“But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them. The revolts we are seeing are a mix of appalling visuals with absurd, pompous and incendiary rhetoric—but no coherent aims or rational ideology.”
Isn’t the idea of British sovereignty a long-established power structure idea? The very reverse of the authors hypothesis seems more likely to be true: those who are aiming to destroy power structures without having a cogent replacement are the cancel culture warriors blaming every ill on ever-broadening definitions of racism and white privilege.
Are the “cancel culture warriors” storming the capitol and chanting for the public execution of our elected officials? Are they spreading conspiracy theories about global cabals of child-eating pedophiles who rule the world? Are they voting these far-right populists into office? Or are they making the lives of comedians and professors more difficult? The “ever-broadening definitions of racism and white privilege” are at least rooted in truth. We do live in a society where whites are more privileged than minority races, and racism is a massive problem inextricably tied to the rise of far-right populism that the author is discussing here. Most of these “cancel culture warriors” are purported to be marxists by the way, so it would seem that they do have a cogent replacement in mind, it’s just a really scary one to most westerners.
Hi Tim: You're right to draw these distinctions between the populist-nihilist left and the populist-nihilist right. My handy elevator message is that the only thing I fear more than the left now is the right. If the left starts stockpiling weapons, I'll reassess. However, I do want to respond to "Marxism." For decades, the political right more or less correctly identified the politics of left-wing academics as Marxist. That was when many academics used to teach [about] Marxism. I used to teach about Marxism and have students read Marx as a way to help them understand the political ideologies of the twentieth century. But we don't do that anymore. I'd be surprised if we could find any college students now who know anything about Marx, though I'm sure some would cite him perfunctorily as an avatar of their politics.
Thanks for your comment, that’s why I used the word “purported,” because the right generally throws that term around very loosely. I’ve always been confused about this hysteria over Marxism in our schools because, like you said, I never encountered it in undergrad, and neither did any of my friends or family as far as I know. I’m reading and learning about Marxism on my free time now and it seems apparent that what you said is true, and it’s more of a neo-liberal sense of righteousness that drives the “cancel culture warriors” as OP put it. I was sort of trying to use the right’s language against him.
Most of these “cancel culture warriors” are purported to be marxists by the way, so it would seem that they do have a cogent replacement in mind, it’s just a really scary one to most westerners....”.
I suppose “cogent” is in the eye of the beholders, but I’m sure it’s scarier to the victims of Marxism than others, and to those of a scientific bent of mind “scientific utopian socialism” is just plain pseudoscience.
Those calling themselves Marxists today, or who I would call cultural Marxists are not ur grandpa’s Marxists. But they extend Marx’s oppressor/oppressed class framework with a without even the grace of a utopian vision of how racism might wither away.
Tim: Yeah, Marx is in the dustbin of history. I see the right trying to figure out what's replaced him, and most of the time the best they can do is "postmodernism." That isn't wrong, but it's harder to make sense of than "communism."
Agree completely. All of our cities burned due to anarchists and neo-communists hiding behind the death of George Floyd. And the capitol incident is all writers on the left can talk about.
I saw a non-partisan poll the other day that indicated that most American saw the threat from ANTIFA as a bigger issue than what happened on Jan 6. That is as it should be. But did it get play in the corporate, left wing media? No.
Here's the fact: many writers on the left see the ANTIFA riots as righteous. Biden and Democrats didn't even mention the burning cities in 5 days of conventions. Talk about out of touch...
All of the hysteria around antifa and the riots over the summer ignored the long history of rioting in the wake of police violence in this country. This did not happen out of nowhere - when cops murder or beat innocent black people, who are the most oppressed population in our society, cities burn. The idea that it happened because people were “hiding behind the death of George Floyd” is historically ignorant. It makes perfect sense that it was more widespread over the summer considering the murder was caught on camera, and we were in the midst of a pandemic that exposed just how inept our government is. “Antifa” is a TINY group of people by the way. We’re talking low thousands in America. Violent right wing extremists are far more widespread.
No. The rioting over the death of a few unarmed black men is completely unjustified given the extent of the deaths relative to the total number of police encounters. WAY more unarmed whites are killed by police than blacks (look up the WaPo stats). This issue is being manufactured to generate a foundation for social change that is about leveraging white guilt for retributive, progressive social policies. You know it, I know it, and I'm calling it out here. You are a liar.
