TPP's chances of survival brighter now

WHEN it comes to American politics, left-leaning progressives who have rallied behind socialist Senator Bernie Sanders during the Democratic presidential primaries, and right-wing nationalists who have been behind Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's electoral success, disagree on many policy issues.

How to respond to the challenge of climate change comes to mind (Trumpists believe that it's basically a hoax invented by liberal environmentalists). Identity politics is another issue over which they haven't found common ground (affirmative-action programmes being at the centre of the progressive agenda).

But then, left-wing populists, like their counterparts on the political right, seem to share a similar view of the world. They may hate each other, but are both targeting the same villains - the Elites in Washington, Wall Street and Brussels who supposedly control national and global economies as they try to spread the gospel of globalism and neo-liberalism by forcing democratically elected governments to bend to their will by signing new free-trade deals, by allowing capital to flow across borders, by scouring globally for cheap labour, and by homogenising national cultures and ways of life, transforming them into commercial products.