The Rise of the Outsiders E-Book

Steve Richards

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Discover why outsiders from Trump to Corbyn are succeeding like never before - and what this means for you. In recent years, voters have deserted the political centre like never before. Whether it's Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, or Corbyn, outsiders and populists are flourishing on the far left and far right. Celebrated political commentator Steve Richards explores factors from globalization and fake news to rising immigration and stagnant wages. Richards argues that the reasons for the success of the outsider also sows the seeds of their eventual demise. If they do gain power, they inevitably become insiders themselves - and fail to live up to their extravagant promises. This landmark book examines the rapidly shifting global political landscape of the last decade, and is essential reading for anyone who has been bothered by Brexit, troubled by Trump or confused by Corbyn.

Leseprobe

‘This book gets to the heart of why conventional politicians and parties are struggling and failing to adapt to the challenge of the outsiders, opening the door to Trump, the Brexiteers and European movements of far left and right.’

Vince Cable – Leader of the Liberal Democrats

‘Richards offers valuable insights into how awkward political power really is.’

Guardian

‘Incisive and urgent... This needs to be read by anyone trying to understand the nature of the current political system in Western democracies.’

Alasdair Blair – Jean Monnet Professor of International Relations, De Montfort University, Leicester

‘Fascinating... an unusual book by one of our best political commentators.’

Tribune

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Richards is an award-winning political commentator, writing columns for the Guardian and the Independent. He presents BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster and is a regular guest on BBC1’s Sunday Politics. He has also presented a series of unscripted BBC talks, Leadership Reflections, profiling modern prime ministers. He was formerly the political editor of the New Statesman, a BBC political correspondent and presenter of ITV’s Sunday Programme.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This edition published in 2018

Copyright © Steve Richards, 2017, 2018

The moral right of Steve Richards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 144 2

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 143 5

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1 The Outsiders on the Right

2 The Rise of the Left-Wing Outsiders

3 Choosing to Be Powerless: The Mainstream Left

4 Choosing to Be Powerless: The Mainstream Right

5 The Powerlessness of Power

6 Taking Back Control

7 Trust

8 Powerlessness and the Media

Conclusion

Political Parties and Politicians/Advisers

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE

I began writing this book before Donald Trump had won the presidential election in the US and when most commentators assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected. Although there was much evidence that political outsiders were making their historic mark before Trump’s victory the book’s title was nevertheless contentious – an assertion that needed justifying. In advance of the US presidential election result and the elections that followed in parts of Europe in 2017 there was a strong argument that the title of the book needed an anti-climactic question mark. Had there been a rise of outsiders of any historic significance? Perhaps a few aberrant peripheral figures gave a false picture. Even when Trump tweeted as a presidential candidate that the Brexit referendum result in 2016 proved he would win the US election few commentators made the connection and he remained the outsider in every sense even after that referendum. Yet Trump’s post-referendum insight informed one of his few accurate tweets. There was a connection. After Brexit we should have been ready for Trump, but we were not. We are still not fully conditioned to expect the unexpected.

Since Trump’s victory in November 2016 there have been volcanic elections in the UK, France, Germany and Austria, each of them in their different ways conforming to the pattern described in the first edition of this book. As well, President Trump’s record since he has been in power reinforces vividly one of the book’s themes – that an outsider is bound to struggle as an insider, not least because he or she cannot claim to be on the outside any longer. Being an outsider is powerful ammunition when out of power and a trap when in government. The developing pattern of outsiders causing historic upset and the challenges posed by electoral victories are reflected in this updated version of the book.

Following the further seismic eruptions in 2017 few would contest the validity of the title any longer. There is no need to contemplate the additional question mark. The outsiders have risen. The book becomes less an assertion that there is a significant rise of outsiders and more an attempt to explain why they soar.

