Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

European elections, too, are not depth-soundings for a commitment to cosmopolitan humanism but reactions to a bundle of emotionally charged issues of the day. These included, recently, the euro currency (which arouses skepticism among many economists), intrusive regulation from Brussels, and pressure to accept large numbers of refugees from the Middle East just when fears of Islamic terrorism (however disproportionate to the risk) were being stoked by horrific attacks. Even then, populist parties have attracted only 13 percent of the votes in recent years, and they have lost seats in as many national legislatures as they have gained them in.³² In the year following the Trump and Brexit shocks, right-wing populism was repudiated in elections in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France—where the new president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed that Europe was “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.”³³

But far more important than the political events of the mid-2010s are the social and economic trends that have fostered authoritarian populism—and more to the point of this chapter, that may foretell its future.

Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism. For economic determinists, this is enough to explain the rise of the movement. But analysts have sifted through the election results like investigators inspecting the wreckage at the site of a plane crash, and we now know that the economic explanation is wrong. In the American election, voters in the two lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the economy” as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out “immigration” and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as the most important issues.³⁴

The twisted metal has turned up more promising clues. An article by the statistician Nate Silver began, “Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page.” That finding jumped right off the page and into the article’s headline: “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.”³⁵ Why should education have mattered so much? Two uninteresting explanations are that the highly educated happen to affiliate with a liberal political tribe, and that education may be a better long-term predictor of economic security than current income. A more interesting explanation is that education exposes people in young adulthood to other races and cultures in a way that makes it harder to demonize them. Most interesting of all is the likelihood that education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery.

In another page-jumper, Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants. But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).³⁶ This doesn’t mean that most Trump supporters are racists. But overt racism shades into resentment and distrust, and the overlap suggests that the regions of the country that gave Trump his Electoral College victory are those with the most resistance to the decades-long process of integration and the promotion of minority interests (particularly racial preferences, which they see as reverse discrimination against them).

Among the exit poll questions that probed general attitudes, the most consistent predictor of Trump support was pessimism.³⁷ Sixty-nine percent of Trump supporters felt that the direction of the country was “seriously off track,” and they were similarly jaundiced about the workings of the federal government and the lives of the next generation of Americans.