Ever since populist-nationalism – or national-populism, if you like – broke through the establishment barriers in 2015/16 with Trump and Brexit, the general opinion has been that “traditional politics” has been upended and that we are now in a “new world”. But is that true, or is it all just a passing storm or perhaps an experiment to be followed by a reversion, if not to the status quo ante, then at least to some form of safer, quieter, indeed more moderate politics? After all, ten years is a mere blink of an eye at the scale of history.
A great political realignment is seen, quite correctly so far, to have taken place during this period. Disaffected communities – Hillary Clinton’s famous “deplorables”, a valid descriptor outside the US, too – which were a core section of the Left’s coalition switched their vote to the new right-wing forces. They were joined by a large swathe of the centre-right voting bloc who had always self-identified as conservatives, either culturally or economically in the classic-liberal sense, or both. Crudely put, these two streams, from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, combined to form the new populist electorate – and, in the process, to weaken the mainstream parties.
The key reasons which produced these electoral defections from the old Left and Right are well understood, albeit the mix and dosage has varied on each side. But, broadly speaking, the ingredients of discontent include things like the pressure of uncontrolled immigration on wages and on community cohesion; the pressure of “woke” on national culture and public life, with the attempted “re-education” of the public, the censorship, and the increasing restrictions on freedoms; and the encroachment of globalist attitudes, “human rights”, “values” and policies – especially climate change – on the Nation State, with the practical loss of sovereignty and the denunciation of national feeling as wrong, racist or even fascist.
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