watching a festival of sovereignty against a backdrop of lost pride.
Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.
