There’s plenty of blame to go around for Donald Trump’s dangerous ascent to the world’s most powerful political office. The Republican Party’s long-term strategy of dog-whistle racism provided Trump with a ready-made base, primed to resonate with a demagogue whose story wove together racial animus, economic anxiety, and popular anger at the establishment. At the same time, Trump was able to successfully navigate the populist landscape partly because the Democratic Party leadership effectively ceded this terrain, by shying away from picking progressive populist fights. For example: with Wall Street and the ‘one per cent’ in the wake of the financial crisis, when they had a compelling mandate to do so. Then, by pushing to nominate the candidate who epitomized the out-of-touch political establishment in the popular mind. These weren’t just poor political moves by the Democratic Party, but part and parcel of its decades-long embrace of neoliberal policies.
The neoliberal project had a long run. But today its eulogy is read aloud across the globe, in the speeches of populist insurgents from both the Left and the Right. Governing parties have failed to mitigate the pain caused by neoliberalism’s prescriptions. The resultant crisis of legitimacy – when a society’s confidence in political authority drops below a critical threshold – has caught the political elite off guard. They missed or underestimated the signs of discontent swelling up in pockets of society from which they themselves were insulated. Maybe they told themselves stories about a ‘strong recovery’, glossing over how growth has concentrated at the tippy-top.
