How Can Democracy Survive in an Age of Discontent? Rachel Navarre and Matthew Rhodes-Purdy on Populism and Political Extremism

I think populism is rather a specific form of discontent. Discontent is the umbrella term. It's this vague sense that the way things are being done is not working. That democracy is not effective. That it's not serving my interests.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Support the podcast on Patreon

Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox.

A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Rachel Navarre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Master of Public Administration Program at Bridgewater State University. Matthew Rhodes-Purdy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Clemson University. They are the coauthors (along with Stephen Utych) of The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:53
• What is Discontent - 3:21
• Crisis and Discontent - 13:34
• Rise of Populism - 25:13
• An End to Neoliberalism? - 39:20

Key Links

The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies by Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Rachel Navarre, and Stephen Utych

Learn more about Rachel Navarre here.

Learn more about Matthew Rhodes-Purdy here.

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Daniel Ziblatt on American Democracy, the Republican Party, and the Tyranny of the Minority

Marc Plattner Has Quite a Bit to Say About Democracy

More Episodes from the Podcast

More Information

Apes of the State created all Music

Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

Follow on Twitter @DemParadox, Facebook, Instagram @democracyparadoxpodcast

100 Books on Democracy

Learn more about the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at https://kellogg.nd.edu/

Transcript

The elections in the Netherlands this past week caught many of us by surprise when the far-right populist Party for Freedom won 35 seats. This means they are now the largest political party in the Dutch Parliament and will very likely either lead the next government or play a major role in it.

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. This is one of many examples where populist parties and politicians have won elections in countries as diverse as Hungary, India, Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Even where populists have not won elections, they have made considerable gains.

It’s clear that populists have a message that resonates, but it’s not fully understood why it does. And most importantly why it resonates right now. Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Rachel Navarre, and Stephen Utych have a few ideas. Their book is called The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies.

They argue unmet concerns during the financial crisis developed into frustrations that developed into cultural backlash and widespread discontent. The consequences include the normalization of political extremism and a proliferation of conspiracy theories.

I talk to Matt and Rachel about their ideas and press them on some of their claims. It’s an interesting conversation and one that touches on many of the concerns I know most of you have.

Now hopefully, you’re listening because you love the podcast. If you do, please make sure to give the show a 5-star rating and review on Apple and Spotify. The past few weeks I’ve mentioned that I am talking to organizations and businesses about sponsorships for the show. If you belong to a nonprofit, think tank, academic institution, or business, send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. I’d love to talk to you about ways to support the podcast. But for now… This is my conversation with Matthew Rhodes-Purdy and Rachel Navarre…

jmk

Rachel Navarre and Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Rachel Navarre

It's very good to be here.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Thanks for having us.

jmk

Well, Matt and Rachel, I really loved your book. It's called The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies. It deals with a lot of topics that I talk to a lot of different scholars on in this podcast. I love the book because it definitely approaches these subjects in a way that has its own twist. You talk about it in terms of discontent. It's a new angle to be able to approach it that builds on a lot of other ideas, but still has its own approach to it. The title, The Age of Discontent, really implies an epoch or an era. So, I'd like to start out by understanding this idea. Do you feel that discontent is something that always exists for some people, but maybe just exists in smaller numbers or is this something that truly emerged from unique historical circumstances?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

I would say that the short answer is yes. I think there are always some discontented people running around, but in that case, discontent is probably mostly bred by personal circumstances, personal life situations, and things like that. What makes our current moment an age of discontent is the fact that historical circumstances, which we explore what those are in the book, have broadened that sense of malaise or just general unhappiness to the way that democracy functions in contemporary societies. We named the book very intentionally. Something is going on to just cause these feelings of frustration with democracy to explode.

jmk

Rachel, do you feel that discontent is just inherently antidemocratic or do you think that it's just a dissatisfaction with the way that we approach democracy?

