Washington Is The New Moscow

This text is mainly an elaborate mea culpa from two neoliberal scholars, one of them being Robert Keohane (among the most influential political economists). The authors admit that the liberal order they dedicated their academic lives to is rigged and doesn't work for the average Joes and Janes. That's certainly true and very well laid out in the text, but at this point it's also certainly no epiphany.

What caught me was a rather short detour on the phenomenon of "othering":

"Social psychologists have demonstrated the crucial importance of 'othering' in identity formation, for individuals and nations alike: a clear sense of who is not on your team makes you feel closer to those who are. The fall of the Soviet Union removed the main 'other' from the American political imagination and thereby reduced social cohesion in the United States."

A huge chunk of a generation was fed continuous news of a booming global economy and domestic (urban) pockets of innovation and wealth, but what those people personally experienced was stagnation or worse. If you are among "them" you certainly don't feel politicians are on "your team". They are the opponent. For populists, Washington is the new Moscow. The same, of course, is true the other way around: 

"Even as communications technology has connected people as never before, different social classes have drifted further apart, becoming almost alien to one another. And since cosmopolitan elites were doing so well, many came to the conclusion—often without realizing it—that solidarity just wasn’t that important for a well-functioning democracy."

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