Calling this end of year/end of decade surreal would be at best, an understatement.
Three thousand feet below me the vast, uninterrupted panorama of countryside sweeps by: rolling hills, their sides as close shaven as buzz cuts, peppered with darker green smudges that are tree stands, while everything is framed by a massive Big Sky of azure blue and scudding cloud puffs. It’s like an impressionist painting sprung to three-dimensional life. The sheep, cattle and horses that graze their way across the fields might as well not be moving, so slow is their languid pace. The illusion is broken only by the minute shape of a distant tractor crossing a field, its metallic sides occasionally reflecting sunlight.
It’s all too easy to lose oneself in this view, in this moment of tranquillity. To remain up here in the Mountain, where time is suspended, while the world turns.
These pages have been quiet for a while now, albeit not from either lack of news or motivation. Rather, as with many things in this so-called postmodernist society, this relatively fallow period between postings resulted from prolonged ill health and the interrelated general malaise which partially resulted. As is its occasional wont, my body simply stopped working the way it’s meant to. How and why isn’t really relevant. All that mattered was that it did. Consequently, this compelled me to slow down, pause and think. And with space to do that, I ended up in refuge from the careworn affairs of our ‘contemporary’ society, retreating to rejuvenate, revitalize and reflect upon what appears to be the current parlous nature of our society.
Precious little seems to be going right these days: all one has to do is switch on the TV, access the internet or simply open a newspaper. In fact, a quote from Jeff Wayne’s musical version of ‘War of the Worlds’ comes to mind:
Take a look around you at the world we've come to know
Does it seem to be much more than a crazy circus show?
That’s the thing: whatever you do, the world turns, with or without you. History follows no schedule. The events that define an era often happen before or after the onset of a new decade. It’s been said that the Sixties didn’t really begin on January 1st, 1960, but on November 22nd, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Neither did they end on January 1st, 1970, but on August 9th, 1974, with the resignation of Richard Nixon as president.
Keep this in mind as you look at what are likely to be many dizzying retrospectives of the 2010s. The calendar decade has closed, but the tendencies, ideas, movements, sentiments, and personalities associated with the past 10 years may not be quite as arbitrarily ready to leave the stage. The underlying causes of national populism have not simply with the clock hands flicking past midnight.
Our times continue to be shaped by immigration, forced migration, terrorism, and the cultural distance between voters without college degrees and those credentialed elites who perchance claim to govern them. It would be a most profound mistake to follow the advice of the Bloomberg editor who wrote in a recent headline, “Populism Will Probably Just Go Away Soon, So Relax.” On the contrary: the populist epoch may be only beginning, though its current permutation may change.
To say that the ’10s began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15th, 2008, doesn’t tell the whole story. The first shoots of national populism visible between the cracks of the ancien regime had sprouted by the time of the Wall Street panic. In 2005, the Dutch and French both voted against a proposed European Constitution in an expression of discontent with the EU. In 2006, massive rallies of immigrants to the United States, some waving the flags of their countries of origin, sparked a backlash against proposed immigration reform. That was also the year that Congress, against the wishes of the Bush administration, blocked a proposal to transfer management of six American ports to a company in Dubai. And on August 29th, 2008, John McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be his running mate.
The debate over Palin’s nomination was a preview of post-crisis debates over the Tea Party and Donald Trump. The very presence on the ticket of this pro-life, evangelical Christian mother of five, including a son with Down syndrome, exposed religious, ideological, geographic, and class fault lines between Republicans and Democrats and within the GOP itself. Palin’s outsider status, her unfamiliarity with political convention, her down-home persona, and her Red-meat Red-state America politics electrified supporters and terrified detractors. She imprinted herself on the election in a way only exceeded by Barack Obama’s partly manufactured media story. Her subsequent criticism of the Independent Payment Advisory Board contained in the Affordable Care Act, which she called a “Death Panel” that would ration care, foreshadowed what would become the occasional wild rhetoric and convoluted hyperbole of the Trump years.
The Great Recession did not trigger populist movements: it accelerated them. The fact of the downturn may have mattered less to voters than the elite’s response to it. In the European Union, austerity policies imposed by the United Kingdom, Germany on Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain bolstered anti-EU opinion. In the spring of 2009, the Tea Party organized against President Obama’s bailouts of politically connected banks and auto companies, his stimulus bill, and his budget increases. The Tea Party’s critique of American politics soon encompassed health-care mandates, tax hikes, bureaucracy, the Republican Party leadership, and the ways in which the country had departed from the essentially libertarian principles of the Founders. From the left, Occupy Wall Street began in 2011 to protest income inequality.