Rachel Navarre

I think there are some that do decide that, yes, democracy doesn't work and the experiment has failed. But I do think a lot of it is a discontent with how we expect democracy to occur. You know, in the folk theory of democracy that we have, if you are in a community or something and you see everybody, ‘Well, most people around me feel like this, so why can't the politicians do anything?’ It doesn't always have to be a feeling. I mean, we know that there are issues where the public's opinion is very much out of sync with what the politicians think public opinion is in the United States.

So, I think the fact that you do also have these anti-majoritarian policies in democracies, which for the most part, I'm a little bit more in favor of those constitutional protections and stuff than Matt. Well, that might sound a little bit like Matt's not for constitutional protections. But I'm a little bit more on the rules to protect the constitutional order, I guess. But I think it's this idea that, ‘Well, if we're the majority, why don't we always get what we want.’ They don’t understand that sometimes there are these problems that we do see where the government doesn't want to do what the people want. Sometimes that doesn't exist for protections of minority groups. I think people do get frustrated when they look at a government and say, ‘Well, we're the majority. Why aren't our policies what's winning?’

jmk

So, Levitsky and Ziblatt just recently came out with a book, and I talked to Daniel Ziblatt about it, called The Tyranny of the Minority. But it focuses a lot on specific circumstances related to the United States. The fact that the United States has so many different checks and balances… Francis Fukuyama calls it a vetocracy in the United States. You make the case that it's not just the United States that has what you call weak voice. That many democracies throughout the world both in Latin America and Europe specifically don't necessarily always follow through on policies that have broad, widespread support. We're not just talking about things that affect minority rights. We're talking about policies that are bread and butter issues sometimes. So, Rachel, why is it that in your words that democracy has produced such weak voice in so many different countries?

Rachel Navarre

I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with institutional structure. Some of it is also just the pressure of winning elections. You know, we had this period of neoliberal consensus where you start to see a lot of agreement on policies. So, you start seeing the center-left parties or the left parties become closer and closer to the right parties and the right parties also have the same thing. But I think what it has to do a lot is with the growing agreement between the left and the right. You see this in the nineties. You see this after the fall of communism. We see the Washington consensus emerge and we see left parties and right parties becoming more similar.

So, you have the rise of the new left and what happens is that gives parties or people less of a chance to vote differently. If you happen to want more left-wing policies or a larger social safety net, the space for that has really diminished in many countries. So, it gives the idea that, first off, all the parties are the same. They're all serving the same interests. They're all serving the same things and so it gives an opportunity for the supply side of populism to come in and say, ‘Look at these policies. They both want free trade. They both want to cut the social safety net. They both want to do this. They're exactly the same. Why don't you vote for me? At least I'm something different.’

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Yeah, that consensus, that lack of differentiation between left and right, I think is the big driving factor. That's not an accident either. We focus on the role of economic crises, that sort of acute mode as the spark that sets things off. But a spark doesn't make fire without fuel and the fuel, we argue, is this long-standing process, this inversion to neoliberalism, and particularly deindustrialization which critically undermined the organizational strength of the popular sectors throughout the democratic world. What that means essentially is that effective voice is impossible. The effective voice of the popular sectors requires organization in order for people who don't necessarily have all the time or all the resources or all the educational resources to become politically effective on their own need to get together with others to become effective.

So, you asked earlier, is discontent inherently anti-democratic? I mean, there are aspects of it that are always dangerous because it's an aggressive form of politics. But I think the key variable there is whether there are effective channels so it can become a pro-reform impulse? The answer in most contemporary democracies is no, because of the organizational weakness of the popular sectors to the point where… Rachel mentioned people who want left wing policies. I think we're actually past that. People who sort of need or would benefit from left wing policies, but really are so disconnected from other people who are sort of disorganized in terms of being part of the popular sectors that would benefit from them that they may not even really understand the policies that would benefit them or have a conception of what the possible solutions are.

jmk

Yeah, I think one of the problems with thinking through economic crisis as a cause of discontent, populism, or however else you want to name it, is the fact that a lot of the parties that have been emerging, particularly in the United States and Europe, but even within Latin America in recent years, the parties of discontent, the parties of populism, are coming from the right. They're not necessarily coming from the left. I mean, we saw Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but that happened a decade before the financial crisis actually occurred. The more recent examples seem to be coming from the right, which seems to have a very different explanation, which of course you discuss, and we're going to touch on that.

