Cause #6 is given far too short a shrift. FF acknowledges that cultural factors played an important role in the Nixon and Reagan ascendencies. That should a clue to be paid attention to, as opposed to written off as not explaining the current more intense cultural counter-reaction.
The Left in the West has pushed much farther to disavow and delegitimize national identity and sovereignty in the past 10 years than in any previous era. Immigration in the US and Europe especially from non-Western countries has reached levels maybe an order of magnitude higher. It’s hard to imagine the British grooming gangs scandal occurring in the 80’s. We get treated every day on X to 15 year old Trump-lite statements about immigration from the Clintons, Schumer and Biden. We hear historically very extremist positions on transgender surgery for children and men playing in women’s sports.
The rise of populism is only in very direct proportion to the level of extremism embedded in our current culture. Progressive control over culture hijacked long standing and accepted national and personal norms in service of its social justice urge, an urge which is profoundly antithetical to long accepted ideals of family nation and God.
Eventually ordinary common sense people (ie populists) say ENOUGH! I am proud of my country, I believe in God and value traditional family centric ideals. And Im tired of being scolded by a bunch of wingnuts.
This explanation is useful because the dynamic and feelings I have described are universal around Western countries.
“We get treated every day on X to…..” Sounds like social media to me. If we weren’t hearing about this stuff constantly on social media, it would matter a whole lot less. If it mattered a whole lot less, we could get on with our lives and maybe get more work done and be less disposed towards mental illness.
Frank would agree - though qualifying it that social media vastly accelerated wokeism and allowed the Left’s committed zealots to spread and enforce woke ruthlessly. He would say that Woke overreach was a small fire that grew far too big because of the online gasoline.
I'm not onboard with this thesis. I think the Internet is the amplification mechanism for the other causes, but it is not the cause. The "term "populism" in this context is a class invective that points to one of the key causes. What is popular in a democracy is what the people believe, not what the over-educated credentialled class elites believe. The premise of this piece is a bit irritating in that is more of that top-down scold that the people don't know how good they have it... if only Fox News and Trump would stop lying to them, they should be happy!
"Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them."
This is another swing and miss. There are two camps of supply-side Republicans here. One supports free trade and capitalism. The other demands globalism, corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy. This latter is fully backed by the current Democrat regime when they are not pushing absurd radical postmodernist feminist ideology. The former is old-school capitalism... the Adam Smith version that assumes domestic labor would share in the returns of domestic capital invested.
There is absolutely no version of real capitalism that supports exporting all of our industry and manufacturing jobs to other countries for the last penny of corporate profit. Global trade is designed for unique product and services, or for significant and unsolvable capacity imbalances... not "here China, you do all these jobs because your poor peasants will do them cheaper."
Just take a look at Shenzhen in the 1980s and now and consider what the US gave away.
NAFTA and then allowing communist China into the WTO were good moves for the upper 10% and sucked for the bottom 80%.
The top 10% own 80% of all stocks. The bottom 80% own 8% of all stocks. The top 10% own 70% of all the wealth.
Charles Murray covered all of this in his book "Coming Apart". There are several sub-causes, but the general root cause is the pursuit of globalism. Or another way to explain it is the failure of our Professional Managerial Class that runs the world to halt the US-funded post Bretton Woods Global Order after it achieved its goals and then began to cause more harm than good... and clearly is the root cause of the "coming apart".
Then we have massive immigration and educated females entering the workforce. Few jobs and more competition for the remaining supply. Good for the corporatists to have the cheap foreign labor and to force two-income families. Add to this inflation that has led to the US having the 6th highest cost of living. Corporate consolidation largely driven by globalism (large corporations can offshore, while small business has to rely on domestic labor) and with more big corporate consolidation the collusion with big government to layer on competition-killing regulations... this is the primary cause of high inflation. The supporters of globalism claim that it benefits us all with competition, but the truth is that it kills competition and turns the global economy into a global corporatocracy, where for example, one Brazilian muti-national owns 80% of the US beef market and beef prices have skyrocketed.
