Moments ago I watched the JD Vance speech to the Munich security conference. Interestingly he said (paraphrased) 'the European political consensus (discourse?) leaves no room for alternatives of the Left or the Right', with which I concur- except the consensus is within the entire liberal-democratic world- not just the European. Its interesting that he includes 'the Left'- presumably for balance- It was a skillful oration regardless the content was mainly upholding the 'free speech' and electoral rights of the Ethno-nationalist parties of Europe. But what of the 'alternatives of the Left'?
The point I would make is that the public talking-points ( the terrifying private talking points are never spoken of outside of elite circles) of the Populist Right have never been suppressed throughout the era of the liberal consensus. There has always been a residuum of racism, misogyny, homophobia, & xenophobia in society, because these ideas don't take any intellectual work to maintain, rather they are like a persistent sub-clinical infection. For the same reasons, these ideas have been considered to exist outside the realm of normal political discourse, thus there was never any real attempt to suppress them, other than the notion that they would wither away over time as everyone's life got better.
But what of Left wing thought? There are two main traditions here: one of Nonconformist Christianity, the other of Historical Materialism. The first has been voided by secularism & usurped by an anti-biblical perversion of 'doing Satan's work in the name of Christ'. The second requires 'doing the work' of grounding in anthropology and history. This can be as superficial or as deep as the individual is capable or has time to engage with- nevertheless it has to be done because there is no equivalent to the bigotries of the populist Right except the fiction of the 'politics of envy' that serves the Right.
For probably the last 100 years, the various Socialist / Social Democratic parties around the world have operated on the level of 'trust us, we'll see you right'. The very last thing they want to contend with is to be squeezed from below by a politically educated and expectant working class. They also perceive that to engage in extra-parliamentary political activity de-legitimises their status as parliamentarians. Note, the Right has no such qualms.
So, Left political education has been long abandoned, leaving only 'indoctrination by immersion' in the tropes of capitalism & westernism. Thus, unlike the Right, which has been happy and able to re-engage & co-opt the bigotries that it previously sidelined, the Left has nothing to fall back on as a foil to the Rightwards move of the Right.
Kevin, this is an interesting perspective, especially your point about the modern Left losing its roots in Nonconformist Christianity and Historical Materialism. It’s true that the old moral and class-based traditions gave the Left a kind of structure and energy that’s hard to replicate. Oh for my university days in the ‘70s and the Marxist discussion group with David Bedgood. These days, it feels less like mobilizing a movement and more like managing a bureaucracy. I’m reminded that Margaret Thatcher once called New Labour her greatest achievement.
But I’d push back on the idea that right-wing populism is just a rehash of old bigotries waiting to come back. That makes it sound like people are moving rightward purely out of reactionary fear, rather than because they see real problems with how they’re being governed. Maybe they’re not just nostalgic for their inner bigot—maybe they’re frustrated with a political class that stopped listening to them decades ago. And look around. It’s not just the working class. A lot of people from the old left feel like the left have left them, and so they’ve up and left the left.
If the Left has abandoned class-based politics in favor of a mix of technocracy and identity-driven coalition-building, why is it surprising that working-class voters—who used to be its heart and soul—have looked elsewhere? If, as Vance suggests, political discourse leaves little room for alternatives on either the Right or the Left, then the bigger issue isn’t just “bad ideas coming back” but a wider failure of the system to offer real choices. Could it be that this is a more useful starting point than diagnosing voters with a ‘sub-clinical infection’?
Yes to all of the above. Given that during the time of the alternating Labour / Tory (Labour / Nat) duopoly a lot of voters simply felt disaffected by 'the last lot' and decided it was time to 'give the other lot a go'. Now that there is more than one viable 'other lot', particularly in Europe, that lot are offering something that looks like a kick up the arse to the old guard. Nowhere on the Left is there anything even resembling that alternative except perhaps the 'Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance' in Germany.
