By which I mean, the forces and feelings that put Trump into the White House. A lot of non-Americans seem to think so, but I’m not so sure, given recent events in Britain, the Philippines, Russia, and other such places.
Is it just worse in the U.S. than in other places, or is there a more general leaning towards that kind of mistrust of immigrants, authoritarianism, etc? If the latter, where does it come from, and how do its opponents fix/counter it?
There’s definitely been a tilt towards authoritarian ethnic nationalism across the world, though in Europe the tide seems to have reversed a little after Brexit.
It seems to be a fairly widespread recent phenomenon - I’m already seeing predictions among my friends that France will be the next to lean in this direction under Marine le Pen.
Germany has its own version, with the AfD, a right-wing populist nationalist movement that didn’t even exist until three years ago, and has now been raking in up to a quarter of the votes in state elections.
The people who lived through WWII’s horrific outcomes of nationalism and blaming-the-foreigner-amongst-you, and experienced them firsthand in real time, are dying off.
In other words, we’re busy forgetting the past. So soon, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Brexit and UKIP are our local home-grown swivel-eyed loons.
Brexit and the continued success of Marie LePen are other instances.
I think the specifics of the Trump phenomenon are specific to the circumstance in the U.S. It’s basically an indictment of the two party controlled by insider elites system we ended up with. It seems like before the ballots were dry in 2012 we were being told that we had a choice between another Bush or Another Clinton in 2016.
And the peasants revolted, and ended up with something revolting. I hope against hope that Donald Trump has just been a 30 year stage personality, and that there is a reasonable person in there, but after months of despair that we would have either Donald or Hillary, I finally entered acceptance stage, and hope the back of the “Party Machinery” stranglehold is broken, and that one day I may be able to vote for a candidate I actually support, who has a feasible chance.
The specific beast is individual, but the forces behind it (populism and xenophobia) are visible in many locations, under slightly different guises. Spain doesn’t have much in the way of xenophobia at the national level but we manage to have it at lower ones: xenophobia is a big component in nationalist movements. We’ve had a string of populist parties which have had better and worse success; one of them has already dissolved, but the current one is way too strong for my taste.
I was going over risk assessment with the executive team of my company yesterday and “Protectionism / international strife” was one of the risks listed our business could face. We have offices in many countries, including the USA, UK, and France.
Everyone - this was before the election disaster - agreed it was a serious problem we had to consider, because everyone felt it was a general trend.
It because everyone refuses to acknowledge the elephant in the room: Globalization has made losers out of the Western working classes. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Trump himself is quite an American phenom, but as mentioned nationalist populism is a large force right now. And it’s not just on the Right – *leftist *nationalist populism for instance has been big in Latin America for most of the current century: just substitute the ethnic nativism line with class conflict.
I’ve been mentioning to my colleague that a lot of Trump’s rhetoric could just as easily come out of the mouth of a Marxist. The working class rising up against the elites and all that.
Indeed.
Metropolitan media feeding back to the hand wringing comfortable, protected middle classes - this is the death of the neo liberal experiment, and thank feck for that.
The working class across the developed world have been ignored, ridiculed, direspected and ignored for 20 years.
That changed with Brixit and last night.
Except that ethnic nativism is a racist fantasy and class (economic) conflict is a logical response to economic conditions. Other than that sure.
But Sanders would have probably beaten Trump - look to what Trump and Sanders have in common; it’s not ‘nationalism’. It’s working class anger, desperation. People want their dignity back.
Canada had Rob Ford - the Fuck You mayor of Toronto.
Currently? The Conservative party has a leadership candidate currently sowing seeds of nativism and “fuck the elite” in an attempt to garner attention.
And in the case of the US there is an element of confusion because we have BOTH issues of nativism AND of structural racism against longtime recognized citizens, and even in the left there is a friction between whether priority #1 is to address economic inequalities or racism.
Indeed, that very woman, Kellie Leitch, is praising Trump’s victory… which based on Canadian opinions of Trump is an act which more or less completely torpedoes her chances as a Canadian politician, so I’m not sure Leitch is the brightest bulb.
After watching Trump in the US, my faith that the Conservative party membership refutes her is a lot lower than it should be.