Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned Monday that voters in developed nations are losing faith in authorities and experts, causing them to embrace counterproductive populist causes and candidates, such as Brexit and Donald Trump.
“I fear that there is a growing distrust of authorities in general,” Lew said in a question-and-answer session at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom.
Asked to distinguish populism from the normal democratic process, Lew said that “the idea that everything big is bad, the idea that the system can’t work for working people and you have to do things on a kind of class basis to right wrongs — I think that’s different.”
If experts and data are not trusted in making decisions about policy, he said, those decisions will be made emotionally, “and that worries me.” He cited the U.K. vote to leave the European Union, against broad opposition from economists, as an example of such a dynamic.
Without mentioning Trump by name, Lew also said that some populism is driven by a false sense that the past was better than the present. It is “a kind of nostalgia for something that may never have been exactly as people remember,” he said.
The U.S., he argued, cannot go back to the times of the 1960s and the 1970s because during that time Europe’s economy was still recovering from World War II, creating a unique but only temporary opportunity for American companies and workers in terms of exports.
On the campaign trail, Trump has frequently compared his own candidacy to the successful Brexit effort.
Lew argued that rather than blow up existing trade and economic arrangements, as he hinted that Trump would, the U.S. should make the case for trade.
Lew also suggested that the sense that wealthy individuals and corporations are gaming the tax system is feeding populism.
The government, he argued, must be active in trying to allay populist fears and in ensuring that specific individuals and groups are not left out of economic growth. “If we’re not seen to be addressing that, it is going to continue to feed the sense that democracy only works for part of the republic,” he said.