I wouldn't say voters are moving rightwards purely out of reactionary fear- more like bloody minded antagonism to the mainstream that, as you say, stopped listening years ago. Voters are going to move, and all the protest votes MUST go to the Right, because there's simply no Left to go to.
My references elsewhere on this blog to 'Turchin's unrepresented 89%' https://grantduncanphd.substack.com/p/political-trust/comment/81259405 that includes workers, small-to-medium business owners and lower to middle managers in the private and public sector are intended to illustrate that the political class has, as you say, abandoned more than just the working class, and these seemingly disparate groups actually have a great deal more interest in common than might at first be obvious- since the replacement of ideologically motivated, finance-serving Neoliberal faux-economics by a system of rational, ideologically neutral economic management grounded in accountancy and mathematics- call it MMT or Post Keynesian I don't care- actually puts political options that serve all those groups back on the table where none exist today- then we can use the political mechanisms for their proper purpose- to talk about relative distributions and public policy options.
My comment about 'sub-clinical infection' was not a diagnosis of voters. It was a commentary on the fact that the 4+ phobias I mentioned persisted in the world without the necessity of active maintenance by those that would eventually use them for political traction because they are visceral, whereas proper analysis, being rational, requires regular informed public discussion to survive, and the abandonment of that discussion has caused it to virtually disappear.
Kevin, thank you for that response. I think we share key views of some things that really matter. Maybe from slightly different angles, but caring about some essential factors for our community that have been misplaced with deadly consequence.
The traditional left-liberal establishment got too comfortable in its role as ‘responsible managers of the system,’ and in doing so, it left behind not just the working class but much of the middle class too. No argument there. And I agree that a lot of populist energy is more of a blunt-force rejection of the mainstream than a neatly ideological shift.
But I’d continue to push back on the idea that the right is just sitting there passively, waiting for discontented voters to fall into its lap. The new right (or at least the more successful parts of it) is actually doing something that the left used to be very good at: offering a story about how the world works and where things went wrong. That’s not just visceral appeal—it’s politics. Meanwhile, the left seems to have gotten stuck managing decline, treating anyone who objects as either nostalgic or irrational.
On the ‘sub-clinical infection’ thing—I get your point that bigotries don’t need conscious effort to persist, while rational public discussion requires ongoing maintenance. But maybe another way of looking at it is that visceral responses aren’t all bad. Some of what gets dismissed as ‘phobia’ might actually just be an instinctive rejection of policies that don’t make sense to people’s lived experience. Maybe instead of framing the issue as ‘we need to protect reasoned analysis from the encroachment of gut instinct,’ it’s worth asking whether political elites stopped listening to those gut instincts in the first place.
Where did I say the right were waiting passively? They have been very active in finding causes- Brexit, the Treaty etc. but the discontent has to be there to build interest in the case. The 'New Right' didn't even get sponsorship during the long era of credit expansion- that era was all about social liberalism even, maybe especially. from the billionaires- breaking down 'tradition' and 'culture' in order to sell 'fashion' and 'entertainment'. The big shift came with the end of that era following 2008 and the shift of billionaire-mode to consolidation into rentier assets and buying of political power to advance the next stage of their dominion i.e the replacement of a still somewhat functioning democracy with fascism.
I'm pretty sure that race and migration have been cynically used a great deal as ways to manage indigenous populations. Immigration from the Caribbean to provide workers to do 'jobs that other people don't want to do' was undeniably missing half of the story, which was ...'at the price we want to pay'. It puts progressives into an unresolvable bind between supporting wage improvements of existing workers or accept that some brown person does the job at the old price. Stalin was given to removing whole populations to control / punish not just the populations being moved, but presumably also the population of the lands to which they were moved.
I'm not sure about your 'instinctive rejection' thing. IMO no-one much cares about the race, religion or sexual proclivities of their neighbour if their own needs of financial security & relationships (these two are now grotesquely intertwined since relationships have become both culturally optional & financially transactional)are being met. Seeing a dude in a dress would be at worst a source of private mirth rather of murderous rage.
