Elecciones USA

Tomado de

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/the-unknown-country

OPINION | CAMPAIGN STOPS

Paul Krugman: Our Unknown Country

 By PAUL KRUGMAN

COMMENT2016-11-08T22:58:01-05:0010:58 PM ET

We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks — incredibly, horribly — as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.

We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.

It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.

I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.

What’s the Biggest Fear of a Trump Presidency?

By DANI RODRIK

COMMENT2016-11-09T17:19:12-05:005:19 PM ET

The real costs of a Donald J. Trump presidency will most likely come on the political rather than on the economic side.

We are likely to see some rise in trade barriers and unilateral economic policies. But for all his bluster, I do not expect Mr. Trump to engage in indiscriminate protectionism. We live in a world of supply chains where imposing tariffs on Mexican or Chinese imports will raise costs of United States businesses and make it hard for them to compete. Mr. Trump is a businessman, and he will understand soon, if he does not now, the senselessness of blanket protectionism.

We may have plenty of trade disputes with foreign countries. It’s useful to bear in mind here the example of the 1980s, when trade frictions with Japan and other leading exporters produced a slew of so-called new protectionist barriers such as voluntary export restraints. But these did very limited damage to the world economy. Before long, the world embarked on a further and more intense round of globalization.

Furthermore, we have robust international institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, that did not exist in the interwar period. And the political lobbies in favor of an open economy (big business and banks) are stronger and retain considerable influence in Washington.

So even though the 1930s parallel is on everyone’s mind, I do not think we are in for a collapse of the international economic order and a retreat into trade war.

The real danger Mr. Trump poses is the undermining of our politics — the norms that sustain our liberal democracies. His campaign was based on a divisive politics of identity. Ideals of equity, equal rights, diversity and inclusion were submerged under the weight of a rhetoric that raised racial and ethnic tensions and inflamed passions against imagined enemies — Mexican immigrants, Chinese exporters, Muslim refugees.

Illiberal democracy has been the bane of several nations around the world. Under Mr. Trump, the traditions in the United States of checks and balances and of rule of law will be tested seriously.

The political danger will be greatly magnified by Mr. Trump’s likely economic failure. He comes into office as the putative leader of middle and lower classes who feel they have been left behind. He has raised their expectations in ways that he cannot meet. There is little chance that incomes at the middle and lower end of income distribution will receive a large boost under his policies. The manufacturing jobs that have left will not return no matter how tough Mr. Trump’s trade policies get. These jobs have disappeared for good, largely thanks to technological changes, and not trade.

When the full scale of his economic disappointment sinks in sometime during his term, Mr. Trump may well react in the time-honored fashion of global populists like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. To keep his base mobilized and insulate himself from economic troubles, he may take shelter in an intensified form of the identity politics that worked so well for him during the presidential campaign. This would rip American society further apart along racial and ethnic cleavages.

The ugliness that characterized politics during the presidential campaign may be nothing compared with what may be yet to come.

Dani Rodrik, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is the author of “Economic Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science” and “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy.”

Mexico and the U.S. Are Distant Neighbors, Again

 By ENRIQUE KRAUZE

COMMENT2016-11-09T09:43:29-05:009:43 AM ET

MEXICO CITY — “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” The comment, attributed to President Porfirio Díaz, has sometimes corresponded with reality, but never more than the present moment. Faith in a loving and present God has always pervaded the daily life of Mexicans. And despite the offenses inflicted upon them across almost 200 years of history, we Mexicans have not really resented the propinquity of the United States nor have we harbored violent nationalist feelings. On the contrary, as people to people, our relations have been fruitful, stable, cordial.

Not anymore. With Donald J. Trump’s electoral victory, every Mexican will have ample reason to entrust himself more closely to God (or the Virgin of Guadalupe) and prepare for a new war, certainly not military, but commercial, economic, ethnic, strategic and diplomatic.

Commercial, because Mr. Trump’s United States may exit Nafta or may impose high tariffs on our exports, to which Mexico will have to retaliate. Economically, if Mr. Trump actually tries to make Mexicans pay for his ridiculous wall by seizing or taxing the remittances of Mexicans working in the States, Mexico will have to respond that such action would be discriminatory and would have to apply to all other immigrants. Ethnic, because of the foreseeable rage that an enormous policy of expelling all undocumented immigrants would unleash, tearing apart families, turning neighbor against neighbor, inflaming differences of identity in the schools. Strategic, because of the disruption of life along the border that would result from even a partial construction of Mr. Trump’s wall.

Confronted with so hostile a government, Mexico could be tempted to cancel agreements that have functioned reasonably well, like our cooperation in matters of security, control of the flow of immigration from Central America or treaties on water rights. A degree of diplomatic tension we have not faced in at least 90 years would accompany the deluge of legal actions that Mexican businesses, individuals and groups — public and private — will start in the courts of both countries as well as internationally to defend their interests.

For Mexico and the United States, Mr. Trump’s victory is a great tragedy. Beyond their governments, Mexicans and Americans have been very good neighbors. Every day, a million people and 370,000 vehicles cross our mutual frontier in an orderly and peaceful manner at 57 border crossings.

Among the many lies spewed by Mr. Trump during his campaign, few were more infamous than his initial assault on the Mexican people: “They’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The statistics on crime prove him a vicious liar. And though the wave of immigration from Mexico is now basically over, in its heyday we were sending many of our best people to the United States. All they wanted was a route (even if it was gradual and difficult) toward a migratory reform that would give them a legal space to feed their families. Yes, the drug trade is a problem, but drugs cross the border because the market is American, a problem that President Trump shows no inclination to confront.

Average Mexicans fear the brutal effects that the Trump administration is likely to inflict on the economy of their country, the second most important commercial partner of the United States, and the result may very well be a collapse of our fragile social peace. The old and almost forgotten historical wounds will open again, to an awesome extent.

I feel perplexed before the rise of a fascist to the venerable office of United States president. The Greeks knew that democracies are mortal. May the democracy of the United States of America, an example to the world for some 240 years, survive Donald Trump.

Enrique Krauze is a historian, the editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres and the author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.” This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.