The Great Disruption
Understanding the Populist Forces Behind Trump, Brexit, and LePen
Summary
Key Takeaways
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Why Populism Is Not Just Trump
- From 1989 to Despair
- What We Don’t Know About Populism
- An Overview of the Book
- The Rise of Populism—A Global Phenomenon
- Chapter 1. The Economic Roots of Populism, Something Old, Something New
- What Is Populism?
- Haven’t We Seen This Movie Before? Understanding the Economic Roots of US Populism in Historical Perspective
- Conclusion
- Chapter 2. A Snapshot—Tying Together the Tumultuous Events of 2016–17
- Who Are the Supporters of Trump, Brexit, and LePen?
- Conclusion
- Chapter 3. The Seemingly Paradoxical Nature of Social Values Towards Race and Immigration in the Populist Wave of 2016
- Racial and Immigrant Values Over Time
- Racial Attitudes in Europe
- Summing Up Long-term Values Evolution
- Xenophobic Upsurge Is Tied to Migration and Terrorism Incidents
- Chapter 4. Empty Rhetoric and Empty Promises—Examining the Phony Solutions of the New Populists
- Introduction—The Empire and the Rebels Are Both Found Wanting
- The Establishment Fiddles at the Margins
- What the Populists Offer Is Equally Clueless
- The Red Herring of Immigration
- Why Illegal Is the Real Lightning Rod, But Covers Up Long-term Demographic Shifts
- Democracy Under Fire—Campaign Funders Use Anger to Obfuscate Real Issues
- Social Media’s Role in Elections
- Chapter 5. Underlying Force Number 1: “American Carnage”—A Codeword for Long-term Economic Decline in the West and the Shrinking Middle Class
- Populist Recognition of the Relative Decline of the West
- A Brief Set of Illustrations on the West’s Rise
- Growing Inequality Exacerbates Relative Decline
- Chapter 6. Underlying Force Number 2: The Collapse of Manufacturing From Globalization, Financialization, and Automation
- Behind Growing Inequality: Declines in Manufacturing Employment
- Manufacturing Declines Made Worse by Financialization
- Why Isn’t Growth in the Service Sector Picking Up the Slack From Manufacturing?
- Unemployment Rates Are Sticky and Likely to Worsen for Blue Collar Workers
- The Near Death of Unions
- Automation Means the Decline Is Not Just a Temporary Business Cycle Downturn or Reversible Through Anti-Globalization
- An Age of Despair for the Middle Class
- Chapter 7. Force Number 3: The Rise of China
- Changes in the Global Order—Implications of the Rise of China
- Why Can’t the West Get Its Act Together? True and False Sources of US Resentment
- Trump’s Myopic Foreign Policy
- Chapter 8. Force Number 4: Rapid Environmental Deterioration
- Climate Change—A Wild Card
- Populists Would Have Us Bury Ourselves in the Sand, But There’s Hope
- Renewable Energy Transition Needs a Lot of Coaxing
- Chapter 9. Force Number 5: Demographics and the Raw Deal Given to Millennials
- Prospects for the Millennial Generation Are Bad and Getting Worse
- Millennial Attitudes Are Nonetheless More Progressive
- Chapter 10. Global Problems Need Global Solutions
- Index
Figure 1.1. Causal Linkages for Conventional Views on Populism.
Figure 1.2. Suggested Sequence of Populism.
Figure 3.1. Percent of US Whites Who Approve of Racial Intermarriage.
Figure 3.2. Percent of US Whites Who Would Live Where Half the Neighbors Were Black.
Figure 3.3. Percent of Whites Who Believe in Legal Intervention to Prevent Racial Discrimination in Housing Sales.
Figure 3.4. Percent of Americans Who Think Immigration Will Make National Unity Harder.
Figure 3.5. 2014: The Number of Immigrants to the US Should Be.
Figure 3.6. Percent of Americans Who Believe Strong Patriotic Feelings Lead to Negative Attitudes Towards Immigration.
Figure 4.1. Percent of US Immigrants by Region of Origin, 1960−2016.
Figure 5.1. GDP Levels, 1−1280 AD.
Figure 5.2. GDP, 1400−1800.
Figure 5.3. GDP, 1800−1900. ← xi | xii →
Figure 5.4. GDP, 1900−2015.
