The coronavirus didn’t mark the end of globalization. It accelerated a malign trend that was already underway.
Yes, the European travel ban is a peculiarly Trumpian flourish. It is hard to imagine any previous president issuing a decree so far removed from scientific advice. President Trump is using the same formula that worked for him in the 2016 election — large and theatrical gestures rather than targeted and efficient ones.
Just as building a wall does nothing to tackle the chief source of illegal immigration (visa overstays), so a travel ban aimed at a group of countries with, in many cases, less serious COVID-19 outbreaks than the United States is more symbolic than pragmatic.
Still, Trump wouldn’t be acting this way if it were not popular. In a crisis, people want to pull up drawbridges. It is how our archaic fight-or-flight response works in modern conditions. As the actual illness, rather than fear of the illness, spreads, the mood will harden. Psychologists have observed that when we are suffering from a cold or flu, we become warier in our outlook and more authoritarian in our politics.
Of course, “more authoritarian” means different things in different contexts. In Medieval times, people might have responded to a plague by murdering suspected witches or persecuting religious minorities. Those things are harder to imagine in a modern, open society.
Then again, 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine American leaders issuing arbitrary travel bans or provoking needless trade wars. The intellectual climate is shifting. People and politicians are becoming more closed, more pessimistic, more protectionist.
When Marco Rubio dropped out of the presidential primaries in 2016, he observed ruefully that “no one wants optimism at the moment.” He has evidently taken his own advice. The cheerful, inspiring Rubio who brightened that campaign has been replaced by an altogether gloomier fellow who keeps prating about the betrayal of blue-collar workers and the outsourcing of American jobs.
Nor is Rubio in any sense an outlier. The consensus behind free enterprise and open markets that held sway in both parties in the 1990s and 2000s has given way to something more introverted and ill-tempered. Among Democrats, it takes the form of quasi-socialism. Among Republicans, it tends to be expressed as skepticism about “free market fundamentalism.”
In a remarkably short time, the GOP has gone from free trade to qualified protectionism, from deficit reduction to high spending, from free enterprise to state intervention. Not every Republican, of course. There are still plenty of conservatives who believe in limited government and personal liberty, among whom Sen. Pat Toomey stands in a place of special honor. But the tide is against them.
Listen, for example, to the youngest member of the Senate, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, who tears into what he calls “market worship,” blaming it for the “collapse of community.” Or to Oren Cass, the scholar who, as recently as 2012, served as Mitt Romney’s economic adviser. He has now brought together a formidable group of rightists who campaign against “libertarian fundamentalists who see the free market as an end unto itself.”
A fundamentalist is someone who believes in things despite the evidence. A belief in free markets is the opposite of fundamentalism. In theory, there are all sorts of arguments for state intervention. It’s just that, in practice, they always end up making people poorer.
Is it really the case that free enterprise is failing? More Americans have jobs than ever before. In 2018, non-high-school graduates, the people who Cass and Hawley care about, saw 6% wage growth (the national average was a still pretty healthy 3%).
Yes, there are problems in parts of the U.S. But why blame them on capitalism rather than on, say, poor schools, family breakdown, substance abuse, or welfare dependency?
The idea of ideological libertarianism is almost a contradiction in terms. Libertarianism is a rejection of ideology — or, at least, a rejection of the notion that your ideology should be imposed on anyone else. It is rooted in the Madisonian observation that “that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”
The notion that the state is primarily there to protect our rights, not to take our stuff, has permitted more wealth to be created in one generation than had been in the previous hundred. This idea, alone, has enriched and elevated working people.
Never mind “common good capitalism.” Capitalism, or, to put it more neutrally, the absence of unnecessarily coercive or punitive laws, is the common good. We’ll miss it when it has gone.