First, I'd like to understand a little bit more about the connection though between discontent and populism, because I feel like we're going to mix those terms up and use them interchangeably in a lot of ways. Matt, do you think that discontent is a true cause for populism or do you think it's a specific type of populism?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Actually, I think populism is rather a specific form of discontent. Discontent is the umbrella term. It's this vague sense that the way things are being done is not working, that democracy is not effective, that it's not serving my interests, so on and so forth. How that manifests really depends on the circumstances in a particular country and for a particular person. So, essentially when people have these vague feelings, they generally go forth and search existing social narratives in order to explain why they feel the way they do and why they have these sentiments. Populist narratives capture that sense of discontent and give it more specificity. They give it an explanation. You feel discontented because these elites are evil and they are ignoring you. Not you, the individual, but you, who is a member of this imagined unity that is called the people.

It morally ennobles the person and makes their discontent valid, which everybody wants to be validated. It also gives them a very clear opponent to strike at, which is the elite and whoever's interest they are serving instead of the people. So, we talk about populism, but there are other forms of discontent. We also talk about including mass contentious politics in Chile. We actually consider prejudicial or bigoted politics to be in some sense a form of discontent as a rejection of multiculturalism. So, it really depends on the narrative that people gravitate to. Populism is one among many and there are many forms of populism.

jmk

So, Rachel, let's go ahead and dive into the basic narrative that you establish. It all begins with an economic cause, or at least that's like the primal cause. The big one that affects the United States and Europe is the financial crisis. One of the problems that I have when we think of the financial crisis, though, as a cause of populism in the future is it feels like it took so many years for it to manifest into more powerful political movements. For example, if we think of Trumpism as something that comes out of discontent from the financial crisis, it took eight years for Donald Trump and his form of populism on the right to actually emerge. Why does it take so long for something like a financial crisis or economic insecurity to actually become a movement of discontent?

Rachel Navarre

Well, I think part of it has to do with a lot of institutional structures, because we do see a reaction to the financial crisis in the United States. Let's look at the United States as an example. We see a reaction to this both on the right and the left. We have the Tea Party and then we have Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street really didn't go too far. We do eventually get Bernie Sanders. But we don't get the same sort of institutional build and capture that you see in the Republican Party. So, you see this movement start, but you also have to have a politician that's able to manipulate the situation or a politician that's able to gain control of power.

So, in some places you can start your own party and you have a system that allows you to have more parties and parties can emerge more easily. We kind of see this in Spain with Podemos on the left. Podemos became a thing much, much earlier than Vox, the right-wing populist counterpoint in Spain. In the United States though, it takes a few more institutional hurdles. You have to get rid of the old school Republicans that want things that we think of as the traditional left right divide. If you go back and look at Reagan's policies compared to the Republican policies in 2016, Reagan wouldn't have made it. You know, he wanted amnesty for immigrants, free trade 100%, and that's just not what we're seeing.

So, you have to have overcome the institutional capture of the parties that you already have. Then in other places, Spain and Portugal were our bastions of anti-rightist politics because of their experience with Franco and Salazar. But you see things start changing. So, you have Podemos. You have some left-wing movements that come out. Then you also have some extra things that happen in Spain that really are more on the cultural side. You have the independence movements in Catalonia that really gives a secondary push to the right. So, I think you have to have the institutional structure where there has to be the demand and the supply.

jmk

Let me ask you a little bit more about Spain. My understanding of Spanish politics and the rise of Podemos is that it emerged largely from the Indignados Movement. The Indignados Movement was a precursor to Occupy Wall Street over in the United States. I mean, it was a massive movement that had enormous cultural influence, not just in Spain, but throughout the world. Podemos emerges as a political party that's supposed to be channeling those ideas of the Indignados Movement. But my understanding is that there was a lot of frustration in channeling that into a political party. That a political party might not have been the right institutional vehicle for those ideas and that expression.

