Three books that help us understand the Trump age

When Donald Trump first became President of the United States (US) in 2016, American commentators dismissed him as an aberration.

- Pramit Bhattacharya

Trump was a historical anomaly in America's great democratic tradition, they claimed. Such claims ring hollow after Trump's emphatic victory in the recent American elections.

Trumpism's effects will be felt globally. Trump's efforts to raise trade barriers will provoke retaliation from other major economies, not just China. His rhetoric against immigrants will encourage nativist politicians across the world to scapegoat minority groups. And his explicit "America First" policy stance will restrict the space for multilateral negotiations on a wide variety of issues, not just the climate crisis.

To deal with this, we must first understand the driving forces behind Trumpism. Three books written by three very different authors can help us in this endeavour.

The first book was written at the fag end of World War II by Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian-Austrian who left Europe to escape the horrors of Nazism. In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi argued that throughout human history, markets had been "embedded" in society, governed by social mores and customs. The first wave of globalisation in the latter half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century sought to delink markets from their social moorings. People's ability to find a job or purchase the basic necessities of life seemed to depend on the distant and abstract world of high finance. This led to a counter-movement aimed at subjugating the market economy to societal or national rules.