BILLIONS of dollars in personal wealth, small businesses, livelihoods were WRECKED by Antifa in a spasm of anarcho-communist violence. The permission structure for the obscenity that was the capitol riot was laid after a summer of violence by the left that was IGNORED by the mainstream media, and SUPPORTED by the political left. Sanders and and his followers could have called them off, but he didn't. He wants this, just as much as you do.
Wow, you’re exhibiting some seriously conspiratorial thinking, which is so prevalent on the right now. I am not lying. I don’t even know what you think I’m lying about. Whether or not you think it was justified isn’t relevant to what I said. It was entirely predictable that it happened, because it’s what ALWAYS happens. There was a full week of riots after MLK was assassinated. Google the Watts riots if you’re unfamiliar. It’s a natural, reoccurring response to a systemic problem that has not been addressed by our elected officials. People are fed up. And the idea that the political left supported it is not true either - Biden repeatedly condemned it. I know the right doesn’t realize that because their media echo-chamber didn’t report on it, but it’s what happened. Even Killer Mike, who is pretty damn close to being a radical, came out and tried to quell the riots in Atlanta.
I'm sorry LosPer, unless you believe the FBI is a sinister left-wing institution, all you need to do is look at who they've concluded is a greater threat to American lives and the US government.
Candidly, my confidence in the FBI has been shattered by the lying charade that was the Russia investigations. I see the FBI now as an arm of the Biden-Woke establishment...I agree there are threats from the extreme right...but I believe they are being played up by the media for political advantage, and to cash in on the optics of the capitol embarrassment. The riots in our cities were real. The more you play them down for political advantage, the less your opinion matters to me.
Honestly, LosPer, I wouldn't play down or excuse the riots. But I believe you've located yourself--and not in a way that works to your advantage--with your reading of the investigation into the Trump campaign as a "lying charade." You're part of the problem "we're" trying to solve here.
“The Biden- woke establishment” doesn’t exist. Biden denounced the defund the police movement and wants to increase police funding across the board. He was an architect of the draconian drug laws and sentencing guidelines of the 90’s which led to an explosion in mass incarceration. People who self-identify as woke, who are few and far between these days due to how the right has co-opted the term to mean anyone who speaks out against systemic racism, would criticize Biden’s views on these issues.
Nadav Eyal, I'm struck by your depiction of Israel as a "province of the American empire." But do your colleagues in Israel really understand Trump as sui generis? I've been reading a variety of media throughout this termus horribilis, and much of it has linked US politics with right-wing nationalist populist movements and leaders around the world. Even if we only paid attention to Europe--the bombshell of Brexit?--and the US, it's impossible not to see the linkages between the demand and support for a leader like Trump and the illiberalisms consolidating elsewhere.
My aim here is to give an outsider's view of the current conversation in the US. I think you are right, that there is a larger picture here - but it's not really being presented in full. What I label as revolt is wider than nationalism.
I think so too. It's just hard to believe that your colleagues don't see the connections you're making here when there has been so much good analysis dedicated to those connections.
There is a book by Alexis de Toqueville describing what led up to the French Revolution. I think it is called The old regime and the french revolution (in english). I read it in January 2020, before the pandemic, and was struck by how much 1790 France resembled 2020 U.S.A. And right up to the storming of the Bastille, those elite writers and journalists and professors, and society elites and church elites (in ancient France) were calling for just what this destructive movement is calling for; namely, a tearing down of old structures and the old status quo, a redistribution of power and wealth into the hands of "the people". These people giving support to the movement had no idea--no idea whatsoever--that THEY themselves would be the first to lose their heads under the guillotine. And sadly, de Toqueville builds a convincing case that the various centralized governments which replaced the French nobility made life worse, much worse in every way, for the French, more so than anything they had experienced under the kings. I think it should be required reading at American universities, at least.
Hear hear. I actually have a first edition of L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution, having been named after Alexis de Tocqueville! Your points are completely on point. Hopefully we don’t go through a French style revolution.
There's a theme that comes up a lot here, one sees it often in Mr. Mounk's writing and elsewhere, that there's a global rise of reactionary, illiberal, strong-man governments -- Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, etc. -- as if they all belong to a club.