So as Podemos continued to be able to develop and evolve as a political party, it feels like that frustration only grew because many felt that it was too tied to traditional parties and was becoming too much of an institutional player. It wasn't being populist enough. Do you feel like that's part of the reason why it created the space for a right-wing party like Vox? I mean, I know that there were other things in terms of the Catalonian independence movement. But maybe it was also the fact that Podemos was disappointing to a lot of people looking for an alternative at the time as well.

Rachel Navarre

I think that is definitely some of what happened, because we can see that now Podemos is no longer the party you expected. So, they get into government in the last, well, in the second to last election since Spain still doesn't have a government. But you see them. They are in coalition government and of course they are constrained. They do a lot of things. They definitely have pushed the Socialist Party, which is a center left party, more to the left. But they haven't been able to do everything, because, of course, they don't have a majority. They're in coalition. So, I think there is some of that and we see a lot of disagreement on the left. I mean, you have Más Madrid. Podemos didn't run as its own parliamentary group this time. They weren't Unidos Podemos or Podemos United.

You have this new conglomerate Sumar. They are saying that they're not really a political party. Sumar’s a big thing. They are a movement of all of these left parties, green parties, Podemos, some sort of not quite independence parties, but regional parties and things like that trying to get back to this idea of a leftist feminist politics. But I think we see this on the right too. Historically once populists get into power, they have a terrible time trying to deliver on what they've promised. Because first off, a lot of times their promises are incoherent. I think Podemos was a little bit more concrete in what they were promising than other parties, but a lot of times their policies just aren't coherent. They don't have the votes. They don't have the power to come in and automatically overturn a lot of this stuff.

It's very hard to convey that when you come in saying, ‘We are going to change the system. We're going to knock it down. We have the right of the people. We have the will and we're going to do it.’ Well, what happens when you don't. You don't have the votes and I think people do get frustrated with it very quickly. Right populist and left populism don't fall on what we think of as the traditional left to right divide. They're mixing things. We've got welfare chauvinism in there.

So, a lot of people have a very hard time, especially with right-wing populism because it adopts the language of the left. It adopts the ideas of the left, the social safety net, but only for certain people, only for the true French, the true Spaniards, the true people. But it sounds like a leftist policy until you realize that they're meaning to exclude half the population.

jmk

So, Matt, to kind of transition that to the United States, Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis and his language in that campaign felt very populist to a lot of people. A lot of people were attracted to that message and he not only won the election, but the Democrats won enormous majorities in the house. They had 60 votes in the Senate, so they could pass legislation over the filibuster at the time. But many people don't think of Barack Obama as governing as a populist. They think of him as being a very traditional politician and there's a lot of discontent on the left about how he actually governed. Do you feel like the way that Obama governed is part of the reason why it created space for a populist party on the right in the United States?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Yes, but I don't want to blame Obama too much. I do think he was inexperienced. He didn't have a lot of experience wrangling an unwieldy legislative majority. All of that said, I'm not sure how much experience is helpful given the dysfunction of the US political system. It's only going to take you so far. You mentioned he had 60 votes. There were 60 Democrats. He never had 60 votes, because you had Lieberman and some of these really conservative Democrats who were very antagonistic towards making really qualitative changes in how social welfare is done in the United States.

Folks like Manchin still remain opposed to any of the kind of universalistic social policies that actually might be able to get political support among the American people, because they violate the narrative that those people get all the help and we have to pay for it, which is obviously a racialized narratives that comes out the idea that people of color get all the support and we being sort of working white people have to pay for those things. The universalistic systems that have occasionally been tried, so for example, the public option that was part of Obamacare originally or the childcare tax credit, they're the reason why conservatives are really afraid of those programs, because they're the kind of programs that can build support in the middle class and become durable whereas there's always that antagonism or resentment towards social welfare programs.

But the short answer to your question is yes. I think Obama is an example of, in a different world with slightly weaker constraints, somebody who could have been a really transformative political figure and could have taken that angst and directed it in a more positive way. We actually have examples of cases where that happened such as the Broad Front in Uruguay. Talking about Spain, there are some really eerie parallels with what goes on in Portugal with what happens in Spain.

