US president-elect Donald Trump, for the first time, won a majority of the popular vote. The Republican candidate took the US presidency with huge swings in his favor, increasing his share of first-time voters, young voters, black voters and Latino voters. He gained among voters earning less than US$100,000, while wealthier voters preferred the Democrats’ candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris — a reversal of the class alignments in 2020.
Voting tallies suggest the swing to the Republicans was largely caused by mass abstention among Democrat voters. That echoes global trends. Trump and his new coalition would head a loose alliance of far-right governments from India to Hungary, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, the Netherlands and Israel.
The rhythm of far-right successes began with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s 2010 landslide in Hungary’s parliamentary election. Since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2014 Indian general election, it has scarcely paused. Trump’s first ascent to the White House, the Brexit vote and former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s success all occurred in 2016. Two years later, then-Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro scored an upset in Brazil.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brothers of Italy won the Italian general election in 2022 and Javier Milei took the Argentinian presidency last year. For most of this period, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has ruled Israel in coalition with far-right parties.
Even where it is not in power, the far right is gaining, as in France and Germany. In the long view, the defeat of Trump in 2020 and Bolsonaro in 2022 were predictable oscillations in a general pattern of ascent.
Why does the far right keep winning? Is it “the economy, stupid,” as James Carville put it during former US president Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign? The idea that far-right voting reflects a protest by the economically “left behind” is quite popular.
There is a kernel of truth to this: The state of the economy was the single biggest motive for Trump voters last week. Liberals, snarking about the “vibecession” — the mistaken belief by the public that the economy is in recession — said GDP is growing and inflation is modest at 2.4 percent.
Headline figures do not reflect how most people experience the economy. Prices are 20 percent higher than before the pandemic and, more importantly, prices for essentials such as food are up 28 percent.
Household debt was a major stress factor. US President Joe Biden also cut a raft of popular benefits established during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, most people do not believe the headline figures.
Yet this narrative barely scratches the surface. First, the evidence suggests that people do not always vote with their wallets. Studies since the 20th century show that simple measures of economic self-interest are not a good predictor of voting behavior.
The economy matters, of course, but not as a simple metric of aggregate well-being. It is a space in which people judge their personal standing relative to how they perceive the state of society. Personal setbacks are generally only politicized when they are perceived as part of a wider crisis.
Second, while the far right cannot win without gaining some working-class support, in the US, Brazil, India and the Philippines, it relies on a bedrock of middle-class support. Besides, millions regularly have their economic lives wrecked without going far right. The poorest in most societies are generally highly susceptible to their message.
Third, in strictly material terms the economic offer of today’s far right is paltry, yet incumbency has been incredibly forgiving for nationalist governments.
In India, after average consumer expenditure fell, Modi was re-elected in 2019 with a 6 percent swing. In the Philippines, as the number of “poor” Filipinos surged, Duterte’s successor Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr won 58 percent of the vote in 2022 — an increase of almost 20 points.
Even in defeat, they do surprisingly well. Average incomes rose more slowly under Trump than his predecessor, yet he added 10 million voters to his base in 2020. If people voted with their wallets, why would many working-class Americans back a candidate committed to cutting taxes for the rich?
The political effects of economic misery are more indirect than “it’s the economy, stupid” implies. Economic shocks are mediated by the existing emotional currents in society. The middle-class and more affluent workers can identify with the rich and resent the poor, migrants and “spongers” who threaten their lifestyle.
Mostly resentment results in impotent complaint. Hit by shocks, most people are ill-placed to confront their causes and tend to withdraw from politics.
Today’s far right offers a different answer — what the political theorist William Connolly calls a “politics of existential revenge.” It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of “communist” takeover and amplifies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against “white genocide” and satanic child-molesting elites.
Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism.
It runs deeper than elections. Rising from the cauldrons of cyberfascism, “lone wolf” murders have increased since 2010. Pogroms have erupted in Delhi and the West Bank. In the US, vigilantes attacked Black Lives Matter protesters. The UK and Ireland have been shaken by racist riots.
In the past few years, there have been bungled “insurrections” such as the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in January 2021 and the trucker blockades intended to block Lula’s accession to power in Brazil.
This is a global social contagion, and far from being discredited by outbursts of collective violence, the new far right is galvanized by it. Modi’s rise to power began with an anti-Muslim pogrom in his home state of Gujarat.
Trump’s 2020 campaign was electrified by vigilante violence. Bolsonaro came from nearly 20 points behind to almost winning after a summer of deadly violence.
Addressing economic issues would defuse some of this. David Brooks acknowledges in the New York Times that Harris’s centrism “didn’t work” and that the Democrats might need to “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption.”
However, disruption is not just about “bread and butter.” People need something to desire, something to be excited about. That is what motivated the Democratic base in 2020, after the Sanders campaign and Black Lives Matter, and countered the right’s politics of revenge.
The Harris campaign obliquely acknowledged this with its vague talk of “joy,” but with economic populism forgotten, the far right’s borders agenda embraced and the administration arming Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza, there was little scope for that.
The ruptures on the right thrive as much on the pattern of liberal decay and demoralization as on its own toxic emotional gyrations. To break out of this deadlock, the left needs ruptures of its own.
Richard Seymour is an author and founding editor of Salvage. His latest book is Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization.
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