Brexit and Trump, leading from behind
As we are now all too aware, the fin de siècle obituaries for the anti-globalization movement were premature. What once roared in the late 1990s made little noise a decade later. The window-smashing Seattle WTO protestors in the 1999 ”Battle of Seattle” were among the first to use the internet as an organizing tool and are remembered for that milestone (and for their mania for breaking glass). But that week of fury at the forces of globalization — wealth inequality, the commoditization of traditional ways of life, the prioritization of the profits of capital over labor, the bad deal forced on poor countries by rich countries — is otherwise seldom recalled. When a few months later, Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization thumper “No Logo” captured book best seller lists, corporations like Nike went ballistic and the editors of The Economist demanded a live debate.
But then, for both the propopents of globalization and its discontents, the argument moved on, forever wars began, the whole proposition that globalization is a thing that could be grasped and be accepted or rejected seemed to fade.
When Brexit and Trump came along — and also trade tariffs and mass migrations and Facebook malfeasance and on and on and on and on — off we went, partying like it’s 1999. Soldiers again fill the globalization battlefield.
But what if the present-day meltdown over globalization is just prelude to something much bigger, stronger, more awful? What if the storyline that began, say, in 1999 isn’t traversing a 20-year arc but is on a much longer march, and today’s headlines are just midway exposition?