IN A trenchant, unapologetically centrist Essay for The Economist Barack Obama has urged the next president to shun the “crude populism” being peddled by both the right and the left, and to ensure that the American economy remains open to the world.
In what is, in effect, an open letter to his successor on how to navigate a time of voter rage, Mr. Obama argues that politicians calling for “anti-immigrant, anti-innovation protectionism” are forgetting an all-American principle—that when businesses remember the common good as well as profits, and free markets avoid unhealthy concentrations of power: “capitalism has been the greatest driver of prosperity and opportunity the world has ever known.”
No living politicians are named, but the open letter contains unmistakable rebukes for Hillary Clinton’s recent, campaign-trail flirtations with anti-trade rhetoric, as well as swipes at those—starting with Bernie Sanders on the left, and Donald Trump on the right—who call the American economy rigged, and demand it be rebuilt. The economy is “an enormously complicated mechanism,” he cautions. Such radical moves as breaking up big banks or “erecting prohibitively steep tariffs on imports” would have serious real-world consequences.
Mr. Obama, a professorial, hyper-rational sort, does not conceal his dismay at an election season that has seen so many voters—notably working-class Americans without college degrees—rally to candidates insisting that their country is a dystopian hell of corruption and government incompetence, or promising to restore past glories. Perhaps no other country has benefited so much from immigration, trade and innovation, he notes. Yet populists are now promising “a return to a past that is not possible to restore.”
Indeed, in a veiled comment on the way that Mr. Trump has wooed white men and downplayed past battles against racial and gender discrimination, Mr. Obama adds that for lots of Americans, those past glories “never existed at all.”
With just months left in office the president is naturally keen to defend his own legacy. He duly argues that government actions in the wake of the financial crisis saved the world from a second Great Depression. But the essay is most striking for the candid advice it offers to the next holder of his office, and for the middle-path it treads between scolding elites and exhorting them to remember their responsibilities to society.
He even offers expressions of regret that so many highly educated youngsters—“potential physicists and engineers”—instead spend their careers “shifting money around in the financial sector”. He suggests that wages gaps were once constrained by social interactions between bosses and employees “at church, at their children’s schools, in civic organizations”—interactions that he calls now sadly rare.
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