The Modern Anti-Globalization Movement: Clear, Simple, and Wrong
I first conceived Defending Globalization late last year after reading yet another mainstream piece lamenting cross-border trade and migration—and just butchering some basic facts in the process. In the all-too-common retelling of recent history, quasi‐religious devotion to “market fundamentalism” among “global elites” singlehandedly drove decades of unfettered and ever‐increasing global integration, basically as if guys like Milton Friedman and Larry Summers cooked up “globalization” in a 1990s lab somewhere—probably Davos—and then unleashed it upon the helpless and unwitting “working class” masses here and abroad.
Even worse, these misguided (nefarious?) “globalists” utterly failed to achieve the mass prosperity, peace, and democratization that they predicted, delivering instead poverty, joblessness, “deindustrialization,” economic fragility, geopolitical insecurity, and (probably) sad puppies—all while hollowing out the global middle class, destroying our communities, and fueling the now‐unstoppable rise of authoritarian regimes. Some folks have gone even further, claiming that globalization is primarily responsible for recent events—the rise of global populism and authoritarianism, the COVID-19 pandemic, marked changes in China’s economic and geopolitical trajectory, and so on—and now that we’re all finally waking up to this supposed reality, the backlash will usher in the “death of globalization” and the return of localized economic activity (and, presumably, happier puppies).
In short, critics of globalization argue that we were promised the “end of history” but instead got empty store shelves, authoritarian invasions, and Donald Trump (and other populists)—problems that critics say only more protectionism, nativism, industrial policy, and even “deglobalization” can fix.
This anti‐globalization narrative is clear and simple. But, as the famous Mencken saying goes, it’s also mostly wrong—typically taking a nugget of truth and then wildly extrapolating a goldmine underneath. We’ve discussed a lot of this here at Capitolism over the years, but let’s quickly tick through some of the most prominent examples:
- Tariffs have surely declined around the world since the 1940s, but we hardly live in an age of “unfettered” trade, migration, and capital flows—as anyone even passingly familiar with the Jones Act, the anti-dumping law, U.S. green card obstacles, and sanctions can attest. Indeed, despite past policy liberalization, the United States maintains high tariffs or non-tariff restrictions on lots of goods (trucks, shoes, sugar, and dairy products, for example), subsidies to plenty of favored industries, a relatively low foreign-born share of its population, and high restrictions on trade in many services—whether performed here or transmitted digitally from abroad. When you consider these barriers collectively, the United States goes from “free market fundamentalist” to “yet another country that has a mix of liberalization and nationalist interventions,” and the U.S. economy isn’t nearly as “globalized” as Americans think.
- Manufacturing jobs have fallen a lot from their historic highs, but they’ve followed a similar long-term path in almost every industrialized nation in the world—including ones with active industrial and labor policies and persistent trade surpluses—and have steadily occurred despite myriad U.S. government efforts to reverse the trend. (We’ve actually gained more than 1 million manufacturing jobs since the Great Recession but remain a long way from the “mill town days” of decades past.) Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output still ranks second in the world overall (No. 1 in several major industries and among major manufacturing nations in terms of output-per-worker) and hovers at or near record levels.
- New foreign competition (imports, immigrants, etc.) surely has disrupted certain companies and workers that were once protected by government trade and immigration restrictions. But these same forces—yes, including those involving China—have also boostedliving standards, fostered innovation, and supported tens of millions of good jobs, including in manufacturing. And their indirect harms, while surely real, have been greatly outweighed by other, bigger economic and cultural factors. In recent years, fewer than 10 percent of non-working, prime‐age Americans report being out of work because they can’t find a job.
