As that similarity reveals, tariffs and other trade restrictions are divisive across the political spectrum. High-profile, California-based donors had hoped a Harris administration would snuff out Joe Biden’s policy experiments which challenged globalisation. But some union-aligned Democrats still believe that a more effective leader could salvage Biden’s vision of a domestic manufacturing renaissance. The evolving politics of protectionism is bound to scramble traditional partisan alignments in this volatile era of geopolitics.

The great irony of the tariff debate is that Trump’s signature issue was largely stolen from Rust Belt Democrats. Although Trump’s nativist rhetoric and broadsides against “cheating”, not just by China but close allies, has alarmed the liberal foreign policy establishment over the years, his fundamental critique of free trade is not so different from the stance adopted by earlier Democrats.

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Can Donald Trump's tariffs fix America?

By Yanis Varoufakis

Between the late Sixties and early Eighties, a number of New Deal-style liberals dropped the Democratic Party’s historical support for trade liberalisation and turned toward full-bore protectionism. On top of advocating aggressive trade controls, these liberals focused on reindustrialising the Northeast and Midwest. The argument was essentially twofold: postwar trade agreements were destabilising wages and employment in once-flourishing manufacturing sectors while doing little to improve the welfare of exploited “sweat shop” workers abroad. This system of trade integration — engineered by import lobbies, US-based multinationals, and their bipartisan allies in Washington — represented what progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren later dubbed a “race to the bottom”.

The final iteration of this Left-protectionist vision, considerably watered down by the rise of tech-obsessed “Atari Democrats” and policy advisors like the young Robert Reich, received two fatal blows. First, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide re-election, and then Bill Clinton’s support for NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. But Rust Belt Democrats persevered for a time. As the China Shock unfolded, rising Democratic stars like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, a “progressive” economic nationalist, proved critical to the Democratic Party retaking Congress in 2006 and staying competitive in the industrial heartland.

There was hope among economic progressives that Barack Obama would use his formidable 2008 victory to pursue fair trade. Yet momentum behind reforms to globalisation stalled abruptly under his presidency. After the 2009 auto bailout, his administration mostly resumed the path charted by Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. And by 2015, the Trans-Pacific-Partnership, another technocratic free-trade agreement, was on the horizon. The opening was Trump’s to seize.

Of course, Trump’s haphazard efforts to reorder global trade occurred in a different economy than the one which had vexed old-school liberals. The new politics of protectionism also took place in a country much more polarised by region — and one in which the parties had largely swapped their geographical orientations, if not quite their policy commitments. That had a strange effect on how the parties responded to the tariffs introduced by Trump’s trade ambassador, Robert Lighthizer. Republicans who supported the old Washington Consensus on globalisation drew their strength from the Midwest and the South, regions that were now suffering the most from trade shocks. Meanwhile, the Democrats, once a vehicle for both the South’s development and industrial workers, handily dominated the Northeastern and Pacific coasts — affluent hubs that had long since turned the corner on industrial decline.

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The Left has forgotten its philosophy

By Justin H. Vassallo

The basis for a coherent industrial strategy was stymied by this evolution in the party system. Trump’s unique coalition of ex-Democrats and populist independents did not fit easily in either party’s tent. Although Democrats retained some loyalty in ailing manufacturing districts, they increasingly represented highly educated metro areas that had benefitted most from the tech boom and globalisation. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan’s Republicans, for their part, were reluctant to drop their faith in free-trade, even though the party’s new working-class base opposed it and even though the GOP historically had been the party of industrial protectionism. Despite working-class voters’ longstanding support for a new approach to trade, the dominant wings of both parties treated tariffs and similar measures as anathema to America’s global leadership.

These dynamics further constrained the rise of a protectionist bloc in Congress during Trump’s first term. While House Democrats worked closely with Lighthizer on the USMCA, NAFTA’s replacement, mainstream liberal discourse routinely mocked Trump’s declaration that he was a “Tariff Man”. Besides the political risks of “agreeing” with Trump on trade during the high tide of the “Resistance”, national Democrats were hesitant over whether to try to win back white industrial workers or harness identity politics to mobilise the so-called “rising American electorate”. Under Biden, the pendulum swung toward the former strategy. This vindicated Rust Belt Democrats like Senator Brown who had pleaded with the party establishment to revise trade policy and decisively counter China’s export model. By then, however, the architects of Bidenism were conjuring a New Deal electorate whose remnants no longer trusted Democrats to deliver on trade. Inflation, meanwhile, had irreversibly soured many voters on the economy, sapping the positive impact of policies decades in the making. Brown and a handful of other red- and purple-state Democrats were among the casualties on election night.