You have a much more experienced and organized and deeply rooted radical left in Portugal that is in some ways more ideologically extreme than Podemos, because it's also been around the block and is able to cut much better deals with the center left and produce better results and therefore keep discontent in that country down despite the fact that it has one of the worst economic crises of that entire time. So, the Portuguese left is considerably more radical and more ideological than Podemos is. And yet, because they're experienced and they're used to working as an opposition party, maximizing concessions, they were able to use that strategy, whereas Podemos had this idea in its head that they were going to be the new left party. They were going to replace the Socialists and as such, they demanded to be in government.

They made a bunch of, frankly, questionable decisions, whereas the left in Portugal made better ones and produced a better result. Therefore, you didn't get the surge in right-wing populism. Justin Trudeau in Canada made some risky policy bets in terms of going into deficit spending during Canada's double dip recession and people responded. They liked the fact that he was willing to challenge orthodoxy and move away from politics as usual. I think those successes were largely ephemeral because they weren't based on institutionalized voice and responsiveness. They were the product of momentary electoral incentives.

But I can imagine a world in which Barack Obama, for example, even if he didn't have the filibuster, could have come much harder in terms of a much larger stimulus package. A stimulus package that gave people much more visible benefits where they could say, ‘Oh, this is the government helping me.’ You know, really reconfigured the healthcare system in much more egalitarian ways and things like that. I can imagine a world like that. Chances are I would submit that we wouldn't have Donald Trump.

jmk

So, a key part of your argument is that the economic crisis leads to negative emotions that lead to cultural anxiety and effectively cultural backlash. It seems to me that it takes time for that to actually happen. That it just doesn't happen overnight and the reason why you have these different cases is that in some of the examples, the governments are able to react to that voice of the people very quickly. But in the cases where it's not able to react, the economic insecurity seems to simmer. It seems to evolve. It seems to change over time into cultural anxiety rather than just economic anxiety. Am I understanding that right? Does it take time to be able to transition from just the economic insecurity into cultural insecurity as well?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

So, we don't have necessarily strong evidence that says it takes this amount of time for this to happen. It's a highly contingent process depending on, among other things, the social narrative environment. Which narratives are flowing around, I think a couple of things lead to that being a long short-term conversion of that. It doesn't take decades, but it does take some years. So, among other things, we noticed that we see right-wing populism a lot of times after a left-wing response. That visible foreclosing of a more direct solution to these economic problems and they decide there is no government help coming. Government is not going to assist you. The democratic state is not going to be able to solve this. Those sentiments seem to have to really solidify before you start seeing that conversion.

The other thing is this is a process. People go out and look for narratives and they hear these ideas. They tend to get radicalized over time. They start out with relatively antiseptic, but still prejudiced and bigoted ideas, ‘Oh, the government only wants to help people of color. It doesn't want to help me.’ Then they go layer by layer into radicalization. As they go, they find increasingly extremist narratives and then down into radical right populism. I also think there is a taboo against sort of open bigotry and racism in most contemporary societies. That taboo needs to be worn away. I think, particularly in the United States, you see opposition to Obama among conservatives taking an increasingly racialized tone through the repetition of the birther conspiracy. These things develop over time.

They get mainstream as more and more people in office or in positions of authority or people in the media are at least treating these as plausible. I think gradually that emboldens people to visibly support these kinds of prejudicial politics, which is all laying the foundation for something like Trump. But it does certainly take time because you don't switch away from a society where those ideas are considered taboo and also just outsider ideas. People who believe these things are not serious political actors because serious political actors don't believe these things.

Rachel Navarre

I mean, I think what also happens is in the United States we have a tradition of the outsider. Everybody always uses a little bit of populism in the United States. Everyone's always campaigning against Washington. So, I think part of it is like Matt said. You have to have these narratives floating around and sometimes it takes time for them to come in. Matt and I were both grad students in Texas when Ted Cruz started his rise to power. Ted Cruz would say, ‘You vote for me, we're going to get rid of Obamacare.’ But he doesn't have the votes. There was no way they were ever going to get rid of Obamacare.

