This week’s cover story in The Economist argues that traditional left vs. right political divides in advanced capitalist countries are beginning to give way to a new fault line, with those who advocate for open economic policies on one side against those who favor a more closed approach. The policies of those in the closed camp will be familiar to anyone following the news: this is the stuff of Trump in the United States, the (successful) Brexit campaign in Britain, or the National Front in France, and there are analogues with various levels of success in practically every country in Europe. They advocate a kind of nativist nationalism, hostile to any group not perceived as pure enough, and so they oppose more open immigration policies, along with free trade deals. They are not skeptical of state intervention in the economy in general, but the state should be discriminating in who it supports. Therefore, millions of voters in the recent Republican primary supported a very un-conservative in Donald Trump, who promised to maintain benefits from Medicare and Social Security while engaging the government in the deportation of more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in what would be a massive use of state power. These newly prominent philosophies all argue that the path to prosperity for natives is to minimize foreign involvement, discriminate against those not deemed appropriately native who are already in the country, and to build walls (sometimes literally) to protect "true" natives from an uncertain and frightening world.
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AuthorEconomist. Professor. Environmentalist. Archives
July 2017
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