It was possible to see Donald Trump’s first election victory as some kind of fluke. But after the results of this election, it’s clear that America is living in the Trump era. And for Americans who’ve struggled to process this fact, you have lots of company around the world. From Hungary to Brazil, right-wing figures with openly authoritarian goals have been voted into power, to the concern of many of the people who live there. A political phenomenon that spans countries like this — especially countries with such different levels of wealth, political systems and cultures — requires an explanation that spans countries, too.
So we wanted to re-air this episode that originally published in November 2022, because it offers exactly that kind of theory. Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. In 2019, she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/…) ,” which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read. And it feels so much more relevant now in this country, after Trump’s decisive election.
In this conversation, we discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes and more.