The odds of deeper collaboration between protectionist Democrats and the incoming administration are hazy at best. The ranks of the former are now diminished, while the Wall Street types jockeying for influence are plainly allergic to a populist, pro-manufacturing agenda. As signalled by his pick of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to lead the Treasury Department, Trump may simply resort to using the threat of new tariffs as a bargaining tool, rather than building on Biden’s more interventionist approach to long-term investment.

If Trump flounders, Democrats may once more have a window to argue they have the vision and the policies to rebuild an egalitarian economy. A nascent group of younger House Democrats who managed to fend off the GOP in parts of the Rust Belt are turning up the dial on economic populism, arguing for both more corporate oversight and more support for manufacturing. Along with Minnesota’s Ken Martin, a populist contender to chair the Democratic National Committee, these Democrats have not disowned Biden’s economic agenda. But they have reproached the party’s liberal elite and media allies, whose blithe view of the economy’s true health betrayed a maddening condescension toward discontent workers.

Blue-city progressives, meanwhile, are at a crossroads: with the purported rise of the “Trump-AOC voter”, they must come to terms with a multiracial electorate that defies easy categorisation on cultural issues and economics. But it is doubtful they can simply shed their close association with doctrinaire identity politics, much as they might find it advantageous to ally with the Rust Belt populists and emphasise workers’ top concerns. For now, both factions are a minority in a party whose internal disagreements on trade and industrial policy cut across its Left and centrist flanks.

Ultimately, any potential reconfiguration of the Democratic Party toward Left-protectionism won’t be possible without an overhaul of its national political strategy. Yet, under its present, ageing leadership, the party’s geographical woes seem insurmountable. Establishment coastal liberals tend to recoil from tariffs, and their potential heirs, in marked contrast to both the populists and the progressives, are mounting a new defence of globalisation. Until a new crop of Democrats forcefully champion left-behind America, the party will remain embattled — and estranged from the liberalism which once gave it purpose.

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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By Aris Roussinos

Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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By Dorian Lynskey

If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

The landslide victory of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – or Amlo as he known – brings to an end the long-run dominance of Mexico’s pro-market PRI and PAN parties.

Although shaky on specifics during the campaign, Lopez Obrador has promised to transform Mexico. His critics fear a shift towards socialist autocracy, leading to ruinous decline à la Hugo Chavez. Supporters see a socialist saviour who will deliver the fair, safe and universally prosperous future they dream of. It is the populist tale of our age. His acceptance speech, though, hints at a more moderate middle way.

But regardless of the course he charts, the Mexican electorate has sent a resounding message: the status quo must end, change is needed.

What remains striking in this era of political realignment is the continuing failure of establishment politicians and pundits to adjust to this new normal. How many ‘upsets’ will it take before they accept that the demand for ‘change’ isn’t some mad cry for revolution, but the reasonable demand of electorates with legitimate grievances?

For while the severity of the three key issues which drove voters into the arms of Lopez Obrador are on a scale we in the West can hardly imagine, each of those drivers is nonetheless also behind the rise of populist politics in Europe and America.

Like UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Podemos’ Pablo Iglesias and Five Star’s Beppe Grillo, Lopez Obrador has presented himself as the ‘outsider’. And like his fellow populist leaders, he has pledged to overthrow the establishment. His criticism of the “mafia of power” proved a powerful rallying call in a country where corruption is endemic – votes are bought, public monies embezzled, and public contracts awarded to cronies.

Ordinary Mexicans, especially those outside the big cities, have had enough of an elite focused on lining their own pockets. It’s a familiar story.

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How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

In Spain last month, corruption forced the resignation of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, and a more general backlash against the establishment has seen the rise of socialist populist party Podemos. In Italy, the populist Five Star Movement has built its platform in opposition to the corruption at the heart of Italian politics.

Across Western democracies, the people are revolting against what they see as self-serving, clubby elites. When Trump promised to “drain the swamp” we all knew what he meant – even if he doesn’t appear to be following through with it.

Lopez Obrador’s promise to clean up politics also came with a commitment to invest in social programmes – funded by the savings from his anti-corruption crusade. Echoes, perhaps, of the domestic investment promised by Brexiteers once the EU gravy train is halted.