Part of the challenge for any guide to the newly forming political terrain lies with the term ‘outsider’. Not all outsiders are the same. Significantly, they do share some common characteristics such as a faith in the power of individual governments in an increasingly globalized economy and in their determined distancing from mainstream parties that have ruled for decades, even if they belong or had belonged to such parties. Yet there are also incomparable differences between outsiders on the right and outsiders on the left. Above all, the left is coherent in its advocacy of the state as a benevolent force. The right is more confused and lapses into aggressive forms of nationalism to obscure its half-baked faith in government activity, while also being anti-government. The term ‘outsider’ is a sweeping one that obscures as much as it clarifies. Similarly, mainstream parties across the democratic world struggle to cope with the new political challenges posed by outsiders and the wider revolutionary changes of which the 2008 financial crash was an early symptom and a trigger. Outsiders and mainstream political parties have their struggle to adapt in common. Yet mainstream parties have agonized in contrasting ways and for varying reasons. Parties on the centre left and those on the centre right are obviously not the same, even if a closer coming together of both sides forms part of the backdrop to the rise of outsiders.

In my investigation that follows I note that some outsiders are dangerous and some are absurd. Some are both dangerous and absurd. A lot are weaker than they seem. But that does not mean all outsiders fit this category by any means. Some on the left have shaken up mainstream centre-left parties and when the pieces settle once more the centre left will be in a more productive place than the one where it sought power with a vacuous timidity. Some on the right have reminded centre-right parties that a faith in markets and the smallest possible state alienates even their natural supporters, the voters that are struggling to make sense of their fragile lives and suddenly unruly work patterns. Indeed, there is one striking benevolent consequence in the rise of the outsiders as an entity – and a vital one. In wildly contrasting ways the outsiders trigger a long overdue focus on the role of the state. From Trump to Corbyn the outsiders recognize that government has a key role to play as a mediator in the global economy. To varying degrees and for different reasons the mainstream parties on the right and left have played down the role of the state since the 1980s. The outsiders have not. But that is the only binding constant factor in terms of ideological verve.

While some outsiders, especially those on the left, perform a positive role in challenging outdated orthodoxies about the role of the state, the framing of democratic politics continues to be deadly dangerous. In no other sphere is an ‘outsider’ with no previous experience likely to rise. If a young man walks into a theatre and asks to play Hamlet a director would enquire politely or impatiently about other acting roles performed in the past. If the aspirant Hamlet says he has no previous experience of acting, he is unlikely to be assigned the biggest theatrical role of the lot. Perversely in democratic politics such inexperience is a positive advantage and yet the stakes are so much higher than the fate of a production of Hamlet. Part of Trump’s pitch was that he had no previous experience of democratic politics as he sought election to the most demanding and powerful elected post in the world. Although Jeremy Corbyn had been an MP since 1983, he had never been near the front bench. This was a great advantage for him as he won two landslide leadership contests in the space of a year. Corbyn’s leadership has several virtues but inexperience at the top of his party or in government is not one of them, despite having been part of his appeal.

How bleakly odd that we as voters elect people to represent us and then assume that they must be useless, indifferent, mad and corrupt. Only those on the outside, distant from power, can come to our rescue. That is the implication of the juxtaposition that frames the idea of outsiders taking on the insiders – one that makes coalition governments especially nightmarish as two or three parties become contaminated by power simultaneously. No wonder the SPD in Germany moved nervously and tentatively towards another grand coalition after being slaughtered in the 2017 election, having been part of Angela Merkel’s pre-election government. How testing for the right-wing Freedom Party in Austria to be part of a coalition formed at the end of 2016. Like Trump in the US it can no longer claim to be an outsider.

The wilfully held fantasy that so-called insiders, elected politicians and elected governments ignore voters is far removed from reality. Indeed, it might have helped some insiders respond to changing times more robustly if they had been less in touch with fickle public opinion and in some cases had not become paralysed by fears of the latest elections, opinion polls and focus groups. Perhaps the insiders might have shown more confident leadership if they had been cocooned in Westminster, Washington, Paris and Berlin – the fantasy bubbles of some voters’ imagination.

