The rise of Populist Nationalism: Part II — Apparent Causes

Despite the general proliferation of far-right nationalist groups across Western Europe, certainly the most alarming example of the swift emergence of populist nationalism to date—not only because of the potential consequences for the country involved, but also because of those for the world at large, given that nation’s superpower status—has come in the United States, with the meteoric launching on the political horizon of billionaire real estate czar and reality show host Donald Trump. The flamboyant tycoon has skyrocketed from political obscurity to the position of presidential candidate for one of the country’s two major parties in just a few short months, solely on the strength of his populist nationalist rhetoric and its effect on the angriest segments of the population.

Trump was not the pick of the Republican Party itself, however. Far from it. He has been imposed on the GOP on the crest of a wave of populist fervor in the Republican primary process that lifted him to the top of a long list of would-be candidates from the ranks of that party itself, more because of, than despite, his being a veritable interloper, a non-politician and a Republican in name only since his past political leanings have often been toward the rival Democratic Party. Indeed, in the primary run-up to the last presidential election four years ago, Trump expressed backing for his now bitter rival for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton, who was vying at the time with the ultimate winner, Barack Obama, for the Democratic nomination.

Why Trump, arguably one of the world’s richest men, decided to run for president is hard to say. Conspiracy theories abound. Even more intriguing, though, is why the constituency most supporting him is precisely the one that should, logically, least trust a member of the “one percent” billionaire-class oligarchy. But his campaign, based on abundant gut-reaction, nationalist sloganeering, anti-everything insults and a lack of any real political knowledge or substance, has resonated more than most political pundits could have imagined with an even more astonishingly large American demographic.

If Trump has taken the country’s political intelligentsia by surprise, however, social analysts have been less caught-out, understanding that his unforeseen level of political success isn’t as much the product of personal charisma, as it is of how the often outrageous things he says play with a segment of society that is fed-up with political double-talk and that sees him as a “straight-shooter”, whose oversimplified discourse regarding everything from immigration to the war on Islamic State is expressed in words they understand, use and identify with, the aggressive words of the disenchanted and the un-filtered words of those with an open disdain for political correctness. Indeed, these are the words of people who are exasperated by their lot in Western democratic society but who fail to fully understand or are confused by what is happening to their immediate world.

But where is this raw contempt for the liberal democratic system as we have known it up to now coming from and how does it bode for the future of open democratic society? At the core of “Trumpism” are the same basic elements as those driving other right-wing populist nationalist movements throughout the West: economic nationalism as opposed to neo-conservative and/or liberal globalization, extreme border control (even to the point of building pharaonic walls and banning entire ethnic or religious demographics), direct mass expulsion of illegal aliens, the surveillance and strict vetting of “foreign elements” considered “potentially dangerous” and the placing of “US interests first”, a catch-all phrase that covers everything from ignoring and/or controlling the United Nations and NATO to seeking to subjugate the strategic and trade interests of major allies to those of the United States.The GOP’s conservative intellectual establishment is quite evidently united against Trump (with major Republican politicians denying him endorsement and with conservative writers like national columnists George Will and Robert Kagan, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, former RedState editor Erick Erickson and Fox News panelist and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, among others, either flatly rejecting Trump and calling on voters to support Hillary Clinton in order to deny him the presidency, or at least stating that they don’t see how they themselves could possibly vote for the GOP candidate no matter how much they dislike Clinton). But the politically incorrect message that ‘The Donald’ proffers has seduced a previously disenfranchised white, far right-wing segment of the public. And with the rise of Trump and his unabashedly ultra-nationalist and populist agenda—which vows to isolate America from foreign influence, openly challenges the ethical authority of the Supreme Court, hints at disdain for certain tenets of the Constitution while waving others in the air like a sacred flag, shows contempt for US allies and admiration for certain of its undemocratic rivals, challenges the entire political establishment and dismisses the current president as weak and unworthy—it has suddenly become clear just how much larger that segment of the political universe is than most observers might have guessed.

Trumpism, however, may only be a mere symptom of and distraction from something much larger that has been undermining to an ever greater extent liberal democracy and the rights of the individual for the past several decades. At the center of the discontent feeding populist nationalist movements is the sense among the middle and lower classes that their position is growing more untenable all the time, that for all the preaching of democracy that their current leaders do, few benefits are filtering down to them. Their pay scales have remained practically flat for decades, good-paying jobs are ever harder to come by, competition is tougher than ever, the days of a single bread-winner providing everything his or her family needs are over, higher education is more prohibitively expensive all the time, unionization only leads to jobs being exported and what was once known as “job security” is now truly a thing of the past.

Those affected want to “take back control” of the system that they believe has defrauded them and populist nationalism plays to that desire by promising—irresponsibly and offering no real accountability for such vows—what disinherited segments of representative democracies are clamoring for: someone who will shut out the foreign influences that they perceive as a threat to their security and economy, someone who will be unafraid to override other branches of government and effect change directly, and someone who claims to have the power to repair a “rigged system” and render it fair and just for “the true citizens” once again. With the rise of populist nationalism, whose leaders claim to be able to work all of these miracles—indeed, Trump purports that he and he alone is “the only one who can fix” the United States—a schism of sorts has been injected into society that is no longer the traditional split between liberals and conservatives within the framework of liberal democratic government, but between those in both the liberal and conservative camps who continue to believe in the system and “Trumpian”-type populist nationalists who believe the system is corrupt and broken and needs to have a new kind of nationalist strongman step in and put things to rights. And this last is much the same path to authoritarianism seen in places like Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain and a number of other countries from the early to mid-20^th century.

Nor are Trump’s followers or their counterparts in other Western democracies wrong about how the liberal democratic system has been eroded in recent decades through, for instance, laws that have turned corporations into “persons”, applying principles to them that were meant to protect the individual. Or how governments have helped big business undermine and even dismantle unions. Or how anti-trust, financial market and other laws have been watered down to permit one percent of the world population to accumulate as much wealth as the entire rest of the world put together. Or how “no one in the West makes anything anymore” and huge fortunes are made moving assets and investing in “paper” while jobs are outsourced abroad, etc. While Trump’s followers are, as I say, not wrong about the progressive erosion of the US system, they are indeed mistaken in thinking that populist nationalism can fix it. History has shown clearly that empowering populist autocrats instead of investing popular outrage in the re-establishment of a fully democratic framework is a recipe for disaster.

Recognition of these swiftly developing symptoms  is why futurological thinkers like renowned social theorist Jeremy Rifkin have invested so much time and study on the (precarious) future of work and why top-flight intellectuals like the esteemed if controversial MIT Professor Noam Chomsky have carefully documented the systematic destruction of “the American Dream”. In the next chapter of this series of articles, I’ll be taking a look at the theories of these and other erudite analysts, that go beyond apparent political upheaval to the root causes of current social frustration and anger.