But if you're telling people, ‘You vote for me and I'm going to make this big change for you, a specific change,’ and that change doesn't happen, the conservative firebrands in the Senate have just gone further and further right. Why? Because every one of them is saying, we're going to do this. We're going to get rid of whatever. We're going to get rid of Obamacare and then they don't do it. They get elected and they don't do it. So, this also sends people searching for people that will do it. I think it can get further and further away. Then you can also have this problem of the other side not recognizing what they're dealing with.

So, going back to Obama and immigration, Obama was trying to get the Republicans to buy in desperately to the immigration package: the amount of spending that went into the border; the amount of enforcement that went it. You have left groups calling Obama the Deporter in Chief and there's a bunch of debates about how deportations are counted and things like that. But at the same time, you see Obama kind of cracking down on immigration to try to get Republicans to say the border is secure. But the Republicans were never going to say that. They were never going to compromise. Instead, you get a bunch of people on the left viewing Obama as the Deporter in Chief and still not getting any of this comprehensive immigration reform that we want.

So, you're getting people frustrated with that, but you're also getting people frustrated on the right with those that say, ‘We're going to stop immigration completely or we're going to shut down the border or we're going to get rid of Obamacare.’ They can't do that. So, you get people that are frustrated with the way things are going. You get politicians that are telling them, ‘We can actually do this’ and it just ends up getting people further and further into looking for new solutions and more and more upset with how things are going.

jmk

But what I'm struggling to understand is populist politicians do the same thing. They make promises that they can't achieve. Donald Trump is a great example because he did the same exact thing that Ted Cruz did. He said that he was going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something that was significantly better. Not only did they not replace it with something that was better, they couldn't even repeal Obamacare. Another example of Trump in terms of immigration is he said that he was going to build a wall along the border.

I actually think that he probably could have found a compromise with the Democrats to be able to get more funding to be able to build border fencing and a wall if he had tried a little bit harder to be able to work for that. But he didn't. They didn't really make much progress on that. He didn't make any progress on immigration reform. Things are still at the same point that they've been and yet Trump has enormous loyalty from his supporters. So, what is it about these populist politicians both in the United States, in Latin America with Bolsonaro, in Europe with so many of the different populist politicians - Why is it that they have so much loyalty even when they don’t deliver results?

Rachel Navarre

Typically, once they're in power for a long time, it tends to fall apart. The problem is you can always go and blame - especially with populists who really go wholeheartedly in. Part of Ted Cruz's problem is he's not willing to go all the way he needs to go and no one likes him. So, that also makes deals hard. But, Donald Trump is also willing to go in and just torch everything. Donald Trump is willing to be fully conspiratorial. ‘The reason it didn't work? Well, because those elites are still there and they're blocking us. The solution is for you to give me more power and more time.’

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Yeah, Justin, I think your previous statement makes sense outside of the populist context. I actually think you're operating on a false assumption, which is that he would have been better off building the wall through compromise than not building it through aggression. Compromise would have hurt him. The whole point of the wall is punitive. It's we're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. People forget that second part a lot. Think about the other catchphrase of Trump: Lock her up. These are deliberate, aggressive acts against perceived wrongdoers whether the Mexican government for exploiting the United States and sending immigrants here and taking our jobs or Hillary Clinton for being corrupt, although he really wasn't ever talking about her.

He was talking about her as an avatar of the entire political establishment. Who she was as a person really wasn't all that relevant. The aggression really is the point. People who are charismatically attached to these figures are in an identity crisis. They lose the ability to distinguish themselves from the leader and you see this in the leader's rhetoric. They say things like I am your voice or I am the people. I am the voice of the people. Trump has used this language. Chávez used this language in Venezuela. It's a very common trope in populism and the idea is they're giving people vicarious satisfaction because they alone are sufficiently powerful to go out and confront this elite that has evaded popular accountability for so long.

