Why Donald Trump’s second victory is the most striking and powerful answer to the question, where is the story of the non-globalists?
Years ago, when I was a college student, the travel writer Pico Iyer was famous for detailing the lives of those who were always on the move, those who were familiar with airports like they were home. Then, the American columnist Tom Friedman wrote “The World Is Flat”. When I read that book, I remember thinking to myself this is the story of those who left home—what about all those who never did? Where is their story?
Donald Trump’s second victory, making him only the second person to ever win the US presidency non-sequentially, meaning there was an election loss between two terms, is the most striking and powerful answer to the question—where is the story of the non-globalists?
This story was told during Brexit, but is perhaps yet to be fully understood in England. This story is being told in riots in Paris, and protests in Germany, in consensus overhaul in Italy, and the scorn for Justin Trudeau in Canada. It is being relayed in protests on the streets of Tehran, and in the anxieties in the streets of Tokyo and Seoul, in election results in India.
The economic and social framework that taught us that “countries that have McDonalds do not go to war against each other” has collapsed, and along it has collapsed a “global media” that controlled the “truth”. It is a system that allowed the Economist, a tiny magazine from a tiny island, to proclaim how voters in various countries ought to be voting even though it had never had the ability to influence an election in its own rainy turf. That confidence came from, ostensibly, the source of power, a “borderless” global elite that controlled finance, trade, commerce, and the ability to raise to power, and bring down, governments at will. Long before the term “influencer” became popular, these were the OG influencers, if you will, the power behind every seat of government, who were everywhere, all at once. Markets, and political destinies, rose and fell to their whims, and their cultural norms were, or had to be, global.
Even though the United Nations grew more listless with each passing decade, a sort of Kantian idea of “world culture” administered by “global norms” and “world government” spread, in part enthused by the early successes of the European Union. For a time, in the heady 2000s, before the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, I would hear rousing talk of a similar union across the Indian subcontinent with north Indian politicians gushing about the dream of having breakfast in Lutyens Delhi, lunch at langar at the Golden Temple, and dinner at Haveli or Cooco’s Den in Lahore.
But by the time the ’00s were coming to an end, this kind of utopia had steadily started receiving severe hits—the meltdown of the financial markets in 2007-08 showed us the flip-side of all this interconnectivity and raised questions about “global” finance that have only grown shriller with each passing year. The stories of local communities devastated by profligacy and corruption thousands of kilometres from their shores became a poignant theme of the times, and questions about “global” corporations, their paths to high profits, their supply chains, and the costs of those supply chains grew ever more urgent.
In India, the 26/11 terror attacks on the country’s financial capital by Pakistani terrorists was a sharp turning point from cheering peaceniks demanding “uninterrupted, and uninterruptable” talks with Pakistan. The mood soured further when the man who America had started two devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to find, and who was the mastermind behind the 9/11 Twin Towers attack, was discovered in Pakistan, America’s great “frontline ally” in the war against terror.
In the decade that followed three things forced countries to turn more acutely towards crisis at home rather than pursuing global integration—several economies including in the West struggled to recover adequately from the 2008 downturn, and many communities, especially in rural areas, were increasingly neglected, with growing financial despair, joblessness, and wage stagnation. In both the UK and the US, wages had stagnated especially for the lowest income wage-earners for around three decades till 2019—even though C-Suite salaries grew exponentially. Second, the elimination of Osama bin Laden did not end global wars or Islamism, in fact, the next wave was led by the rise of ISIS and the spread of Islamist violence at the very heart of Western (and non-Western) cities. Paris, in a sense, has never been the same after the Charlie Hebdo murders in 2015, and the crackdown on Islamists’ cells across the Western world only triggered greater spread of Islamist terrorism including infiltration of Islamist ideology in politics, academia, and the media. And third, simultaneously, a trend of global immigration of relatively low checks and balances was growing, and what started out as a humanitarian good, soon became an uncontrollable tidal wave which brought hitherto unknown issues like gang violence onto the streets of the most unlikely cities, for instance, Malmo in Sweden, and terror attacks at the centre of some of the world’s most cosmopolitan-proud areas, like central London.
All the wars, all the violence, all the terrorism which had, till now, had mostly been happening somewhere else, to someone else, was now happening in the neighbourhood and to communities of some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. Everything that had been comfortingly global, had become searingly, unnervingly, local. There were no escaping consequences of decisions taken far away, no ignoring radical voices as “stray” at home. It was word “lit” had entered the slang dictionary around the 2010s, and by the turn of the decade, many localities in the West (and elsewhere) were lit—often quite literally.
The term “lone wolf” attack emerged, but there was a certain wilful disbelief even in the introduction of this term. It suggested independently motivated terrorists because these men (they were almost always men) were not officially part of terror organisations. But what many could not understand was that official affliction did not matter, what mattered was adherence to the toxic ideology. The globalisation of Islamist radicalisation had made every attack quite local in places and ways that had never been imagined.
The victory of Donald Trump upsetting what had been seen as a sure shot transition from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton should have been a wakeup call on dealing with the anxiety and the crisis—instead what happened was demonising any shift from the “global agenda” was described as “tribalism” and Trump’s loss four years later was seen as the “end of the nightmare”. But that crowds had been willing to rampage Capitol Hill unwilling to accept Trump’s defeat should have given pause. It should have been asked—was there really a consensus about issues like immigration, Islamist violence, radicalization, and financialization of every aspect of the economy? Was there really consensus for the unchecked immigration that countries like Germany and Sweden allowed? Were there people whose everyday lives were being dramatically impacted, who were not getting a seat on the table to express their worries? Were personal pronouns really the most urgent issue to be vocalized and enforced across academia? Should issues like puberty blockers and sex change be matters that should impact school children, some of whom are not even teenagers? It is important to decolonise, but is it really true that most people would be happy to have all their national heroes torn down? And in countries which suffered colonialism, was it “authoritarian” to question persistent colonial structures?
Such questions, if asked, led to accusations of racism, fascism, and worse. What should have been a time for trying to find middle ground became a time of deeper fracturing.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic which crushed any last illusions of “global-ness”. When countries deprived others of vaccine to save countless lives, how could they argue for any worldwide agenda? When institutions were shown to have lied to cover up the source of the virus even when confronted with a historic medical crisis, how could those institutions be trusted? And what about Western companies pushing vaccines upon less prosperous nations which had not been comprehensibly tested?
The pandemic tore up the last easy assumptions about global cooperation. Everything from supply chains to academic agenda had to return to listen to voices on the ground, local voices, which were actively rejecting any utopian internationalism. The pandemic and its aftermath showed the weakness of countries, raising questions of defence and protection which had, in a sense, not been asked since the Second World War. The war in Ukraine, and the subsequent one in Gaza, has made all these questions frontline. Countries now have to think of their individual protection capabilities and not rely easily on others (think Japan on America, for instance). Energy sources have to be resilient, as must supply chains of vital goods. There is renewed vigour of manufacturing at home, and not elsewhere. Sovereignty issues, once again, are more important than cost benefits.
Globalisation is not dead, of course. But the globalist is more threatened and under pressure than ever. Local questions will dominate discourse, especially with the second Trump victory, and narrative, for near future. There is a deeper understanding that without individual comprehensive strength and security, the global chain is weak, and unless global institutions undergo comprehensive reform, they cannot hope to represent the future of the world.
We used to be globalists. We are all localists now.
* Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at O. P. Jindal Global University, and co-founder of the foreign affairs platform, Global Order.