Transcript: How Democrats Can Defeat Trump’s Identity Politics

Author Justin Gest says that economic policy alone won’t defeat the far-right in the United States and Europe.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon, host of Right Now at The New Republic. I’m honored to be joined by Justin Gest. He’s a professor of policy and government at George Mason University. Justin, welcome.

Justin Gest: Thanks so much, Perry. It’s great to be with you.

Bacon: Justin is an author and professor who has written a number of books I want to get into, but he wrote a piece in September that I happened to catch and really want to talk about. It was part of a symposium by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which works on economic policies to help the working class. The piece is titled “Populist Voters Feel a Sense of Loss That Is Reshaping Democracies Around the World.”

Justin and some fellow academics studied not only the U.S. but also 19 countries in Europe, really digging into the populist movement and where the appeal of populist parties comes from. I want to get into this because I think there are lessons for what we’re dealing with here in America. Let me start with this: you have an idea in the piece called “nostalgic deprivation.” Explain to people what that means.

Gest: Sure, great question. Nostalgic deprivation is really about feelings of loss—a sense that you, your family, and people like you have lost wealth over the years. You may have lost social standing and status: how important you feel. You may have lost political power: how capable you feel of impacting change in your community or your country. This is something I studied very closely between 2012 and 2014, in the run-up to Trump’s first election victory here in the United States, but also in the run-up to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, where they decided to separate from the European Union.

Both of those elections were really driven by white working-class voters who swung from the left—or from not voting at all—to the right-wing parties in their respective countries. I wanted to understand what was driving this shift in perceptions and in politics. And what I really came up with, from a lot of interviews, was this sense of loss. In this article and a number of other works I’ve written, I went ahead and tested it statistically with public opinion data. But ultimately what it comes down to is a feeling that you’re being left behind.

Bacon: This sense of loss is not purely financial—talk about that. It’s not just that you lost your job, and it correlates with non-college-educated voters, but it’s not just about economics.

Gest: No, it’s not purely a sense of economic loss. To be sure, many people do feel that they, their families, and people like them have lost a source of wealth or financial stability that they once had years before. The question we use in our public opinion polling to understand this is: how wealthy are people like you today? We give them a 10-point scale, and then we ask: how wealthy were people like you 25 years ago? We simply subtract the difference between where they are today and where they were 25 years ago to determine whether they feel a sense of deprivation—a sense of loss from the past.

But we do precisely the same thing when it comes to social standing and political power. For political power, we ask: how powerful do you think you are today, and how powerful were people like you 25 years ago? The reason we ask about “people like you,” by the way, is that some people were children 25 years ago—they weren’t around. So we want to make sure we capture everybody. But ultimately it is a sense of collective loss of power or wealth.

For social standing, it’s a little more interesting, because we give people a diagram that looks like a bullseye—like a dartboard, with concentric circles. We tell people that this is a model of society: the people on the outer rings are peripheral, they matter less in their societies, and the people in the center are the core, the center of their societies. Where would you place yourself today, and where would you place people like you 25 years ago? We asked this first in the United States and the U.K., as I mentioned—but in the study you read, we look at 19 European countries beyond the U.S. and Britain. So we’re studying this more broadly.

Bacon: To be very reductive: which of the three factors drives decline the most—power, wealth, or social status—when it comes to predicting support for the far right or the far left? Is one more important, or more correlated with change, than the others?

Gest: They’re all correlated. We see different trends depending on how you slice the data—by country, by income class, by region, by whether people are rural or urban. But all three are correlated with far-right voting and populist voting more broadly. And actually, that’s a really important point: they’re not just correlated with far-right voting, they’re also correlated with far-left voting. So basically we see a rush to the fringes of our political systems. It’s just that the far right has far more support—not only in the United States but also across Europe. And those three phenomena are clearly correlated with each other; they just have different effects in different places.

Perry Bacon: So we’re talking about the United States and a lot of countries in Europe—all of which have experienced significant globalization and immigration. Speaking broadly, how important are those two factors?

Justin Gest: I think those are really the most essential ways of understanding our politics today—it really dates back to the movement away from an industrial manufacturing economy into a more service-driven, high-technology economy, which took place across high-income countries beginning basically in the 1970s. And during that period, where we see the shift of this massive economic transformation with a lot of people displaced, is exactly the same time when we also see great demographic shifts because of the entry of immigrants.

A country like the United States basically had a closed-door policy—with a few exceptions—between the 1920s and the late 1960s, when immigration reform was passed by Congress. So there wasn’t a whole lot of immigration coming into the country for decades. Beginning in the late 1960s, we opened the doors to more people coming in, and that’s when the........

© New Republic