That said, once they get into power, that fiction becomes harder and harder to maintain, because the populist worldview is a sham. Things are bad, not because the elite are all bad people. They might not be all that great people. I mean, you can believe that, but that's not the reason. There are structural issues, historical issues. There are all sorts of stuff going on here that one person at one moment cannot overcome. However, they've already primed their followers at that point to follow them down the rabbit hole. This is where conspiracy theories come in. We actually have a subheading in the book that a conspiracy theory is a warm hug.

The idea is that when they see this supposedly superhuman figure they follow faltering, it's terrifying. It's psychologically intolerable to accept that this person they followed isn't in fact a venal and selfish and very stupid and incompetent human being. It's much easier to accept that the deep state is doing this. I mean, QAnon, this whole conspiracy theory that we talk about, is a really interesting example. It's sort of a merger of old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on blood libel and the protocols of the Elders of Zion. But it actually started out pretty simple. It was just this idea that Trump is supposed to be destroying corruption. So, why is it that this respected Republican figure, Robert Mueller, is investigating him? Those things don't go together.

So, the narrative that emerges is the investigation is a sham. It's actually an excuse for him to work with Trump to take down the deep state. If you actually look at the origins of this really bizarre conspiracy theory, it's excusing Trump's failure in corruption.

jmk

A big part of the theory is that economic insecurity eventually leads to emotions that produce cultural backlash. One of the problems that I have wrapping my head around this idea is that many of the people that are experiencing cultural backlash tend to be older. They tend to be older in terms of age or demographics at least according to Pippa Norris and the Ronald Inglehart study on cultural backlash. They also tend to be the most economically secure because they have a government pension. They have government healthcare provided for them.

They oftentimes have savings that younger people don't have. They're dealing with kids. They're dealing with lots of different problems. They could get laid off at any moment. Why is it that those people who I would think would be less concerned, that the government actually puts more resources towards to be able to take care of, why is it that they're the ones who are experiencing the most cultural anxiety rather than younger people who should be experiencing the most economic insecurity?

Rachel Navarre

We talk about this and it's not so much your actual, you know, if we lay it down and put it on paper - it's not so much the actual insecurity you have. If you've never had anything, you don't have much to lose. It's the perception and the mismatch of where you perceive you should be in your expectation of what you should be. It's not the guy that's contracted to work with the plumbing company, the low-level employee of the plumbing company, that's the Trumper. It's the plumbing company owner who's driving around in a $90,000 pickup truck because there is more to lose. They're not where they think they should be.

They also perceive more of it as a zero sum. That if someone else gains, I'm losing. So, it evolves into this perception in how you feel. And they do have a lot to lose. You have one bad medical emergency and your nice, comfortable middle-class life is gone. You go unemployed for a year and there is no safety net for you. It's either this continues and you continue to do good or you could lose everything. So, it's those people that have something to lose and that also perceive that they should be doing better and perceive that someone else maybe is getting ahead of them.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

I mean, you think about people who retired in the wake of 2008, the people we're talking about who are Trump voters. If you're retiring in 2009-2010, you're not having the kind of retirement you thought you were going to. Social Security and Medicare are kind of cold comfort. Your 401K has been destroyed. The fact that the 401K is how you retire these days and not a fixed pension for a lot of people is indicative of the long-term erosion of Social Security that we talk about throughout the book. You're exposed to the vicissitudes of the market. Now you don't have the guaranteed lifestyle into old age and into death.

But I think Rachel really hit most of it, which is just a lot of Trump voters and a lot of populists in general, particularly on the right, are comfortable. They have good lifestyles in terms of nice houses and nice cars. Yet insecurity, I think, is underappreciated. There's been a lot of focus on deprivation. Recently, we've been talking a lot about inequality. What we conclude in the book is that really insecurity is what's driving people who expected to have comfortable middle-class lifestyles and expected to be able to provide those for their children are now feeling like their children are going to be worse off than they are.

jmk

One of the themes of the book is the fact that neoliberalism has taken away a lot of the security that government would provide people. It's hollowed out government resources for people. The final chapter that you have is titled, ‘Is Neoliberal Democracy Sustainable?’ You answer that in that chapter, but what I'd like to ask you is, do you feel that that's enough? If we shift away from neoliberalism, would that be enough to avoid future discontent? And for those who are currently discontented, is that all that's necessary to happen to be able to alleviate those emotions of discontent that would kind of normalize politics? Is that what we need to do? Is that all that we need to be able to do at this point?