But again, like the ‘outsiders’ not all ‘insiders’ are the same. Some are paralysed by being too in touch while others lose touch with the country over which they rule – not out of indifference but by making judgements that prove to be wrong. To take one historic example of many, David Cameron believed the UK would vote to stay in the EU; prime ministers only offer referendums on the assumption they will win. He left office having discovered in the referendum that he did not know, after all, the country over which he had ruled as prime minister for six years. And yet it is entirely false to suggest that the ‘elite’ supported Remain while noble outsiders backed Brexit; powerful newspaper editors and owners that helped to shape the debate in favour of Brexit are as much a part of the ‘elite’ as politicians fleetingly in power. The perception of cocooned elites is dangerous and distorting.

The influence of UK newspapers in shaping perceptions of the EU over the last several decades shows why the alarm over ‘fake news’ is largely a red herring. There has always been fake news, and perceptions of elected politicians were distorted long before the eruption of social media. Consider the traditional-style reporting of the 2015 election in the UK. At the beginning of that campaign the Conservatives published a clever poster depicting the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, in the pocket of the former SNP leader, Alex Salmond. Like most propaganda the implicit message – that under a minority Labour government alone (sic) the SNP would be the real rulers – was nonsense. The truth is that under any minority government, Tory or Labour, a large third party in the House of Commons would have influence. At the start of the election campaign the much-respected Times newspaper published the photo of Salmond and Miliband that formed the Conservative poster on its front page as if it were a news story. That morning Labour announced its economic policies for the campaign. On the BBC’s Today programme there was only one set of questions for its Treasury spokesman: Are you in the pocket of the SNP? The Tory party had not at that point launched the poster, but the presenter and overnight producers will have read the front page of the first edition of The Times that arrives at Broadcasting House the night before. A fantasy theme was launched, dwarfed only by the other fantasy theme in 2015 – the one that revolved around which party would wipe out the deficit most speedily. The smart director of this fantasy was the chancellor, George Osborne, even though he had failed to deliver his pledge to wipe out the deficit by 2015. For pro-Conservative newspapers like The Times, the favourite of senior BBC presenters and editors, this was a minor matter. Cameron and Osborne were projected as figures saving the economy by dealing with ‘the deficit’ while their opponents were profligate in pledging to cut the deficit at a pace that was in itself highly ambitious.

This was fake news, more sinister because it appeared to come from such authoritative media sources. There is nothing we can do about fake news (most of which, thankfully, is obviously fake); it has always been around and always will be. Social media at least gives the chance for alternative voices to have a platform.

Using both traditional and new media sources in updating The Rise of the Outsiders I became aware that regardless of the platform we urgently need new terms to guide us through the dark, combustible mess of news coverage today. Clarity of definition is at least as important as exposing fake news. Terms such as ‘social-’ and ‘economic liberal’, ‘modernizer’, ‘centrist’, ‘moderate’, ‘hard left’ and ‘hard right’ are deployed persistently as if they are precise when they are not. Social liberalism, for example, has nothing to do with economic liberalism; the two do not have to go together and yet are often conflated as if one follows the other like night follows day. Yet a believer in state intervention and someone who is not ‘economically liberal’ is quite likely to be a social liberal. Some economic liberals will not be social liberals. The conflation leads to misleading assumptions. A social and economic liberal is not necessarily a ‘centrist’. Yet I read regularly that the former chancellor in the UK, George Osborne, is a centrist because he is a social and economic liberal. He may be right or wrong in his espousal of economic liberalism but his austere response as an economic liberal to the 2008 global crash did not place him on the ‘centre ground’, however imprecise that term is too.

What is a ‘modernizer’? If the term means a break with the recent past, then Jeremy Corbyn is more of a ‘modernizer’ than either Tony Blair or David Cameron as he takes his party on a leap to the left; it is Corbyn who challenges many current orthodoxies. Yet in the UK Blair and Cameron are two leaders associated with the term that implies a leap from the past. Perhaps Corbyn is wrong in some cases and Cameron and Blair correct in their analyses in some respects, but the term ‘modern’ does not tell us whether they are right or wrong. The term tells us nothing.