Kevin, this has been a great discussion—I appreciate how thoughtful you are about all this. I like that we differ on some things but we are talking, not yelling. Most of the guts of what you’re saying is how I see it too:
• The 2008 crash changed everything. The system was rigged—banks got rescued, executives kept their bonuses, and ordinary people took the hit. That shattered public trust. The first wave of anger went left (Occupy, Corbyn, Syriza), but when that failed or got co-opted, the energy shifted right.
• Immigration has been used as a tool to suppress wages elsewhere. Businesses always prefer cheap labor, and that puts progressives in a bind between worker protections and open-borders idealism.
• The establishment has abandoned honest economic discussion. Instead of confronting these contradictions head-on, the things that directly affect real people, it’s often defaulted to moralising wokery and identitarian separatism, which has driven disaffected voters toward populism.
• People are justified in feeling like they’ve been abandoned. The institutions that once represented ordinary people—unions, local politics, even the old social-democratic left—have hollowed out, leaving frustration with nowhere to go.
But of course I think you are completely off your trolley (I’m teasing) on some things:
• I’m not sure immigration in NZ fits the same pattern. The big economic pressure here hasn’t been on wages but on housing and infrastructure. If anything, the real divide is between asset owners and those locked out. Does this still fit your argument, or do you think the economic pressures play out differently here?
• I don’t think reactionary politics is just about old bigotries resurfacing. People weren’t suddenly overtaken by racism, sexism, or homophobia—they were told that noticing obvious realities was hateful. Watching a bloke deck a woman at the Olympics and being called a transphobe for thinking that’s unfair? That’s not prejudice bubbling up, that’s frickin’ anger at being gaslit.
• I’m skeptical of the idea that billionaires have ‘switched to fascism.’ Rentier capitalism, financialization, and asset hoarding are real trends. But billionaires don’t need fascism—they just need governments weak enough to stay out of their way. If social democracy served their interests, they’d be funding that instead.
On a different note, since I suspect I’m talking to an old-school Marxist here—what’s your take on AI doing the thinking work and humanoid robots doing the doing? Hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, raising cattle before dinner, then a bit of critiquing? Or do we just get capital absolutely concentrated and everyone immiserated, exactly like Marx predicted?
I feel like we are two guys dancing with the same girl, wanting to be the last man standing for the privilege of escorting the subject home!
So this will be my last dance!
The significance of 2008 is that it signals the beginning of the end for the era of credit expansion and social liberalism. It also signals the beginning of the beginning for a move to political consolidation of the Right (Atlas Network, move towards buying the political apparatus more directly rather than just influencing) and away from social liberalism towards authoritarianism. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-dawn-of-austerity/
The asset owners vs those locked out is real everywhere. However we have been here before in the Gilded Age. Asset prices are so wildly overvalued there will be a crash that destroys most of the monetary value of the assets, though not the asset itself. That's the motive for their move from a fragile trading model during the expansive credit era to a resilient rentier model in this era. beyond that, its about who's got the most resolve when the crunch happens.
I'm not with you on the idpol thing as a serious rather than purely subjective driver of the Right Shift, despite that I pretty much agree that most (not all) idpol beyond race, gender and disability is just invented oppression- a sticking plaster over the symptom of a deeper social dysphoria- unresolved class issues (obviously lol)
Billionaires are definitely switching to fascism. The current divide between Democrat and Republican is that Democrat believes they can squeeze more juice out of the credit system by busting open Russia and China, whereas Republican believes that game is over (de-dollarisation) and retrenchment to a contiguous North American Empire is the next best move (the Canada / Greenland / Panama thing didn't appear from nowhere). The intention is to create a 'thousand year reich' using emergent technology to lock everything down before 'the Left (the real one, not the fake one) has a chance to catch up in the ideological race, and before the aforementioned crunch.
