It has been three years since the UK’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the USA, events that were followed by a long string of authoritarian and far-right populist victories across the world. However, most diagnoses of the underlying dynamics that led us into this mess continue to be astonishingly shallow.
Aside from broad agreement that the algorithms of facebook, twitter and youtube have played a key role in influencing elections, two contrasting diagnoses dominate progressive discourse. One is that real economic fears and grievances exist among parts of societies, and far-right populists have cultivated this fertile ground to blame immigrants, manipulate people and drive forward a xenophobic and racist agenda in politics.
This explanation apparently shows how easily people can be manipulated to turn against each other, as demagogues have demonstrated many times over in the course of history. However, if the economic situation were such an important factor, why is the populist left not benefitting from these fears much more extensively? The reason is that economic hardship and self-interest is not an important driver for most people who vote for far right parties, as research shows clearly.
