20 yrs ago I spent 3 days in jail for protesting the WTO. Two decades later, a Republican senator is calling for its abolition. Not something I ever would've anticipated. The ideology of neoliberalism is already dead, it's just ambling along like a zombie. nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opi…
Hawley is only wrong about one thing: The US has not been a victim of the WTO, at least not as a nation-state. The WTO routinely and overwhelmingly rules in its favor. But that's the problem w using the nation-state as your metric unit: WTO has helped US investors, not workers.
The world has long been stratified into a transnational capitalist class unconstrained by borders and a working class very much constrained by them. That's how Chinese econ interests can be at once entirely in accord with those of the US and at the same time diametrically opposed
The pandemic more than anything is throwing these internal contradictions into astonishingly sharp relief. And as the econ fallout from it develops, it will cleave our politics in two.
Our narrow and ideologically destitute tribal two-party system cannot possibly accommodate the complexity of the debate to come. It's going to bust both parties into fragments, which could either save our democracy or destroy it.