The US is almost $40 trillion in debt. Its infrastructure is crumbling. We have declining life expectancy. We run a $1.4 trillion dollar trade deficit. Family consumer debt is through the roof. We have millions of homeless. All other countries have tariffs on US goods, but the US has kept its platinum consumer markets open to them.
The support of Trump is simply a rejection of globalism and support for the US to implement a National Industrial Policy. The top10% don't want that to happen, and that is why they have gone to the Internet to implement cancel culture and now assassination culture.
Oh, and the population had the fog lifted from their eyes during the pandemic for what life would be like under Democrat rule.
A regular reminder that the first year of the pandemic (including masks, lockdowns and accelerated vaccine development) was under Trump rule. You're welcome 😊
Not the first year, but the first few months when nobody knew what to expect. Then we learned and what we learned was that the virus was less dangerous than the seasonal flu for young and healthy people, and that the mRNA drugs did not work as vaccines, and that all the partisan Democrat relief spending under Biden was not required and caused a massive increase in our national debt and massive inflation.
And Trump era pandemic spending was approved bipartisan. Biden era pandemic spending was 100% Democrat and 0% Republican. And all the mask, lockdowns and vaccine mandates were rejected by Republicans and Democrats had an authoritarian orgasm over them.
Excellent. My scores on "Guess Frank's response before he posts it" are getting better and better, though I'm still not quite reaching the required depths of paranoia to score 100%.
In many ways we are in a similar spot to Renaissance Europe, after the development of the printing press and before the adoption of widespread censorship. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door it was dismissed as an “argument between monks” by Charles V, but within 3 years his message had circulated to millions of people, and the first state-led attempts to regulate media began.
The ultimate Renaissance conspiracy theory was probably the book Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of the Witches by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer managed to overturn an elite consensus forbidding the execution of witches that had lasted for a thousand years, arguing that Canon Law forbidding executions didn’t apply to “modern” witches who were responsible for anomalous weather patterns and crop failures. This coincided with the Little Ice Age. The book was a bestseller second only to the Bible for centuries, causing at least 60,000 deaths, 80% of them women.
Welcome aboard, Francis, I've been rowing this boat for nearly 10 years. My viewpoint is shared with James Madison, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." While the other eight issues are troubling, their presentation by the disinformation industry amplifies and distorts the problems, thus becoming more divisive. Although more limited in geographic scope and more difficult economic issues, the corollary to the America today is Germany in 1930. Goebbels weaponized the country's unlimited free speech and turned a giant swath of voters into believing that the Jews were the cause of all their problems and only Hitler had the right stuff to "fix" it. 60 million deaths later and a country in ruin, the German voters had to take hard look at their media environment and introduced hate speech laws with teeth. The only reason that more populists didn't pop up around the world then, as is the case today, is that the means of worldwide disinformation didn't exist. Our cherished First Amendment is eating America from the inside like a cancer. Beware First Amendment purists; unlimited free speech can be abused and weaponized. The solutions are available to us if only smart people with good intentions could address the obvious problem.
The specific way this happens is because of the simultaneous annhilation of local Politics and its media ecosystem: when all politics is national, a single person can easily swallow a party.
The First Past the Post system makes sense when local Politics is the relevant representation cleavage. But today, persons are very different, but places are more homogeneous. Proportional parlaments allow for ideological pluralism…
#1 Economic inequality is not an important factor in working class populism. Working class families do not mind if billionaires have 4 mansions as long as they can buy their own home. They also want to envision their children buying their own home.
OPPORTUNITY, or at least the *vision* of opportunity, is what is terrifying. "We have lost the path of predictable progress". And all the Ds can do is quote unemployment statistics. They're NOT reading the room, just spouting their class warfare notions that only work with a small fraction of the country. DOA.
Fukuyama’s argument is sharp but too clean. The internet didn’t break democracy; it just made it impossible to hide the cracks.