My first reaction is to question how much to trust even the observations, before we get to the explanations. I know firsthand how farcical the descriptions of Israel are, so I have to wonder whether to believe the characterizations of the countries that I haven't personally observed.
My second reaction is why exactly North Korea, Iran, Venezuela et al aren't on the same list, or maybe a parallel list. Maybe they sometimes are, but certainly not always.
Third is whether the world is really trending this way. I wonder what Steven Pinker would say and what data he'd provide.
Finally, although I'm often impressed by the creativity, and sometimes even the intellectual rigor, of these meta-narratives of history, I'm not often sold on them. Effects are often overdetermined. Things that look alike from 30,000 feet look very different up close. I'm not saying we should give up on drawing conclusions from our observations, those conclusions should be tentative at best.
Michael, there in your comments may lie the key to restoring credibility and trust in civic discourse.
Elevate the first-hand accounts of journalists at sea level, the ones who are out walking the walk on the streets of Caracas, Tehran, Manila, and even Pyongyang provided they're not poisoned on the way back home. Same goes for those walking around Tel Aviv, Moscow, Brasilia, and Kampala. Discuss those person-to-person narratives with your family and friends; even better, discuss them with friends of friends, fellow parishioners, people in your weekend Harley club, and other networking opportunities.
At the same time, don't settle for hearsay and the word of the "many people are saying" elite. Let's try always to seek the truth with a lower-case "T" - that is, the truth that isn't trademarked and co-opted by opportunists and profiteers. If we arrive at the truth between us, then I think we stand a chance at making those lofty conclusions less tentative.
"Covid worsened disillusionment with the capacity of democratic governments to respond. Amplified by online lies, discontent with the liberal order is mutating into an assault on rational discourse itself. With Covid, it means anti-vaxxers and denialists fighting against science."
This sentiment is really troubling in an otherwise interesting piece. Using "science" as a shield for government overreach and the infringement of rights and "rational discourse" as a claim against public disagreement is a gross and ugly distortion to justify the elimination of liberty.
"But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
One can just as easily argue they were trying to preserve a power structure--their sovereign nation--in response to a bloated trade union that has for decades arrogated ever more power to itself, with no end in sight. When voters object it simply does end runs around them, as with the Lisbon Treaty.
"Those who broke into Congress ... were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
Reverence for the US Constitution is predominant among rightwing populists in the US, and I assume it was predominant among participants in the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, who were supporters of Donald Trump, a rightwing populist. Hence, I doubt that many of them had any desire to overthrow the framework of government established pursuant to the Constitution. And even if some of them would have liked to overthrow the established constitutional order they could hardly have expected to accomplish that without equipping themselves with weapons more formidable than pepper spray and curtain rods. They had gathered to hear a speech from Trump -- who expounded, in detail, his belief that the recent Presidential election had been stolen from him by widespread vote fraud and cheating by election officials in various "battleground" states; told them that the appropriate remedy was for the US Senate's presiding officer, Vice President Pence, to refuse to credit electoral votes from those states; and exhorted them to march to the US Capitol building to "make your voices heard" demanding that outcome. Arriving at the Capitol building in response to Trump's exhortation, they found that their access to the building's interior and their intended audience of politicians was blocked by the Capitol Police. Rather than meekly disperse or content themselves with making an incoherent hubbub outside the building, frustration, outrage, and animal spirits drove them to break in and attack the cops who stood in their way (many of whom, I daresay, were also Trump supporters).
Left-leaning journalists and politicians routinely refer to this lamentable incident as an "insurrection," which the more strident among them attribute to white supremacism. The description and the attribution of motive are both tendentious.
The right-wing hate of the Sixties ( the previous politician that Trump resembles most is probably George Wallace) exploded at the peak of the postwar economic boom, right when the white working class has never had it so good. (For that matter, the left wing hate came disproportionately--though not as exclusively as some claim--from the affluent.) If you want a more contemporary example, India is a country where hundreds of millions of people who used to live in extreme poverty have benefited from globalization, and they still elected Modi. So I'm suspicious of economic explanations for the antiliberal rage that Eyal talks about.
So what's my alternative? Maybe it's a status thing: the jocks can't stand the fact that the nerds have outcompeted them.
This is rather narrow-minded thinking:
“But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them. The revolts we are seeing are a mix of appalling visuals with absurd, pompous and incendiary rhetoric—but no coherent aims or rational ideology.”