What is a ‘centrist’? The centre ground is subjective terrain. Not so long ago, election-winning leaders avoided the centre ground. Margaret Thatcher noted that there was a risk of getting run over in the centre of a road as she led her party towards the radical right. Harold Wilson won elections on manifestos that were to the left of Jeremy Corbyn’s programme in 2017. Yet after New Labour’s landslide win in 1997 on the most cautious and incremental of plans, commentators assumed that the party could only win from such a position. The term ‘hard left’ is also misleading. Is it ‘hard’ to advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament? Is it ‘centrist’ to support the war in Iraq? Perhaps that is ‘hard’. Theresa May is supposed to be leading a party to the ‘right’ of the ‘centrist’ Cameron yet it is May who makes the case for intervening in failed markets and seeks an industrial strategy, positions that put her close in some respects to Labour’s former leader, Ed Miliband.

The same imprecision applies to the fashionable but vague debate about ‘identity’. Some commentators argue that political leaders will only flourish when they shape their messages around a sense of national identity. Yet where does this lead in terms of precise policy outcomes? Anyone can claim to have hit upon the centrality of, say, ‘Britishness’ or ‘Englishness’ and attract some fleeting interest from voters aching for a sense of belonging. But if work is still unreliable, wages fall, GPs are inaccessible, train fares soar for unreliable services, hospital waiting lists grow, universities become a cause of intimidating debt for young people and housing is impossibly expensive, then a new-look British passport or whatever symbol of identity is being cheaply pitched will do nothing to make some voters feel connected for more than ten minutes.

At a time of febrile change we need to drop such imprecise terms, from ‘centrist’ to those related vaguely to national identity, and seek clearer explanations. This is my attempt at an explanation as the outsiders continue to rise across much of the democratic world and the mainstream continues to agonize over how to respond.

INTRODUCTION

A pattern forms. There are many jagged edges and there is no neat uniformity, but across much of the democratic world, outsiders trigger volcanic political explosions, in some cases by winning power or by forcing more mainstream governments to change direction, with historic consequences.

The outsiders are varied, but in an era of vague slogans and assertions they are easily defined. Some are from the right and some from the left, but they come from outside orthodox mainstream democratic politics. A lot of them are not elected to their national parliament. Most of those who are elected have not been close to government. That is what makes them ‘outsiders’, or allows them to claim to be from the outside. What is relatively new is that the outsiders have made waves in supposedly robust liberal democracies across the Western world. The reasons for their rise and the marked failure of the mainstream parties to respond robustly are explored in this book.

The pattern started to take vivid shape when UKIP (the UK Independence Party) secured more votes than any other UK party in the European elections in the summer of 2014. At the start of 2015 the left-wing party Syriza won the election in Greece. During the rest of 2015 support for far-right parties across the European Union (EU) start to increase significantly, a rise that had begun several years earlier. In Spain and Portugal left-wing parties appeared from nowhere and shook up the political landscape. In the UK general election in 2015 the SNP (Scottish National Party) won virtually every seat in Scotland, nearly wiping out the once-dominant Labour Party. And in its leadership contest in 2015 the UK’s Labour Party elected the left-wing rebel, Jeremy Corbyn, to be its new leader. The veteran Corbyn won a landslide. In the same year Marine Le Pen’s Front National made huge gains in local elections, coming first in six of France’s thirteen regions. In 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union, against the advice of the prime minister, all living former prime ministers, the leader of the Opposition and President Obama. A few months later Donald Trump was elected President of the US, as Obama’s successor. Trump was a supporter of Brexit – the proposition that the UK should leave the EU – and had accurately proclaimed during his campaign that Brexit was a sign that he would win, too. In the UK 2017 general election, Corbyn’s Labour Party wiped out the Conservatives’ overall majority, an authority-enhancing triumph given that the prime minister Theresa May had called an early poll on the assumption she would win with ease. Later, in Germany, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) secured significant parliamentary representation as the supposedly mighty Angela Merkel clung to power precariously. At the end of 2017 a new coalition was formed in Austria that included the far-right Freedom Party.

In each case the voters were in revolt against their traditional rulers and challenging the assumptions of lofty commentators, who were taken aback at every convulsion. As the pattern formed we struggled to see what was happening in front of our eyes.