We talk about “good economic conditions” as if GDP proves people should feel fine. But GDP is a terrible compass. It measures motion, not meaning. It rewards extraction, burnout, and pollution, and calls them progress. It rises when people go to therapy for stress, or rebuild after disasters. It counts the money changing hands, not the quality of the lives involved. When GDP goes up, who actually wins? The hedge fund manager or the single parent working weekends?
Here’s the part that gets lost: the system has been quietly squeezing the middle while telling everyone the numbers look great. So when people say “the economy’s strong,” what they really mean is “the spreadsheet’s happy.”
The deeper truth is that people were already alienated before the algorithms arrived. The internet didn’t invent distrust. It exposed it. You can blame the screens, or you can ask why so many of us were ready to believe the game was rigged long before we logged on.
Maybe populism isn’t an internet glitch at all. Maybe it’s a collective audit of a society that stopped measuring what really matters.
All of Prof. Fukuyama’s 9 items except #s 4 and 6 have been caused by the 4th Industrial Revolution (Digital, AI?). Read Mark Carney’s book! History is repeating itself and it’s time we started learning from it. I have written Prof. Fukuyama about it previously but either he’s not buying it or not reading what I’ve written.
WHY is this important? Because if you don’t understand the root cause your solutions will likely be incomplete and inadequate to the task.
IS there a “solution”? Given the diffuse nature of the malady, a single "solution" is highly unlikely. Every other industrialized country is having the same problems and NONE of them have a solution. It’s something we (the World) is going to have to work through. Any “solution” we offer is shot-in-the-dark, maybe hit, more likely miss. We don’t need more misses, thank you.
OK, so what should the DDems do?
Here are the short summations on “how things are in the country” from middle-aged males in a NYT focus group experiment: “Stagnant, In need of a change, Financial insecurity, Uncertain, Surviving, Surviving in an uncertain economy, Optimistic, S-show, Confused, Challenging, Chaotic, Optimistic.” 2/12 optimistic, the rest clearly confused and pessimistic.
Does that sound like the ‘great economy, low crime, low unemployment’ Prof. Fukuyama talks about? Why not? Because their responses are not rational. They’re emotional responses to something for which there IS no “rational” answer. STOP talking TO them and listen. Read Arlie Hochschild. We have, as Kyla Scanlon says, “lost the path of predictable progress” and that’s existentially frightening to almost everyone.
Maybe something like: “We’re in highly uncertain times. NOBODY knows how this is going to all work out. But your country is here to support you, to help ALL of us work through this and come out stronger on the other side.” Big Tent. Let’s get moving!
Robert, this is excellent. I think you’re spot on about listening first. The “liberal conceit” you describe hits home. That reflex to analyze before we empathize is real. You’re right that a lot of people aren’t responding to data; they’re responding to disorientation.
Your framing of the Digital Industrial Revolution as the deeper current underneath Fukuyama’s nine causes is compelling. It raises a question I keep circling back to: when the ground itself is shifting, what does leadership even look like? How do we restore trust without pretending to have answers we don’t yet have?
I’d love to unpack that further with you. I read your Dropbox paper, and one line jumped out: “we don’t know how to navigate these shoals.” That humility is refreshing. Maybe the best starting point really is to listen, not to win arguments but to map where people are emotionally anchored before we try to steer anywhere new.
If you’re open to it, I’d love to continue this thread. How do you think we could apply that kind of listening in practice, not just in politics but in daily civic life, workplaces, or local communities?
Happy to continue. I love thinking about this stuff and (maybe)finding some answers. Please send me a comment at my Substack chat and we can go from there. Thanks SO much for your in-depth reading of my stuff and your pithy comments.
I would demur from this analysis in three ways. First, in the US the roots of everything that is going on today lie in the Reagan Revolution, followed by the extraordinary radicalization of the Republican Party after 1994. Second, the first full blown model of "right wing populism" governing a rich capitalist democracy is Silvio Berlusconi whose first turn in government also begins in 1994. So this phenomenon starts well before the internet. So, no, I don't think technological determinism works in this case any more than it would work for an attempt to explain interwar fascism by invoking the radio. There is another interesting approach that could be developed on the basis of a book I think the title of which was The End of History and the Last Man. But I can't remember the author.
