Politics & Power Quote by John J. Sweeney

Globalization, Sweeney warns, isn’t failing because people are parochial; it’s failing because the deal looks rigged. The line is built like a pressure test: “in its current form” concedes the value of cross-border trade while indicting the version that treats labor, wages, and community stability as expendable inputs. It’s a union leader’s rhetorical judo move (Sweeney headed the AFL-CIO), flipping what elites often frame as inevitable progress into a political choice with consequences.

The subtext is about legitimacy. “Democratic societies will not support it” reads less like prediction than leverage: if voters feel globalization only disciplines them - layoffs, hollowed towns, weakened bargaining power - they’ll respond the only way democracies reliably do when ignored, through backlash. Written before “globalization skepticism” became a mainstream campaign plank, it anticipates the later cycle of anti-trade referendums, populist parties, and rage at institutions that promised prosperity and delivered precarity.

Then comes the sharper turn: “Authoritarian leaders will fear to impose it.” That’s not a compliment to autocrats; it’s a reminder that even non-democratic regimes calculate risk. Push market liberalization too fast and you invite strikes, unrest, or challenges to state authority. Sweeney is arguing that the problem isn’t simply education or messaging. It’s distribution: unless globalization is redesigned with enforceable labor standards, social protections, and some brake on capital’s ability to arbitrage wages across borders, it will collapse under its own political weight - rejected by democracies, and too destabilizing even for strongmen to force through.