Extreme politics by Matthew Goodwin

well against the backdrop of 2016 many people are talking about political extremism and the rise of extreme and radical parties across the West I'm going to try and show you why this is not just about economic crises and scarcity and why we collectively have failed to understand what is driving these movements forward my name is Mathew Goodwin and from the University of Kent and Chatham House so good evening and welcome to the 6th of the 2017 Darwin College lectures on extremes now think over the last year how many times have we heard things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity Yeats wrote that in 1919 after World War one but the death of liberal England Britain had come earlier in a sort of decade of peace and prosperity are we at some similar turning point in a cycle now Cambridge has always held both the center and the extreme here we are in the lady Mitchell Hall Erasmus lived in Queens College a few hundred meters from here the man who tried so hard to hold the sum of things together the Via Media Cambridge is also the place of Matthew Parker who directed the Elizabethan church to seek a golden mediocrity not a floppy middle lacking all conviction but as Rowan Williams has pointed out a generous orthodoxy to be guarded with passionate patience but Cambridge has also given birth to those who attacked the centre Cromwell in some ways grandfather to the United States now today stands outside parliament Keynes denounced the centre's Versailles Treaty and what of Darwin or Dirac who in their turn broke modes extremes in wonder generation can become central in those that follow so tonight's lecture explores some of today's rheems what really drives political extremism in the West today so please welcome Matthew Goodwin professor of politics at University of Kent and senior visiting fellow at Chatham House to speak on political expect so I'm sorry extreme politics I thought the title was going to be on the on the board extreme politics Matthew welcome well thank you very much and thank you for giving up your time to listen to some of my research and research of colleagues and there's no doubt that the timing for tonight is ideal our discussion is sandwiched between on one side the election of somebody I don't need to mention but also a lesser documented presidential election in Austria often seen as a laboratory for ideas that would follow around Europe and at the presidential election in Austria a party called the Freedom Party of Austria recently called 46% of the national vote and last month called for a ban on what it describes as political Islam when that party failed to win the Austrian presidency many liberals in Europe breathed a sigh of relief while simultaneously perhaps losing sight of the fact that the last presidential election in Austria that party polled only 15 percent of the vote and of course on the other side our discussion or my talk comes ahead of the French presidential elections where marine lepen is currently cruising comfortably in first place typically polling 26 or 27 percent of the boat and if you look at those second round opinion polls some of those put lepen on as high as 44 percent of the boat so she looks almost certain to eclipse her father's result of 18 percent in 2002 and we also have elections in the Netherlands where builders is also topping the opinion polls having a difficult time over the last two weeks but nonetheless tip 2 when the largest number of seats and it doesn't end there in September we turn our attention to Germany where it looks likely that the radical right alternative for Germany whose leader has claimed that the European people are engaged in a fight against the immigrant lumpam proletariat of the Afro Arab world looks set to become the first party on the radical right in post-war German history to win seats in the Bundestag they have been extreme and radical right parties that have won seats in two state Parliament's but this would be something of a watershed and they're not the only examples over the next 12 months we will go from one debate to the next in Europe talking about populist extremism in Austria we'll go back to look at national elections where the freedom party will probably do just as well it's currently sitting in first place in Italy the lega Nord or the Northern League which recently called for the closure of all mosques in the country and for the refugee boats arriving on the Italian shores to be pushed back into the sea has support from around 1 in 8 Italians even historically liberal states such as Sweden have seen the Sweden Democrats a party that is unquestionably rooted in neo Nazism become the third most successful political party in that democracy at the last election in 2014 the Sweden Democrats polled 13% of the boat in the most recent opinion poll from a few days ago the Sweden Democrats attracted 24% of the vote which makes them the most popular party in the country the second time that they've reached that height in 2017 in highly developed and affluent societies such as Switzerland the Swiss People's Party which is called for stricter immigration laws and also led an initiative to ban minarets became the largest party in the federal assembly in 2015 taking 1/3 of all seats and so as you may have already noticed these advances have taken place across quite different countries during quite different political and economic cycles and directly challenged the widespread conventional wisdom that economic stagnation is a necessary ingredient for these parties to prosper some of them have arisen and sustained support in some of the most highly developed states in the Western world some of which have cradle to grave welfare states some of them have the most highly educated populations in the world others have emerged in countries with only a short history of democratic rule such as Hungary others have put down roots and some of the oldest democracies in the world such as ours now some people argue that the success of the parties that I'm talking about tonight has been overstated but there is no doubt that they have momentum in a recent paper to political scientists calculated that since the 1960s the average share of the vote in national and European elections for these parties has more than doubled rising from 5.1 percent to 13.2% now that might