That probably answers your last question too, since AI is one of those 'emergent technologies'. I believe in simplicity & the dignity of craft and skill. My motto: DESTROY ALL ROBOTS.
Thank you Grant, this is a thoughtful piece. I appreciate the effort to take populist voters seriously rather than dismiss them as irrational or manipulated. Your discussion of political trust is spot on —distrust isn’t just a problem for democracy, imo it’s a rational response when people feel unheard or disregarded. I also think you’re right that simply treating populist parties as pariahs hasn’t worked and may well be counterproductive. In liberal democracies, at the end of the day, the majority of voters decides. Effective minority action is engagement and persuasion, not attack.
I do wonder though if your article doesn’t miss something crucial. It presents right-populist movements largely as reactions to cultural or economic anxieties, but doesn’t consider whether these movements also have a coherent vision of governance. If the system isn’t delivering, why is the assumption that populists are merely venting frustration rather than making legitimate critiques?
The discussion of norm-breaking focuses heavily on figures like Trump and Berlusconi but doesn’t explore comparable norm shifts on the left—whether in lawfare, judicial activism, or policy overreach. If trust is declining, is it just because of populists, or is there a broader accountability failure in governance? Pretending that only one side has been playing fast and loose with democratic norms looks to me like a straightforward way to tank trust.
While I appreciate the caution against overplaying victimhood, dismissing concerns about affirmative action, gender roles, and political representation as “playing the victim card” risks overlooking the ways in which these policies actually affect people’s lives. It could be that what looks like grievance politics is simply the recognition of a real problem.
I think Less Certain is onto something - see “Waitangi Day, Te Pati Mãori and Nationalism In New Zealand” from 4 Feb. If populists succeed where establishment parties fail, maybe the real question isn’t “why are people voting for them?” but “why aren’t mainstream parties offering something better?”
Great comments, thank you, John. Do these parties have a coherent vision of governance? That's a great question and would take some thought and research, across numerous jurisdictions. Comparable norm shifts on the left is also a great question, and would take another post as well! To some extent my book Government and Political Trust does that work. Here it's one post at a time. I have a piece coming out in the UK's Political Quarterly about why the Ardern/Hipkins government was defeated so badly in 2023, and previous posts here on that theme. But I really appreciate your critical response. Grant
Nations with strong equity seem to remain more immune to the forces of reactionary populism than those with weak equity. In saying that, the world's Left parties need to get better at story-telling, as FDR & MJS did back in their day. Moving the Left to the Centre is so tired & 1997; moving the Centre to the Left is wired/inspired.
As I've previously mentioned, the Thatcherist/Reaganomic New Right orthodoxy is collapsing, and whatever is replacing it is jostling for the steering wheel. Could it be the Great Deglobalisation? A New Deal 2.0? A World Troubles? The "Muslim Question" being answered with a 2nd Final Solution? Rehashes of 1789 & 1933 colliding head on? Who knows...
Which year in history do you think the world is repeating right now?
"Which year in history do you think the world is repeating right now?" not a year, broadly an era
1914-1930?- but only very approximately & with no specific analogies as to who is playing which part. I am reminded of Gramsci's “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Grant about history not repeating, but there's always useful analogies.
I should have used "rhyming" instead of "repeating". I'd say there are echoes of either 1913 or the interwar years right now, and it doesn't seem far-fetched to see America & Germany swapping places, with China possibly the "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".
I much prefer Hegel’s view that history teaches us
"that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. Each age and each nation finds itself in such peculiar circumstances, in such a unique situation, that it can and must make decisions with respect to itself alone."
Moments ago I watched the JD Vance speech to the Munich security conference. Interestingly he said (paraphrased) 'the European political consensus (discourse?) leaves no room for alternatives of the Left or the Right', with which I concur- except the consensus is within the entire liberal-democratic world- not just the European. Its interesting that he includes 'the Left'- presumably for balance- It was a skillful oration regardless the content was mainly upholding the 'free speech' and electoral rights of the Ethno-nationalist parties of Europe. But what of the 'alternatives of the Left'?