Which brings us to the second driver of voter behaviour: poverty and inequality.

By Mexico’s own measure, half of its population live in poverty. In a country with a relatively new and burgeoning middle class, the gap between the haves and have-nots is stark. And, as is the case in many countries, that economic division is mirrored geographically, with high levels of deprivation in the South of Mexico in comparison with a relatively prosperous North.

Just as stagnating wages, insecure work and high levels of income and wealth inequality have called into question the efficacy of capitalism in the West, many in Mexico are questioning the wisdom of economic liberalisation and free trade.

NAFTA (the free trade agreement between America, Mexico and Canada signed in 1993) may have led to billions of dollars of foreign investment for Mexico, and a dramatic surge in exports, but not everyone benefited.

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By Charlotte Pickles

Border cities (and big business) boomed, while the rural South suffered – by 2007, Mexico had experienced a net loss of two million farming jobs. Average incomes in Mexico barely changed under NAFTA, and six in ten Mexicans still work in the informal economy. The higher paying, higher skilled jobs that were created didn’t neatly replace those jobs that were lost – a problem all too familiar to Rust Belt America and deindustrialised Northern Britain.

It is unsurprising that Lopez Obrador’s promise to redistribute the wealth and rein in big business proved so popular – just as Jeremy Corbyn’s promise did in Britain. Even the staunchest defender of free trade must recognise that globalisation has its limits, and domestic policy should seek to mitigate its harsher impacts.

The third issue driving the desire for change was, in a country notorious for its drug cartels and the violence they perpetrate, security. In 2017, Mexico recorded its highest death toll since records began. 2018 isn’t looking any better – almost 3,000 people were murdered in the single month of May, that’s pushing 100 deaths per day.

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Successive PRI and PAN governments have proved powerless to stem the violence with their law and order ‘solutions’ (PAN President Felipe Calderon’s military-led war on the drug cartels saw the death toll rise). Lopez Obrador is pledging a new approach: an amnesty for drug traffickers. Crazy as that might sound, for a terrorised nation, exhausted from decades of failed initiatives, a change of tactic is exactly what people are looking for.

Even here there are parallels with Europe and America, where, although for very different reasons, security is a growing concern. A recent YouGov poll asked citizens in 11 European countries what they thought the top two issues were facing the European Union: they were terrorism and immigration (though domestic issues were of much greater concern at a personal level).

The devastating spate of terrorist attacks through 2016 and 2017 appeared to show that governments could not perform the first priority of any state: keeping its citizens safe. And populist leaders were quick to jump on those fears – France’s Marie Le Pen has railed against “Islamism”, and Trump made a Muslim travel ban a key campaign pledge.

In Germany, the 2016 New Year’s eve Cologne attacks triggered the anti-immigration backlash that has helped propel AFD into the centre of German politics. And the populist Sweden Democrats are gaining ground, helped by rising violence which is being tied to immigration.

Significant portions of electorates across the West have lost faith in the establishment’s approach to security and are turning to more radical options.

Mexico’s problems are the West’s writ large.

Lopez Obrador’s 30-point win over his nearest rival appears to give the Leftist a clear mandate for change, but it is not yet clear that his party – Moreno – will win a majority in congress. If they do, it will be the first time that a Mexican president has commanded a legislative majority since 1997, and his ability to implement a more radical set of reforms will be significantly increased. And that, of course, is scaring the establishment horses.

In the aftermath of the British vote to leave the EU in 2016, the British Pound took a hit, just as the weakening of Angela Merkel’s grip and the rise of the far-right in last year’s German elections saw the Euro dip. In Mexico, as the scale of Lopez Obrador’s victory has become apparent, the Peso wobbled. The global markets – and their Davos backers – do not like disruption.

But disruption is exactly what voters in Mexico, and across Western democracies, are demanding. Disparaging the call for change as ‘populism’ is arrogant and counter-productive. If, instead of hurling insults, the establishment and one percenters had paid their fair share of tax, invested in re-skilling and decent wages, and acted like responsible economic stewards rather than drunken casino goers, the status quo may just have been palatable.

Until they realise that, populist leaders – like Lopez Obrador – will keep winning. And that, of course, is the beauty of democracy.

Further reading

How Latin America's Pink Tide turned

By James Bloodworth