Inequality and rightwing populist politics
Goerge Monbiot, co-author of a recent book on neoliberalism, recently took a stab in a Guardian column at the ways in which social and economic equality breed rightwing populist politics:
Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded.1
I’m not sure how meaningful the particular measure of Trump’s popularity cited there means. Most commentators seem to be taking his popularity measurements as notably low for this stage of a Presidency.
The problem with arguments like this is that pundits often reduce it to vague concepts like “alienation” or “economic anxiety,” which have been used so much in this context that they don’t say much to most people.
I mean, you can feel “alienated” by how politicians talk or take big bribes officially labeled “campaign contributions” without deciding, “I want to vote for politicians who will cut off my parents’ Social Security payments and who will make my health insurance unaffordable.”
And you can feel “economic anxiety” for a lot of reasons. For most people in the US, “economic anxiety” is no stranger to their life experiences. But you can also feel “economic anxiety” without thinking, “What would really make me feel better is to elect a blundering fool as President who will impose international tariffs without even understanding what are and send the economy into a big recession as a result with higher prices at the same time.”
In his column, Monbiot does give some more substantive social science findings:
There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.
The “Gini coefficient” is a measurement that economists used to investigate income distributions.
Monbiot also links to a an open-access paper that comes to the following conclusions, in academia-speak from the summary description:
Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy in recent decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Europe since the 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect austerity to increase populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters, who are hit the hardest by austerity. We identify economically vulnerable regions as those with a high share of low-skilled workers, workers in manufacturing and in jobs with a high routine-task intensity. The analysis of district-level elections demonstrates that austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions, but has little effect in less vulnerable regions. The individual-level analysis confirms these findings. Our results suggest that the success of populist parties hinges on the government’s failure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies.2 [my emphasis]
Monbiot may overstate a single cause in his concluding paragraph. But the point for parties of the center and left is that to succeed against rightwing populism, they have to push back directly against the authoritarian parties’ claims. And they have to show they will fight for policies that improve the lives of working people.
Monbiot, George (2025): Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature. The Guardian 04/13/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth> (Accessed: 2025-17-04).
Baccini, Leonardo & Staller, Thomas (2023): Replication Data for: Austerity, Economic Vulnerability, and Populism. American Journal of Political Science. <https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/1OPRYA> (Accessed: 2025-17-04).