I get the feeling that we’re missing something big: that no single explanation of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election captures the whole story.
Most explanations of what happened have focused on recent events in the US – like Biden running too late or Democrats alienating the working class. They have different uses, but they all suffer from a shared problem: the United States is not the only country where incumbents have lost power of late.
2024 was the first year in recorded history that incumbents lost vote share Every single developed democracy has held a contestVice President Kamala Harris is actually outperforming all but one of her developed-world peers. Since 2020, ruling parties in Western democracies have lost 40 out of 54 elections — means the incumbent’s chance of defeat over the past few years has been as shy as 80 percent. Dominant ruling parties have suffered electoral setbacks or even outright defeats in places as diverse as South Africa, India and Japan. Even the few exceptions to the late “incumbent lose” rule reinforce the point, as they have a kind of anti-system credentials (see, for example, the Morena party in Mexico).
Inflation has been identified as the most common culprit in the global anti-authoritarian movement. But while that’s certainly part of the picture, it’s not the whole story. Incumbents have also recently lost votes in countries which has experienced low post-Covid inflationLike Japan and Germany. So most of the best explanations don’t really work in the face of the sheer chance of an anti-incumbency wave.
Clearly, there’s something bigger going on here: voters around the world are really angry about how their political system is working, and want to empower those who aim to destroy or transform it. To understand why radical parties are succeeding on both sides of the aisle — but especially on the right — is to understand why, exactly, voters have become radicalized against the political status quo.
The truth is that we don’t actually know. But it’s something we should figure out quickly because the kind of parties these voters are empowering are more threatening than just parts of the system that deserve to be fixed. Their rise could undermine the institutions that have achieved the greatest things in human history.
The Riddle of Anti-System Voting
Recently, I find myself dividing supporters of far-right anti-democratic parties roughly into two groups.
On the one hand, you have the disaffected: people who, for example, voted for Trump twice in the GOP primaries. Research suggests that these voters are overwhelmingly driven by hostility to culture change and weakening social stratification. my book responsive spiritMostly about these types of people and what makes them tick.
But while diehards are often the majority of supporters of far-right parties, they are not usually the majority of voters. To win, people like Trump will have to win over a different kind of voter, one who doesn’t share the hardcore base’s preoccupation with the culture wars.
Of course, we are all familiar with the concept of the “swing voter”. What makes them even more interesting today is that they increasingly swing in much wider arcs. Where voters in wealthy democracies once bounced between center-right and center-left, they are now willing to consider far-left and far-right options (or, depending on the country, both).
This, I think, is where the anti-system attitude is most important. These swing voters are unhappy with how their system is working. Although they Not ready to give up on democracy altogetherThey want it to look very different.
How should democracy be different? Well, they are less clear on that.
Anti-system voters are the kind of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and then for Trump in the general election. They are probably Robert F. gravitated to figures like Kennedy Jr., Joe Rogan, Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard – people with very different ideas and perspectives, but who were generally hostile to the “establishment” in one form or another.
The rise of such voters itself raises two questions. First, why are swing voters more open to radicalization? And second, why has it accelerated so much in the last few years?
Again, there are no easy answers here. But one explanation is that moderate parties on the left and right are reaping what they have sown.
The 21st century can be described, in broad strokes, as a series of shocks: 9/11, the 2003 Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 European refugee crisis and, perhaps most importantly, the Covid-19 pandemic. There is plenty of reason to be upset with how elites handled these situations, as they often directly caused the crisis or botched the response. When you layer deeper structural issues on top of that, like rising inequality or the looming threat of climate change, it’s clearly understandable that voters would erupt in protest.
Of course, this is an important part of the story for some segments of the global electorate. But it’s a heavily Western and particularly American narrative that makes less sense when applied to other democracies—such as Mexico, South Africa, Japan or Brazil—that have seen major anti-incumbency votes of late.
Moreover, it assumes a model of voting – where voters rationally reflect and evaluate policy successes and failures – that may not be accurate. Extensive evidence, compiled in books like Democracy for Pragmatistsshows that voters often base their ballot decisions on identity, partisan allegiance or just plain old gut feeling. In the United States, this quasi-rationality is particularly acute for swing voters, who pay less attention to politics than strongly partisans and therefore Generally less informed about what is happening in any given election cycle– Let go of what happened 10 or 20 years ago.
This is where the limits of our knowledge on the subject begin to fragment. A diffuse, emotional, gut-level dissatisfaction with the political system – which I suspect is actually at the heart of global anti-system voting – is something that is harder to study than general dissatisfaction with specific policy choices or economic conditions. And we don’t really know why that feeling is arising now, or what can be done to counter it.
Rancid vibes of human development – or, what’s right is right
I think that one group that captures this sentiment, at least to some degree, is the so-called “Northern” right.
These thinkers believed that modernism was, broadly speaking, a failure. Liberal capitalism’s task of “liberating” us from the constraints of traditional religion and community has instead delivered a society of aimless, depressed and lonely people. People angry at the political system, in this narrative, are really angry at something deeper: a soulless society.
I don’t quite buy the postliberal narrative. It rests largely on the concept of “deaths of despair”—the increasing number of American deaths by drugs due to suicide and mass morbidity—which is essentially has been debunked by critics the left, the rightAnd the center. Some of its claims, such as the idea that we are in a uniquely lonely period of history Also on dubious empirical grounds.
But as much as I don’t buy certain claims, I think there is something instructive about their diagnosis.
There is indeed a sense among people of all political stripes that things are not working the way they should. You can see this in reliable data (for example) trust in government, declining in both areas United States of America And Global democracy. You can also see it anecdotally in the way people talk about politics on social media, where “doomerism” dominates and people of all political stripes regularly speak pessimistically about their country’s future.
Political vibes have gone rancid – and we don’t quite understand why.
It is a puzzle that is especially important to solve given that, at this moment, humanity is living through the best period in its history.
The world is It is richer than it has ever been. War deaths have risen during the unusually destructive Gaza and Ukraine wars, but they are still far below what the world looked like before World War II. We eradicated smallpox, a disease that kills 500 million people throughout history. We have made tremendous strides towards social equality and inclusion, with historical practices such as slavery now officially abolished around the world. Challenges such as income inequality and climate change remain serious, but there are some real progress right way
To see what all this progress looks like, take a look at this chart of life expectancy — perhaps the most useful metric of whether people are doing well. This shows a long-term trend toward longer-living people everywhere, which has been rising consistently over the decades.
There has only been one global dip in the trend – the Covid-19 pandemic – and it has already reversed. By the end of 2023, global life expectancy was Highest in human history.
This is an important counterpoint to the 21st century horror stories I mentioned earlier. Our era has been defined as much by its extraordinary successes as by its failures—both of which have been made possible, in large part, by the existing political system. When anti-system political leaders begin to threaten the fundamental building blocks of the current order — including alliance networks, global trade, public health institutions, and democracy itself — you can imagine a world in which the long trend toward human flourishing is reversed for good.
Yet simply saying “things are better” won’t persuade people who think they’ve never been worse off. What we need to do is better understand anti-system voting and try to understand why there is such a feeling of universalism and what can be done to counter it.
We — who believe in liberal democratic political systems, imperfect as they are — are still missing something. And we’d better find out before voters throw the baby out with the bathwater by elevating politicians who stick it to the old elites and destroy the parts of the system that are actually working.