I’ve read your review of Neil Howe’s “The Fourth Turning”. You, and all classical political scientists, refuse the idea of natural social cycles. Most political scientists and historians operate from an unexamined premise that world orders are merely chaotic, unpredictable, random, cause-and-effect, linearly unfolding things. You might agree “things rhyme” with the vibes of the 1930s, 1850s, and 1770s. Similarly social cycle upheavals defined by populism and violence. But you couldn’t agree with Neil that these cycles are natural and predictable.
I suppose such mystical “it’s in the stars” thinking is offensive to the progressive mind’s premise that humans have agency. That we progress, via social engineering, to never cover the same ground twice. The idea of Turnings and generations and zeitgeists - while the most plausible explantation for the re-emergence of populism to reinvigorate a fatigued and spent world order every 80-100 years - simply violates The Progressive Mind and every unquestioned premise as to how human social groups operate and the (very) limited number of moods that possess generations of citizens.
Yes, the internet is an accelerant to this fire. But it didn’t start the fire.
People make this situation overly complicated because they can't accept the most reasonable explanation - that the populist wave was caused by the obvious failures of the elites' worldview. Ask yourself, why is that discussions about certain topics (for instance group differences, crime stats or Jewish influence in US politics) were effectively banned for decades? It was because they were a direct threat to that worldview. The internet simply lifted the veil and exposed what many people privately suspected. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad actors who took advantage of the situation to build an audience.
Instead of correcting their worldview after 2016, the elites doubled down. And the rest is history (not the end of history).
Cause #6 is given far too short a shrift. FF acknowledges that cultural factors played an important role in the Nixon and Reagan ascendencies. That should a clue to be paid attention to, as opposed to written off as not explaining the current more intense cultural counter-reaction.
The Left in the West has pushed much farther to disavow and delegitimize national identity and sovereignty in the past 10 years than in any previous era. Immigration in the US and Europe especially from non-Western countries has reached levels maybe an order of magnitude higher. It’s hard to imagine the British grooming gangs scandal occurring in the 80’s. We get treated every day on X to 15 year old Trump-lite statements about immigration from the Clintons, Schumer and Biden. We hear historically very extremist positions on transgender surgery for children and men playing in women’s sports.
The rise of populism is only in very direct proportion to the level of extremism embedded in our current culture. Progressive control over culture hijacked long standing and accepted national and personal norms in service of its social justice urge, an urge which is profoundly antithetical to long accepted ideals of family nation and God.
Eventually ordinary common sense people (ie populists) say ENOUGH! I am proud of my country, I believe in God and value traditional family centric ideals. And Im tired of being scolded by a bunch of wingnuts.
This explanation is useful because the dynamic and feelings I have described are universal around Western countries.
“We get treated every day on X to…..” Sounds like social media to me. If we weren’t hearing about this stuff constantly on social media, it would matter a whole lot less. If it mattered a whole lot less, we could get on with our lives and maybe get more work done and be less disposed towards mental illness.
I think the most significant purity spirals that resulted in the worst of the cultural factors were primarily driven by the internet and social media.
Frank would agree - though qualifying it that social media vastly accelerated wokeism and allowed the Left’s committed zealots to spread and enforce woke ruthlessly. He would say that Woke overreach was a small fire that grew far too big because of the online gasoline.
I'm not onboard with this thesis. I think the Internet is the amplification mechanism for the other causes, but it is not the cause. The "term "populism" in this context is a class invective that points to one of the key causes. What is popular in a democracy is what the people believe, not what the over-educated credentialled class elites believe. The premise of this piece is a bit irritating in that is more of that top-down scold that the people don't know how good they have it... if only Fox News and Trump would stop lying to them, they should be happy!
"Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them."
This is another swing and miss. There are two camps of supply-side Republicans here. One supports free trade and capitalism. The other demands globalism, corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy. This latter is fully backed by the current Democrat regime when they are not pushing absurd radical postmodernist feminist ideology. The former is old-school capitalism... the Adam Smith version that assumes domestic labor would share in the returns of domestic capital invested.
