After Globalization, a New Specter Could Feed Populist Politics
Populist parties’ share of vote worldwide* 25 % 20 15 10 5 0 ’61- ’65 ’66- ’70 ’71- ’75 ’76- ’80 ’81- ’85 ’86- ’90 ’91- ’95 ’96- ’00 ’01- ’05 ’06- ’10 ’11- ’16 Populist
parties’ share of vote worldwide* 25 % 20 15 10 5 0 ’61- ’65 ’66- ’70 ’71- ’75 ’76- ’80 ’81- ’85 ’86- ’90 ’91- ’95 ’96- ’00 ’01- ’05 ’06- ’10 ’11- ’16 JAN. 30, 2018
To be sure, economic dislocations don’t have to produce populist politics.
The United Farm Workers loudly protested tomato-harvesting machines after they were introduced in California in the 1960s.In New York, the local of the "sandhogs" who dig subway tunnels negotiated a deal where it gets $450,000 for each
tunnel-digging machine used, to make up for job losses caused by "technological advancement." Yet though automation has displaced many more jobs than trade ever could, robots have never inspired the fury that trade routinely does.
Economists studying the changes in the nature of work
that produced such an angry political response suggest, however, that another wave of disruption is about to wash across the world economy, knocking out entire new classes of jobs: artificial intelligence.
is concentrated in big cities, where workers have more options to find new jobs, the backlash
will be more muted than it was when trade took out the jobs of single-industry company towns.
If it was globalization — or, more precisely, the shock of imports from China —
that moved voters to put Mr. Trump in the White House, could politicians get back to supporting the market-oriented order once the China shock played out?
But for all the wishful elucidations, the cosmopolitan elite can’t rid themselves of a stubborn fear: The populist wave
that produced President Trump — not to mention Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, as well as Britain’s exodus from the European Union and the rise of the National Front in France — may be here to stay?