The US will choose its next president against a backdrop of mounting popular anxiety about living standards. Despite low unemployment and respectable economic growth, the country’s wide middle class feels under assault. This sentiment is already driving the debate on immigration, trade, taxes and more. It may very well swing the election.

In an article in the current Foreign Affairs journal, Kenneth Scheve (a political scientist) and Matthew Slaughter (an economist who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers) fear the consequences of this mood for liberal trade. To avoid a protectionist backlash, they argue, the US needs a “New Deal for Globalisation”. They want the government to offer the electorate a bargain: tolerate globalisation and we will reform the tax system to share its benefits more widely. “[E]nsuring that most Americans are benefiting,” they say, “is the best way of saving globalisation.”