The point I would make is that the public talking-points ( the terrifying private talking points are never spoken of outside of elite circles) of the Populist Right have never been suppressed throughout the era of the liberal consensus. There has always been a residuum of racism, misogyny, homophobia, & xenophobia in society, because these ideas don't take any intellectual work to maintain, rather they are like a persistent sub-clinical infection. For the same reasons, these ideas have been considered to exist outside the realm of normal political discourse, thus there was never any real attempt to suppress them, other than the notion that they would wither away over time as everyone's life got better.
But what of Left wing thought? There are two main traditions here: one of Nonconformist Christianity, the other of Historical Materialism. The first has been voided by secularism & usurped by an anti-biblical perversion of 'doing Satan's work in the name of Christ'. The second requires 'doing the work' of grounding in anthropology and history. This can be as superficial or as deep as the individual is capable or has time to engage with- nevertheless it has to be done because there is no equivalent to the bigotries of the populist Right except the fiction of the 'politics of envy' that serves the Right.
For probably the last 100 years, the various Socialist / Social Democratic parties around the world have operated on the level of 'trust us, we'll see you right'. The very last thing they want to contend with is to be squeezed from below by a politically educated and expectant working class. They also perceive that to engage in extra-parliamentary political activity de-legitimises their status as parliamentarians. Note, the Right has no such qualms.
So, Left political education has been long abandoned, leaving only 'indoctrination by immersion' in the tropes of capitalism & westernism. Thus, unlike the Right, which has been happy and able to re-engage & co-opt the bigotries that it previously sidelined, the Left has nothing to fall back on as a foil to the Rightwards move of the Right.
Kevin, this is an interesting perspective, especially your point about the modern Left losing its roots in Nonconformist Christianity and Historical Materialism. It’s true that the old moral and class-based traditions gave the Left a kind of structure and energy that’s hard to replicate. Oh for my university days in the ‘70s and the Marxist discussion group with David Bedgood. These days, it feels less like mobilizing a movement and more like managing a bureaucracy. I’m reminded that Margaret Thatcher once called New Labour her greatest achievement.
But I’d push back on the idea that right-wing populism is just a rehash of old bigotries waiting to come back. That makes it sound like people are moving rightward purely out of reactionary fear, rather than because they see real problems with how they’re being governed. Maybe they’re not just nostalgic for their inner bigot—maybe they’re frustrated with a political class that stopped listening to them decades ago. And look around. It’s not just the working class. A lot of people from the old left feel like the left have left them, and so they’ve up and left the left.
If the Left has abandoned class-based politics in favor of a mix of technocracy and identity-driven coalition-building, why is it surprising that working-class voters—who used to be its heart and soul—have looked elsewhere? If, as Vance suggests, political discourse leaves little room for alternatives on either the Right or the Left, then the bigger issue isn’t just “bad ideas coming back” but a wider failure of the system to offer real choices. Could it be that this is a more useful starting point than diagnosing voters with a ‘sub-clinical infection’?
Yes to all of the above. Given that during the time of the alternating Labour / Tory (Labour / Nat) duopoly a lot of voters simply felt disaffected by 'the last lot' and decided it was time to 'give the other lot a go'. Now that there is more than one viable 'other lot', particularly in Europe, that lot are offering something that looks like a kick up the arse to the old guard. Nowhere on the Left is there anything even resembling that alternative except perhaps the 'Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance' in Germany.
I wouldn't say voters are moving rightwards purely out of reactionary fear- more like bloody minded antagonism to the mainstream that, as you say, stopped listening years ago. Voters are going to move, and all the protest votes MUST go to the Right, because there's simply no Left to go to.