The pattern of volcanic significance takes firmer shape when turning to the mainstream. Many mainstream parties have suffered a crisis of identity that partly explains the rise of the outsiders, and in turn boosts their ascendancy further. In the US, Democrats wonder how they failed to connect with once-reliable supporters in the presidential election in 2016. Republicans do not know whether to celebrate a presidential victory or distance themselves from it. The UK Labour Party has held two leadership contests since the 2015 election and has elected the same leader on both occasions – whacky behaviour that is a symptom of deep unease. The UK Conservative Party lost a prime minister a year after he unexpectedly won an election, and staged its own bizarre leadership contest that was over within days – as much a symptom of deeper unease as Labour’s conduct. In Germany, Angela Merkel was forced to change her approach to the asylum crisis not because she believed she was wrong, but because her party panicked about the electoral consequences. In France, the then president Hollande did not dare to stand for a second term, fearing that he would be annihilated. And the former President Sarkozy failed in his attempt at a comeback – part of the recent past that is near-fatal terrain for mainstream leaders. In the US, Hillary Clinton was trapped by her surname and by her own vocation as a long-serving politician. In Greece, mainstream parties on the left and right agonize about their purpose, after ruling together. Many coalition partners across Europe suffer the same neuroses, as they look nervously to the left and right of their own vaguely defiant positions.

The jagged edges of the pattern are important, too. Outsiders across the democratic world are intimidatingly strong and yet in a lot of cases weaker than they seem. They win power. They bring about historic change. They influence policy, even when still distant from securing national power. These are extraordinary achievements for political novices, like winning Wimbledon or the US Open, having played only a few games at the local park. Yet often the outsiders are pathetic, fragile, inconsistent, inexperienced and sometimes quite silly, the last quality being especially dangerous for those wishing to be taken seriously on the political stage. They espouse causes erratically and have no secure base on which to build. Their purpose is often unclear and the internal divisions are played out in public. As politicians, some are both muscular and hopeless.

The ambiguity of their powerful and weak positions partly explains why each time an outsider wins an election or secures a significant increase in support, nearly everyone appears to be taken aback: voters, the media and sometimes the bewildered outsiders themselves, responding to success they had not anticipated or prepared for. On one level, the fragilities are so deep that there is cause for astonishment each time an outsider rises from nowhere. On another level, the surprise is that any of us are still surprised.

Across much of the democratic world, large numbers of voters are turning away from mainstream politicians and looking to those who come from the ‘outside’ to rescue them from tumultuous change. Some outsiders soar from the left as well as from the populist right. A few of them rise fleetingly, only to decline just as fast when fatal flaws are exposed. On occasions, mainstream parties or individual liberal progressives get their act together and win elections with a confident flourish. The US elects Donald Trump. Canada elects Justin Trudeau. Austria nearly elected a far-right president, but in the end chose a progressive member of the Green Party in the 2016 presidential election, before electing a significant block from the far right in the 2017 national parliamentary election. As we become more accustomed to what is happening in front of our eyes it is the jagged edges that are the new surprises, the electoral successes of previously mainstream parties and the vulnerability of the outsiders. Yet even when viewed from the edges the pattern is clear.

Earlier in March 2017 Holland’s centre-right prime minister, Mark Rutte, was re-elected, defeating the far right’s Geert Wilders by a relatively wide margin, and yet Wilders’ party made gains. The result in Holland, and the reaction to it, showed how electoral assumptions had changed. Although performing less well than Wilders had hoped, his Party for Freedom came second in terms of the number of seats won. Wilders had set the agenda for much of the campaign. At times Rutte appeared to be racing to keep pace with the far-right leader and may have profited from the hard line that he drew in a diplomatic stand-off with Turkey towards the end of the contest.

For Rutte, the electorally convenient row erupted over his refusal to allow two Turkish ministers to address rallies in Rotterdam. The ministers had planned to speak about the referendum aimed at giving Turkey’s President Erdoğan greater powers. The controversy gave Rutte an opportunity to be perceived as a ‘strong leader’, in refusing to bow to foreign pressure. To some extent, he danced to Wilders’ populist tunes as he headed towards his victory.

