Navigating the New Populism

Anger, or more specifically, a swelling tide of resentment against the status quo, has been a central, reoccurring sociopolitical theme in the western world for the last year. Populism’s rise in the U.S. and Europe, similarities between Donald Trump’s unstoppable ascension to presumptive Republican presidential nominee and Britain’s surprising June referendum vote to leave the European Union, have been stated countless times in editorials in the last several weeks. It’s an apropos comparison, but what hasn’t been mentioned is how we never seem to address the reason why these people are so upset in the first place. We seem only interested in drawing parallels between the effects of their anger, while willfully ignoring the causes. Maybe that's because we don’t understand where they’re coming from.

At times it reads like a dystopian novel: the narcissistic scion of a real estate tycoon runs for President, and along the way discovers that the more racist, the more misogynistic, the more cartoonishly idiotic he sounds, the more popular he grows in the polls, because, as it turns out, the zeitgeist is now so proudly ignorant his toxic beliefs can’t find a bottom. A year later, the Trump phenomenon still has the media and millions around the world scratching their heads, and it’s clear that many just don’t get it. Trump has galvanized an angry working-class electorate who, for decades, has witnessed stagnant wages and dwindling blue collar jobs, in a country where the average worker now makes $700 less a year than he did more than forty years ago. They’ve received constant lip-service from a GOP establishment who courts them for votes yet refuses to sign bills protecting veterans or 9/11 first-responders, all while spending lavishly on wars, dolling out tax breaks for corporations earning record profits and mandating taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks as homeowners facing foreclosure are left with no recourse. Meanwhile, a spate of terrorist attacks at home and abroad has made the threat of the Islamic State a top policy concern, but we’re not allowed to call it that, so they feel our efforts to effectively combat terrorism have been stifled by a culture of political correctness in an age where aging white men have lost their top rung on the ladder. Is it any wonder why our establishment candidates didn’t get more votes?

Many have found it unfathomable that supporters of outgoing antiestablishment leftist candidate Bernie Sanders would cross party lines and back Trump. Few seem to remember that this is exactly what happened during the 1968 election, when anti-war Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy lost his bid for nominee after late-coming VP Hubert Humphrey was awarded a majority of delegates at the Democratic National Convention. When segregationist George Wallace entered the race as the Independent Party candidate, he filled the antiestablishment vacuum even though he was as far opposite on the political spectrum as one could get from McCarthy, and Wallace’s presence in the race pulled enough votes away from Humphrey that the subsequent attrition handed Nixon the election by the slimmest of margins. For some, an identification of outsider status supersedes party affiliation.

The story is eerily similar on the other side of the pond. Mostly white, mostly older, mostly working-class Brits living primarily in areas of England and Wales where industry jobs disappeared years ago were rallied by a conservative political minority to direct their years-long resentment against not only national party leaders but also EU ministers, whose allegedly undemocratic, prohibitive trade policies and austerity measures have hampered economic growth and wrested governmental control away from Britain to Brussels. The antiestablishment Brexit supporters seem indifferent to the long-lasting and severe economic implications Europe’s second largest economy leaving the bloc will have, and once again, the world at large remains incredulous at this, wondering how so many could possibly vote against their own interests. Or at least that’s the line we tell ourselves.

We have a habit of analyzing others’ behaviors within the framework of our own experiences and preconceptions. The Internet has made this even easier: we condense nuanced, complex issues into easy-to-swallow slogans, and the resulting consensus is often merely a product of manufactured opinion, where we coopt the voice of the establishment and dismiss anyone who doesn’t share our viewpoints as naive or stupid. I think this is a convenient deflection.

Trivializing others’ concerns is a cynical response that does nothing to address the problem. In fact, it has the effect of not only confirming the objections of the people making them, but also ignores the original source of their ire. There’s no question that what’s happening in the U.S. and Britain can be attributed in large part to a rash of xenophobia, but it’s also certainly easier for us to dismiss Trump’s popularity and the Brexit’s success as merely the result of idiotic, racist, semiliterate brutes than it is for us to cede that some of their grievances may have some legitimacy, or at the least, that leading comfortable lives unencumbered by working class wages often has the unintended effect of making other people's problems seem invisible. Donald Trump and Britain’s exit from the European Union are not the solution, but let’s not mistake bad decisions for the reasons people are making them. Given where the world is headed, it might be a good idea to pay attention to the latter.