On Wednesday 28 April 2010, 20 months had passed since the financial crash of 2008, and there were eight days left until the UK general election. Soon, the reins of government would be taken by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, committed to a programme of austerity that would still be making its effects felt a decade later. But for another fortnight, Gordon Brown would be prime minister, and he was on a walkabout in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. It was there that he was introduced to 65-year-old Gillian Duffy.
Surrounded by men in suits, and accompanied by the snap of cameras, Duffy ran through a mess of grievances – about the tax she had to pay on her pension, the state of the national finances, and a benefits system she claimed paid out to people who “aren’t vulnerable” while denying help to those who needed it. She reached a climax with a single broken sentence about immigration: “You can’t say anything about the immigrants… but all these easterns European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?” Still wearing a radio microphone pinned to his lapel by Sky News, Brown then got back in his car, and let rip. “She’s just this sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be a Labour voter,” he said.
The media bowed to the inevitable and called the episode “Bigotgate”. And over the next five or six years, Duffy became a minor political celebrity. Thanks to the BBC’s Newsnight and a piece she wrote for the Daily Mirror, we know that she enthusiastically voted Leave in the 2016 referendum – partly, she said, because, “I love being English, and I don’t want to be a European.”
Her small place in political history should be assured, because her encounter with Brown represented the first stirrings – in Britain, anyway – of changes wrought by people and places far from the usual centres of power. Duffy remained loyal to the Labour party, which was soon tying itself in knots about how to appeal to such voters, eventually offering its members mugs emblazoned with the words “controls on immigration”. But here and elsewhere, lots of other people embraced parties that – and I’m being generous here – viewed their small “c” conservative, nationalistic instincts and hostility to political establishment as a giant political opportunity.
Thanks to a term that dates back to the 19th century, we know it as populism: to quote from the Oxford English Dictionary, “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups”. There is a leftwing version of populism, seen lately in the way Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party is campaigning in the general election, against an “establishment elite” and “rigged system”. But it is the rightwing iteration that has spread around the world.
Ukip got only 3.1% of the national vote in 2010, but by the end of 2016, Nigel Farage had played a key role in the leave side’s referendum victory. Europe has been shaken by such hard-right populist parties as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the Sweden Democrats, the revived French National Front (these days known as National Rally), and Italy’s Northern League. At the same time, the world has seen the rise of a new breed of populist “strongmen”, defined by their hostility to the conventions of democracy and gleeful embrace of prejudice and bigotry. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán began his second stint as prime minister in 2010. Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan became president in 2014; India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, took power in the same year. Five years later came the election victory of perhaps the most reckless populist of them all: Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, who replied to a congratulatory tweet from Donald Trump thus: “Together, under God’s protection, we shall bring prosperity and progress to our people!”
Which brings us to the big orange baby in the White House. Back in 2011, as the Labour party licked its wounds and Farage began to push his way into the political mainstream, Trump was slowly edging towards the US presidency, a prize on which he had fixed his eyes in the past. In 2011, a poll in the Wall Street Journal put him in front of all the Republican contenders. Not long after, he jumped on a conspiracy theory that dated back to 2008, questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in the US, and demanding to see the president’s birth certificate. This mischief laid the path to 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy with a characteristically rambling speech delivered in Trump Tower, in New York.
“Our country is in serious trouble,” he said. “When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us… When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… I’ve watched the politicians…. They’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests… the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”
Here was every key facet of populism, in full, shameless effect: racism, the rejection of free trade and globalisation, and a self-serving loathing of supposed elites, made all the more ludicrous by the fact that it was voiced by a billionaire. What Trump said may have regularly tumbled into incoherence and contradiction, but it was also built around a winning slogan stolen from Ronald Reagan, which Trump registered as a trademark in November 2012: “Make America great again”. And if he was gauche and inarticulate, maybe that was the point: here was someone so far from the usual polished politicians that his speeches didn’t even have a clear beginning, middle and end.
In 2016, I watched Trump do his thing at a rally in Evansville, Indiana, a faded place with a dilapidated downtown, where a refrigerator factory that had once employed 10,000 people had closed six years before, something locals blamed on the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the way it had incentivised moving jobs to Mexico. He rambled on about the economic threat from China, the need to bring jobs back to America, and his fabled border wall. The 12,000-strong crowd roared their approval. I recognised many of them as kindred spirits of voters I’d spoken to in Britain: older, anxious, often angry white people, wondering what had happened to the world they knew, and where on earth everything was going next.