Isn’t the idea of British sovereignty a long-established power structure idea? The very reverse of the authors hypothesis seems more likely to be true: those who are aiming to destroy power structures without having a cogent replacement are the cancel culture warriors blaming every ill on ever-broadening definitions of racism and white privilege.
Are the “cancel culture warriors” storming the capitol and chanting for the public execution of our elected officials? Are they spreading conspiracy theories about global cabals of child-eating pedophiles who rule the world? Are they voting these far-right populists into office? Or are they making the lives of comedians and professors more difficult? The “ever-broadening definitions of racism and white privilege” are at least rooted in truth. We do live in a society where whites are more privileged than minority races, and racism is a massive problem inextricably tied to the rise of far-right populism that the author is discussing here. Most of these “cancel culture warriors” are purported to be marxists by the way, so it would seem that they do have a cogent replacement in mind, it’s just a really scary one to most westerners.
Hi Tim: You're right to draw these distinctions between the populist-nihilist left and the populist-nihilist right. My handy elevator message is that the only thing I fear more than the left now is the right. If the left starts stockpiling weapons, I'll reassess. However, I do want to respond to "Marxism." For decades, the political right more or less correctly identified the politics of left-wing academics as Marxist. That was when many academics used to teach [about] Marxism. I used to teach about Marxism and have students read Marx as a way to help them understand the political ideologies of the twentieth century. But we don't do that anymore. I'd be surprised if we could find any college students now who know anything about Marx, though I'm sure some would cite him perfunctorily as an avatar of their politics.
Thanks for your comment, that’s why I used the word “purported,” because the right generally throws that term around very loosely. I’ve always been confused about this hysteria over Marxism in our schools because, like you said, I never encountered it in undergrad, and neither did any of my friends or family as far as I know. I’m reading and learning about Marxism on my free time now and it seems apparent that what you said is true, and it’s more of a neo-liberal sense of righteousness that drives the “cancel culture warriors” as OP put it. I was sort of trying to use the right’s language against him.
Most of these “cancel culture warriors” are purported to be marxists by the way, so it would seem that they do have a cogent replacement in mind, it’s just a really scary one to most westerners....”.
I suppose “cogent” is in the eye of the beholders, but I’m sure it’s scarier to the victims of Marxism than others, and to those of a scientific bent of mind “scientific utopian socialism” is just plain pseudoscience.
Those calling themselves Marxists today, or who I would call cultural Marxists are not ur grandpa’s Marxists. But they extend Marx’s oppressor/oppressed class framework with a without even the grace of a utopian vision of how racism might wither away.
Tim: Yeah, Marx is in the dustbin of history. I see the right trying to figure out what's replaced him, and most of the time the best they can do is "postmodernism." That isn't wrong, but it's harder to make sense of than "communism."
Ah, just googled you, your take makes a lot of sense now. Not that it’s rooted in rational thinking, but that it’s coming from you.
Now do Antifa.
Agree completely. All of our cities burned due to anarchists and neo-communists hiding behind the death of George Floyd. And the capitol incident is all writers on the left can talk about.
I saw a non-partisan poll the other day that indicated that most American saw the threat from ANTIFA as a bigger issue than what happened on Jan 6. That is as it should be. But did it get play in the corporate, left wing media? No.
Here's the fact: many writers on the left see the ANTIFA riots as righteous. Biden and Democrats didn't even mention the burning cities in 5 days of conventions. Talk about out of touch...
All of the hysteria around antifa and the riots over the summer ignored the long history of rioting in the wake of police violence in this country. This did not happen out of nowhere - when cops murder or beat innocent black people, who are the most oppressed population in our society, cities burn. The idea that it happened because people were “hiding behind the death of George Floyd” is historically ignorant. It makes perfect sense that it was more widespread over the summer considering the murder was caught on camera, and we were in the midst of a pandemic that exposed just how inept our government is. “Antifa” is a TINY group of people by the way. We’re talking low thousands in America. Violent right wing extremists are far more widespread.
https://www.propublica.org/article/global-right-wing-extremism-networks-are-growing-the-u-s-is-just-now-catching-up
No. The rioting over the death of a few unarmed black men is completely unjustified given the extent of the deaths relative to the total number of police encounters. WAY more unarmed whites are killed by police than blacks (look up the WaPo stats). This issue is being manufactured to generate a foundation for social change that is about leveraging white guilt for retributive, progressive social policies. You know it, I know it, and I'm calling it out here. You are a liar.
