Inclusive Populism

May 1, 2017 was a poignant anniversary. Twenty years earlier, Tony Blair, had swept to power in a landslide victory, proclaiming a "new dawn" in UK politics. His sense of optimism reflected the wider temper of the times. Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated for a second term as US President and Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader of Russian Federation. These memories stood in painful contrast with the political scene two decades later. In Britain, Blair’s vision of a “modern”, multicultural Britain nation anchored in the European Union buckled under the weight of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and successive social and economic convulsions. It was finally put to rest on June 23, 2016, when a narrow majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union after a campaign dominated by the fear of immigration and the perceived need to “take back control” from foreigners. Across the Atlantic, the change in political mood has been even starker. The angry nativism of Donald Trump’s campaign represented a departure from the hopeful and inclusive optimism of Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can” campaign eight years earlier. On the day of his inauguration, the new President declared that his predecessors of both parties had presided over an “American carnage.” The divisive tone of Trump’s rhetoric —and policies— has shaped his presidency.
Perhaps the one thing that unifies an otherwise deeply fractured America is this mood of anger and anxiety. As the new President was delivering his inauguration address, a wave of “women’s marches” two million strong protested his election. Marking the first anniversary of the inauguration and the protest, an equal or larger number of outraged citizens again took to the streets calling for resistance to the administration. While Trump proclaimed “America First,” he understood his rise to be part of a new political reality sweeping across many nations. In his campaign, he repeatedly invoked the Brexit vote in Britain, and argued for a more positive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the early days of his administration, he endorsed the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in her contest with Emmanuel Macron for the French Presidency. While the US, UK, France and Russia are very different contexts, the rise of right-wing populism seemed an international phenomenon. Across a range of contexts, it manifested striking commonalities: a hostility to “liberal elites” and democratic norms; the proclamation of a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam; and a deep hostility to immigration, which is blamed for the dilution of each country’s “Christian heritage.” Increasingly, across these different contexts, fellow-citizens are being turned into strangers. Three factors help to explain this rise in far-right populism: the increasing flows of global migration, the resultant increase in religious diversity, and a period of intense economic upheaval whose cost has been distributed unevenly. Across the world, twenty global cities include among their residents more than one million migrants. Together, these cities, which are the epicenter of global wealth and power, contain one in five of the world’s migrants, and as well as standing at the heart of the flows of global migration. The majority of these cities lie in historically Christian countries. With the exception of Russia (where the Soviet regime sought for many decades to impose atheism on the populace), all of these countries are undergoing a decline in religious belief and practice. Now, however, global migration is bringing new, religiously committed citizens into these nations – many of them adherents of Christianity and Islam. The reason is simple: while these two faiths make up around half of the world’s total population, it is estimated that they account for three-quarters of the world’s migrants. Ironically, just as Harvey Cox was writing The Secular City in 1966, which called attention to patterns of urbanization that seemed at the time post-religious, these flows of global migration began to increase dramatically. They have put helped put religion back on the agenda of western political debate, and rendered Cox’s narrative of ‘secularization’ problematic. As for pressures exerted by failing economies, Russia entered a period of economic crisis in the final years of the 20th century. The welfare and employment protections of the former Soviet Union were dismantled at a time when a new capitalist elite was engaged in conspicuous consumption. In the west, the financial crash of 2008 generated a similar dissonance, with the restaurants and boutiques of the wealthiest areas recovering quickly while the majority of citizens endured a sustained period of stagnant wages and reduced public services. Putin’s rise to power, Britain’s Brexit vote and Trump’s election came on the heels of their nation’s respective economic upheavals. (Excerpted from ch 1)