There is absolutely no version of real capitalism that supports exporting all of our industry and manufacturing jobs to other countries for the last penny of corporate profit. Global trade is designed for unique product and services, or for significant and unsolvable capacity imbalances... not "here China, you do all these jobs because your poor peasants will do them cheaper."
Just take a look at Shenzhen in the 1980s and now and consider what the US gave away.
NAFTA and then allowing communist China into the WTO were good moves for the upper 10% and sucked for the bottom 80%.
The top 10% own 80% of all stocks. The bottom 80% own 8% of all stocks. The top 10% own 70% of all the wealth.
Charles Murray covered all of this in his book "Coming Apart". There are several sub-causes, but the general root cause is the pursuit of globalism. Or another way to explain it is the failure of our Professional Managerial Class that runs the world to halt the US-funded post Bretton Woods Global Order after it achieved its goals and then began to cause more harm than good... and clearly is the root cause of the "coming apart".
Then we have massive immigration and educated females entering the workforce. Few jobs and more competition for the remaining supply. Good for the corporatists to have the cheap foreign labor and to force two-income families. Add to this inflation that has led to the US having the 6th highest cost of living. Corporate consolidation largely driven by globalism (large corporations can offshore, while small business has to rely on domestic labor) and with more big corporate consolidation the collusion with big government to layer on competition-killing regulations... this is the primary cause of high inflation. The supporters of globalism claim that it benefits us all with competition, but the truth is that it kills competition and turns the global economy into a global corporatocracy, where for example, one Brazilian muti-national owns 80% of the US beef market and beef prices have skyrocketed.
The US is almost $40 trillion in debt. Its infrastructure is crumbling. We have declining life expectancy. We run a $1.4 trillion dollar trade deficit. Family consumer debt is through the roof. We have millions of homeless. All other countries have tariffs on US goods, but the US has kept its platinum consumer markets open to them.
The support of Trump is simply a rejection of globalism and support for the US to implement a National Industrial Policy. The top10% don't want that to happen, and that is why they have gone to the Internet to implement cancel culture and now assassination culture.
Oh, and the population had the fog lifted from their eyes during the pandemic for what life would be like under Democrat rule.
I concur.
A regular reminder that the first year of the pandemic (including masks, lockdowns and accelerated vaccine development) was under Trump rule. You're welcome 😊
Not the first year, but the first few months when nobody knew what to expect. Then we learned and what we learned was that the virus was less dangerous than the seasonal flu for young and healthy people, and that the mRNA drugs did not work as vaccines, and that all the partisan Democrat relief spending under Biden was not required and caused a massive increase in our national debt and massive inflation.
And Trump era pandemic spending was approved bipartisan. Biden era pandemic spending was 100% Democrat and 0% Republican. And all the mask, lockdowns and vaccine mandates were rejected by Republicans and Democrats had an authoritarian orgasm over them.
Excellent. My scores on "Guess Frank's response before he posts it" are getting better and better, though I'm still not quite reaching the required depths of paranoia to score 100%.
What does your paranoia have to do with my posts. That is your problem. Maybe you should see a shrink.
It seems maybe real facts that conflict with your programming irritate you to the point that you cannot acknowledge them.
😘
In many ways we are in a similar spot to Renaissance Europe, after the development of the printing press and before the adoption of widespread censorship. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door it was dismissed as an “argument between monks” by Charles V, but within 3 years his message had circulated to millions of people, and the first state-led attempts to regulate media began.
The ultimate Renaissance conspiracy theory was probably the book Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of the Witches by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer managed to overturn an elite consensus forbidding the execution of witches that had lasted for a thousand years, arguing that Canon Law forbidding executions didn’t apply to “modern” witches who were responsible for anomalous weather patterns and crop failures. This coincided with the Little Ice Age. The book was a bestseller second only to the Bible for centuries, causing at least 60,000 deaths, 80% of them women.
