MICHAEL HEAZLE AND JOHN KANE |
Sam Roggeveen argues that the real challenge to globalisation and openness and immigration is not cultural (popular prejudice and so on) but political. Similarly, Edward Luce argues that the central problem is the political failure of elites to implement openness in a way that is politically acceptable for most people, in most circumstances, most of the time. We agree and wish to emphasise the ethical dimension this raises and which drives the political phenomenon of contemporary populism.
Populism is always premised on ethical outrage. Its most salient feature is the revolt of a disempowered majority (the ‘people’) against a usurping minority (the ‘elite’), sometimes but not always mediated by a powerful leader (the ‘demagogue’). There are famously both left and right varieties, the latter generally promoting fear of some significant ‘other’ as cause of the people’s sorrows. But we should not be unduly distracted by surging ultra-right cultural-racial intolerance. Rather, the focus should be on a perception common to left- and right-wing populisms: that inequity and disenfranchisement are the result of the inability, or unwillingness, of major political parties to ensure that the common people are protected from, and compensated for, the costs of globalisation.
The case for open trade, investment, and immigration has always been argued primarily on grounds of economic benefit, obscuring important political questions about concomitant social costs. Neglect of these questions eventually produced previously unthinkable outcomes in our established liberal democracies, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. But what explains this failure? Indifference and neglect from those doing well from globalisation is no doubt part of the story, but insufficient in a democracy where politicians must inevitably pay attention to voter sentiment.
The more robust explanation is that political elites simply did not appreciate the enormous complexity of implementing openness on the scale and at the rapid pace that globalisation demanded. Managing who gets what, when, and how – the core business of politics, as Harold Lasswell told us – has always been a fraught one for governments. But permitting the accelerated movement of various peoples, forms of investment, and goods and services across borders, while simultaneously relinquishing degrees of sovereign control over how such movements occur, hugely amplified the already daunting challenges of liberal-democratic government.
Why did elites not plan for the increased uncertainty and risk that rapid escalation and greater policy complexity was bound to produce?
Please click here to read the full “Populism, globalisation and the failure of elites” article in The Lowy Interpreter by Associate Professor Michael Heazle and Professor John Kane.
