Lessons and Limitations from “National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy”
National Populism and the Question of Its Social Roots
Right-wing “national populist” parties have surged across Western democracies in recent years. One of the most controversial attempts to explain this was written by a liberal academic who would soon join the populists himself.
In 2018, before entering populist politics, Matt Goodwin co-authored National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy with political scientist Roger Eatwell.
It’s a landmark book for several reasons. It was among the first studies of contemporary populism not openly hostile to its subject from the start. Instead, Goodwin and Eatwell took populist voters seriously without moralizing against them. It began from the assumption that they had their reasons. The book also underscores the critical issue of sovereignty, a focal point that is often neglected even in the small industry that now exists to study populism.
The 4 Ds
At the center of the book’s analysis, National Populism discerns 4 key “drivers” of populism.
These are The 4 Ds:
Distrust, Deprivation, Destruction, and Dealignment.
- Distrust: the decades-long rise in mistrust of establishment institutions
- Deprivation: stagnancy in quality of life relative to other groups
- Destruction: national culture allegedly being wiped out by immigration and political correctness
- Dealignment: of the public from the post-war political parties.
Do the 4 Ds Explain National Populism in Particular?
Few would deny that the four trends Eatwell and Goodwin identify are concerns for many voters, broadly speaking. Distrust of institutions has deepened, material expectations have stagnated, the culture war blathers on, and long-standing party loyalties have eroded.
Taken together, these dynamics clearly define the political terrain on which national populism has emerged.
Yet aspects of the 4 Ds could also just as easily explain the rise of technocratic figures like Barack Obama or Emmanuel Macron. It’s often forgotten that Obama won his primary fight against Hillary Clinton in 2008 by channeling anti-political, anti-party, anti-Washington sentiment. It was simply wrapped in Jimmy Carter-esque good governance instead of populism.
More recently, Macron managed to temporarily save the French establishment from itself by calling for “democratic revolution” against it and sweeping away the old parties. While not a popular figure, he gave the French political class about a decade more life in the face of Marine Le Pen’s surging National Rally by responding to distrust and dealignment.
If Populism Has a Social Base, Where Is It?
The awkward question is not whether the four Ds exist but whether they explain national populism in particular. Otherwise, the populists can just as easily be read as scavengers picking at the bones of an unraveling post-war political order, without a major social movement behind them. This party systems interpretation, of course, would present problems for them in power and point to a broader crisis of politics than even the populists represent.
If right-populism has a social base, we would expect to see corresponding shifts in society itself: rising and participatory nationalist identification, hardening exclusionary attitudes, and a clear ideological realignment among voters over time. If populism reflects a growing social force, it should register not only at the ballot box, but in longitudinal measures of belief, identity, and civic activity.
What the Longitudinal Data Show
Yet the available data sit uneasily with that expectation.
Across multiple surveys and over long time horizons, levels of nationalist identification, authoritarian attitudes, and exclusionary sentiment show only modest change, uneven movement, or none at all — even in countries where populist parties have made dramatic electoral gains. In some cases, nationalist politics has surged in the absence of any clear increase in nationalist attitudes, while in others similar attitudes have persisted for decades without producing comparable political outcomes.
This raises a problem that the “four Ds” alone do not resolve. If distrust, deprivation, cultural anxiety, and dealignment are so widespread — and in many cases long-standing — why does populism take the specific form it does? And why does it succeed electorally without leaving a clearer imprint on the social attitudes it is said to express?
European Social Survey data from 2002–2020 show stability in mean left-right self-placement in countries like France and Germany — there have been fluctuations, but no linear drift to the far-right. In the U.S., Gallup finds the share of Americans calling themselves “conservative” has hovered around ~35–40% since the 1990s, with no long-term increase.
Let’s look at more data, collated by University of Graz Professor Florian Bieber. These numbers come from his article Is Nationalism on the Rise? Assessing Global Trends.
The article situates nationalism as a social-ill and suggests ways to combat it. It has no investment in downplaying attitudes that would “drive” national populism. Yet it concludes that there “is no clear global trend that would suggest a rise of nationalism, but instead, there has been a rise of nationalist politics in some countries, either expressed by the rise of new parties, the electoral success of nationalist candidates or the shift of public discourse of established parties.”
