Democracy and Dystopia: Part Two
The Revenge of Politics
The progressive worldview of the transnational class has left the West divided and exhausted.
In the first part of this essay we looked at how the financial crisis created the economic conditions for an increasingly illiberal form of politics. Here, we discuss the populist reaction to transnational progressivism after 2016 and the political challenges Western democracy now confronts.
In Greece, the UK, across Western Europe, and in the US, an unanticipated and inchoate popular reaction to the financial crisis questioned the progressive assumptions that had informed the end-of-history project. To the astonishment of the transnational elites in politics, academia, finance, and the mainstream media, the second decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a resurgence of nationalism and populism on both the left and right of the political spectrum and on both sides of the Atlantic.
The financial crisis of 2008 and the decade of bank bailouts and austerity that followed, created a mounting sense of unease about the governance of Western Europe and the United States. It fed a loss of confidence in established political parties. In 2016, the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and the rise of nativist and radical socialist political movements everywhere, announced a wave of angry populism crashing on the rapidly eroding shore of Western progressive orthodoxy. Trump and Brexit signalled a revolt of the masses against a progressive antipathy to borders. The pandemic lockdowns of 2020 further reinforced a growing predilection for national solidarity.
Across Europe, parties have either emerged from nowhere or chased electability from the political fringes. Populism finds the new social media particularly congenial for transmitting its message, bypassing established party systems that acted as filters to limit their appeal. Social media enabled the electoral success of previously fringe movements, such as Syriza in Greece or the Five Star Movement in Italy, as well as the hijacking of mainstream parties. Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination for the 2016 US presidential election against the wishes of the party establishment, whilst Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership victory in 2015 lit a bonfire under Tony Blair’s progressive third way vanities.
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