Donald Trump, for the first time, won a majority of the popular vote. He took the US presidency with huge swings in his favour, increasing his share of first-time voters, young voters, black voters and Latino voters. And he gained among voters earning under $100,000, while wealthier voters preferred Harris – a reversal of the class alignments in 2020. Current voting tallies suggest the swing to the Republicans was largely caused by mass abstention among Democrat voters. This result echoes global trends. Trump and his new coalition will now head a loose alliance of far-right governments from India to Hungary, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, the Netherlands and Israel.
The rhythm of far-right successes began with Viktor Orbán’s landslide in Hungary’s 2010 parliamentary election. Since Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2014 Indian general election, it has scarcely paused: Trump’s first ascent to the White House, the Brexit vote and Rodrigo Duterte’s success in the Philippines all took place in 2016. Two years later, Jair Bolsonaro scored an upset in Brazil. Since the pandemic, the Brothers of Italy won the Italian general election in 2022 and Javier Milei took the Argentinian presidency in 2023. For most of this period, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has ruled Israel in coalition with far-right parties. Even where it is not in power, the far right is gaining, as in France and Germany. In the long view, the defeat of Trump in 2020 and Bolsonaro in 2022 were predictable oscillations in a general pattern of ascent.
Why does the far right keep winning? Is it “the economy, stupid”, as James Carville put it during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run? The idea that far-right voting reflects a protest by the economically “left behind” is quite popular.
There is a kernel of truth to this: the state of the economy was the single biggest motive for Trump voters in 2024. Liberals, snarking about the “vibecession” – the mistaken belief by the public that the economy is in recession – say GDP is growing and inflation is modest at 2.4%. But headline figures don’t reflect how most people experience the economy. Prices are 20% higher than before the pandemic and, more importantly, prices for essentials such as food are up 28%. Household debt was a major stress factor. Biden also cut a raft of popular benefits established during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t believe the headline figures.
Yet this narrative barely scratches the surface. First, the evidence suggests that people don’t always vote with their wallets: studies from the 20th century up to the present show that simple measures of economic self-interest aren’t a very good predictor of voting behaviour. The economy matters, of course, but not as a simple metric of aggregate wellbeing. It is a space in which people judge their personal standing relative to how they perceive the state of society. Personal setbacks are generally only politicised when they are perceived as part of a wider crisis. Second, while the far right can’t win without gaining some working-class support, in the US, Brazil, India and the Philippines, it relies on a bedrock of middle-class support. Besides, millions regularly have their economic lives wrecked without going far right: the poorest in most societies generally aren’t very susceptible to their message. Third, in strictly material terms the economic offer of today’s far right is paltry, yet incumbency has been incredibly forgiving for nationalist governments.
In India, after average consumer expenditure fell, Modi was re-elected in 2019 with a 6% swing. In the Philippines, as the number of “poor” Filipinos surged, Duterte’s successor Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr won 58% of the vote in 2022 – an increase of almost 20 points. Even in defeat, they do surprisingly well. Average incomes rose more slowly under Trump than his predecessor, yet he added 10 million voters to his base in 2020. And if people voted with their wallets, why would many working-class Americans back a candidate committed to cutting taxes for the rich?
The political effects of economic misery are more indirect than “It’s the economy, stupid” implies. Economic shocks are mediated by the existing emotional currents in society. The middle-class and more affluent workers can identify with the rich and resent the poor, migrants and “spongers” who threaten their lifestyle. Mostly resentment results in impotent complaint. Hit by shocks, most people are ill-placed to confront their causes and tend to withdraw from politics.
Today’s far right offers a different answer – what the political theorist William Connolly calls a “politics of existential revenge”. It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of “communist” takeover and amplifies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against “white genocide” and satanic child-molesting elites. Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism.
It runs deeper than elections. Rising from the cauldrons of cyberfascism, “lone wolf” murders have increased since 2010. Pogroms have erupted in Delhi and the West Bank. In the US, vigilantes attacked Black Lives Matter protesters. Britain and Ireland have been shaken by racist riots. And in recent years, there have been bungled “insurrections” such as the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in January 2021 and the trucker blockades intended to block Lula’s accession to power in Brazil.
This is a global social contagion. And far from being discredited by outbursts of collective violence, the new far right is galvanised by it. Modi’s rise to power began with an anti-Muslim pogrom in his home state of Gujarat. Trump’s 2020 campaign was electrified by vigilante violence. Bolsonaro came from nearly 20 points behind to almost winning after a summer of deadly violence.
Addressing economic issues will defuse some of this. David Brooks acknowledges in the New York Times that Harris’s centrism “didn’t work” and that the Democrats may need to “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption”.
But disruption isn’t just about “bread and butter”. People need something to desire, something to be excited about. That is what motivated the Democratic base in 2020, after the Sanders campaign and Black Lives Matter, and countered the right’s politics of revenge. The Harris campaign obliquely acknowledged this with its vague talk of “joy”. But with economic populism forgotten, the far right’s borders agenda embraced and the administration arming Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza, there was little scope for that.
The ruptures on the right thrive as much on the pattern of liberal decay and demoralisation as on its own toxic emotional gyrations. To break out of this deadlock, the left needs ruptures of its own.
Richard Seymour is an author and founding editor of Salvage. His latest book is Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