Come 2012, elements of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street had been integrated into the GOP and Democratic Party, respectively. Each bill proposed in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives had to cite the provision of the Constitution that authorized it. To secure his right flank, former presidential nominee (and now senator) Mitt Romney labelled himself “severely conservative.” To protect his left, President Obama attacked “you’re-on-your-own economics” from the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. Obama and Romney each appropriated Elizabeth Warren’s “You didn’t build that” jeremiad for their own purposes.
The 2012 election was fought primarily on economic grounds between an incumbent who had inherited a recession and a challenger whose personal manner and résumé made it challenging for him to connect with voters who swooned for the more familiar Sarah Palin approach. Lurking below the surface were the two issues that drive national populism: terrorism and immigration. The attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi demonstrated that the killing of Osama bin Laden had not indeed extinguished radical Islam. Romney pledged that illegal immigrants would “self-deport” under his administration, and Obama promised in the last days of the campaign to make immigration his top domestic priority.
One consequence of Obama’s second term is that terrorism and immigration became fused in the minds of a large part of the electorate. Seeking an alternative approach to simple rejection of what was widely labelled “the Obama Coalition” of Blacks, Hispanics, women, educated urbanites and youthful progressives, the Republican leadership embraced immigration in its post-2012 “autopsy,” which only served to widen the divide between the party elite and the increasingly activist grassroots. In the summer of 2014, ISIS leader Omar al-Baghdadi announced the establishment of a terrorist caliphate in Syria-Iraq, and arrivals of unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle of Central America spiked across America’s southern border. Obama was pressured into a military campaign against ISIS that slowly reduced the territory under its control, while he cajoled Mexico into interdicting families seeking asylum before they reached the United States (Obama has also been responsible for more forced detentions and repatriations to Mexico then Trump).
Stunningly, however, Obama also broadly expanded his executive amnesty to include the parents of illegal immigrants brought to America as children. He did so despite having said multiple times in public that he lacked such power, and after an election in which Republicans maintained their House majority and gained control of the Senate. It set back the cause of immigration reform, infuriated the Republican base, and ensured that the issue would be front and centre in 2016.
All of this took place against the background of the refugee crisis in Europe. The inflow of more than 1 million Muslim asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa radicalized continental politics. Then the terrorist attacks began: Charlie Hebdo in January 2015; the Bataclan in November 2015; an office park in San Bernardino, California, a little less than three weeks later; the Brussels airport in March 2016; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016; a truck attack in Nice a month after that; and the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017.
After San Bernardino, Trump announced his policy of banning Muslims from entering the United States. Missed in all the resultant hullabaloo a ‘Morning Consult’ poll showed that 60 percent of Republican voters agreed with him. By July 2016, the Pew Research Centre found that the economy and terrorism were the top issues among registered voters and among Trump voters, immigration was the third-most-important issue.
Support for Trump is correlated not with economic anxiety but with cultural despair, with the idea that one’s community is under assault by powerful external forces seeking to subvert individual rights – a powerful, latent fear present in the American polity but never clearly articulated prior. In November 2016 Gallup conducted a study of 125,000 and found that there was mixed evidence that the Trumpian base had been galvanized into action by economic issues. While his supporters are demographically less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they still earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.
Hillary Clinton's sweepingly condescending generalizations on "deplorables" had been way off base. Yet, there was polling evidence to suggest that living in racially isolated communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income, predicts higher levels of Trump support.
A May 2017 study by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that white working-class voters “who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favour Trump than those who did not share these concerns.” However, white working-class voters “who reported being in fair or poor financial shape were 1.7 times more likely to support <Hillary> Clinton, compared to those who were in better financial shape.”
Material causes do not go far enough in explaining the rise of national populism in the United States, England, France, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Germany. Immigration, terrorism, and the perception of an unresponsive political elite have mattered far more. And until these conditions change, our populist decades won’t come to an end.
And one can remain on his Mountain, only to descend at a time of his own choosing, to find out that nothing has changed much.
I think I'll stay here a bit longer.
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