The greatest challenge to the sustainability of our current era of globalization comes from within the United States. The United States is at the center of global system. No single country has played a larger role in creating—and then cheerleading for—this era of global capitalism than has the United States. Yet most Americans have come to reject globalization: according to some polls, as few as forty percent of U.S. citizens believe that globalization is a force for good. As developing countries around the world came enthusiastically to embrace globalization, global capitalism began to face its fiercest critics in the developed world.
What can be done to restore the legitimacy of global capitalism within a country that, perhaps paradoxically, continues to embrace its national model of capitalism? We must discern the lessons from the parts of the developed world where the backlash is also profound—France, for example—and where it has been more muted—such as Germany.
Resolving these challenges has taken on an even greater urgency in the midst of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The American fiscal policy response has reproduced some of the American system’s inherent failings and allowed for the emergence of mass unemployment, while the German fiscal policy response has preserved both the stability of firms and employment patterns. Now more than ever we should examine how to cultivate the legitimacy of the system in the eyes of its citizens.