1 week Ago
As I complete this column on Election Day, the outcome of the 2024 presidential race is unknown. Even if Donald Trump is defeated after the ballot count, however, the populist MAGA movement he inspired will be with us for years to come due to the rapid technological, economic and social changes sweeping the world. In his recent insightful book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present,” columnist and commentator Fareed Zakaria explores the history of populist movements over the past five centuries, explaining them as the almost inevitable byproduct of societal convulsions he dubs “identity revolutions.
” “Since the 16th century, technological and economic change have produced enormous advances but also massive disruption,” Zakaria writes. “The disruption and unequal distribution of its benefits stoke huge anxiety,” which, “in turn, leads to an identity revolution with people searching for new meaning and community.” In Zakaria’s view, disruptive technological innovations have enabled enormous leaps in economic wealth and cultural openness, which “have helped the vast majority of people live better lives, with greater control over their own identities.
” But they’ve also created economic winners and losers, with the losers feeling deep resentment over their diminished status and unease over the loss of traditional forms of authority, religion and community that disappear in the wake of disruption. This, in turn, precipitates social and political backlash against progress. Zakaria traces back the origins of this whipsaw cycle to the Netherlands’ economic miracle in the late 1500s.
Enjoying far greater political, religious and intellectual freedoms and a more urbanized, industrialized economy than the rest of continental Europe, still emerging from feudalism, the Netherlands pioneered innovations that made it the paramount commercial power of its age. Using wind-powered sawmills to cut timber and advances in cartography and navigational instruments, the Dutch built superior wide-bodied cargo ships that plied the world’s sea routes exploiting profitable trading opportunities. Their voyages were protected by armed naval escorts, financed by a newly invented stock exchange to share investment risk, and facilitated by a nascent central bank to exchange foreign currencies.
The capital city of Amsterdam became a wealthy, multicultural haven for talented and industrious Protestant refugees fleeing persecution by Catholic monarchs throughout Europe, thereby benefiting the Netherlands and creating a brain-drain in neighboring Catholic France. In a manner reminiscent of the present-day U.S.
, however, Dutch rural regions impoverished by urbanization became embittered, guilds (craft unions) pressed for protective trade laws, and large-scale immigration made many yearn for the days when the country was more ethnically homogeneous. With the country politically divided, French King Louis XIV was able to invade and rapidly overrun its cities in 1672, installing a conservative monarchy in place of the republic and stifling progress. Shortly thereafter, the Netherlands lost its edge to its economic rival, England.
The United States has been through a series of economic growth spurts, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 1860s, each of which has spawned its own populist movement. But the latest surge — a product of the internet and hyper-globalization of trade and travel (thanks to the advent of the shipping cargo container in 1956, transoceanic passenger jet flights in 1958, and a host of international trade treaties) — has discombobulated traditional society in so many ways that the populist backlash threatens to tear down the very structures that have provided Americans with unparalleled peace and prosperity since the end of World War II. We are unquestionably better off materially than Americans were in the early 1960s.
Our houses are larger, food and clothing consume a far smaller portion of our budget, information and entertainment are more widely available (much of it free), a greater number of households own motor vehicles, air travel is cheaper, a bigger percentage of the population graduates from college, and life-saving medical devices and drugs are available that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago. Not only that, but economic benefits are spread more broadly among Black and Hispanic Americans and women. But the combination of technology and globalization has caused severe dislocations.
It has, for instance, hollowed out auto manufacturing in Michigan, the steel industry in Pennsylvania and Indiana, coal mining in Appalachia, and papermaking in Maine, depriving many non-college educated men of good-paying jobs and a communal way of life. At the same time, it has created a rootless class of highly educated, technologically sophisticated men and women who have prospered in this environment but who identify less with their community, ethnicity and religion than with their education, occupation and recreational passions. The result is a deep divide between a disgruntled MAGA class, who fear further displacement from mass immigration, and a class of cosmopolitan, technocratic, self-satisfied elites.
Zakaria characterizes this as a clash between people who want to be from “somewhere” and those who are comfortable being from “anywhere.” This process is not just an American one. It has occurred around the globe.
Opportunistic leaders in countries like Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland have pandered to their citizens experiencing the painful effects of displacement by offering up authoritarian, Trump-like versions of populism. It’s nearly impossible to halt the juggernaut of progress unleashed by technology, short of imposing the kind of repressive crackdown being attempted in China. Furthermore, we’re at the cusp of yet another great technological leap forward as the result of artificial intelligence and bioengineering.
The challenge for the United States, in Zakaria’s opinion, is “to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart.” The alternative, he predicts darkly, is the collapse of modern civilization that “has given ordinary human beings greater freedom, wealth and dignity than any before it.” Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Shukie & Segovias in Lewiston.
His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 17 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.
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