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Since 2000, national-populism has expanded from a small sect into a significant force in European and American politics. In this extract from their sharp and timely Little Black Book of the Populist Right, Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar anatomise the threat posed by another national populist Donald Trump presidency.
After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, hostility to a black president pressurised the Republican Party to move ever rightwards, starting with the rise of the Tea Party movement and then with the successful takeover of the party by Donald Trump. Just as geographer Danny Dorling showed how the crucial votes for Brexit were delivered by Conservative voters in affluent southern England, so the 2020 New York Times exit poll showed that Biden defeated Trump among the 73% of US voters whose family income was below $100,000, while Trump beat Biden by 11 points among the better off. But the sliver of support which shifted from Obama to Trump in the northern rustbelt states like Wisconsin and Michigan was a demographic that had suffered acutely in the previous two decades. Between 1998 and 2013, working-class Americans had seen their net worth decline by 53%, as the richest tenth got 75% richer. As Barack Obama had promised to save the auto industry in 2012, Trump had pledged to stop the export of jobs and to put “America first”.
Trump began his campaign on 26 June 2015, attacking Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals and rapists (claims he was to repeat in 2024). He presented himself as a born-again social conservative, promising to overturn the right to abortion. He also promised policies to protect US industry and its workers and a programme of public works unmatched since the New Deal of the 1930s.
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As was happening across Europe, a charismatic, maverick political leader was presenting a programme combining interventionist economics with social conservatism. But Trump was not heading a small insurgent political grouping but a major, established political party. His encouragement of his supporters to storm the Capitol to stop the confirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral victory exposed how in thrall the Republican president had become to the anti-democratic, often white supremacist forces that he and his party had unleashed.
On top of his 2016 speech in Florida about conspiratorial global elites (“Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty, in order to enrich those global financial powers”) Donald Trump’s 2023–4 campaign language has been increasingly reminiscent of inter-war Nazi rhetoric. In a Veterans Day speech in November 2023, Trump pledged to root out radicals and Marxists who “live like vermin within the confines of our country”, and to expel immigrants who were “poisoning the blood” of America. He described Biden’s immigration policy as a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States” and predicted a bloodbath if he doesn’t get elected.
Is Trump fascist? Fascist parties are hyper-nationalist, xenophobic movements which emerge after an economic crisis has thrown existing political structures and systems into question. Glorifying an idealised and exclusive vision of national cultural identity, fascism locates a threat from a visible enemy or enemies, bound together by a conspiracy theory which seeks to explain national decline on the machinations of secretive, international finance. A strong, charismatic leader directs an increasingly paramilitary bid for power. Often winning power through legitimate elections, fascists constrain and then dismantle opposition parties and intermediate institutions (judiciary, media, trade unions, even churches).
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Clearly, national populism overlaps with fascism (nationalism, xenophobia, idealised national culture, identified threat, anti-global conspiracy theory, charismatic leader) but thus far movements aspiring to power have not been militarised and have remained within the rules of electoral democracy. In power, the position is more complex. In Europe, Viktor Orban certainly shares all the above elements, and he has also sought both to gerrymander the Hungarian electoral system and to undermine or incorporate the judiciary and the media.
In America, Donald Trump shares all the overlapping characteristics with Viktor Orban. In addition, he encouraged an insurrection (in the case of the Proud Boys, in an organised, quasi-paramilitary group) intended to overthrow the result of the 2020 election. The substance of Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s plan to give the Trump Presidency hugely increased executive powers and impose an ultra-conservative social vision – points to the authoritarian direction in which a Trump victory on 5th November could head, while giving a huge boost to autocrats and racist nationalists across the globe.
We don’t think national populism is fascist. But the danger of national populism proving not a barrier but a gateway to the further right is the first of many threats it poses to liberal democracy. A second Trump presidency could take us through that door and down that road.
You can get your copy of the Little Black Book of the Populist Right, by Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar by clicking the link below.