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

So, a couple of answers to your question. First of all, the things we do to avoid discontent and the things we do to get rid of it once it's already there and built up are probably two very different things. I think we know much less about how we deal with discontent once we've had full blown effective polarization throughout society that becomes sort of self-sustaining. I think there are very different interventions that need to take place there. Some of the things you do to prevent discontent in an ordinary situation might actually be problematic in an already polarized polity. The short answer is moving away from neoliberalism is absolutely not sufficient because neoliberalism has two problems.

It's, first of all, economic insecurity, but it's also the hollowing of the democracy that needs to take place in order to support neoliberalism. Clinically speaking, I think very few people in ordinary society, very few of them, are genuinely neoliberals. Theda Skocpol’s book on the Tea Party kind of lays this out. People are neoliberal for groups that they don't like and socialists for themselves. They want to protect their own benefits and they want to get rid of benefits for young people or people of color or whoever they feel is outside of themselves. So, in order to actually build an effective democracy that marries itself to neoliberalism, you have to essentially reduce democratic voice to the point where popular majorities really can't influence policy which is basically what we have in the United States.

It's what's happened in the rest of the world, not so much through institutional veto points like we have here, but just through the breakdown of popular sector organizations, the breakdown of unions and the center left parties that they have relied on to advance their interests. If you just get rid of neoliberalism, you still have these hollow democracies that make people feel unheard and voiceless. So, here's the thing. I also don't think you can get rid of neoliberalism because the people who are at the top like it and benefit from it. You need a redemocratization in order to accomplish the move away from neoliberalism to some sort of more pro-social economy.

So, my big focus that I've always said is democratization has to come first. You have to democratize the system: removing veto points; making systems more responsive, more representative. But a big part of that is actually outside of the state structure in most places. It's about trying to figure out how do we organize popular sectors effectively in this new post-industrial world. I think you alluded to this when you talked about Podemos trying to not be a political party, wanting to be a movement of movements. Podemos, as far as I can tell, is doing that rather poorly, frankly.

But there are political parties, one of which is the Broad Front in Uruguay that has effectively employed that strategy to provide voice. So, I think redemocratization is absolutely critical and is in fact a necessary condition for increasing economic security, because it's not going to happen without a push.

Rachel Navarre

Yeah, I think Matt's got a very good point. What we do to prevent it could be very different than what we do to solve it. And I am seeing very good signs in the United States. I think that the hot labor summer and pushing back and having more people think about unions and seeing unions do really good stuff and getting the support for the Hollywood strike is huge. So, I think seeing some of that in this talk from the UAW telling people we need to have all of our union contracts come up in 2028. We can kind of see this movement. You're starting to see some of these links that have been destroyed being built back up. So, it's not quite the bowling alone scenario, but it is a little bit.

We do have these disconnects between the people and the party. We're not seeing the same sort of influence. So, I think bringing that in is a good way to help stop populism rising on the left in the United States. But I do think that might be different than what you have to do once populism also exists. So, I think it includes bringing back in voice, recreating the social safety net.

But, of course, this still leaves problems because while we focus on emotional transfer from economic crises, we don't focus on emotional transfer that might be caused by other crises. If you happen to have a cultural crisis or something like that, which is oftentimes more associated with the right, that can still have emotional transfer as well. So, I think once you get into that stage, it's a little different. I don't think we have much to say on that yet.

jmk

Well, Matt and Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today. To plug the book one more time, it's called The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies. I thought it was a phenomenal read. I think it brings together a lot of different ideas that we talk about when we think about populism and helps try to be able to put them together in a way that makes a little bit more sense. Instead of thinking about a lot of ideas as competing, you guys really helped put the puzzle pieces together, if you will. So, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing the book.

Rachel Navarre

Well, thank you very much for having us. It was a great conversation.

Matthew Rhodes-Purdy

Thank you. Awesome experience. We really appreciate it.