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

Across the pond, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris spotted similar patterns in their analysis of 268 political parties in thirty-one European countries.³⁸ Economic issues, they found, have been playing a smaller role in party manifestoes for decades, and noneconomic issues a larger role. The same was true of the distribution of voters. Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.³⁹ Brexit voters, too, were older, more rural, and less educated than those who voted to remain: 66 percent of high school graduates voted to leave, but only 29 percent of degree holders did.⁴⁰

Inglehart and Norris concluded that supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . . . The silent revolution launched in the 1970s seems to have spawned a resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.”⁴¹ Paul Taylor, a political analyst at the Pew Research Center, singled out the same counter-current in American polling results: “The overall drift is toward more liberal views on a range of issues, but that doesn’t mean the whole country’s buying in.”⁴²

Though the source of the populist backlash may be found in currents of modernity that have been engulfing the world for some time—globalization, racial diversity, women’s empowerment, secularism, urbanization, education—its electoral success in a particular country depends on whether a leader materializes who can channel that resentment. Neighboring countries with comparable cultures can thus differ in the degree to which populism gains traction: Hungary more than the Czech Republic, Norway more than Sweden, Poland more than Romania, Austria more than Germany, France more than Spain, and the United States more than Canada. (In 2016 Spain, Canada, and Portugal had no populist party legislators at all.)⁴³

How will the tension play out between the liberal, cosmopolitan, enlightenment humanism that has been sweeping the world for decades and the regressive, authoritarian, tribal populism pushing back? The major long-term forces that have carried liberalism along—mobility, connectivity, education, urbanization—are not likely to go into reverse, and neither is the pressure for equality from women and ethnic minorities.

All of these portents, to be sure, are conjectural. But one is as certain as the first half of the idiom “death and taxes.” Populism is an old man’s movement. As figure 20-1 shows, support for all three of its recrudescences—Trump, Brexit, and European populist parties—falls off dramatically with year of birth. (The alt-right movement, which overlaps with populism, has a youngish membership, but for all its notoriety it is an electoral nonentity, numbering perhaps 50,000 people or 0.02 percent of the American population.)⁴⁴ The age rolloff isn’t surprising, since we saw in chapter 15 that in the 20th century every birth cohort has been more tolerant and liberal than the one that came before (at the same time that all the cohorts have drifted liberalward). This raises the possibility that as the Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, they will take authoritarian populism with them.