Welcome aboard, Francis, I've been rowing this boat for nearly 10 years. My viewpoint is shared with James Madison, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." While the other eight issues are troubling, their presentation by the disinformation industry amplifies and distorts the problems, thus becoming more divisive. Although more limited in geographic scope and more difficult economic issues, the corollary to the America today is Germany in 1930. Goebbels weaponized the country's unlimited free speech and turned a giant swath of voters into believing that the Jews were the cause of all their problems and only Hitler had the right stuff to "fix" it. 60 million deaths later and a country in ruin, the German voters had to take hard look at their media environment and introduced hate speech laws with teeth. The only reason that more populists didn't pop up around the world then, as is the case today, is that the means of worldwide disinformation didn't exist. Our cherished First Amendment is eating America from the inside like a cancer. Beware First Amendment purists; unlimited free speech can be abused and weaponized. The solutions are available to us if only smart people with good intentions could address the obvious problem.
The specific way this happens is because of the simultaneous annhilation of local Politics and its media ecosystem: when all politics is national, a single person can easily swallow a party.
The First Past the Post system makes sense when local Politics is the relevant representation cleavage. But today, persons are very different, but places are more homogeneous. Proportional parlaments allow for ideological pluralism…
#1 Economic inequality is not an important factor in working class populism. Working class families do not mind if billionaires have 4 mansions as long as they can buy their own home. They also want to envision their children buying their own home.
OPPORTUNITY, or at least the *vision* of opportunity, is what is terrifying. "We have lost the path of predictable progress". And all the Ds can do is quote unemployment statistics. They're NOT reading the room, just spouting their class warfare notions that only work with a small fraction of the country. DOA.
Fukuyama’s argument is sharp but too clean. The internet didn’t break democracy; it just made it impossible to hide the cracks.
We talk about “good economic conditions” as if GDP proves people should feel fine. But GDP is a terrible compass. It measures motion, not meaning. It rewards extraction, burnout, and pollution, and calls them progress. It rises when people go to therapy for stress, or rebuild after disasters. It counts the money changing hands, not the quality of the lives involved. When GDP goes up, who actually wins? The hedge fund manager or the single parent working weekends?
Here’s the part that gets lost: the system has been quietly squeezing the middle while telling everyone the numbers look great. So when people say “the economy’s strong,” what they really mean is “the spreadsheet’s happy.”
The deeper truth is that people were already alienated before the algorithms arrived. The internet didn’t invent distrust. It exposed it. You can blame the screens, or you can ask why so many of us were ready to believe the game was rigged long before we logged on.
Maybe populism isn’t an internet glitch at all. Maybe it’s a collective audit of a society that stopped measuring what really matters.
Sorry, only partial credit allowable on this analysis. The answer is NOT "The Internet".
The problem with this thesis is that all the proffered answers are a layer or more too superficial. For The Root Cause, see my course analysis here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p3s1ix1tvehnwq8ycajmz/The-Root-Cause-of-the-Rightward-Lean.pdf?rlkey=sbbq43op2uuwmul2s7tykor2y&e=1&st=vz9mll7y&dl=0
All of Prof. Fukuyama’s 9 items except #s 4 and 6 have been caused by the 4th Industrial Revolution (Digital, AI?). Read Mark Carney’s book! History is repeating itself and it’s time we started learning from it. I have written Prof. Fukuyama about it previously but either he’s not buying it or not reading what I’ve written.
WHY is this important? Because if you don’t understand the root cause your solutions will likely be incomplete and inadequate to the task.
IS there a “solution”? Given the diffuse nature of the malady, a single "solution" is highly unlikely. Every other industrialized country is having the same problems and NONE of them have a solution. It’s something we (the World) is going to have to work through. Any “solution” we offer is shot-in-the-dark, maybe hit, more likely miss. We don’t need more misses, thank you.
OK, so what should the DDems do?