not seem like much but over the same period their share of seats in national legislatures tripled from nearly 4 to 13 percent and that has allowed parties that we would associate either with the radical or the extreme right to join government coalitions in no less than 11 Western democracies so Donald Trump is by no means the first right-wing populists to enter the corridors of power it's also misleading to only look at the experience of direct power based on recent events here in the UK you could argue that some of the most successful parties are those that have had almost no elected representative at all despite its weak internal organization its inability to overcome first-past-the-post the radical not extreme but radical right UK Independence Party has had a clear damage demonstratable effect on the direction of our country helping to force a national referendum and then helping to mobilize the vote to leave the European Union and when you look across some Western democracies some would argue that suddenly it feels as though we've all come a long way from Francis Fukuyama's famous claim that the liberal West had reached the end of history but does it if you look at all of the parties and politicians that I'm talking about almost all of them they are united by one thing in that they claim to speak for the people to be the true Democrats and while some of them are extreme in their attitudes toward minorities immigrants and refugees almost none of them are actually calling for the overthrow of democracy in fact academic research by comparative political scientists like Elizabeth Carter or David art has shown that these parties do best at elections when they comply with democratic norms those that openly pledge to do away with representative democracy typically attract the lowest returns at elections over recent decades I believe ultimately that is a good thing that you could argue that democracy and the social norms that have emerged in the post-war period have actually tamed parties on the nationalist right and some of you may push back against me by arguing that the type of democracy that these parties advocate a direct perhaps you might argue a liberal conception of democracy is one that serves to push the majority view against minorities and one that seeks to close down the open marketplace of ideas where compromise and bargaining takes us to the true essence of what representative democracy is all about and I would partly accept that point in some cases but at broad level we are not dealing with political parties that want to overthrow the democratic system such as the interwar fascists but the central question I want to deal with tonight is actually less about ideology and more about support simple question how can we explain the rise of the parties on the board behind me why now thinking about this question leads us towards another question that I want to try and answer along the way which is to what extent are these parties a short term fixture a flash in the pan or are they actually set to become a permanent presence within our Western democracies now if you look at the slide for a moment and just think about what you're looking at do you see a short-term flash in the pan a temporary outburst of protests among older working-class voters who have felt the full force of the Great Recession and perhaps who will soon be replaced by a more tolerant young majority or do you see the arrival of a realignment a long-term challenge symptoms of a deeper and more profound structural shift in our political behavior and do you think that the mainstream or the center has what it takes to fend off this challenge and when we look at the media debate the public debate about what's going on in the West it seems to me there's a curious tension in that on the one hand we collectively seem shocked when results come back from Austria France the United States but on the other hand we all appear so convinced about what's driving support for these parties most of those commentators who have looked at Trump and the freedom party and marine lepen draw a straight line from their support to the post 2008 Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe the chief cause is often identified as economic insecurity the claimed remedy is economic growth and stability it's an especially popular view among those on the political left who like to reduce awkward questions about national identity about nationhood about community to questions about transactional politics resources inequality redistribution and tonight I'm going to push back against those ideas and instead put forward a different thesis about what is driving this trend a broad level I'm going to argue that collectively we are fundamentally failing to understand what is going on what lies behind the rising tally of votes for these movements and the underlying drivers I'm going to try and convince you that what we are witnessing across the West is the emergence of a political force that is rooted not simply in economic competition fiscal austerity or scarcity and nor is it a short term temporary protest I'm going to argue that these parties are symptoms of a much deeper and quite profound structural shift in our political systems one that has been coming for a long time and which still has a long way to go as an extension of that I'm going to argue that the populist nationalist right has probably only just got started and that it is likely to stay embedded within our democracies for years and most likely decades to come when people are asked to explain the apparently sudden rise of these movements the most popular response typically is economic crisis which is not a new argument it's shaped strongly by the experiences of interwar fascism and German Nazism and quite lazy into rotations that saw both of those principally is a response to the Wall Street Crash this narrative was especially visible after the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece after the eruption of the eurozone crisis and a realization that the Greek economy was going under self-declared fascists by the way had already found their way into the elected corridors of power in post-war Europe Alessandro Mussolini Benito Mussolini's great-granddaughter had first been elected in Naples in 1992 and today sits in the European Parliament after winning a seat in 2014 