The paradox at the heart of these populist right-wing movements is that while they are products of popular anger — and appear a rejection of the globalized, hyperconnected world extolled by the elite — it’s also segments of this elite that are helping power these movements.
These aren’t outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign. [...]
This isn’t limited to the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the largest donor to Geert Wilders’ far right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an American organization that funds various conservative and Islamophobic outlets, including Jihad Watch. The center gave the PVV €108,244 in 2015, the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system in a single year, though it’s donated to the party over the course of a number of years, as well as paying for Wilders’s trips to the United States. [...]
All this at first seems counter-intuitive. After all, it’s generally assumed that xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes are the domain of the white working class, which goes to explain the success of Trump and Brexit among such voters. But data analyses like this one from Vox paint a more complicated picture. It suggests that the most active elite donors have significantly harsher anti-immigration and authoritarian views than others, including other wealthy people who aren’t political donors.
None of this is to say that these movements and ideas are simply astroturfed. They’re not. Nor is it to say that the far right would be unsuccessful without the backing of big donors. A party founded by actual Nazis nearly won the Austrian elections despite the country’s public funding of elections, and Marine Le Pen had tremendous success despite the strict restrictions on French campaign finance laws (though she, too, comes from less than humble beginnings).
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