Why now? Obviously, it is no accident that populism began its rebirth only a couple of years after the 2008 crash, and the spectacle of reckless financiers taking the global economy to the brink of disaster but suffering almost no comeback. To compound people’s sense of injustice, the long slump that followed has seen wages stagnate, and changes to the world of work that have made more and more jobs insecure, and poorly paid. These developments exacerbated resentments that went back years, into the deindustralisation and automation that had been eating away at people and places’ collective esteem for decades. Rochdale, the home of Duffy, was once a thriving mill town and the birthplace of the co-operative movement. Trump won the presidency thanks to support in rust belt states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania – carried by the Democrats in previous elections. The Sweden Democrats are strongest in the old industrial towns and cities of southern Sweden; AfD’s bedrock is the deprived former industrial areas of the old East.
For sure, populism appeals to affluent voters who live in more comfortable places, and who seem to see the new forces of populism as a logical next step from their past support for traditional parties of the right. Trump, let us not forget, is a Republican, whose victory depended on affluent voters in the party’s usual strongholds; the bedrock of support for Ukip – and Brexit – came from Tories in the party’s traditional heartlands.
Six years ago, the Guardian sent me to the east of England to speak to some of the activists and voters responsible for Farage’s surge: going back now to what I wrote then, among the most striking things is the sense that lifelong Tories saw Ukip as an answer to their belief that the Conservatives were no longer Conservative enough. I met retired estate agents, former middle managers, the owners of small businesses, who talked of the second world war, their antipathy to immigration, and the idea that Britain was a “Christian country”. Another of my interviewees was a former policeman, who rather suggested the Duffy worldview shifted to the right. He spoke warmly of Margaret Thatcher. “She looked after the armed forces and the police, and I’m all for that,” he told me. “I mean, we’re becoming a third-world country, really, the way we’re going.”
He lived in Rayleigh, in Essex, not exactly on its last legs. But neither the referendum nor the presidency would have been won without the support of those whose experience of modernity was bound up with loss and hardship, and who proved to be open to a politics of nostalgia and score-settling. The point is to make America great again, and to take back control. It is part of the same basic message that populism also yearns for a return to the glories of the nation state, and the pushing back of globalisation, international trade deals – and, obviously, the EU.
Meanwhile, the forces of economics and technology push the world in the opposite direction. Whatever its troubles, our planet is more connected than ever before. The movement of people is a simple fact of life, along with the diversity and change that come with it. But for reasons that seem to fuse insecurity and fear with base prejudice, some people do not like these things at all, which is one of the reasons why the refugee crisis of 2015 marked such a watershed moment for many European populists. Muslim people are a scapegoat to which populists return, time and again; so, too, are Jews.
There are echoes of the fascism and antisemitism of the 1930s. But populism is also deeply modern. It has prospered over the last 10 years not just because of the way that economies have changed, but because social media platforms have proved to be the ideal outlet for its furies. Their algorithms promote anything vivid, angry and sensationalist, and incubate endless conspiracy theories. Facebook, as a matter of policy, allows political advertisements that tell lies. Modi and his people deftly manipulate WhatsApp, using a network of an estimated 900,000 online activists to collect data about voters, and foment useful controversies; with echoes of anti-Obama birtherism, Modi supporters have claimed that the establishment Nehru-Gandhi family, which still dominates India’s Congress party, are secret followers of Islam. Recent research into German politics found that 85% of Facebook posts from political parties came from AfD. There is a great irony here, in liberal northern Californians encouraging a huge revolt against everything they stand for, but history usually moves in strange, often contradictory ways.
Five years before Brown met Duffy, I was in Brighton, writing my first feature for the Guardian at the Labour party conference. Brown’s old colleague and adversary Tony Blair was in his pomp, delivering a big speech that advised anyone watching that the world was being transformed at speed, and their basic choice was to either get with it, or sink. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he said. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer… The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they go only to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”
Even back then, the words sounded so arrogant and hubristic that they almost invited people to prove Blair wrong. So it followed: in retrospect, he voiced a great deal of what drove people across the world into the arms of the new populists. The lesson of the last decade is that millions of people do not want to adapt or change, and their complaints are likely to continue. For the foreseeable future, the opportunistic politicians who claim to represent them are going to be at the heart of yet another contradiction: Trump, Farage, Orbán and the rest attract the votes of people who want the world to return to the past; but their mission is to push us into a chaotic, ugly future we cannot yet imagine.