but against the backdrop of the eurozone crisis Golden Dawn attracted global attention in 2009 this small group of neo-nazis had only attracted naught point 3 percent of the national vote and three years later that figure rocketed to 7 percent which gave the party 21 seats in the Greek parliament making it the first openly neo-nazi party to win elected representation in a national legislature in post-war Europe then other events in Europe quickly entrenched it's quite comfortable narrative about what was going on that economic crisis equals extremism as the eurozone crisis swirled around us unemployment in France passed 10 percent and in 2012 marine lepen 117 percent of the vote in the French presidential elections she then won 14 percent of the vote in the national elections and at the 2014 European Parliament elections an array of similar parties from Hungary to Austria to the UK either retain their seats or won more seats in the European Parliament the pop the politics of populist anger wrote The New York Times at that time are on the march across Europe fueled by austerity recession and the inability of mainstream politicians to revive growth many on the Left like The Guardian similarly argued that the far-right in Europe has been force-fed by the first world recession since at least at least the 1930s and possibly since before 1914 mass unemployment and fooling living standards in the euro area and the wider EU made worse by the crazy and self-defeating austerity obsession of European leaders has opened the door to the revival of the far-right one argument that is closely linked to this heavy emphasis on on the economic crisis is the so-called Left Behind thesis namely that across the West white older working class or lower middle class voters have been left behind by the rapid economic transformation of our advanced States and now feel anxious over the threat that is posed by globalization free trade and principally the economic competition that has come with mass emigration such as low-skilled workers from central in Eastern Europe whereas the global economy benefited the winners those with the skills the qualifications and social mobility the so-called losers citizens with few or no skills or qualifications and who often resided outside of big cities were thrown to one side that argument too is not new in the immediate post-war years see more lipset and Daniel Bell argued that interwar fascism the populist Puja deist movement in France and McCarthyism in the United States do most of their support from small business owners and the lower middle classes who felt that they had been left behind by industrialization and were now turning to the extremes to backlash against big business and trade unions extremist movements have much in common they argued they appeal to the disgruntled the psychologically homeless to the personal failures the socially isolated the economically insecure the uneducated the unsophisticated and Beyond the authoritarian persons that argument was then updated when academics pointed to the emergence of a low skilled blue-collar underclass that they argued had much in the same way being left behind by the post-war economic developments low wages little job security those were the groups that being left most at risk from the shift towards a post-industrial high-skill economy where university degrees have become the new passports to social mobility and that argument circulated widely after both the vote for brexit not not an extremist act and the election of Donald Trump for example if you were to look at the data on the brexit vote compiled by the National Center for Social Research you would find that the average leave vote among those who earn more than three thousand seven hundred pounds per month was only 38% but among those on less than 1200 pounds a month it was 66 percent you would also find that support for brexit was much stronger among those who subjectively felt that they were being left behind among those who said they were living comfortably the average vote to leave was 41% but among those who felt that they were just getting by it was 60% and among those who said they were finding it quite difficult or very difficult it was 70% similar arguments were then deployed to explain support for Donald Trump and other populist figures across Europe seeking to explain what is now called the brexit Trump syndrome two economists wrote there can be little doubt that in Michigan and Merthyr Tydfil South Carolina and Sunderland the dissatisfaction of people on below average incomes drove the outcome why wouldn't people vote for these insurgent radicals they essentially asked in the United States median household incomes are basically the same today as they were a quarter of a century ago while in the first three years of the US recovery after 2008 an estimated 91% of the gains in income went to the richest one hundredth of the population at the more extreme end of the spectrum this Left Behind thesis led others to point to how economic marginalization among those same groups was having far more sinister and depressing effects in 2015 a study emerged to suggest that mortality rates among middle-aged white men and women who had less than a college education had increased markedly most likely because of what they called the diseases of despair alcoholism drug addiction and suicide this increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced western state was virtually unheard of except perhaps among Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union a few months later during the Republican primaries in the early months of 2016 the Washington Post took that research a little further and uncovered what it described as an eerie correlation the insurgent Donald Trump was performing the best in counties where middle-aged whites were dying the fastest the implication was that Trump had tipped into a profound politics of despair among those who have been left behind or cut adrift by the post-industrial economy when those less well-educated White's were then presented with an opportunity to vent their economic frustration their feelings of relative deprivation they jumped all over it and they turned out on mass now irrespective of whether or not you find that argument convincing it is worth dwelling on the implications and this is where much will depend upon whether you are a pessimist or an optimist if you are an optimist this is actually a very comfortable argument because it implies that once economic growth and stability are restored then these radical populist will evaporate economic growth will remove public anxiety over scarce resources and encourage people to return to the center ground if you are an optimist you might also argue that the future potential for these parties will inevitably diminish as each year one generation increasingly replaces the last as the angry old white man slips over the horizon he and I say he because there is a pronounced gender gap in support for these parties will be replaced by a newly ascendant more highly educated hive skill socially mobile liberal and more ethnically diverse and majority many of whom are more likely to have strong interactions with people from different ethnic cultural and religious backgrounds in the aftermath of the vote for brexit it was this point about generational replacement that temporarily lifted the spirits of some remain voters pointing to how the average lis vote among 18 to 34 year-olds was only 30 percent while the average leave vote among the over 65s was 61% one commentator enthusiastically explained that if you work on the basis that turnout rates birth rates and death rates remain fairly static and you assume there is a cohort effect mainly that younger people will always be more supportive of EU membership there are non current projections the remain side will establish a clear majority in 2021 so if you are dreaming at night about a second referendum I would suggest that you wait four years but if you are a pessimist then you would point to other things you would point to the incoming waves of automation that looks set to cause a new wave of disruption dislocation and economic pain especially among those same working class lower middle class less well skilled groups that are already receptive to this brand of politics you might point for example to one recent study which suggested that up to 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at risk for motivation perhaps you'd point to the more conservative estimates instead such as another study which estimates that across a 21 OCD countries one in ten jobs are at risk of automation and in conclusion I quote low qualified workers are likely to bear the brunt of the adjustment costs as their jobs become at risk of automation and they suffer in comparison to highly qualified workers but is what we are witnessing across the West today really rooted in those economic shifts and in the Great Recession because I do not find that argument particularly convincing before looking at more recent events as an aside it's worth remembering the early history early 20th century European history is actually being Mis misread if you were to go back to Italy for example it's worth remembering that while there were industrial strikes that sparked anxiety about the looming threat from communism and there were anxieties about an uncertain economic future and listen when Mussolini took power in 1922 the country was not engulfed by a major economic depression while it is true that Germany was different there was a severe depression actually research in more recent years have suggested that the voters who were hit the hardest by the crisis did not swing in a uniform fashion behind the nationalist extreme right while the unemployed tended to defect to the Communists it was the working poor and the self-employed those who had generally had a lower risk of unemployment who endorsed Hitler a most recent work on the Nazi electorate there's also little evidence of a strong correlation between economic distress and support for that earlier movement but let me get back to today the idea that what we are witnessing is rooted in recent economic events is quickly undermined by taking only a brief look at how these parties have evolved one of the first academic books to look at these movements in the West was edited by Klaus von Bain in 1988 and looking back at that work is important because it reminds us that the challenge from this political phenomenon has been a long time coming and that as a political force it has endured through very different economic and political cycles according to a recent paper which looks at the growth of support for these parties in Europe between 1990 and 2013 and at the regional level the bulk of their gains actually took place between 1990 and 2008 before the eruption of the post 2008 Great Recession and the debt crisis in fact during the real crisis period of 2009 to 2013 these parties collectively gained a moderate 1.2 percentage points of the boat suggesting at least at the aggregate level that the crisis had had only a small effect on their support furthermore the same paper reveals that these parties actually recorded their strongest results in regions that have been the least hit by the crisis those regions that still had relatively low unemployment rates saw their vote shares increase while those regions have maintained high growth rates recorded the strongest gains of all the finding that support for the radical right increase most during a period when Europe was enjoying relative economic prosperity does not fit easily with some of those popular accounts that I've mentioned but we can look at this from another angle as well if you were to simply compare the levels of support for radical and extreme right parties in the three years before the outbreak of the Great Recession and the three years after that crisis you would not find much if you looked across the entire European Union area the first thing that you might note is that around ten states do not have a successful radical or extreme right party and those include some of those states that have been the hardest hit by the economic turbulence Cyprus Ireland Portugal Spain and when I then dug into the data I realized that many of those same countries had also recorded some of the sharpest declines in levels of political trust yet even in Greece the hardest hit country the neo-nazi Golden Dawn actually only recruited support from one in ten citizens conversely of the seven countries that have seen the sharpest gains for these movements since 2004 such as Denmark or Austria they've remained above the average in terms of their employment rates