EDITORIAL: Trump’s new world disorder
SA should resist aligning itself more closely with Brics states — a pullback from the free movement of goods and services, capital and labour will undermine growth
If the Brexit vote came as a shock, the election on Wednesday of Donald Trump as the next US president is a bombshell, compounding a sense that the lights are going out everywhere on openness and modernity and globalisation, and even just a sense of simple decency. Just as Brexit revealed changes in UK society that the pollsters and the mainstream politicians had hardly noticed, so the US presidential election told a similar story, of the expansion of a deeply disaffected population of Americans, most of them white, working class and without college education, who feel left behind by globalisation and technological change. The US election results reflected deep divides between educated and uneducated, urban and rural, just as Brexit did. It reflected the desire of a very large group of Americans who, far from being horrified by Trump’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny and general brashness, were attracted by it because it represented a challenge to the American political establishment, ...
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