BILLIONS of dollars in personal wealth, small businesses, livelihoods were WRECKED by Antifa in a spasm of anarcho-communist violence. The permission structure for the obscenity that was the capitol riot was laid after a summer of violence by the left that was IGNORED by the mainstream media, and SUPPORTED by the political left. Sanders and and his followers could have called them off, but he didn't. He wants this, just as much as you do.
Wow, you’re exhibiting some seriously conspiratorial thinking, which is so prevalent on the right now. I am not lying. I don’t even know what you think I’m lying about. Whether or not you think it was justified isn’t relevant to what I said. It was entirely predictable that it happened, because it’s what ALWAYS happens. There was a full week of riots after MLK was assassinated. Google the Watts riots if you’re unfamiliar. It’s a natural, reoccurring response to a systemic problem that has not been addressed by our elected officials. People are fed up. And the idea that the political left supported it is not true either - Biden repeatedly condemned it. I know the right doesn’t realize that because their media echo-chamber didn’t report on it, but it’s what happened. Even Killer Mike, who is pretty damn close to being a radical, came out and tried to quell the riots in Atlanta.
I'm sorry LosPer, unless you believe the FBI is a sinister left-wing institution, all you need to do is look at who they've concluded is a greater threat to American lives and the US government.
Candidly, my confidence in the FBI has been shattered by the lying charade that was the Russia investigations. I see the FBI now as an arm of the Biden-Woke establishment...I agree there are threats from the extreme right...but I believe they are being played up by the media for political advantage, and to cash in on the optics of the capitol embarrassment. The riots in our cities were real. The more you play them down for political advantage, the less your opinion matters to me.
Honestly, LosPer, I wouldn't play down or excuse the riots. But I believe you've located yourself--and not in a way that works to your advantage--with your reading of the investigation into the Trump campaign as a "lying charade." You're part of the problem "we're" trying to solve here.
“The Biden- woke establishment” doesn’t exist. Biden denounced the defund the police movement and wants to increase police funding across the board. He was an architect of the draconian drug laws and sentencing guidelines of the 90’s which led to an explosion in mass incarceration. People who self-identify as woke, who are few and far between these days due to how the right has co-opted the term to mean anyone who speaks out against systemic racism, would criticize Biden’s views on these issues.
Nadav Eyal, I'm struck by your depiction of Israel as a "province of the American empire." But do your colleagues in Israel really understand Trump as sui generis? I've been reading a variety of media throughout this termus horribilis, and much of it has linked US politics with right-wing nationalist populist movements and leaders around the world. Even if we only paid attention to Europe--the bombshell of Brexit?--and the US, it's impossible not to see the linkages between the demand and support for a leader like Trump and the illiberalisms consolidating elsewhere.
My aim here is to give an outsider's view of the current conversation in the US. I think you are right, that there is a larger picture here - but it's not really being presented in full. What I label as revolt is wider than nationalism.
I think so too. It's just hard to believe that your colleagues don't see the connections you're making here when there has been so much good analysis dedicated to those connections.
There is a book by Alexis de Toqueville describing what led up to the French Revolution. I think it is called The old regime and the french revolution (in english). I read it in January 2020, before the pandemic, and was struck by how much 1790 France resembled 2020 U.S.A. And right up to the storming of the Bastille, those elite writers and journalists and professors, and society elites and church elites (in ancient France) were calling for just what this destructive movement is calling for; namely, a tearing down of old structures and the old status quo, a redistribution of power and wealth into the hands of "the people". These people giving support to the movement had no idea--no idea whatsoever--that THEY themselves would be the first to lose their heads under the guillotine. And sadly, de Toqueville builds a convincing case that the various centralized governments which replaced the French nobility made life worse, much worse in every way, for the French, more so than anything they had experienced under the kings. I think it should be required reading at American universities, at least.
Hear hear. I actually have a first edition of L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution, having been named after Alexis de Tocqueville! Your points are completely on point. Hopefully we don’t go through a French style revolution.
We get it -- you don't like Netanyahu.
There's a theme that comes up a lot here, one sees it often in Mr. Mounk's writing and elsewhere, that there's a global rise of reactionary, illiberal, strong-man governments -- Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, etc. -- as if they all belong to a club.
