I lost my secure, well-paying manufacturing job to free trade with the People’s Republic of China, and all I got was this damn virus that killed Grandma — and shut down even the lousy, insecure service-industry gig the Chinese had left me.
Whether the political and journalistic classes like it or not, that’s how many working-class and left-behind Americans will politically interpret the events of the past couple of months.
And not just Americans, but similarly situated voters across the developed world: Britons who backed Brexit, Italians who support the populist League and Five Star Movement, Spaniards who pull for the nationalist Vox party and Frenchmen who’d take the arch-neoliberal Emmanuel Macron to the guillotine if they could. And on and on.
Which is why when this is all over — and please, God, let it be sooner than later — the populist uprising first launched in 2016 with Brexit and the election of President Trump will only gather strength and momentum.
Right now, populist (read: working class) voters are staggering under the viral weight of the COVID-19 and the economic side effects of the cure. They’re too scared and miserable to think about politics. But at some point, the virus will pass. Then, the full scale of the damage will become apparent — not only to their own lives and finances, but to their neighbors and communities.
That’s when anger — the most powerful passion of the demos — will set in. Whom will they blame? Whom will they make pay a price at the ballot box?
Perhaps a better question to ask is: Who set in motion a global order that made Americans (and Europeans) so vulnerable to a novel virus that jumped to humans from a certain species of bat at a disgusting bushmeat market in a Chinese city most hadn’t heard of until a few weeks ago?
The blue-check Twitterati no doubt wish to lay the blame at Trump’s feet. Hence the ludicrous gotcha journalism: If the president warns of rising suicides as a result of mass joblessness, diligent reporters will attack him for making baseless claims. And if the president says the sky is blue … .
Yes, Trump has had his predictable crisis-management shortcomings, from sending petty tweets at Mitt Romney to loose talk about quarantining New York. But fact is, to his voters, Trump remains an avatar of common sense about China and the whole utopian vision of a borderless world, in which every other good had to be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency and cheap consumer goods.
It wasn’t Trump, remember, who thought it was a good idea to deeply entangle our economy and way of life with a totalitarian Communist regime that, as we speak, keeps more than a million Muslims in “re-education camps,” a regime that harvests the organs of political prisoners and thinks nothing of hiding the truth about a highly contagious virus ravaging a city of 11 million.
No, it wasn’t Trump who did that. Our China entanglement was the handiwork of highly credentialed imbeciles, in Europe and America, who promoted the idea that national barriers were an impediment to human freedom and were bound to fade away with ever-deeper economic integration. (Oh, it helped that this model made a few large firms and financiers stupendously wealthy.)
Trump has always believed this was a recipe of despoiling downscale workers and destroying America’s manufacturing base. But don’t worry, the spokesmen of the borderless world reassured skeptics, if things go wrong, we could always turn to multilateral orgs and transnational bodies.
You mean, like the World Health Organization, which throughout the crisis has acted as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party? The same WHO that last month opposed travel bans, lest they “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade”?
If there ever was a glaring illustration that to preserve true freedom, we need some barriers, it is the novel coronavirus crisis of 2019-20. What a bitter irony: The utopian dream of free trade on every front, free movement through every boundary, ended up shuttering the playground next door and necessitated curfews against leaving our own homes.
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari