Trump’s era heralds not only the end of Globalization but also inevitably the Slow Death of Liberal Democracy
The West is kind of like the Weimar Republic of the 1930s.
By Joshua Tartakovsky, 4.11.2025
A few weeks after President Joe Biden got elected, I was visiting a Bohemian friend at a friendly city in Germany. I told her I feared that he won’t be assertive enough to pursue the right reforms needed to improve the lives of most ordinary Americans. I said it was inevitable that he will lose, due to his lack of confidence. She didn’t agree. She thought that Biden knows that Trump is waiting in the wings should he fail and therefore will do what is necessary so that the Republicans will not take over again. Biden is smart, she said. I didn’t think he was as smart as she thought he was, and even if he was smart, I didn’t think he was as courageous as he should be. Now, Trump is back in power.
It is said that a fool makes a mistake twice and then keeps repeating his mistakes while never learning from experience, never measuring his actions against an objective reality. I recently met a Canadian friend who believes that Trump will not win a third term, even if he runs as a vice president of JD Vance. Obama will also come, he said. People, he said, didn’t vote for Trump because of any fundamental reason. People just change their minds and move from one extreme to another without a material basis. He believes that in the third time, if it comes, Trump will not win support because people will see that his actions failed. He is wrong, I believe.
By this point, Trump created such a grassroots popular movement that no matter how hard things get, his followers will have his back. Additionally, Trump already showed his true colors in his first term, that the fact that he garnered support in the third try should be surprising to no one. People voted for him because of deindustrialization. The not-so-well-to-do Americans who live in what used to be industrial areas are now out of work or struggling to get by. Their jobs were shipped abroad, to Mexico, Canada, Asia, under Clinton’s liberal free-trade policies. Cost of living has been too high. The influx of migrants too big. People can accept some migrants when the economy is good. When the economy is bad, most normal people wonder, why do immigrants keep coming to their country if the economy is that bad? They may be an easy escape goat, but most people are not saints.
I used to attend lectures on globalization held by David Held at the London School of Economics. He predicted that globalization was pretty much inevitable. With his astute British accent he made us think he was holding a crystal ball, and could see the future that lay people could not grasp. According to this mindset, common among pro-globalization proponents anyone who opposed globalization was a relic of the past. Held had left the LSE and died since, so he did not live to see his dreams fall apart under the Trump era. But globalization is definitely and predictably over.
Germany which has been pushed into a culture of shame, in its previous incarnation as Nazi Germany suffered from over ten years of very harsh inflation. Under Nazi Germany, people resisted. There were nationalist generals who sought to assassinate Hitler. There were radical leftists who did their best to oppose him. There were people who tried to passively disobey. People in Nazi Germany faced death or imprisonment, usually death for going against the Führer, but they resisted him anyway. In the US, people do not face death for opposing Trump. Nor do they even face significant imprisonment. Moreover, Trump is not even exterminating migrants, he is merely deporting them. But the pseudo-liberals and pseudo-intellectuals who wrote books and books on how Trump was in fact as a fascist authoritarian, and how his election heralds the end of democracy, people like Timothy Snyder of Yale, have since escaped to the safe haven of academia in Toronto. If Trump is a fascist, why isn’t Snyder mobilizing the public to resist him, why is he leaving the US masses without the guidance of intellectuals? Meanwhile, many Americans who can are moving to Mexico. Mexico has always been open to accept people who make their way down to the south since the time of slavery. But liberal democracy will die faster in Canada, I think, then it will in Mexico, if it does. Canada has been facing neoliberal cuts to humanities and education since the 1970s, and this trend has not been reversed since. Maybe Canada now wants to give the finger to Trump by taking in a pundit like Snyder who opposes Trump in all his writings, but that doesn’t mean the Canadian academia will be on an hiring spree to hire many more Americans with a PhD under their arm who want to follow. Mexico will not see scenes of people attacking white immigrants, as Americans have attacked Asians, Chinese in particular, at least not now, when the economy is more or less stable, the government of Claudia Sheinbaum, following Amlo, has a generous policy of sending cash to workers who are not earning much, and the Mexicans, due to a deep inferiority complex and post-colonialism tend to generally view white people from the US and Europe as if they are the chosen people. Additionally, Mexico can assume a closer trade relationship with the BRICS and with the rest of Latin America. In fact, had Latin American leaders had more of a vision, they would have pursued a Latin American union, build train tracks throughout the continent, linking Mexico City to Santiago, and at the minimum, collaborated with Canada to mitigate Trump’s trade policies. But Canada does not want to align itself with the darker America, and Latin American leaders are mostly beholden to US pressure, and are generally corrupt with exceptions. The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well in America’s backyard, Latin America. And if Trump will start repression at home, even at the face of violent deaths, if he starts imprisoning or killing transgender people for instance, most Americans will not even bother to resist Trump even a fraction of how the Germans resisted Hitler.
Why is globalization over? And why is the death of liberal democracy inevitable, even if not immediate?