they've had lower debt and they've seen lower reductions in economic growth indeed two of the most successful parties are found in Austria in the Netherlands two states that have had some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe or look at the Swiss People's Party as another example which has emerged amid a booming economy that is widely noted for its low unemployment so clearly we need to dig a little deeper one reason why these parties have arisen and persisted owes less to public conflicts over economic Goods and far more to public conflict over values politics in the West is no longer underpinned by a neatly defined dividing line between the so-called left and right between the Socialists and Social Democrats on one side and traditional conservatives and classical liberals on the other instead these older divisions over economic redistribution have now been joined and are possibly being eclipsed by new divisions over competing values between those who broadly share the universalistic and socially liberal outlook of much of our political and media elite and those who subscribe to a very different set of values and today we're talking more and more about these parties not because people are struggling to find jobs some people are but because the underlying foundations of politics are shifting in ways that many have still not understood it's the populace who have grasped this reality and who are now having conversations with voters that are completely different from what those voters are having with mainstream parties and what do I mean by all of this if you look at the political science literature it's fair to say that there's now a consensus that the underlying dividing lines have changed in an important way in earlier decades voting behavior was shaped mainly by what political scientists will call the socio-economic dimension economic questions principally as Europe cleared away the rubble and the turmoil from the Second World War politics was based on pretty neat and clearly defined divisions between the left and the right parties our media debated what are still big questions around the role of free markets how to distribute resources how much we should spend on our welfare states level of Taxation whether we should privatize key industries and the role of workers relative to employers if you sympathize with the left you favored intervention by the state you want to perhaps to redistribute resources to the left behind but if he sympathized with the right you probably believed in the power of the free market to resolve society's problems and thought that the state should be pushed back from interfering in our lives either way that socio-economic cleavage was well entrenched and it was anchored in an older division between workers and owners and in the 50s and the 60s this led the main parties to not only focus on those issues but also to appeal to very clearly defined class divisions within Western societies and that was especially true for parties on the left of the spectrum who at this point still relied on the working classes for the bulk of their support but from the 70s and the 80s the foundations of political competition began to change and those dividing lines began to make way for new ones and the starting point in a way came in 1971 when Ron Englehart an academic sociologist sat down to examine how the values were changing across the West and in short and some of you will be familiar he argued that because of economic growth in the post-war period the so-called 30 glorious years the welfare state an expansion of university education greater access to information people had become more likely to exhibit post material values and less likely to subscribe to materialist concerns or what he called the silent revolution theory of value change writing at a time when there were a few visible extreme or radical right or vertically nationalist movements and in the shadow of the rise of the new left social movements of the 1960's Englehart argued that a transformation may be taking place in the political culture of advanced industrial societies this transformation seems to be altering the basic value priorities of given generations as a result of changing conditions influencing their basic socialization in the years that followed based on birth cohort analysis Englehart and his colleagues showed how post-war generations did trigger an intergenerational shift from materialist to post materialist values as younger cohorts replaced older ones in the population among the older groups of voters materialist values that stress things like economic and physical security were still overwhelmingly predominant but as one move toward younger cohorts post materialist values that stress things like autonomy human rights quality of life and self-expression became more widespread and as economic growth swept across the West it encouraged citizens to feel more secure and thus become more concerned over a new parallel range of issues unlike the older and less well-educated materialists who worried about scarce resources and how to fend off competition or protect their national community from threatening Outsiders the more economically secure in university graduates turn their attention to environmentalism multiculturalism rights for sexual and ethnic minorities and so forth and on the supply side those ideas those values were met by new left social movements social democrat parties that adapted that were far more concerned at that point with cultural issues than with economic redistribution and which helped to push forward cosmopolitan ideas that stressed open borders open societies equal rights and a tolerance of or even a celebration of rising ethnic diversity and immigration ideas that won support from voters amid very high levels of existential security as you can see on the slide when from one generation to the next you subtract materialists from closed materialists over time you can see the growing influence and proportion of post materialists across West Germany France Britain Italy the Netherlands and Belgium and this had very real political repercussions in several democracies it was this essentially that facilitated the emergence of the greens of radical left populist and a proliferation of social movements but not everybody participated in this value change while many celebrated those changes under the surface even in the 70s in the 80s you could see the beginnings of a backlash to this rapid cultural change an emerging revolt that was being led principally by older white men less well-educated voters the working classes some in the lower middle classes self-employed and traditional conservatives and those who supported more authoritarian values what those groups shared was a rejection of the shift toward an inherently liberal and apparently borderless future that was being celebrated now by large sections of their political and media elite and seen from this perspective the anti-immigration and even xenophobic attitudes that have consistently been shown to dominate the electorate's of populist right parties well not so much single issue concerns in the 90s a lot of political scientists talked about single issue voting but we're more accurately seen as one piece in a much broader cultural backlash just as hostility towards international organizations like the European Union was seen not simply as an economic issue which is arguably where they remain camp went wrong by the way but also as a threat to national ways of life traditional values and national identity if you take a look at the slide which shows you the difference as an example between UK Independence Party supporters and conservative Labor and Liberal Democrat supporters when it comes to the issue of the effects of immigration the black column show you how these populist right voters like their counterparts across much of Europe I could put up a slide relating to Austria France Italy and so on are significantly more likely to think that immigrants are a burden on the welfare state are bad for the national economy and undermine our national culture now if we were to stop there we might conclude that this is primarily a single issue vote and it's one that is motivated by opposition to immigration but if we adopt a slightly broader focus and turn to the vote for brexit which included many of those same voters some not but many same and come at this from the point of view of those value divides then we can see something that's a little bit more interesting among those who oppose gender equality equality for same-sex couples who want to see stiffer sentences for criminals we want to see the reintroduction of the death penalty support for brexit is consistently far higher than it is among social liberals who support or oppose those views in some work I did with Oliver heat for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation we found that while the average leave vote among people who want to see the death penalty reintroduced was 71% among those who opposed the death penalty the average leave vote was only 20% and we're using a slightly different data another way of throwing light on the divide has been pursued by my colleague Eric Kaufman who looks at the relationship between wanting to leave the European Union and levels of agreement with the value-based statement and wait for it that sex criminals should be publicly whipped what did he find that among those who strongly agreed with the statement seventy-five percent wanted to leave the EU whereas only around 20 percent of those who disagree with the idea of publicly whipping sex criminals voted in the same way it also reflected in the finding it's also reflected in the findings across many studies of populist right voters in Europe that the most important predictor of this support is negative attitudes towards immigration and it's perceived effects on society but also that a broader contain look is a core characteristic of these supporters and all of this and the changes in the political in the West led Rodden Englehart back to this issue recently with his colleague Pippa Norris and they turned to explore the rise of the populist right and similarly came to the same conclusion that it is a cultural backlash rather than a phenomenon rooted in economic insecurity when Englehart and norris ran their analysis of radical right-wing voters across western states they found exactly the same as what we found and others have found that after you apply social and demographic controls it's a cultural value scales that are the strongest predictors of support for these movements or in their words populist support was strengthened by anti-immigrant attitudes mistrust of global and national governance and support for authoritarian values there greater support is concentrated among the older generation men the religious majority populations and the less educated the electoral success of these parties at the ballot box can be attributed mainly to their ideological and issue appeals to traditional values and supporters who want to push back against the cultural value changes that came before in Norris and Englehart as I sort of allude alluded to we're not the first to notice this trend writing in 1991 an Italian political scientist called Piero Ignatz II wrote a paper that deserves to be read by more people than it is but he talked about the silent counter-revolution and Ignatz he asked a simple but quite important question and an interesting question given where we are in 2017 why in an era of mounting post-materialism and economic growth was Europe witnessing a growing number of right-wing voters not just right-wing voters but voters who were rejecting the mainstream in favour of radical and extreme right-wing parties such as jean-marie Le Pen's National Front in the 1980s Yorke Haider in the Freedom Party of Austria in the 1980's the progress parties in Scandinavia from the late 1970s even the short-lived National Front in the United Kingdom all movements that we have seemingly forgotten about Ignatz he was one of the first to point to values he argued that alongside this post material value change was a different cultural and political mood that had started to take root in Europe this included the emergence of new priorities and issues that were not being treated by the main parties disillusionment towards parties in general their growing lack of confidence in the political system and a general pessimism about the future it was anchored mainly in a reassertion of a different set of values where things such as authority patriotism role the family traditional moral issues were being advocated by particular social groups much of which he argued