My references elsewhere on this blog to 'Turchin's unrepresented 89%' https://grantduncanphd.substack.com/p/political-trust/comment/81259405 that includes workers, small-to-medium business owners and lower to middle managers in the private and public sector are intended to illustrate that the political class has, as you say, abandoned more than just the working class, and these seemingly disparate groups actually have a great deal more interest in common than might at first be obvious- since the replacement of ideologically motivated, finance-serving Neoliberal faux-economics by a system of rational, ideologically neutral economic management grounded in accountancy and mathematics- call it MMT or Post Keynesian I don't care- actually puts political options that serve all those groups back on the table where none exist today- then we can use the political mechanisms for their proper purpose- to talk about relative distributions and public policy options.
My comment about 'sub-clinical infection' was not a diagnosis of voters. It was a commentary on the fact that the 4+ phobias I mentioned persisted in the world without the necessity of active maintenance by those that would eventually use them for political traction because they are visceral, whereas proper analysis, being rational, requires regular informed public discussion to survive, and the abandonment of that discussion has caused it to virtually disappear.
Kevin, thank you for that response. I think we share key views of some things that really matter. Maybe from slightly different angles, but caring about some essential factors for our community that have been misplaced with deadly consequence.
The traditional left-liberal establishment got too comfortable in its role as ‘responsible managers of the system,’ and in doing so, it left behind not just the working class but much of the middle class too. No argument there. And I agree that a lot of populist energy is more of a blunt-force rejection of the mainstream than a neatly ideological shift.
But I’d continue to push back on the idea that the right is just sitting there passively, waiting for discontented voters to fall into its lap. The new right (or at least the more successful parts of it) is actually doing something that the left used to be very good at: offering a story about how the world works and where things went wrong. That’s not just visceral appeal—it’s politics. Meanwhile, the left seems to have gotten stuck managing decline, treating anyone who objects as either nostalgic or irrational.
On the ‘sub-clinical infection’ thing—I get your point that bigotries don’t need conscious effort to persist, while rational public discussion requires ongoing maintenance. But maybe another way of looking at it is that visceral responses aren’t all bad. Some of what gets dismissed as ‘phobia’ might actually just be an instinctive rejection of policies that don’t make sense to people’s lived experience. Maybe instead of framing the issue as ‘we need to protect reasoned analysis from the encroachment of gut instinct,’ it’s worth asking whether political elites stopped listening to those gut instincts in the first place.
Where did I say the right were waiting passively? They have been very active in finding causes- Brexit, the Treaty etc. but the discontent has to be there to build interest in the case. The 'New Right' didn't even get sponsorship during the long era of credit expansion- that era was all about social liberalism even, maybe especially. from the billionaires- breaking down 'tradition' and 'culture' in order to sell 'fashion' and 'entertainment'. The big shift came with the end of that era following 2008 and the shift of billionaire-mode to consolidation into rentier assets and buying of political power to advance the next stage of their dominion i.e the replacement of a still somewhat functioning democracy with fascism.
I'm pretty sure that race and migration have been cynically used a great deal as ways to manage indigenous populations. Immigration from the Caribbean to provide workers to do 'jobs that other people don't want to do' was undeniably missing half of the story, which was ...'at the price we want to pay'. It puts progressives into an unresolvable bind between supporting wage improvements of existing workers or accept that some brown person does the job at the old price. Stalin was given to removing whole populations to control / punish not just the populations being moved, but presumably also the population of the lands to which they were moved.
I'm not sure about your 'instinctive rejection' thing. IMO no-one much cares about the race, religion or sexual proclivities of their neighbour if their own needs of financial security & relationships (these two are now grotesquely intertwined since relationships have become both culturally optional & financially transactional)are being met. Seeing a dude in a dress would be at worst a source of private mirth rather of murderous rage.