On the other side of the political spectrum, support for the mainstream Labour Party collapsed, while backing for the Greens rose significantly. The Greens won several more seats than Labour, establishing them as the most formidable parliamentary and electoral force on the left. Such were the fearful expectations, in turbulent times, that mainstream leaders across the European Union expressed relief at the outcome of an election that had been shaped by Wilders’ agenda and in which his party made some gains, while the Greens surpassed what had been the main centre-left party in Holland.

There is no denying the pattern. The policy changes that follow the rise of outsiders are momentous and transform the political landscape. A short time ago the proposition that the UK should leave the EU was advanced by a few seemingly eccentric figures and was not remotely part of the political agenda. In the late 1980s Margaret Thatcher raged against the EU, but signed every treaty. Never once, as prime minister, did she suggest the UK might leave. In the 1990s Tory Eurosceptic MPs fumed against the Maastricht Treaty and made the life of the prime minister, John Major, a unique form of political hell, but few called for the UK to leave. Instead, they put the case for a larger EU and an ‘opt out’ from the single currency. They secured both. When David Cameron became their leader in 2010 he urged his party to stop banging on about Europe. Six years later he held a referendum that led to Brexit – a revolution that would not have happened without the rise of UKIP. In Germany, Angela Merkel was forced to partially disown her own policy towards Syrian refugees, while her allies from other countries performed abrupt U-turns on the same issue, as support for far-right parties rose in the ubiquitous, intimidating opinion polls and local elections. In the US, President Trump announces travel bans, the building of a wall on the border with Mexico, and conducts his presidency as if it were a freakish TV show competing for high ratings: a revolutionary act in itself.

In spite of his mountainous flaws, the election of President Trump should not have been a shock. We should have recognized by then the space that was opening up on parts of the political stage. In the build-up to the election in November 2016 there was much comment in the US, the UK and elsewhere about the echoes with the referendum on Brexit, which had taken place a few months earlier. Yet when Trump claimed, in the aftermath of the UK plebiscite, that the victory for Brexit showed he was heading for a win too, his words were seen as mere hyperbole, the wishful thinking of a loser. On this, Trump read the trend accurately and looked towards its logical outcome in the US.

Many columnists wrote about the similar factors shaping the two contests. The parallels were precise. In the US presidential election the familiar and deadly juxtaposition was in place: an outsider versus the elite. During the UK referendum the same fatal divide – self-proclaimed outsiders taking on the insiders – was apparent. In both countries those who felt ‘left behind’ turned to those claiming to be on the ‘outside’, a part-fantasy made stronger by the imprecision of these two pervasive terms. Given that the build-up to the election in the US was so similar to the Brexit campaign, the result was always going to be the same, too: victory for those on the outside. Yet each time the pattern is confirmed, we are amazed once again.

Trump’s victory was much the biggest contribution to the contours taking shape across large parts of the democratic world, but his triumph is the latest in a line of unorthodox developments. In the US, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpected fright from the left, in the battle for the Democrats’ nomination, a shock that stirred her into being a little less cautious. He partially forced her to break free of self-imposed chains, but not in a way that liberated her from a perception that she was part of an elite which had failed to deliver. Clinton’s policy agenda was more radical than many left-of-centre proposed programmes, but few people chose to notice. They saw the figure framed by a different era – the one before the financial crash in 2008. In her memoir WhatHappened Hillary Clinton cites many factors to explain her defeat: the FBI, Vladimir Putin, her freakish opponent, the media. She acknowledges her culpability to some extent. All are red herrings. She was doomed from the beginning, her fate being part of the wider pattern.

In Europe, the rise of UKIP from the right was the pivotal factor in persuading David Cameron to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. Without UKIP – a party that fell into darkly comic disarray after the referendum – the UK would still be in the European Union. Cameron’s Conservative Party was already difficult to manage, but with a party rising to the right of his own and demanding a referendum on the EU, Cameron felt the need to respond. There were tumultuous consequences, which included his resignation one year after unexpectedly winning a general election. Cameron should have been prepared; his earlier referendum on independence in Scotland led to the remarkable rise of the Scottish National Party, now the dominant political force there. Its overwhelming triumph in the 2015 UK general election was again based on an argument about outsiders in Scotland taking on the mighty elite in London. In France, the centrist president Emmanuel Macron rose from nearly nowhere and did so without being a member of an established party.