My first reaction is to question how much to trust even the observations, before we get to the explanations. I know firsthand how farcical the descriptions of Israel are, so I have to wonder whether to believe the characterizations of the countries that I haven't personally observed.
My second reaction is why exactly North Korea, Iran, Venezuela et al aren't on the same list, or maybe a parallel list. Maybe they sometimes are, but certainly not always.
Third is whether the world is really trending this way. I wonder what Steven Pinker would say and what data he'd provide.
Finally, although I'm often impressed by the creativity, and sometimes even the intellectual rigor, of these meta-narratives of history, I'm not often sold on them. Effects are often overdetermined. Things that look alike from 30,000 feet look very different up close. I'm not saying we should give up on drawing conclusions from our observations, those conclusions should be tentative at best.
Michael, there in your comments may lie the key to restoring credibility and trust in civic discourse.
Elevate the first-hand accounts of journalists at sea level, the ones who are out walking the walk on the streets of Caracas, Tehran, Manila, and even Pyongyang provided they're not poisoned on the way back home. Same goes for those walking around Tel Aviv, Moscow, Brasilia, and Kampala. Discuss those person-to-person narratives with your family and friends; even better, discuss them with friends of friends, fellow parishioners, people in your weekend Harley club, and other networking opportunities.
At the same time, don't settle for hearsay and the word of the "many people are saying" elite. Let's try always to seek the truth with a lower-case "T" - that is, the truth that isn't trademarked and co-opted by opportunists and profiteers. If we arrive at the truth between us, then I think we stand a chance at making those lofty conclusions less tentative.
"Covid worsened disillusionment with the capacity of democratic governments to respond. Amplified by online lies, discontent with the liberal order is mutating into an assault on rational discourse itself. With Covid, it means anti-vaxxers and denialists fighting against science."
This sentiment is really troubling in an otherwise interesting piece. Using "science" as a shield for government overreach and the infringement of rights and "rational discourse" as a claim against public disagreement is a gross and ugly distortion to justify the elimination of liberty.
"But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
One can just as easily argue they were trying to preserve a power structure--their sovereign nation--in response to a bloated trade union that has for decades arrogated ever more power to itself, with no end in sight. When voters object it simply does end runs around them, as with the Lisbon Treaty.
"Those who broke into Congress ... were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
Reverence for the US Constitution is predominant among rightwing populists in the US, and I assume it was predominant among participants in the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, who were supporters of Donald Trump, a rightwing populist. Hence, I doubt that many of them had any desire to overthrow the framework of government established pursuant to the Constitution. And even if some of them would have liked to overthrow the established constitutional order they could hardly have expected to accomplish that without equipping themselves with weapons more formidable than pepper spray and curtain rods. They had gathered to hear a speech from Trump -- who expounded, in detail, his belief that the recent Presidential election had been stolen from him by widespread vote fraud and cheating by election officials in various "battleground" states; told them that the appropriate remedy was for the US Senate's presiding officer, Vice President Pence, to refuse to credit electoral votes from those states; and exhorted them to march to the US Capitol building to "make your voices heard" demanding that outcome. Arriving at the Capitol building in response to Trump's exhortation, they found that their access to the building's interior and their intended audience of politicians was blocked by the Capitol Police. Rather than meekly disperse or content themselves with making an incoherent hubbub outside the building, frustration, outrage, and animal spirits drove them to break in and attack the cops who stood in their way (many of whom, I daresay, were also Trump supporters).
Left-leaning journalists and politicians routinely refer to this lamentable incident as an "insurrection," which the more strident among them attribute to white supremacism. The description and the attribution of motive are both tendentious.
The right-wing hate of the Sixties ( the previous politician that Trump resembles most is probably George Wallace) exploded at the peak of the postwar economic boom, right when the white working class has never had it so good. (For that matter, the left wing hate came disproportionately--though not as exclusively as some claim--from the affluent.) If you want a more contemporary example, India is a country where hundreds of millions of people who used to live in extreme poverty have benefited from globalization, and they still elected Modi. So I'm suspicious of economic explanations for the antiliberal rage that Eyal talks about.
So what's my alternative? Maybe it's a status thing: the jocks can't stand the fact that the nerds have outcompeted them.