The 2016 presidential election of the US and Brexit dealt fresh blows to the liberal democratic governing system and market economy. Brexit challenged the idea of a common European market and demanded a British identity1, which was going against the idea of pooling its sovereignty with the other European nations. The election of Trump in 2016 was also equally remarkable as Trump promised the “America First” protectionist policies against free trade and globalisation, which the US championed in the 1990s with North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the commitment to a broader Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Once elected, Trump renegotiated NAFTA, withdrew the US from TPP, and started a costly trade war with China. By 2016 the golden era of globalisation was already over. Globalisation was weakened by a global financial crisis, and it was under attack in its own architect countries in the 1980s under the Reagan-Thatcher period. The economic literature produced many influential papers linking the rise of populist nationalism in the UK and US with the distributional and adjustment costs of trade-localised import competition, unemployment, wage inequality, and reduced wages-austerity measures, and the inadequacy of state funds for trade adjustment packages2. Fukuyama goes deeper, identifying the link between the human mind and the

1O’Rourke (2018) provides a rich account of Brexit. 2In the 1990s and the early 2000s, import competition from developing countries was not considered a threat to wages and employment in developed countries. However, with China’s phenomenal rise after the accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), studies showed that trade generated costsdistributional and adjustment-in addition to the benefits in the advanced economies. Read Autor et al.(2016) for a comprehensive review. The electoral effect of the import competition in developed countries is also well investigated in the economic literature (Autor et al., 2020; Colantone & Stanig, 2018; Wijesinghe, 2020)