Elsewhere in Europe a far-right candidate made waves in the presidential election in Austria, even if he lost by a small margin. The party of the far right became part of a new coalition at the end of 2017. A country that was once virtually conditioned to be wary of the extreme now almost hailed extremists. The far right in Germany increases its support and now has representatives elected to the national parliament following the election in 2017. In Poland the parliament consists solely of parties on the right. The right asserts a seemingly mighty grip in Hungary. Even in northern Europe, once a model for vibrant self-confident social democracy, there are right-wing parties that worry the mainstream.

The left-wing outsiders are part of the pattern, too, although they struggle to make up quite as much of the fabric. Syriza rules in Greece, and the Left Bloc is part of a coalition in Portugal. Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the UK’s Labour Party – a left-wing rebel when Tony Blair was its determinedly centrist and timidly expedient leader. In Spain charismatic left-wing leaders, hailed like rock stars, move erratically a little closer to government and then further away again.

Support for once-formidable mainstream parties is fracturing and they are becoming less coherent. In the US election, senior Republican figures distanced themselves from Trump’s candidacy and become even more overtly detached now the outsider is on the inside. Their protestation before the election made no difference, or might even have helped him. The Democrats chose the most respectable figure available to them, one with unmatched experience of government at the top. But their support for weighty credibility was misplaced. Experience of government is a disadvantage in the new topsy-turvy political era.

While having no experience of power – of being on the inside – is an advantage electorally, the challenges for governments from a globalized economy become impossibly intimidating. This is one of the bizarre ironies of the outsiders’ ascendancy. The global economy requires leaders with titanic skills and experience. But there are electoral advantages in having no experience whatsoever.

Often out of all proportion to their ideological coherence, the outsiders terrify the insiders and influence major policy decisions, even when they do not gain power. Mainstream rulers read the opinion polls, tremble at the results in local elections and change their policies in an attempt to appease the supporters of outsiders. The threat that outsiders might win a national election has been enough for them to wield influence in relation to policy. But Trump is the biggest signal yet that the outsiders can do more than simply hold influence out of power. They can win elections. The outsiders are becoming the new insiders.

In March 2011, less than three years after the financial crash, the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, noted candidly: ‘I’m surprised the real anger has not been greater than it has… The people whose jobs were destroyed were in no way responsible for the excesses of the financial sector and the crisis that followed.’1

King was both insightful and premature in his analysis. He made a noteworthy observation. The global Occupy movement against social inequality came closest to an insurrectionary protest, but there were no riots related directly to the crash across Europe or the US. Instead of riots, the anger of electorates was channelled largely into support for parties and candidates away from the mainstream. Those who were victims of the crash, or felt they were, discovered a far more effective way of expressing their anger: they gave power or influence to an outsider on the left or right, through the ballot box. If there had been riots in the US, it is unlikely they would have had much impact on policy. Instead, the angry rebels elected a president who claims to speak for them; and in UK they voted to take the country out of the EU. These are protestations of immense proportions. They were democratic revolutions, although in some respects they pose at least as big a threat to democratic politics as a riot might have done.

The outsiders vary in origin and aspiration. As well as those on the far right and the far left, a few veer towards forms of populist nationalism that can easily lapse into overt racism. Most are subtler in public projection, deliberately seeking a wider audience with their claims to be compassionate patriots. Those on the left focus more on the need for an economic revolution as a counter to the ongoing revolution of globalization. Those on the right highlight immigration and security. There are tonal overlaps and some common ground. In different ways the outsiders on the right and left share a faith in the nation state, as they vow to protect their supporters from the consequences of the global economy. Trump is closer to Sanders in his apparent ambition for huge increases in capital spending than he is to the small-state Washington Republicans. Marine Le Pen moves close at times to the politics of the late Tony Benn, the mesmerizing orator who propelled Labour to the left in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the French presidential contest she was the statist from the right; anti-government while arguing for active government, a contradiction that she struggled to overcome. Trump did not even recognize the contradiction and therefore was untroubled in his strident self-confidence.

