Why Is Populism Winning on the American Right?
The answer may have less to to with the Trump phenomenon, and more daunting implications, than it seems.
.. “There are are a couple of black-swan events that happened here,” Brooks said.
.. “One was that media are going bust, and they saw Donald Trump as bank. CNN gave Donald Trump an 80 percent market share of earned media. Eighty percent. They basically treated him like Anthony Bourdain, … as a reality-show star on CNN. Responsible fourth estate? It’s about money; it’s about not going out of business for another year. That’s what it comes down to,” he says. “The second was a field of 17 candidates on the Republican side.”
Without these black swans, Brooks suggests, Trump’s candidacy would be as implausible now as conventional wisdom saw it to be a year ago.
.. “What we are seeing is anger at a disruption of our economy and, really, our social order—of the magnitude we saw when the agricultural age gave way to the industrial age,” Slaughter says:
.. “The problem is when anger is the salient characteristic of a political system. And that has a name: It’s populism. And populism is driven by grievance; and grievance is the rocket fuel of an anger that becomes truly salient, that becomes truly central to the political system.”
.. “On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30% after a financial crisis.”
.. But if the restoration of such a moral consensus is the work of aspirational leadership, why couldn’t Barack Obama pull that off? Many Americans see him as the apotheosis of an aspirational leader.
.. “My father hated bumper stickers. He said that they’re undemocratic. In fact, once he even said, they’re ‘fascistic.’ Now, that’s not my view, but … what bothered him was that a bumper sticker is a slogan. It’s a way of reducing a complex issue to an applause line. And that, he thought, was poisonous in our politics.”
.. Donald Trump may be defeated in November, but the anger and resentment behind him won’t be.