The End of the Globalization Ideologues
By 
For many years, those of us who opposed things like 1,138 workers dying in Bangladesh making our clothes were attacked as being out of touch by the ideologues of globalization After all, THINGS WERE GETTING BETTER IF WE LOOK AT THE WORLD FROM 30,000 FEET! One of my favorite examples of this was when Annie Lowrey attacked Paul Theroux as History’s Greatest Monster for saying that maybe we should keep some jobs in the U.S. to help poor people here, who are indeed truly poor.
Well, this all became a lot harder for these ideologues to push after Donald Trump’s election. Huh, you means not giving a shit about the poor in your own country might have a negative impact? Wow, who could have known! Certainly not the Clinton or Obama administrations! Not that it stopped any of them from continuing to be seen as Important People. It’s interesting to watch a lot of those people issue mea culpas these days, especially as the Biden administration takes a somewhat different approach to these questions. In this Ezra Klein piece about Biden trying to appeal to working class concerns, there is this tidbit:
Back in May, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser (and a key aide, before that, to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), made this explicit during a speech to the Brookings Institution. Sullivan slammed the belief that “the type of growth did not matter.” That had led, he said, to administrations that let Wall Street thrive while “essential sectors, like semiconductors and infrastructure, atrophied.” He dismissed the “assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently.”
And he tendered a modest mea culpa for his own party. “Frankly, our domestic economic policies also failed to fully account for the consequences of our international economic policies,” he said. In letting globalization and automation hollow out domestic manufacturing, Democrats had been part of a Washington consensus that “had frayed the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests.”
Ya think!
No one actually opposes globalization. What people oppose is unfair globalization. People oppose indifference to the poor in our own nation, the political consequences of which we have to live with, which everyone finally not knows. People oppose allowing companies to dump pollution in poor nations. People oppose capital mobility for unionbusting. People oppose 1,138 workers dying making our clothes. Not everyone knows or opposes all parts of this, of course. Much of it still needs far more attention than it gets. But at least it is harder for Yglesias and Matthews and Lowrey and the other ideologues of globalization on the internet to push this line of bullshit. I’m sure Larry Summers and Rahm still do, but they are now isolated artifacts. People want much about globalization. But they also wanted to be treated like humans with a say in their own lives, with dignity, with a decent job. It’s sad that the working class party in the United States completely forgot this for 40 years. Sadder still that the working class party of Great Britain did too, but that’s for a different post.