Here are the short summations on “how things are in the country” from middle-aged males in a NYT focus group experiment: “Stagnant, In need of a change, Financial insecurity, Uncertain, Surviving, Surviving in an uncertain economy, Optimistic, S-show, Confused, Challenging, Chaotic, Optimistic.” 2/12 optimistic, the rest clearly confused and pessimistic.
Does that sound like the ‘great economy, low crime, low unemployment’ Prof. Fukuyama talks about? Why not? Because their responses are not rational. They’re emotional responses to something for which there IS no “rational” answer. STOP talking TO them and listen. Read Arlie Hochschild. We have, as Kyla Scanlon says, “lost the path of predictable progress” and that’s existentially frightening to almost everyone.
Maybe something like: “We’re in highly uncertain times. NOBODY knows how this is going to all work out. But your country is here to support you, to help ALL of us work through this and come out stronger on the other side.” Big Tent. Let’s get moving!
Robert, this is excellent. I think you’re spot on about listening first. The “liberal conceit” you describe hits home. That reflex to analyze before we empathize is real. You’re right that a lot of people aren’t responding to data; they’re responding to disorientation.
Your framing of the Digital Industrial Revolution as the deeper current underneath Fukuyama’s nine causes is compelling. It raises a question I keep circling back to: when the ground itself is shifting, what does leadership even look like? How do we restore trust without pretending to have answers we don’t yet have?
I’d love to unpack that further with you. I read your Dropbox paper, and one line jumped out: “we don’t know how to navigate these shoals.” That humility is refreshing. Maybe the best starting point really is to listen, not to win arguments but to map where people are emotionally anchored before we try to steer anywhere new.
If you’re open to it, I’d love to continue this thread. How do you think we could apply that kind of listening in practice, not just in politics but in daily civic life, workplaces, or local communities?
Happy to continue. I love thinking about this stuff and (maybe)finding some answers. Please send me a comment at my Substack chat and we can go from there. Thanks SO much for your in-depth reading of my stuff and your pithy comments.
I would demur from this analysis in three ways. First, in the US the roots of everything that is going on today lie in the Reagan Revolution, followed by the extraordinary radicalization of the Republican Party after 1994. Second, the first full blown model of "right wing populism" governing a rich capitalist democracy is Silvio Berlusconi whose first turn in government also begins in 1994. So this phenomenon starts well before the internet. So, no, I don't think technological determinism works in this case any more than it would work for an attempt to explain interwar fascism by invoking the radio. There is another interesting approach that could be developed on the basis of a book I think the title of which was The End of History and the Last Man. But I can't remember the author.
Good analysis.
A counterpoint:
I’ve read your review of Neil Howe’s “The Fourth Turning”. You, and all classical political scientists, refuse the idea of natural social cycles. Most political scientists and historians operate from an unexamined premise that world orders are merely chaotic, unpredictable, random, cause-and-effect, linearly unfolding things. You might agree “things rhyme” with the vibes of the 1930s, 1850s, and 1770s. Similarly social cycle upheavals defined by populism and violence. But you couldn’t agree with Neil that these cycles are natural and predictable.
I suppose such mystical “it’s in the stars” thinking is offensive to the progressive mind’s premise that humans have agency. That we progress, via social engineering, to never cover the same ground twice. The idea of Turnings and generations and zeitgeists - while the most plausible explantation for the re-emergence of populism to reinvigorate a fatigued and spent world order every 80-100 years - simply violates The Progressive Mind and every unquestioned premise as to how human social groups operate and the (very) limited number of moods that possess generations of citizens.
Yes, the internet is an accelerant to this fire. But it didn’t start the fire.
People make this situation overly complicated because they can't accept the most reasonable explanation - that the populist wave was caused by the obvious failures of the elites' worldview. Ask yourself, why is that discussions about certain topics (for instance group differences, crime stats or Jewish influence in US politics) were effectively banned for decades? It was because they were a direct threat to that worldview. The internet simply lifted the veil and exposed what many people privately suspected. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad actors who took advantage of the situation to build an audience.
Instead of correcting their worldview after 2016, the elites doubled down. And the rest is history (not the end of history).