Trump has a genuine problem in his hands. The US is in huge debt, and the US is not producing as in the past. Most of the US economy is based on financialization and high-tech, and with high-tech, China is gradually taking the lead (DeepSeek), though it is not on par with the US (not yet and it still has a long way to go). The neo-liberal economy needed cheap workers who can produce cheap goods. All this was good, for a while. But then at some point, Asia, India and China in particular, started growing faster than the west would have liked. Without China, US cannot have cheap goods. Trump wants to recreate the US industrial base, but for that, he need to make foreign goods too expensive for the American buyer. Alternately, he can force other countries to agree to unfair agreements that would hamper their economic standards and create a master-slave relationship, but most foreign countries refuse to do that, especially China (note how China reciprocated with tariffs on the US while Colombia backed away very quickly). Globalization has been good for stock-holders, including myself, but not for workers. And AI is replacing most jobs. Even data programmers are in excess now since the supply over-exceeds demand as so many people bothered to learn data programing during Covid. So most of us have a big problem in our hands. In most western countries, in fact, in all of them, the rich are getting richer, the poor and getting poorer, and the middle class is dying. With these dreadful economic prospects, liberal democracy is dying too, because many people, the ones Hilary Clinton deemed a basket of deplorables, or Alternative for Germany voters who the German mainstream media terms Nazis, want to stop the influx of migrants, to assert national sovereignty in the face of chaos, and to buy cheap gas from Russia. The sanctions of Russia have caused Germany to deindustrialize rapidly, and have hurt German consumers. But Americans who supported Trump believe that the pain will be worth it, and that the economy will eventually improve, even though the US cannot re-industrialize again because automation has replaced workers, and many mainstream German voters believed that their pockets must suffer to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The problem is politicians often know that their populations are masochistic. Many Europeans don’t mind flying less due to alleged global warming just as many Germans don’t mind paying more while moralizing to Russia, and Trump has released many demons held prior in the bottle and has electrified his power-base so that his supporters are unlikely to wane anytime soon even if times get tough.
Globalization has been good for corporations and for the middle class, but globalization coupled by AI, in countries dominated by western governments who serve big businesses rather than the public, means that ultimately the majority of populations in all western countries will face the brunt, and that the middle class, the bourgeoisie, will start shedding money as well as its self-congratulating, virtue-signaling behavior in favor of open-mindedness and tolerance for the other. Things will get ugly, and quickly. But change of attitudes takes time, and for now people are worried but do not see the big picture that clearly.
Liberal democracy is already disappearing as JD Vance rightly noted at the Munich Security Conference. In France, Marin Le Pen has been barred from running as has the Romanian presidential candidate, Calin Georgescu. We will witness more and more cuts to the educational and health fields, and to any area that is not immediately profitable, because unrestrained capitalism naturally creates monopolies, because nothing can ultimately stop a powerful businessman from purchasing everything he wants to, including his competition, besides the court and governmental legislation (to this end the US supreme court has recently ruled against the Google search engine). The point that should be remembered is that all that has been happening now has been generally predictable. The economic crisis in Greece, showed that the western economy is not working, that liberal democracy is failing (the Syriza government rushed to accept Troika demands despite a popular referendum),and that a band-aid solution will not stop the bleeding, even if the bleeding emerges elsewhere in a different country of the global body in an interconnected economic system.
As Slavoj Zizek likes to say, welcome to the desert of the real. The show has just started.
What to expect then? Chaos, violence, collapse, the rise of populist parties, and the channeling of popular anger against particular populations because the western governments cannot solve the problem unless they join the Global South in fairer agreements. But they are not going to do so anytime soon.
If Trump nationalizes entire industries, provides fair wages, dismantles the corporations, and engages in win-win trade with China and India, if he engages in massive reconstruction of the country and hired people for projects, he can revive the US. But he has moving into privatization, rather than nationalization, just like Hitler. Additionally, Trump is merely reacting to a genuine economic problem that is much bigger than him, and as much as the New York Times may like to fret about him and columnists like Thomas Friedman and Brett Stephens take a righteous pleasure in losing their minds every day, the fact remains that the western economies are in a genuine mess and that Trump is doing what appears logical to him based on the rules of the market. And if this means that the US dollar will eventually become worthless and US products will be cheaper, so be it. The issue here is that Trump believes in Manifest Destiny, like most Americans, and thinks he can pull the US out of the quagmire. He wants the US dollar to continue to dominate, even as his policies make the US dollar weaker. He wants to strengthen Israel, an American ally, even though this may mean he will need to go to war with Iran, and even though he opposed wars during his election campaign, because he not only believes blindly in American greatness forever and ever but also because he is emboldened to Zionist donors who put him in power. Trump is destroying the global economy but it would have happened anyway with someone else, even someone worse. Trump may manage to avoid making a decision one way or another for a while. But at the same time he is also an accelerationist who is exposing the contradictions within the system. The problem is it has become too difficult to have a genuine debate in our day and age when people are addicted to social media and weren’t educated to refute an argument that offends them.
