Note on Trump

Trump is the symptom of 2 trends: The decay of public morality (which is the dialectic frame within which for and against are set); and the disruption of the nation state as a political and cultural layer of unity within a world where economic and information flows polarise different community of values.

The breakdown of public morality is due to the monoculture of neoliberalism as the dominant essential principle governing social and political relations, and the overextension of market morality to social domains. In particular, the loss of concepts of political virtue and stewardship, the breakdown of collective social institutions highlighted by Putnam, skewed incentive structures to capitalise on market structures, and individualism without individual wisdom or responsibility, has led to a failing public life.

On the disruption of the nation state, what is required in the long term is a structural review of the functions of the nation state and the terms which define its boundaries. What is needed in the short term is an institutional mechanism of pooling sovereignty over issue areas where global management is required without infringing on the areas where sovereignty is to be retained. This is a delicate task as communities are bound by total value systems as issue area bears consequences on another which may require sovereign control to preserve them. However the key mistake was that policymakers were unable to foresee the dislocations caused by globalised flows and to create global coordination tools to manage them. This was due in part to lack of convergence which makes common goals difficult, however tools of compromise was not created as they might have been. The goal for the medium term is to facilitate convergence in social conditions that enable global norms over a wider set of issue areas.