We are still living with the wreckage of liberal globalisation

News Snapshot:

Illustration by Otto Dettmer / Ikon Images When Jean Baudrillard, the French postmodernist, travelled through the US during the Reagan era he described a country in which he said reality had been lost to its imitation. It was, he wrote in America (1988), a country without culture and without hope, a land of “space and the spirit of fiction”. The class and generation I belong to grew up absorbing the pleasures, obsessions and anxieties of American popular culture. It inhabits our nostalgia and our dreams, and defines us, even in our rebellion against it. Our contact with the irrational spirit...