If your political tendencies disinclined you to favor the U.S. presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, you might be tempted to think that for all its initial implausibility, it’s in retrospect not that tough to explain: Trump’s doubters simply underestimated a contempt for reality and depth of bigotry among Republican Party voters. It’s an inversion of Trump’s apparent view of himself, really: His haters couldn’t comprehend how much true-believing Americans would love him for his authenticity, decisiveness, and straight-shooting demolition of nonsense.
Speaking on Thursday at the Aspen Ideas festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, however, Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute argued for separating out the broad, complex forces behind the current rise of populism in the U.S. and the narrow, contingent reasons for Trump’s success in picking off the GOP nomination. “There are are a couple of black-swan events that happened here,” Brooks said.
[…]
According to New America’s Anne Marie Slaughter, for all the Trump campaign has used xenophobia and other modes of bigotry to draw out support from radical elements of the Republican base, they are not the real catalysts of populist revolt on the American right today. The real catalysts are a set of deep disruptions in the American economy—a constellation of forces that also accounts for much of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, as far as it’s gone.
“What we are seeing is anger at a disruption of our economy and, really, our social order—of the magnitude we saw when the agricultural age gave way to the industrial age,” Slaughter says: When the industrial age completely upended the way people lived and worked, from small cottage-industry, farming villages to going to factories, in another place from your family, to work—which is the same kind of profound upheaval we’re seeing now, we got Marxism. We got Marxism, and then we got World War I, and then we got World War II—that upheaval … was a direct outgrowth of the changes wrought by the industrial revolution.
That is what we are seeing the beginnings of today. The digital revolution … is completely upending how we work, what the sources of value are, how people can support their families, if they can at all, and creates tremendous fear and rage in the sense that you are at the mercy of forces you cannot control.
[…]
If this is the right analytical framework, then, distinguishing between the prominence of anger and the dominance of populism, what’s the right comparative or historical framework for putting the current populist moment in context? There is, after all, a lot of freaking out about the idea of a Hitler in America these days.
Brooks cites a study out this year in the European Economic Review (“Going to Extremes: Politics After Financial Crises, 1870-2014,” by Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch) that looks at 20 advanced European economies across 154 years and more than 800 elections—and concludes that after a financial crisis (not a regular recession, but a full-blown financial crisis), the mean political impact has been a significant increase in support for right-wing populism: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners,” the authors write. “On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30% after a financial crisis.”
But as Brooks points out, populism has a distinctive and long history in America, where it’s “not necessarily just a right-wing phenomenon; it can be a left-wing phenomenon as well.” Following a pair of financial crises in the 1890s, for example (one when the railroads went bust on account of overbuilding and unsound financing, the other after a silver panic), and the deep recessionary effects that accompanied them, William Jennings Bryan became the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1896—thundering, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”—and for two further cycles. Brooks quotes H.L. Mencken’s obituary of Bryan: “Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
Why Is Populism Taking Over the Republican Party? – The Atlantic