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JazzG These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation
"Ordinary people" are rational but they do have incorrect premises. Like anyone is, they're apt to prefer explanations for things that are more reassuring.
In the OECD the domestic wage share of revenue has stagnated for over fifty years, as these nations have unevenly deindustrialised due to globalisation.
The familiar public goods of the post-WWII social democratic wave (like the NHS) were brought about by the mass politics of the labour movement and the need and opportunity of renewal following disastrous warfare. That politics relied on strong unions with high density in the workforce. But those unions relied on the industries that started moving offshore during the era of globalisation, so this way of doing things began to slowly fail.
The first big way this failure emerged was in the union-busting conflicts of the 70s and 80s. Traditionally powerful unions fought rearguard actions against an alliance of national governments with freshly international and mobile forms of capital. They lost.
We still talk about these conflicts now (eg the coal miners' strikes of the Thatcher era or the Australian airline disputes of the 1980s) because there have been few to match them since. The bosses won, and the labour movement's role has been reduced to bargaining since.
In the 80s and 90s, Thatcherism or "third way" politics (pick your poison) brought the managerialist neoliberalism we have now. Centre left parties disaffiliated themselves from the weakened labour movement. Tottering deindustrialising economies were patched up by way of privatisations, credit booms, and the rise of new forms of knowledge and service work.
All through this history, social and economic inequality has continued unevenly to rise. There's no mechanism that keeps it in check now. A gap in living standards has tended to rise everywhere, with degraded relative expectations about welfare, housing, and access to health and education for the majority.
This inequality has been masked by the price benefits of offshoring production, making many everyday goods wonderfully cheap by historical standards, but it becomes impossible to ignore.
By around 2000 "pasokification" (named after the old Greek centre left party PASOK) was in motion. Centre left parties have been getting irregularly hammered at the polls by a rational public increasingly aware of the reduced appeal of its offering. No labour movement, no proper labour parties.
But parties of the centre right are actually worse: all they do is sell things off, abandon helpful economic regulation to attract capital, apply austerity measures to people who don't vote for them, and use tax policy to redistribute overall wealth to their constituency. In effect these parties accelerate system failure.
The last decade's wave of ambiguous populism comes about because these old parties of government are failing. Greater numbers of "ordinary people" are resentfully severed from both sides of the parliaments supposed to represent them. It is highly rational they want new politics that appear to be different.
This new populism has two basic traits: nostalgia and scapegoating.
Its nostalgia harkens back to before globalisation and deindustrialisation. It promises its supporters a powerful phantasm, supported by cherry-picked history, film and photography, of an era when their nations manufactured advanced goods, and everyone was more equal with much fairer access to public goods. It edits out all the bad points, the relative poverty, the racism and misogyny, etc.
Along with this nostalgia come varying stories about who to blame. These go along with fantasies about rolling back social changes of this past half century: women entering the workforce, multiculturalism, etc.
"Ordinary people" prefer not to admit that for fifty years they've been spectating economic changes their withering politics has never been in a position to prevent.
Populists never, ever state that they're not magically in a position to reverse these changes. No one votes for that.
With "ordinary people" and their politicians preferring neither to accept the situation nor be accountable, it becomes a question of scapegoating.
So now it's terrorists, the Chinese, the migrants, the Muslims, the EU ... and now it's affirmative action and trans people wrecking the joint. Even during Trump's political career, the emphasis of blame has changed up a few times.
As the emphasis changes, so too does the symbolic spectacle of "something being done": Rwanda deportation flights, confiscating asylum seekers' family heirlooms at the border, "building the Wall", national enquiries, assassinations and airstrikes ... and now it's purging HR departments of efforts to reduce workplace prejudice.
Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
They have no renewed mass politics, no base in society, and no loyalty to the collective interest. They have no coherent plan and no particular expertise. And since women, migrants, and trans people aren't the problem, punishing and disciplining them will fix nothing.
The populists can "win", but the framework of power doesn't change. A general decline of civic standards leaves the door wide open for unprecedented looting of public goods by capital.
Quite likely the United States federal apparatus is about to get rolled over, ripped off and wrecked in a way that'll resemble the Tory Cabinet feeding their in-laws contracts during COVID-19.
It's also possible some things can incrementally improve, because there's no doubt fifty years of shittifying managerialism have left a fair few easy wins.
I predict we'll hear all about savings and victories through this period, but at its end the US system and its agencies will become even more dysfunctional, half the services they used to provide will be gone, the US will be a pariah in many more multilateral institutions, and nothing will get better for "ordinary people".
When the dust settles on Trump and Musk (or Farage or Le Pen or Beppe bloody Grillo) we're left right back where we were with the other parties. There's no politics here that can check capital and enforce outcomes in our collective interest. Let's hope the new bosses are kind.
