We live in resentful times. Dare we even utter these words? They sound as trite and cliché as that time-honored opening sentence that has introduced so many articles on populism in recent years, “A specter is haunting Europe.” It can easily apply to Latin America, or the United States or, why...
At an earlier stage of my life, I had the great pleasure of spending two years teaching at York University in Toronto, Canada. Unlike the University of Toronto, whose campus looks like Harvard or Yale, York resembles British public universities such as Sussex: modern, functional, but without what...
When Steve Bannon left the Trump administration in 2017 after having established the new dogma of “America First,” few assumed that his new vocation would be to convert Europe to his doctrine. No one expected an opportunist who had dallied with the movie industry and alt-right journalism at...
Democracy faces a global crisis. And this crisis couldn’t be coming at a worse time. If you’re a supporter of Donald Trump — or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Matteo Salvini in Italy — you probably think that democracy has never been in better health. Recent elections in these countries...
In the 2019 European Parliament elections, populist radical-right parties have further increased their vote shares. Academic scholarship and media coverage of the populist radical right has expanded considerably in the past few years, due to its rising prominence in global politics. In the 2019...
The results of the European elections have revealed some breakthroughs for populists. There is concern about the impact of populism on rational decision-making in many Western democracies. But there is no agreement on what "populism" means. All politics appeal — to some extent — to...
Tom Watson promoted himself as a leading voice of Southern white supremacy, nostalgically evoking images of the "Old South" that drew legitimacy from its grounding in a combination of Jeffersonian political theory and cultural agrarianism. In 2012, I had the opportunity to spend a few weeks in...
What that Protestant Reformation can teach us about the durability of far-right movements — and the order they seek to replace. Less than a month ago, the candidate leading in the polls in the Brazilian presidential election was a jailed ex-politician who technically couldn’t even run for...
