Harvard political economy professor Dani Rodrik has a piece in today’s Financial Times arguing that the true enemies of globalization today are its uncritical cheerleaders, who threaten to provoke a populist protectionist backlash:

Closed markets may have been a fundamental problem during the 1950s and 1960s; it is hard to believe they still are. The greatest risk to globalisation is elsewhere. It lies in the prospect that national governments’ room for manoeuvre will shrink to such levels that they will be unable to deliver the policies that their electorates want and need in order to buy into the global economy.

It's nice to see people once again arguing that millionaires have to be nice to the regular people or they'll burn down the millionaires' houses, rather than arguing that regular people have to be nice to millionaires or the millionaires will burn down the regular people's houses, as they have since the '80s.

But I'm kind of confused about what Rodrik is saying will happen. So national governments' room for maneuver shrinks. And then...what? Will they reinstate protectionism? But if that only leads to economic ruin, which is what would likely happen in today's integrated world economy, then voters won't continue voting for it, will they? I mean, if governments' room for maneuver shrinks, doesn't that mean by definition that there isn't much they can do to limit or reverse market-liberalizing policies? Or does Rodrik think there are ways in which governments can defy the global trade regime that concretely benefit voters? If so, what are those ways? That seems like the nub of the question.