Figure 5.5. Average Real Annual Economic Growth Rates, 1950−2014.
Figure 5.6. Average Real Annual Economic Growth Rates, 1950−2014.
Figure 5.7. UK Top 0.05% Share of Income.
Figure 5.8. US Top 1% Income Share.
Figure 5.9. France Top 1% Share of Income.
Figure 6.1. Top World Merchandise Exporters, 1950−2017.
Figure 6.2. China Employment by Sector, 1950−2010.
Figure 6.3. India Employment by Sector.
Figure 6.4. US Employment by Sector.
Figure 6.5. UK Employment by Sector.
Figure 6.6. France Employment by Sector.
Figure 6.7. US Corporate Profit/GDP.
Figure 6.8. Top Commercial Service Exporters, 1980−2013, % of World Total.
Figure 6.9. US Unemployment Rate, 1947−2016.
Figure 6.10. US Median Income by Educational Attainment.
Figure 6.11. Percent of Employment in Manufacturing, 1971−2012.
Figure 7.1. Defense Expenditures by Major Country, 1949−2017, (2016 $millions).
Figure 9.1. India 1950 & 2010.
Figure 9.2. Iraq 1950 & 2010.
Figure 9.3. UK 1950 & 2010.
Figure 9.4. France 1950 & 2010.
Figure 9.5. US 1950 & 2010.
Figure 9.6. China 1950 & 2010.
Table 6.1. Rankings of Top US Companies by Market Capitalization,1917, 1967, and 2017.
Table 7.1. Military Expenditures as a % of GDP, Average by Decade.
Table 7.2. Average Trade Deficit by Decade, Major Economies.
This book is written for a general audience interested in politics, coming out of several public discussions and numerous interviews in the wake of the events of 2016, and particularly the election of Donald Trump. Observers everywhere seemed shocked and befuddled not only by his election but also the rise of right wing and left wing extremes throughout the West, and nationalistic reactions to globalization capped by the Brexit (the UK leaving the European Union). Is all of this a temporary blip, a hiccup of madness, or can we reach a wider conclusion that Western society is going through a sea change? A flood of social science analyses is emerging to examine these events, teasing out demographic “swing” voters, looking at political party formation, and trying in general to gauge citizen sentiment. The research for the most part focuses on each event separately, seeking to explain election/referendum results through two main variables- latent racism and anger over lingering economic conditions of recession. The events are separated in the analysis as they occur in different electoral systems.
While I see the merit of the “trees” view, I believe that a wider, “forest” view is necessary to truly understand and link these events. What has come from much of the public discourse is the usual kind of global schadenfreude on events in the U.S. as kind of inevitable racial paroxysm and the events in Europe as a kind of faint hiccup. Having grown up and worked in ← xiii | xiv → my formative years in U.S. politics and witnessed the steady improvement in race relations, I can not help but believe a better analysis is required. As someone who has studied world events for the past 50 years, I can not also help but wonder what the links among the events are, and what might be the explanation that would place them into a wider sense of historical trajectory. From my experience as a veteran of international relations studies, if we focus too much on short-term analysis, we miss the wider trajectory of events, one that could better inform our choices and aid a fuller understanding of causality, rather than correlation and replaying event sequences. I have seen this time and again in my life, from the optimism of the moon landing and the fall of the Berlin Wall to the “malaise” of the late 1970s and the US invasion of Iraq. There was analysis aplenty on each event, but academics not only failed to predict the long-term points of change, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the rise of the age of terror, we have for the most part, failed to help society to put such events into a wider perspective in order to properly respond to them. I write this book unabashedly, perhaps foolishly, in this age of Twitter and Instagram and election models, to do just that. I have therefore tried to reduce the jargon and endless citations of ordinary academic usage in the hopes of making the discussion more approachable. If you take the journey through this book, you will see the Trump, LePen, and Brexit are but epiphenomena of much wider trends and currents, ones that if we pay attention to, can uncover the real challenges we face, ones so far buried beneath the sandstorm of global populism.
Details
- Pages
- XVI, 174
- Publication Year
- 2019
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433166105
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433166112
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433166129
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433166136
- DOI
- 10.3726/b15730
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2019 (July)
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2019. XVI, 174 pp., 36 b/w ill., 3 tables
