These are times of deliberate dramatic change, as witnessed by the “Liberation Day” tariffs, which shook the world and introduced uncertainty into markets.
Everyone is trying to make sense of this policy’s back-and-forth changes. Both opponents and supporters admit that it lacks a clear purpose and specific goals.
This dramatic change is not a mere adjustment in trade policy. It is an effort to be free of a global system now seen as onerous and exhausting. That explains the desperate situation where leaving the system becomes much more important than the policy’s consequences.
A House with a Gas Leak
The situation might be likened to people inside a comfortable house with a gas leak that gradually poisons them. Once discovered, those inside seek to get out of the house by any means possible, even if it means breaking down the door or crashing through a window.
The desperate people do not concern themselves with these damages or the dangers that lie outside. All they can see is the need to get out of the toxic home. They want out of the frying pan and are not immediately concerned about the fire.
Leaving the Liberal Order
And so it is with the global liberal order. It has produced unprecedented wealth and opportunities. It can be comfortable inside. However, it has also created discontent, contradictions and resentments, which, like a gas, are poisoning society.
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Many have identified this gas as liberalism, which is gradually reaching threatening levels of concentration. It manifests itself in ever more radical forms like that of wokism, climate alarmism or gender ideology.
Producing Polarization
It also manifests itself in polarization. Indeed, the values-neutral liberalism has produced polarization by its refusal to take definitive stands on moral issues.
Under its present regime, nothing can be declared morally right or wrong. Thus, people are forced to live amid the most blaring contradictions, especially on the sexual hot-button issues.
It is a society where all speech is equal, be it pornography, blasphemy and sublime prayer. Any relationship can be called a family. Any gender can be invented.
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Life together becomes intolerable as this polarization increases between those who accept the absurd and those who don’t. People can no longer take it and want out.
An Economic Order With Contradictions
The liberal economic order also has its contradictions and imbalances. Unleveled economic playing fields like those with China have done much to harm and undercut national economies. Individualism and unbridled consumerism have eroded culture and virtue.
The power of big capital and big media also contributes to the problems by spreading woke doctrines and disastrous ESG mandates. Many want out of these financial straitjackets and don’t care how it happens.
Thus, some voices are calling for bringing down the whole social and economic liberal establishment.
Like the people in the room with the gas leak, they want out regardless of the consequences. Rather than fix the leak, they break down the doors and crash through the window. The target is not the tariffs but the system.
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Not About Tariffs
Thus, Liberation Day tariffs are not really or only about trade and tariffs. They are a pretext for dismantling the postwar global order, which many populists now see as onerous. Tariffs are tickets out of one noxious world and an entrance into another unknown place, full of its own dangers.
In the short term, some call for turning down the heat in the frying pan by cutting deals and making trade concessions. The effect of these policies will be a decoupling from the vast system undergirding the global economy and its eventual unraveling into a multipolar world.
However, the real problem is how to deal with the blazing fires of antagonism, contradiction and resentment that threaten the world order. In the maddened dash through the broken windows, few discuss how to resolve the moral questions that have polarized the world.
Meanwhile, as many exit the frying pan, the mysterious dangers of a post-liberal fire remain undefined.
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