In other words, the “system,” with its high-toned rationale and its high-handed maneuvers, struck millions of people as unaccountable and unjust. It might have been a good thing that the sky didn’t fall on everybody, but shouldn’t it at least have fallen on somebody? Bernie Sanders got remarkably close to winning the Democratic nomination by calling Wall Street a fraud and demanding prosecutions. Hillary Clinton lost the White House by so perfectly typifying the system that supposedly worked so well. Donald Trump is what he is, and readers know what I think of that. But Mrs. Clinton’s unforgivable sin was her outsized—and unearned—sense of entitlement…

The populist wave now cresting across much of the world is sometimes described as a revolt against globalization: immigrants failing to assimilate the values of their hosts, poorer countries drawing jobs from richer ones, and so on. But the root complaint is not about economics. It’s about justice. Why does the banker get the bailout while the merchant goes bankrupt? Why does the illegal immigrant get to jump the citizenship queue? What right does a foreign judge have to tell us what punishments our criminals deserve? Why do our soldiers risk their lives for the defense of wealthy allies?

Those of us who believe in the liberal international order (now derisively called “globalism”) ought to think about this. There are powerful academic arguments to be made for the superiority of free trade over mercantilism, or of Pax Americana over America First. But liberalism’s champions will continue to lose the argument until we learn to make our case not in the language of what works, but of what’s right.