The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics

"Yes, and specifically the Great Recession. Because Judis’s book, although it has some historical background, is really very much about the last couple of years. His key argument is that the populist explosion, as he calls it, is a direct consequence of the Great Recession, and so of crisis. The strength of the book is that it’s written by a journalist and, therefore, very accessible. It’s also, therefore, much more simplistic. It makes it more attractive for many readers because it tells a very clear story. But that story— that populism is predominately, if not exclusively, an effect of an economic crisis—is empirically not true. No. there were several very successful populist parties well before the economic crisis like the Front National in France, or the Freedom Party in Austria which, already in the 1990s, got really high percentages of support. Traditionally, right-wing populism does particularly well in countries that are the most affluent in Europe, like Denmark and the Netherlands. The problem is that there are very few concepts as vague as ‘crisis.’ When you look at the Great Recession you can empirically define that as a crisis. Clearly Europe is still in that crisis. But, on a day-to-day basis, while most people in Greece are fundamentally impacted by it, most people in Germany are not. Nonetheless, people in Germany or the Netherlands feel that they are in an economic crisis. It is also a kind of state. This is even worse with political crises. A lot of voters for Trump, for example, felt—and we saw in the polls—that the economy is doing terrible, that we’re going the wrong way, and that we’re in crisis: even though empirically the US is not. People act politically not so much on the basis of actual facts, but of what they think is the truth. In that sense, crisis is important. When people think that there is an economic or a political crisis, they will act accordingly. Not economically, but there are a lot of people in the Netherlands who feel that civilisation is in crisis because we are being threatened by global Islam and by European integration. They feel that it is a crisis because things are changing fundamentally for the worse and there’s a matter of urgency. That is what crisis does, and that’s what, for example, a lot of people on the right, including Trump but also others, were pushing all the time. This idea that this was the last election, that if Clinton won, it would be over forever. That’s the idea of crisis. It’s now or never. I don’t think that it helps to be reactive. In our discourse we’re always trying to convince people—who say that we are in a crisis and that Muslims are going to kill us, or that there’s a big conspiracy of east Cost elites—with our numbers or our rational arguments. We say, ‘Well, that’s not the case.’ The only way to get out of it is, first of all, to realise that in most countries the vast majority of people don’t believe that we’re in crisis, and to present a positive and effective programme. Let’s just take the US, because it’s the most pronounced example. A large portion of people who voted for Trump voted for the party they always support. They didn’t support a populist, necessarily. They had no choice but to vote for a populist, but they would have voted for Cruz or Rubio had he been the candidate for the Republican Party. While populism is important, we shouldn’t act as if it is the only game in town. Trump didn’t get the majority of the popular vote. Almost 3 million more people voted for a positive programme with regard to, particularly, multiculturalism, and, to a certain extent, politics, than for Trump’s populist version. There’s a certain group that has been excluded, which is largely white working class. A part of that you can get back by having better redistributive politics. Other parts you won’t get back because they’re Islamophobic or racist. The only way to get them back is by becoming Islamophobic or racist, and that is not the role of liberal democratic parties. It plays a role, but we’re talking, in the vast majority of cases, about a radical, right-wing populism. Left-wing populism is relatively minor. The economic anxiety is translated in a social-cultural way. It is translated, in American terms, racially. It is that racial translation that is essential because if it’s only about economic anxiety, then it would have been almost random whether you voted for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Both took on moving jobs abroad, globalisation, etc. But very few voters went from Sanders over to Trump because of that racialized vision of economic anxiety. If you take away the economic anxiety, there’s a large portion of people who are not going to vote for these parties anymore. But others will still vote for them. There are a lot of people voting for Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or Marine Le Pen, or for Donald Trump, who are affluent. But they’re still terrified about the Muslims. It’s the easiest introduction to the topic. It does so through a bit of an oversimplified lens, but it still provides a lot of good information. Yes. And left and right. It talks about the Netherlands and about France, as well as Spain and Greece. That’s particularly important because those are the two cases of left-wing populism that are successful. I think those cases are much better explained by the Great Recession than Front National and other far-right populist groups."