The story of Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory, according to exit poll data, is very clear: He won the white working class by an unprecedented margin, and held on to a surprising majority of college-educated whites. That allowed him to flip heavily white areas of states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that had voted for Obama.
The big questions now are: Why this? And why now?
One answer you’ll hear is economic: that those white-working class voters were angry in the wake of the Great Recession and the ongoing job losses due to globalization, and were looking for someone to blame. This may end up being part of the general election story — we don’t have enough data to say for sure.
But preliminary data suggests it is hardly all of it. An analysis from USA Today’s Brad Heath found that Hillary Clinton got crushed in counties where unemployment had fallen in the late Obama years:
There’s something deeper going on here. And to understand this part of the story, you need to look beyond American borders. It's tempting to think of Trump as something uniquely American, but the truth is that his rise is being repeated throughout the Western world, where far-right populists are rising in the polls. They’re not rising because of their economies. They’re gaining unprecedented strength because of their xenophobia.
In Hungary, the increasingly authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has started building a wall to keep out immigrants and holding migrants in detention camps where guards have been filmed flinging food at them as if they were zoo animals. In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League, led by a politician who has attacked the pope for calling for dialogue with Muslims, is polling at more than three times its 2013 level, making it the country’s third most popular party. And in Finland, the Finns Party — which wants to dramatically slash immigration numbers and keep out many non-Europeans — is part of the government. Its leader, Timo Soini, is the country’s foreign minister.
Those leaders were among the first to praise the president-elect. Marine Le Pen, who runs an increasingly popular French far-right party, tweeted in elation: “Congratulations to the new president of the United States Donald Trump and to the free American people!”
Politicians like Le Pen and Orban share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his deeply negative views of immigrants, his belief that Muslims are inherently dangerous, and his stated support for closing the borders to refugees and economic migrants alike.
These parties’ values are too similar, and their victories coming too quickly, for their success to be coincidental. Their platforms, a right-wing radicalism somewhere between traditional conservatism and the naked racism of the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan, have attracted widespread support in countries with wildly different cultures and histories.
A vast universe of academic research suggests the real sources of the far right's appeal on both sides of the Atlantic are anger over immigration and a toxic mix of racial and religious intolerance. That conclusion is supported by an extraordinary amount of social science, from statistical analyses that examine data on how hundreds of thousands of Europeans to books on how, when, and why ethnic conflicts erupt.
We cannot understand Donald Trump’s victory, then, without understanding this global wave of what CNN anchor Van Jones memorably summed up as a “white lash.”
The resentment of the privileged
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Political scientist Roger Petersen has argued, persuasively, that ethnic conflict around the world is often driven by something he calls “resentment:” the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn't previously held it. Drawing on social psychology, he theorized that one of the underappreciated causes of ethnic violence was a change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups.
In his book, Understanding Ethnic Violence, Petersen argues that his theory helps explain the causes of other cases of ethnic violence in Eastern Europe, including the carnage in the Balkans in the 1990s. Other scholars have since found that it could be used to understand communal violence elsewhere in the world.
A 2010 paper published in the journal World Politics tested Petersen’s theory, looking at 157 cases of ethnic violence in nations ranging from Chad to Lebanon. It found strong statistical correlations between a group’s decline in status and the likelihood that it turns to violence against another group.
What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump?
Petersen predicts that ethnic struggle should play out differently when governments are weak, as in the wake of a Nazi invasion, and when they’re strong, as in modern France. In nations with strong and legitimate governments, the loss of status by a privileged group is extremely unlikely to produce large-scale ethnic slaughter.
But "resentment" on the part of the previously dominant group doesn’t just dissipate; it is simply channeled into another way of clinging to power and preventing another group from attaining it. Like, say, elections and government policies.
"Dominance," Petersen writes, "is sought by shaping the nature of the state rather than through violence."
While Petersen’s book focuses on Eastern Europe, his framework applies to all different kinds of countries. So when post–World War II Europe experienced a massive wave of immigration, in large part from nonwhite and Muslim countries, Petersen’s work would predict a major backlash. Ditto when the United States ended Jim Crow, allowing black people to participate as formal equals, and experienced a mass wave of Latino immigration.
What you saw in many of these countries was a very different kind of population moving in and occupying social roles that had previously been reserved for white Christians. This was the ultimate change in social hierarchy. Nonwhites, who had historically been Europe and America’s colonial subjects and slaves, were now becoming its citizens. They weren’t just moving in; they were changing its society.
The question wasn’t whether there would be a massive electoral backlash. It was when.
The rise of the European far right
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Marine Le Pen.
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For Jean-Marie Le Pen, arguably the father of Europe’s far-right political movement, the backlash began in earnest in 1984. His political party, the Front National (FN), won about 11 percent of the French national vote in the 1984 elections to the European Parliament. It was the first major electoral victory for a party of its kind.
Le Pen had founded the party 12 years earlier. It was a populist party, one that argued that ordinary people were being exploited by a corrupt class of cosmopolitan elites. They were also authoritarian, constantly warning of the dangers of crime and the need for a harsh state response.
But above all else, the FN was xenophobic. Its members believed the postwar wave of immigrants threatened the French nation itself; stopping more from coming in was the only thing that could save the country from being overrun. The party cleverly avoided labeling nonwhites “inferior,” but instead sold their xenophobia as a defense of “French culture” — rhetoric that functioned very similarly to Trump rhetoric about Latino crime.
"Immigration is the symbolic starting point for the debate of the future of the French nation," FN politician Jean-Yves Le Gallou once said.
The FN’s success spawned imitators. In 1986, Jörg Haider — a firebrand who once praised Hitler for having a "proper employment policy" — took over Austria’s Freedom Party (FPO), transforming it into a xenophobic party along the FN’s lines. In 1999, the FPO came in second in Austria’s parliamentary elections, joining a government led by the center-right People’s Party.
In 2001, a Dutch sociology professor named Pim Fortuyn launched a new political movement — oriented entirely around opposition to Muslim immigration. "I don't hate Islam," he once said. "I consider it a backward culture."
By 2002, Fortuyn’s new party, the Pim Fortuyn List, was second in the national polls. He was assassinated by a far-left activist that year but was succeeded by another charismatic populist, Geert Wilders.
Wilders, who declared in July that "I don’t want more Muslims in the Netherlands and I am proud to say that," leads the third-largest bloc in the Dutch parliament. Wilders’s party, the ironically named Party for Freedom, is consistently leading the polls ahead of the March 2017 national elections.
Donald Trump’s victory is part of a global white backlash
Cacs feel threatened and the privileged ain't gonna let their position in the world slip.
Be aware brehs.
Don't let any cac tell you excuse a like economic anxiety. That's just straight up BS.
Donald Trump’s victory is part of a global white backlash
