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...
Sweden’s summer of discontent presages an ill wind for Europe this fall and beyond. The election in Sweden on September 9 confirmed the trend throughout Europe of increasing numbers of voters ready to support populist, xenophobic, nationalistic, extreme right-wing parties. One Swedish...
In the past, emotions in politics were too often negatively defined, dismissed as symptoms of immaturity and irrationality. "I'm mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” shouts news anchor Howard Beale in the 1975 movie Network. Thousands of ordinary people follow his lead,...
The history that citizens of modern nations study as the true record of their past may in reality be nothing more than a set of new mythologies. In an article for Aeon, Oxford historian Josephine Quinn tells us that “Modern nationalism created history as we know it today: what we learn in...
The relationship between the mainstream media and populism is more symbiotic than you think. Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s victory in the United States have marked the beginning of what some analysts call the rise of the global populist wave. Although there is no consensus...
What does Donald Trump’s victory mean for the future of the Korean Peninsula? I recently returned to the United States after living, working and studying in Seoul, South Korea, for the past six years. As I prepared to return to America last spring, the US presidential election and the...