was being legitimized by the simultaneous rise of neoconservative ISM in the UK and the u.s. while this underlying value divide had probably always existed indeed I'm sure that's what Ignatz II would say the point about today is that it has now been activated has become salient by the experiences in particular of immigration and of rapid ethnic change the arrival of immigration as a major issue in European politics the perceived inability of mainstream elites to respond to that issue or indeed the refugee crisis is at the center of what is activating and amplifying these underlying divisions if you look for example as an aside at the brexit vote one of the big misperceptions out there is that it was strongest in areas that were all-white actually if you looked at the report that we did for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation we found that support for leave was strongest in areas that had experienced the sharpest rates of demographic change over the last ten years a direct experience of how society was changing if you were to look at recent research on the Donald Trump a lecture at you would find evidence to support the argument that it was often strongest in areas that had similarly experienced the most rapid change and the sharpest increase in the percentage of Latino and Hispanic voters so if you were to look in early years in the early 2000s in the UK at the rise of the extreme right British National Party we wrote a paper in political studies that shows how that vote too was strongest in areas that neighbored large Muslim communities of Bangladeshi or African heritage to go back to Ignatz see a mounting sense of doom in contrast to post materialist optimism has been transformed into new demands mainly unforeseen by the established parties these demands include law and order enforcement but above all immigration control which seems to be the leading issue for all of these parties this value change stimulated by the reaction to post-materialism and by a new combination of authoritarian is might be identified as a silent counter-revolution unlike the old socio-economic dimension the new cultural cleavage across the West between populist nationalists and cosmopolitan liberals will continue to push questions of national identity immigration human rights law and order and integration to the forefront of our debates it's now prompting voters to think about questions that our mainstream elites are increasingly struggling with what does it mean to be a member of my ethnic group what is the future of my ethnic group in a world where major cities are becoming majority minority do I feel relaxed about these rapid social changes the swirl around me or do I feel as though they are posing a major threat not simply to my economic position but to the sacred values the ways of life and the identities that I cherish how are my traditional parties of choice responding to these events do they look capable of stalling these trends or are they leading my group towards a seemingly endless future of threatening social and ethnic change many working-class voters concluded that their traditional representatives in politics were not up to the task and this is why much of what I've discussed really really matters for the center-left and social democracy who across much of Europe in the West have struggled to respond to this debate in a language that resonates among the traditional working-class whereas many of these voters are economically protectionist they feel hostile towards things like free trade and big banks it won't take you long on Google to find that out about Trump's voters but they are also socially conservative they favor more restrictive immigration policies they adhere to more exclusive conceptions of national identity and they are hostile towards wider trends that are perceived to threaten a national community including European integration but what many on the center-left I would suggest have failed to recognize is that their traditional voters now prioritize cultural protectionism over economic protectionism it is perhaps no coincidence as this conflict in the west over values has opened up and as a populist right has gained momentum support for social democracy has rapidly declined this chart shows an index based on the simple and population weighted average vote shares for Social Democrat parties in the old European Union 15 member states from 1946 until 2014 and was compiled by Chris Hanratty and the base year for this index is 1970 as Chris notes the graph is not pretty reading for social democracy and it shows how it is now consistently lost support from 2005 onwards a closely related trend concerns a steep decline in class voting that has also been taken place across much of the west and that I would suggest is intimately wrapped up in these value changes that we've been discussing though not restricted to the center-left this chart shows how voters today including the working classes are much less likely to be swayed by their old class-based loyalties that used to guide their parents and their grandparents by the time you get to the 1990s it is estimated that social class voting was less than half as strong as it had been a generation earlier thus things like income and class are now much weaker predictors of how people will vote when compared to their attitudes towards issues like immigration and also their cultural outlook this helps us to understand for example why it was actually in the 1990s that jean-marie Le Pen found himself leading the most working-class electorate in French politics or why by 2014 Nigel Farage in the UK Independence Party had in relative terms the most working-class electorate in the UK many center-left parties gambled that they could win over the new middle class and that they could do so while retaining support from the traditional working class but they are now waking up to that realization an awkward realization that they have lost that gamble so what does the future hold and where are we going is this the beginning of a new era of populist politics and volatility or if we all gathered here again in 25 years where we look back at this moment in Western politics as a kind of curious outlier a flash in the pan again how you answer that and I think you can guess my view depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist if you're an optimist and you were to look at the work on value change in the West you might argue that we're in for a few years of tumultuous populist revolts but ultimately the sea will settle if you're an optimist like Norris and Englehart you would point to the long-term changes in our values and argue as they do that the older white men with traditional values who form the cultural majority in the West in the 50s and the 60s who have seen their predominance and privilege eroded will how do I put this delicately not be with us for very long older cohorts with traditional attitudes who adhere to material values will soon be replaced by their children and grandchildren who will instead subscribe to more progressive values and this argument about generational replacement is incredibly seductive and it is often cited frequently in the Economist when claiming that the threat of this populist revolt will soon diminish my penultimate slide shows the stark generational gap on a range of questions relating to issues that we've been talking about integration immigration national identity and the idea of giving equal opportunities to minority groups if you just look at those big tall columns with the numbers at the top those are the 65 year olds and above if you look at the light blue columns those are the under 35s it is consistently the older generations who are the most likely to object to their relatives marrying a Muslim to favor reductions in immigration to think that being born in Britain or having British ancestors are very important markers of national identity and that attempts to give equal opportunities to same-sex couples have gone too far but the argument is actually not smooth sailing there are some problems that liberals and progressives sweep under the rug I personally do not find the assumption that younger generations will continue on the escalator of value change very convincing many young Europeans across much of the southern half of the continent for example will probably tell us firsthand tonight about how they are lacking the very things that are supposed to act as incubators for post materialist value change might it be then that we are already witnessing the emergence of a new generation of voters who may propel forward the populist nationalist of tomorrow or this past week I've looked in detail at the dynamics of support for marine lepen in France who is hoping to follow brexit and Trump by causing an upset and the polls currently suggests that lepen will make make it into the second round but she will almost certainly attract to support more support than a father even if she loses but what is even more striking is something that's hidden away in the crosstabs to the opinion polls which is marine lepen rather disproportion of support among 18 to 24 year-olds in France the last week a survey by I thought suggested that one in three 18 to 24 year olds are planning to cast their first-round vote for lepen a figure that is significantly higher than support among young people for her two main competitors including by the way macron who is apparently energizing the youth of today this is not a new phenomenon in the first round of the regional elections in France in 2015 the Pens National Front picked up 35% of boats from 18 to 34 year olds and nor should those findings be seen in isolation at the 2009 European Parliament elections nearly one in four young Austrian men aged 16 to 25 voiced their support for the Freedom Party and second this value divided I would suggest is having at one other effect that we're not really talking about a lot in our popular debate recent research by Laura McLaren at the University of Glasgow has shown that one consequence of failing to resolve these ongoing public concerns over immigration and its effects on society is that the longer those concerns remain unresolved the lower overall Trust is in the political system put in other words the longer according to McLaren the longer that public concern over this issue continues and the more polarized our societies become the greater the risk that overall levels of support for our political system will be eroded from below it may well be then that contrary to the expectations of the optimist the challenge to Western liberal democracies to liberal values is in fact only just beginning while my publisher always warns me against the pessimistic ending when you put the evidence together it is for me difficult to escape the conclusion that what we witnessed in 2016 and will witness more of in 2017 may well come to be seen in the future as a start of a much broader cultural backlash against the values ideas and figures that have dominated our politics over recent decades thank you very much [Applause] [Music] so thank you very much for putting populist extremism into a much wider context know with brexit and an American and European politics so much in the news it certainly feels as though we are living in times of very significant potential change because so much seems unstable and we worry about what might happen about the overall stability of our societies our democracies it's good to hit see and have any sum of the the basis behind what we feel on a more emotional level if you want to hear more or read more from from Matthew Goodwin I think there are Flyers have been put out on the benches his you only have to wait until April his book brexit why Britain voted to leave the EU will be published then by Cu P so next week we turn from matters of national and international uncertainty and concern to something that might seem to be just far more personal but in view of what we've heard now perhaps it isn't Sarah Harper who's professor of gerontology at the University of Oxford and director of the Oxford Institute of population ageing we'll be speaking on extreme aging so finally once more please show your appreciation to master Goodwin you

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 3,705

Keywords: Populists, xenophobes, Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent, fascism, economic scarcity, recycling, historic fascism, radicalism, Donald Trump, Brexit, Rutherford College, Darwin College, Darwin College Lectures, Darwin College lecture series, Extremes, University of Cambridge

Id: f0NZl8W0GHo

Length: 60min 1sec (3601 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020