Donald Trump, the brash, often incoherent leftist-turned-Republican, leads all polls for the GOP presidential nomination. Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist buddy of Hamas who wants to nationalize the banks, has been elected to lead Britain’s Labour Party, which only last decade controlled the U.K. government.
Greeks, amid a debt crisis, elected socialists to run their country, and Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are ready to do the same, if the polls showing Bernie Sanders in first place are to be believed.
The Scottish National Party in May swept the polls in the U.K. parliamentary elections, winning every district in Scotland but one. Throughout the European Union, fringe parties are grabbing huge chunks of the electorate with anti-immigration, or anti-EU messages. In the U.S., the Tea Party phenomenon has been upending national and state politics for five years.
Its feels like something is going on here.
The circumstances — from near default and strict austerity in Greece, to centuries-old ethnic tension in Scotland, to Obamacare and bailouts in the U.S. — are all quite different, as are the popular reactions. So different that it’s hard to lump all of these phenomena into one description. But liberal writer and television host Chris Hayes did a pretty good job in his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites.
“We do not trust our institutions because they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy,” Hayes wrote. “The drumbeat of institutional failure echoes among the populace as skepticism… We are in the midst of a broad and devastating crisis of authority.”
This is true. And with Trump, Sanders, Syriza, Corbyn, et alii, you can detect a pattern — a common enemy besides simply “the elites,” or “the establishment.”
There’s a common strain to these disparate populist ideologies taking hold around the globe: Some call it “nationalism.” Sympathetic commentators on the Left say it’s skepticism of, or opposition to globalization. Those are both loaded terms. Anti-internationalism is another way to describe it.
Greek voters asked themselves, in effect, are we really supposed to go poor because the Germans tell us we have to? Hell no. So they elected the Syriza party.
For Corbyn, his biggest issues include opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (a free-trade agreement), and skepticism of the European Union, whose “central goal,” he says, is pandering to multinational corporations.
The Scottish National Party’s central plank is Scottish independence. Look to the push for independence from Spain in Catalunya and at recent elections in Poland, and voters are expressing similar sentiments.
Trump fits in with this. His first standing ovation in Dallas Monday night was for his pledge to end illegal immigration. Opposition to mass immigration and criticism of multinational corporations that take jobs overseas — these have been at the heart of Trump’s surge to the top of the polls. Bernie Sanders, too, is skeptical of open borders and free trade.
Many issues in America divide along a Left-Right axis. Taxes, guns, and abortion are three most obvious. But other issues divide Top versus Bottom — that is, the elites in both parties agree, but the populace in both parties is not on board with the elite consensus.
Specifically, elites across the political spectrum tend to be cosmopolitan internationalists, and the grassroots less so. Politicians know this, too — that’s why both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama campaigned in 2012 posturing as quasi-protectionists.
Yet the elites in both parties are free traders, and for open borders, while the grassroots in both parties are more skeptical of both.
It’s similar when it comes to humanitarian military interventions. For instance, in early March 2011, just before President Obama decided to invade Libya, Pew asked 1,001 Americans whether “the United States has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Libya between government forces and anti-government groups.” Only 27 percent said yes. By 77 percent to 16 percent, Americans opposed bombing Libya’s air defenses.
For the elites, open borders, free trade, multilateralism, and a little war here and there all make perfect sense. For the working class guy whose kids’ public school is now half Spanish-speaking, or who sees his wages falling thanks to cheap immigrant labor or his employer chasing cheaper wages overseas, a world without borders isn’t so obviously beneficial.
The most telling line Trump delivered Tuesday night was his penultimate line: “It’s time to take back our country.”
Go outside of the Beltway, and talk to the average conservative Republican for long enough, and that exact phrase will come up. To liberals, this phrase screams of racism. The racial element is there — and worrisome — as it often is in populism. But at bottom, the question is: Who is your cohort?
When you say “us” who do you mean?
For Trump fans, “us” is largely working-class white Americans. Corbyn’s “people” are working class white Brits. For the SNP, “us” doesn’t include the English.
For the elites, Left and Right in all these countries, “us” means those elites and their counterparts across the globe.
So both the elites and rabble can be seen as looking after their own tribes. The elites say their agenda is simply the public interest — but sometimes that’s hard to believe. The harder it becomes to trust the elites, the easier it becomes to listen to Donald Trump.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.