Government will never be the same.

JASON KENNEY HAS OVERPROMISED ON JOBS.

— CARSON JEREMA

Four years after his unconventional inaugural speech in which he painted a dark picture of “American carnage”, Donald Trump's presidency has officially come to an end.

How should we think about his legacy on matters of policy and governance?

Answering this question is obviously complicated by Trump's fundamental flaws as a person and a president. His postelection efforts to overturn the results, which contributed to violent riots at the U.S. Capitol building and are now the subject of an ongoing impeachment process, punctuated a presidency frequently marked by an inherent amorality.

It's difficult to separate Trump's transgressions from the ideas and issues — including free trade and globalization, the rise of China, immigration and deindustrialization — that comprised his populist agenda sometimes described as Trumpism. But it's important that we try to understand its long-run political consequences.

Trump's legacy on matters of policy and governance can best be characterized as disjunctive: a fundamental break with what came before. Trumpism was more about breaking the old than building anew. Its main accomplishment was to hasten an end to the policy paradigm that shaped how we think about the role of government and markets for the previous 40 years or so.

The starting point of this paradigm, which is typically referred to as “the Washington consensus,” “neo-liberalism” or “hyper-globalization”, can be a bit challenging to pinpoint. Some might date it to the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Others attribute it to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman winning the Nobel Prize in economics in the mid-1970s.

But irrespective of when it started, there's a basic agreement on its core ideas. The paradigm emphasized the role of markets, the importance of competition and incentives and the broad-based benefits of liberalized trade. It in turn de-emphasized the role of national governments in guiding or shaping market outcomes and placing a strategic value on certain sectors or domestic productive capacities. It amounted to swapping the clumsy hand of government in the economy for the invisible hand of decentralized market forces.

These ideas were a necessary and proper response to the era's challenges of stagnation, sclerosis and drift. It's easy to forget how dire the circumstances were. The socalled “Misery Index”, which combined inflation and unemployment, hit more than 20 per cent in most advanced economies by the late 1970s. Price and wage controls, trade union strikes in Britain and long lineups for gasoline in the U.S. contributed to what American President Jimmy Carter famously characterized as a “crisis of confidence.”

The new, market-oriented paradigm provided a jolt of dynamism and innovation to the economy and society. It gave us high rates of economic growth, enabled the computer revolution and lifted more than a billion people out of poverty by expanding trade and opportunity to poor countries around the world.

But it came with its own trade offs and excesses including rising inequality, the offshoring of key productive capacities (including, for instance, vaccine production in the case of Canada) and a failed assumption that expanded trade with China would lead to its political liberalization. The paradigm began to break down in the past decade or so. In hindsight, the global financial crisis in 2008-09 was probably an inflection point. Yet there was no serious intellectual or political alternative, so it continued on like an old, nearly broken-down car that one struggles to get a few thousands more miles out of.

To the extent that Trump had a coherent message in 2016, it was that he brought expression to what most of us didn't see or chose not to see: the paradigm had outlived its usefulness. His candidacy amounted to a vote to bring it to its finality.

Of course he had no real alternative. At best he had intuitions about the reassertion of national interests in the face of a renewed great power competition with China. At worst it was an impulsive and ego-driven mishmash of statements and policies for which no serious, animating logic can be discerned.

Yet, by directly challenging prevailing orthodoxy, Trump inadvertently enabled others to start to articulate what a new and different policy paradigm might look like. The socalled “Overton window” of politically-acceptable ideas and policies has never been wider.

There's no doubt that some of the ideas that have emerged are bad or wrong. Modern Monetary Theory's defence of permanent, largescale deficit spending is one such example. But the point is that Trump's presidency represents a transitional moment where we won't go back to the old paradigm. The incoming Biden administration's hawkishness on China is a sign that something has permanently changed.

It's not clear that this would have happened without Trumpism. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, for instance, there's a strong likelihood that we'd still be trying to eke a few more miles out of the old consensus.

Breaking it is Trump's main policy legacy. The question that must animate our politics in the coming years is: what do we replace it with?

Jimmy Carter