Firstly, we have Citizens who are very proud of nationality (World Value Survey)
Let’s then look at Measures of nationalism in Germany (Decker et al., 2016), the country which is allegedly on the verge of a far-right social turn if we go by the success of the right-wing AfD.
How about Low levels of trust of people of another nationality (World Values Survey)? Is there a trend here?
Note that the United States, a multi-ethnic immigrant society, remains at the low end of the spectrum even in the lead-up to Trump’s first election. Peoples’ views on the level of disorganization at the border (see the Biden years) may drive temporary swings via perception of an immigration crisis, but long term attitudes towards immigrants have been stable and overly-harsh responses are unpopular.
Gallup and Pew polls indicated that by 2020, three-quarters of Americans said immigration is good for the country, a higher share than in the 1990s or 2000s. And according to Gallup in 2025, “when asked if immigration is generally a good thing or bad thing for the country, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults call it a good thing; a record-low 17% see it as a bad thing.”
It doesn’t take a social soothsayer to infer from polling that American voters would prefer a coherent yet attainable process for legal immigration over both current Democratic or Republican party orientations. In Europe, attitudes around immigration have oscillated with the ebb and flow of the refugee crisis, with waves of concern followed by counter-trends where attitudes soften.
Sovereignty and immigration, despite the culture war emphasis on xenophobia, may be flashpoints in our time more because they relate to central democratic questions around who the political state is actually for. Especially as citizens increasingly feel that “their own” political class isn’t serving them.
Unpopular Populism
What these patterns suggest is not that populist voters are imaginary, or that the grievances captured by the four Ds are trivial. It is that electoral success alone does not amount to the formation of a coherent social base implied by National Populism.
Populists ultimately exist in the broader anti-political social context just as much as the establishment parties do.
Populist parties have been effective at mobilizing votes, yes, but they remain strikingly thin as social organizations: weakly rooted in civil society, light on membership, and largely absent from the kinds of extra-parliamentary institutions that once anchored political parties in everyday social life.
A social base, in the stronger sense, is not a vote share or a cluster of grievances. It consists of durable social institutions — like unions, churches, or civic organizations — that bind a movement to everyday social life and reproduce it over time.
From this perspective, national populism looks less like the emergence of a powerful new social bloc and more like one of several strategies by canny political entrepreneurs who are capitalizing on the ever more apparent “void” between citizen and state. The cartel-like establishment parties, after years of boxing out their opposition, are crumbling. Someone inevitably stands to gain from this volatility. The counter-intuitive truth may be that national populism’s success in the political sphere primarily reflects neither nationalism nor populism in wider society. Instead, they have shown one way to take advantage of the rising anti-political trend amid the unraveling of the postwar political order.
Populism in power thus faces the same core problem of democratic representation in modern society as the establishment parties it has scavenged votes from. As cartelized postwar party systems hollow out — shedding members, losing social ties, and converging around technocratic governance — large numbers of voters are left politically homeless. Populists thrive in that vacuum, but not because they have a movement.
This has substantial implications for national populism’s promise to reinvigorate democracy’s popular will. The establishment’s fear of the “reactionary” masses and Goodwin’s sympathetic idealization are ultimately just two sides of the same illusion.
This is the sense in which populist parties can be understood as scavengers rather than builders: successful at exploiting the collapse of the old order, but structurally constrained by the same absence of civil-social ties to politics that helped enable their rise.
To the extent national populists have managed to be socially relevant, it is worth considering the role of national sentiment in harnessing an actually far more widespread phenomenon of antipathy towards the political class. The “national interest” enters the equation, for example, as a way to attack the legacy political class for retreating into or deferring sovereignty to global supranational institutions — the UN, NAFTA, the EU, the World Bank, and so on — but the question of democratic sovereignty will remain thorny if a new populist political class claims to “restore the primacy of the nation” only to find the void between society and the political sphere remains.
Hostility to politics-as-politics has spread well beyond the populist voter bloc, cutting across social strata. Given their lack of a true social base, populists in power may find that citizens’ alienation from and antagonism with the political state runs far deeper than even the most salient national issues they highlight.
Further discussion on National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy can be found in the Rabble Report video below, featuring guest Dr. Tad Tietze. We also start to explore what comes after populism in power.
And to see how left-wing populism fares in this environment, check out our prior video unpacking The Populist Moment by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello.
