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On 20 January Donald Trump will be installed as US President for the second time. Key to his victory was his national populist Make America Great Again movement succeeding in winning the votes of a much wider spectrum of Americans than in 2016. One major factor was the backing of many young white men in the rural areas of rustbelt states. But Trump also gained among male African Americans and, particularly, among Latino men. His victory showed the expanding reach of this cross-class coalition – what Trump called “the great realignment” of politics. Whereas in 2020, Biden won the poor (people earning $50,000 and under) and Trump won the better-off (earners of $100,000 and above), in 2024 it was the other way round, with Trump narrowly winning the under $50,000-ers, and Harris the higher-earners.
Trump’s victory represents the greatest success yet for the national-populist cocktail, which combines the red meat of paranoid racism (Haitian immigrants wolfing down people’s pets) with promises of standing up for the little guy against the big battalions. But, this time, even before he gets his hands on the keys to the White House, what Trump may actually deliver is already in contest among his leading courtiers, exposing the flaws and fallacies at the heart of national-populist ideology.
The National Populist Cocktail
What distinguishes national-populism from traditional conservatism, and has led to its success, is its ability to attract working-class and low-income voters on socially-conservative issues like sexuality, family, crime and – most of all – immigration, while at the same time reassuring those voters that national-populists aren’t economic conservatives, out to exploit them on behalf of the rich. As we point out in our Little Black Book of the Populist Right, this imperative initially led national-populist parties across Europe to ditch neo-liberal and anti-state policies that would put off working-class voters.
So Elon Musk’s favourite Alternative fur Deutschland dropped its earlier commitment to free market economics in order to appeal to left-behind workers in the east; Holland’s Geert Wilders abandoned his opposition to the minimum wage and workers’ rights; the Austrian Freedom Party reversed its policy to raise the retirement age; and both the French National Rally and UK’s Reform Party came out for partial state ownership of utilities.
Underpinning Conspiracy Theory
The socially-conservative/economically interventionist cocktail was and is underpinned by an increasingly visible and toxic conspiracy theory which claims that international finance capitalism is working in cahoots with a liberal, metropolitan elite to destroy nations and impose a one-world tyranny under their control.
The British populist right analyst turned advocate Matthew Goodwin, writing in the co-written National Populism (2018), describes the version peddled by Hungary’s national-populist prime minister Viktor Orbán as follows: “Liberal politicians within the EU, along with the billionaire Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros, are engaged in a plot to flood Hungary and ‘Christian’ Europe with Muslim immigrants”. The purpose of this being “to dismantle western nations and usher in a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism”.
This theory lay behind Trump’s 2016 claim that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers”. Since then, the idea that immigration is not just the result of people wanting to escape war and poverty and make a better life for themselves, but is part of a directed plot – in which immigrants themselves are just pawns – has become more explicit and was central to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
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So, in campaign speeches in March 2024, Trump described mass immigration as a Democratic Party plot, “to collapse the American system, nullify the will of actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them power for generations”. In the same speeches, he cited immigration as part of a more generalised “conspiracy to overthrow the United States”.
This idea has been expanded by key national populist ideologues. In a Substack piece by Frank Furedi, the former guru of the Revolutionary Communist Party – who now runs a Brussels think-tank devoted to spreading Viktor Orbán’s brand around the world – argued that “mass migration serves as a weapon for the de-nationalisation of society”, going on to claim that “from a globalist-cosmopolitan perspective it is essential to deny the moral significance of borders to promote their wider objective of de-legitimating the status of the nation and the sovereignty of its people”, by “provoking cultural confusion and uncertainty”. Similarly, Sohrab Ahmari, part of Vice President J.D.Vance’s inner circle and US editor of Unherd believes that the progressive elite class has eagerly imported “a large underclass of serfs who don’t speak the language and lack the power to organize”.
The Founding Myth
These claims draw their recent inspiration from the ideas articulated in Renaud Camus’s book The Great Replacement, a crucial text of the far right, published in 2012. But the idea that sinister and shadowy global financial powers are seeking to use a deracinated underclass to undermine the organised working class, abolish borders, and create a one-world tyranny, is well over 100 years old.
It was promoted in Britain by the fascist National Front (forerunner of the BNP) in the 1970s, who identified the cosmopolitan conspirators as Jewish; by the far-right American John Birch Society (who didn’t) in 1950s/60s America; and it was the ideological mainstay of interwar fascism. But the key modern founding text was the thesis outlined in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forgery by the Tsarist secret police in the early years of the 20th century. This purported to articulate the plot of a cabal of Jews to destroy nations and take over the world.
Despite being exposed as a fake in the early 1920s, the Protocols were widely circulated and promoted by the far Right. One early admirer was Henry Ford, American’s most successful 20th Century motor car producer. Throughout the 1920s he avidly promoted the Protocols in his rabidly anti-Semitic Detroit newspaper The Dearborn Independent. Unsurprisingly, the Protocols were admired by Hitler and taught compulsorily in his schools. With results we all know about.
However disguised or watered down, this racialized, anti-capitalist theory justifies the national populist idea that you can be a nationalist and a socialist at the same time. Which may explain why AfD leader Alice Weidel can tell Elon Musk that “Hitler was a socialist” or why so many national populist ideologues are former left-wingers.
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Ditching Redistribution
But reality bites. Once national populists get into office, they quickly junk the economically-progressive aspects of their platform.
When first elected as Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán raised the minimum wage and subsidized housing. He then went on to impose a flat-rate tax of 16%, amended the labour code to weaken employee rights and raised overtime hours. In 2019, Boris Johnson promised 40 new hospitals. Five years later,