This is important to remember because there’s a real risk today of repeating those mistakes—of coming together around lowest-common-denominator demands such as “Impeach Trump” or “Elect Democrats” and, in the process, losing our focus on the conditions and politics that allowed Trump’s rise and are fueling the growth of far-right parties around the world. One thing we know for certain from the Bush years is that saying no is not enough.
I’ll never forget that, just a few days after the September 11 attacks, the National Post—a right-wing paper in Canada—ran a story headlined ANTI-GLOBALIZATION IS SO YESTERDAY. They couldn’t wait to bury our movement. But they were spectacularly wrong—there is nothing “yesterday” about the alarm we raised. The pain and dislocation didn’t go away just because the media decided it was time to talk about terrorism 24/7.
On the contrary, the crises deepened, forcing millions to leave their homes in search of a better life. A 2017 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that Mexico’s poverty rate has risen since the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, with 20 million additional people now living in poverty—a major factor pushing Mexican migration to the United States. Meanwhile, in North America and Europe, white workers grew progressively more pissed off at having their voices ignored. This opened the space for demagogues like Trump to step in and direct workers’ rage away from plutocrats like him, who had profited so lavishly from the outsourcing opportunities enabled by these deals, and at Mexican migrants instead, victims of the same policies that were hollowing out their communities, the very same bad deals.
This is the space the Brexit campaign usurped, under its slogan “Take back control!” And it is the same rage that France’s Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National speaks to when she tells crowds that globalization has meant “manufacturing by slaves for selling to the unemployed.” Around the world, far-right forces are gaining ground by harnessing the power of nostalgic nationalism and anger directed at remote economic bureaucracies—whether Washington, NAFTA, the WTO, or the EU—and mixing it with racism and xenophobia, offering an illusion of control through bashing immigrants, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women.
It’s a toxic combination, and it was an avoidable one. Confronting the cruelties of a system designed by and for the wealthiest interests on earth is terrain that rightly belongs to the Left. But the hard truth is that after September 11, large parts of the progressive side of the political spectrum got spooked, and that left the economic-populist space open to abuse. Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
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The good news is that the progressive anti-free-trade coalition has finally started to revive in the past couple of years. In Europe—particularly in Germany, France, and Belgium—there has been a big recent surge of unions and environmentalists coming together to oppose corporate trade deals with the United States and Canada. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, came out powerfully against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, slamming it as “part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations and Wall Street by outsourcing jobs; undercutting worker rights; dismantling labor, environmental, health, food safety and financial laws; and allowing corporations to challenge our laws in international tribunals rather than our own court system.”
If Sanders had run against Trump on that message, he might well have peeled away some of the white and Latino workers who ended up voting Republican in 2016. But Sanders didn’t run against Trump—Hillary Clinton did. And with her long history of both backing and personally negotiating precisely these sorts of deals, she had no credibility when she criticized them on the campaign trail. Whenever she tried, it became one more opportunity to paint her as a typical shifty politician.
The Perils of Ceding the Populist Ground
Tired of the betrayals, some gave up on centrist parties and voted for self-styled “outsiders” and “insurgents” like Trump. Many more around the world have just given up, period—staying home during elections, disengaging from electoral politics, convinced that the whole system is rigged and is never going to help improve their lives. This phenomenon was most evident in the United States, in the 2016 elections, when despite unprecedented wall-to-wall coverage, despite the presence of a flamboyant and dangerous demagogue in the race, and despite the chance to make history by voting in the first woman president, approximately 90 million eligible voting-age Americans shrugged and decided to stay home instead. Far more would-be voters chose not to vote—roughly 40 percent—than chose to cast a ballot for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, who each got roughly 25 percent of total eligible voters. That is a staggering level of disengagement in a democracy.
Which brings us back to those labor leaders at the White House. Yes, it was a deal with the devil. But the mere fact that these union heads were willing to align themselves with an administration as regressive as Trump’s reflects the systemic neglect of and disdain for workers that has characterized both the Democratic and Republican parties for decades.
No, Oprah and Zuckerberg Will Not Save Us
Trump’s path to the White House was partially paved by two men who are beloved by many US liberals—Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. That may seem counterintuitive, but bear with me.
Donald Trump stood before the world and proclaimed he had one qualification to be president: I’m rich. To be more specific, he said, “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” He presented his wealth as evidence that he was “very smart,” and indeed superior in every respect. So magical were the powers that flowed from the mere fact of having accumulated this much cash (how much, we don’t know) that it would surely compensate for complete political inexperience or lack of the most basic administrative or historical knowledge. Once in office, he extended this logic to other members of the super-rich club, filling his government with individuals whose sole qualification for public office was their enormous, often inherited wealth.