Kevin, this has been a great discussion—I appreciate how thoughtful you are about all this. I like that we differ on some things but we are talking, not yelling. Most of the guts of what you’re saying is how I see it too:
• The 2008 crash changed everything. The system was rigged—banks got rescued, executives kept their bonuses, and ordinary people took the hit. That shattered public trust. The first wave of anger went left (Occupy, Corbyn, Syriza), but when that failed or got co-opted, the energy shifted right.
• Immigration has been used as a tool to suppress wages elsewhere. Businesses always prefer cheap labor, and that puts progressives in a bind between worker protections and open-borders idealism.
• The establishment has abandoned honest economic discussion. Instead of confronting these contradictions head-on, the things that directly affect real people, it’s often defaulted to moralising wokery and identitarian separatism, which has driven disaffected voters toward populism.
• People are justified in feeling like they’ve been abandoned. The institutions that once represented ordinary people—unions, local politics, even the old social-democratic left—have hollowed out, leaving frustration with nowhere to go.
But of course I think you are completely off your trolley (I’m teasing) on some things:
• I’m not sure immigration in NZ fits the same pattern. The big economic pressure here hasn’t been on wages but on housing and infrastructure. If anything, the real divide is between asset owners and those locked out. Does this still fit your argument, or do you think the economic pressures play out differently here?
• I don’t think reactionary politics is just about old bigotries resurfacing. People weren’t suddenly overtaken by racism, sexism, or homophobia—they were told that noticing obvious realities was hateful. Watching a bloke deck a woman at the Olympics and being called a transphobe for thinking that’s unfair? That’s not prejudice bubbling up, that’s frickin’ anger at being gaslit.
• I’m skeptical of the idea that billionaires have ‘switched to fascism.’ Rentier capitalism, financialization, and asset hoarding are real trends. But billionaires don’t need fascism—they just need governments weak enough to stay out of their way. If social democracy served their interests, they’d be funding that instead.
On a different note, since I suspect I’m talking to an old-school Marxist here—what’s your take on AI doing the thinking work and humanoid robots doing the doing? Hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, raising cattle before dinner, then a bit of critiquing? Or do we just get capital absolutely concentrated and everyone immiserated, exactly like Marx predicted?
I feel like we are two guys dancing with the same girl, wanting to be the last man standing for the privilege of escorting the subject home!
So this will be my last dance!
The significance of 2008 is that it signals the beginning of the end for the era of credit expansion and social liberalism. It also signals the beginning of the beginning for a move to political consolidation of the Right (Atlas Network, move towards buying the political apparatus more directly rather than just influencing) and away from social liberalism towards authoritarianism. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-dawn-of-austerity/
The asset owners vs those locked out is real everywhere. However we have been here before in the Gilded Age. Asset prices are so wildly overvalued there will be a crash that destroys most of the monetary value of the assets, though not the asset itself. That's the motive for their move from a fragile trading model during the expansive credit era to a resilient rentier model in this era. beyond that, its about who's got the most resolve when the crunch happens.
I'm not with you on the idpol thing as a serious rather than purely subjective driver of the Right Shift, despite that I pretty much agree that most (not all) idpol beyond race, gender and disability is just invented oppression- a sticking plaster over the symptom of a deeper social dysphoria- unresolved class issues (obviously lol)
Billionaires are definitely switching to fascism. The current divide between Democrat and Republican is that Democrat believes they can squeeze more juice out of the credit system by busting open Russia and China, whereas Republican believes that game is over (de-dollarisation) and retrenchment to a contiguous North American Empire is the next best move (the Canada / Greenland / Panama thing didn't appear from nowhere). The intention is to create a 'thousand year reich' using emergent technology to lock everything down before 'the Left (the real one, not the fake one) has a chance to catch up in the ideological race, and before the aforementioned crunch.
That probably answers your last question too, since AI is one of those 'emergent technologies'. I believe in simplicity & the dignity of craft and skill. My motto: DESTROY ALL ROBOTS.
