People no longer feel that the political system is actually delivering for them. I think there are three primary drivers of the rise of populism. One of them is the stagnation of living standards for ordinary people. From 1935 to 1960, the living standard of the average American doubled. From 1965 to 1985, it doubled again. [...]
A lot of this discontent is driven by economic concerns, but the form it takes is cultural or racial. We have to recognize that we’re in the middle of a unique historical experiment: We’ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones, which is what’s happening in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Some of these countries were always multiethnic, but they also had a clear racial hierarchy in which some people had advantages over others. [...]
Our system has failed at one of the core ambitions of a democracy, which is to translate popular views into public policies. That’s because of the role of money in our politics, because of the revolving door between legislators and lobbyists, and because the political class has become separated from the bulk of the population. [...]
For people who have come of age in the last 30 years, it was easy to just focus on our shortcomings, because there was no viable alternative out there in the world to which we were comparing ourselves. Now that people see what authoritarian populists have done to countries like Turkey or Russia, and many people are seeing what a populist like Trump is threatening to do to this country, I think there’s a chance that they will relearn the importance of our political system.
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