Snap out of the win-win fantasy of liberal democracy

Washington

FEW analysts expected Britons to vote to exit the European Union or Americans to choose Donald Trump as their next president. Yet it did not take long for a consensus explanation of these miscalculations to emerge. When it comes to such complex and consequential developments, however, we should beware of facile reasoning.

The current consensus blames the "elites" - in academia, media, and business - for becoming so caught up in their relatively cosmopolitan and connected world that they failed to listen carefully to less educated and connected groups. Because the latter groups are those that have benefited the least from globalisation, they were the most likely to reject supranational institutions (in the case of "Brexit") or establishment candidates (in the case of Mr Trump). Ignoring them was, in many ways, an obvious mistake.