Thank you Grant, this is a thoughtful piece. I appreciate the effort to take populist voters seriously rather than dismiss them as irrational or manipulated. Your discussion of political trust is spot on —distrust isn’t just a problem for democracy, imo it’s a rational response when people feel unheard or disregarded. I also think you’re right that simply treating populist parties as pariahs hasn’t worked and may well be counterproductive. In liberal democracies, at the end of the day, the majority of voters decides. Effective minority action is engagement and persuasion, not attack.
I do wonder though if your article doesn’t miss something crucial. It presents right-populist movements largely as reactions to cultural or economic anxieties, but doesn’t consider whether these movements also have a coherent vision of governance. If the system isn’t delivering, why is the assumption that populists are merely venting frustration rather than making legitimate critiques?
The discussion of norm-breaking focuses heavily on figures like Trump and Berlusconi but doesn’t explore comparable norm shifts on the left—whether in lawfare, judicial activism, or policy overreach. If trust is declining, is it just because of populists, or is there a broader accountability failure in governance? Pretending that only one side has been playing fast and loose with democratic norms looks to me like a straightforward way to tank trust.
While I appreciate the caution against overplaying victimhood, dismissing concerns about affirmative action, gender roles, and political representation as “playing the victim card” risks overlooking the ways in which these policies actually affect people’s lives. It could be that what looks like grievance politics is simply the recognition of a real problem.
I think Less Certain is onto something - see “Waitangi Day, Te Pati Mãori and Nationalism In New Zealand” from 4 Feb. If populists succeed where establishment parties fail, maybe the real question isn’t “why are people voting for them?” but “why aren’t mainstream parties offering something better?”
Great comments, thank you, John. Do these parties have a coherent vision of governance? That's a great question and would take some thought and research, across numerous jurisdictions. Comparable norm shifts on the left is also a great question, and would take another post as well! To some extent my book Government and Political Trust does that work. Here it's one post at a time. I have a piece coming out in the UK's Political Quarterly about why the Ardern/Hipkins government was defeated so badly in 2023, and previous posts here on that theme. But I really appreciate your critical response. Grant
Nations with strong equity seem to remain more immune to the forces of reactionary populism than those with weak equity. In saying that, the world's Left parties need to get better at story-telling, as FDR & MJS did back in their day. Moving the Left to the Centre is so tired & 1997; moving the Centre to the Left is wired/inspired.
As I've previously mentioned, the Thatcherist/Reaganomic New Right orthodoxy is collapsing, and whatever is replacing it is jostling for the steering wheel. Could it be the Great Deglobalisation? A New Deal 2.0? A World Troubles? The "Muslim Question" being answered with a 2nd Final Solution? Rehashes of 1789 & 1933 colliding head on? Who knows...
Which year in history do you think the world is repeating right now?
Sorry to be a bore, KR, but I don't subscribe to the history repeats thing. I like the comments all the same!
I correlated Sweden etc. to education and worldly experience too. The far right parties usually do better in rural areas for a reason.
"Which year in history do you think the world is repeating right now?" not a year, broadly an era
1914-1930?- but only very approximately & with no specific analogies as to who is playing which part. I am reminded of Gramsci's “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Grant about history not repeating, but there's always useful analogies.
I should have used "rhyming" instead of "repeating". I'd say there are echoes of either 1913 or the interwar years right now, and it doesn't seem far-fetched to see America & Germany swapping places, with China possibly the "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".
I much prefer Hegel’s view that history teaches us
"that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. Each age and each nation finds itself in such peculiar circumstances, in such a unique situation, that it can and must make decisions with respect to itself alone."
If this is anything to go by, "Tepid War" might be a fitting term.
https://theconversation.com/no-the-world-isnt-heading-toward-a-new-cold-war-its-closer-to-the-grinding-world-order-collapse-of-the-1930s-234939
Good read. The Edelman survey is sobering reading this year:
https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer