JOHN BRUMMETT: Reasons for hope

"History has never set any precedent that an empire is capable of governing the world forever."

What that means is that, so far, dominance of the world has been a matter of phases and stages, circles and cycles.

The quotation, appearing on Page One in Sunday's New York Times, is from the writings of Jin Liqun, a Chinese economist and politician. He now leads the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, which envisions itself as a competitor or even usurper of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Liqun is saying that the world order as existing since the American-led formation of alliances mostly with Europe after World War II, and which has generally ruled the globe for the last 70 years, would seem by the lessons of history to be susceptible inevitably to lapsing like every world order coming before.

The Times used the quotation in an article wondering whether the United Kingdom's voter decision last week to pull out of the European Union portends the thing the Chinese economist invokes.

Is the world order as America and Western Europe reset it after 1945, and which fed democracy and great prosperity and might while winning the Cold War, at risk of breaking up?

The question is being raised not only in England, but also in the United States.

A reckless and egomaniacal demagogue named Donald Trump has won the Republican presidential nomination. He says such things as that Americans must so prioritize their own internal interest that maybe they'll pull out of NATO and tell Japan and South Korea to make their own nuclear weapons if they're worried about North Korea. He also says that maybe the United States would offer creditors a settlement of less than what we owe them.

He plies the time-honored practice of the political demagogue, which is to exploit understandable fear--of a global economy, of free trade, of cultural integration, of a changing way of life--to demonize everything outside national borders.

Thus he seeks not to overcome fear but to yield to it. He wants to galvanize that fear in his own ego-driven interest.

Please understand that the fear--in the United States and the United Kingdom--is well-founded. So is the anger, which psychologists tell us is the same as fear.

Perfectly fine people, playing by the rules, learned a manufacturing craft and earned a living for their families, only to see the manufacturing plant close for cheaper overseas labor as the economy restructured into one favoring the favored and transcending national boundaries.

But retrenchment, nativism, nationalism, isolationism, exclusion and reactionary politics--history also tells us those tempting and emotional reactions not only don't work, but prove corrosive and dangerous.

If you've been playing by the rules and responsibly putting aside as much as you can afford in an individual retirement account with a typical allocation to equity funds, then you lost about 3 percent of it Friday. It happened because U.K. voters, by 52 percent, voted to retrench and isolate.

Investors want as clear and certain a view of what's to come as possible. The mere intimation of a threat to the existing world order causes them to--guess what?--retreat, retrench, disengage, isolate.

Through all this anger and fear, there is hope.

For one thing, literally millions of Brits have indicated they made a protest vote to leave the EU, didn't understand the full essence, and would like a revote.

The second thing is that, alone, the U.K. action is containable. Adjustments can be made. Three percent can be re-earned.

The third is that America has a different political demographic from the United Kingdom, possessing greater diversity and less resistance to inevitable change.

The fourth is that Trump is down 51-39 in one of the latest polls because he is such a flawed human being that he can't take advantage of a prevailing mood that ought to work to his favor.

Actually, there's a fifth reason for hope. It's that Trump doesn't believe a lot of what he says and wouldn't, if elected, get many of the nonsensical declarations about which he rants and raves actually accomplished.

So we can balance that hope against these worries: that the U.K. vote was a harbinger of more national separatism to come elsewhere in the European Union; that Trump's campaign is repairable though his temperament may not be; and that the only thing standing between him and us is the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who is experienced and competent but flawed and shop-worn and deeply uninspiring.

Seventy years seem much too few for this post-World War II world order. That's barely the blink of an eye.

Democracy, a socially conscious capitalism, international alliance, economic evolution and ethnic and racial tolerance--we need to stay on the ship in service to those principles and objectives, not jump overboard in fear of them.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/28/2016

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