Some of the factors behind the rise of the outsiders are obvious. Globalization forms the background to their ascent – the sense of powerlessness and loss of national identity that accompanies sweeping change. The financial crash in 2008, as well as widening inequality, immigration and shapeless new work patterns, is the stormy consequence of globalization, ones that help to explain outsider electoral breakthroughs.

At the same time there are related but distinct technological revolutions. These are not incremental, but fast-moving sequences, a leap from relative security to insecurity on several fronts. Forms of communication change on an almost daily basis. Driverless cars are just around the corner and, with them, robotic machines and software that will apparently carry out the duties of those who once assumed they had a career for life. Coffee shops in towns are crammed with people who once had staff jobs and are now part of the fractured world of work. They are the lucky ones. In many places there are no coffee shops or much chance to join tentatively, laptop in hand, the alternative vocations. Amidst such shapeless fragility, simple and simplistic messages can resonate.

What is less obvious is why once-robust mainstream parties have struggled to adapt to change, giving space to the outsiders to make the incredible seem credible. Their messages about making their countries great again were not bound to propel them to electoral triumphs. Their political opponents gave them the opportunities to make hay.

The purpose of this book is to seek the answer – or answers – to these questions: Why have the mainstream parties on the right and left allowed the outsiders to thrive? Why have they shown such puny resistance to the populists within their ranks and from outside? There is no automatic reason why voters in the US should back a TV celebrity like Trump, or at least enough of them to make him president. There are more reasons for voters who felt ‘left behind’ not to have backed a billionaire who pledged to make tax cuts for the wealthy. The same applies in other countries where outsiders make epoch-changing impact. The UK’s exit from the EU was not inevitable, and some of those who voted for Brexit risk becoming victims of the UK’s departure from the EU. The electorally strong performance of the far-right-wing presidential candidate in Austria, Norbert Hofer, was at odds with the banality of his campaign. In Italy the policies of the former comedian Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement are hard to discern, partly because he stands as an anti-politics candidate and can therefore argue that he is a different sort of potential leader, without the need for detailed policies. But while his pitch has an obvious superficial appeal, some of his supporters will be dependent on a coherent policy programme as Italy struggles, like Greece, with its membership of the eurozone and the demands of its own economy. In Germany the right-wing AfD party seeks wider appeal by adopting a more emollient tone, but then its leadership appears to make the case, in some circumstances, for shooting refugees. These are not formidable political movements. They have become formidable in spite of themselves.

So why are mainstream parties feeble rather than formidable, and their representatives not as strong as they might – or should – be? Not so long ago the Republican president was George Bush, Senior, a figure so removed from Trump in his largely pragmatic approach to power that the two of them could have come from different planets. In the UK the Conservative Party won landslides in the 1980s, and the Labour Party did the same from the late 1990s, an era when the social democrats were the dominant force in Germany and across much of the European Union. Now social democrats suffer a crisis of identity and purpose in much of Europe, and mainstream centre-right parties look nervously over their shoulders at forces to their right.

In seeking to find a solution to the mystery of their decline, and their deep (and in some cases potentially fatal) identity crises, I will focus largely on countries where mainstream parties have previously flourished in long-standing democracies and are now in a state of bewildered fragility. I will do so sympathetically. Governing has become even more nightmarishly complex, and it was never easy. Opposing a government, in the hope of winning an election, has become equally daunting as parties fracture and become less coherent. Seeking power from opposition was more straightforward in the mid-1990s than it is now. Globalization throws up many new dilemmas for those who rule, or seek to rule. Instead of seeking to appreciate the constraints of power, voters and much of the media choose the easier option, which is to view the democratically elected with disdain. This is a book partly about politics, and how the vocation is wilfully misunderstood. If democracy is in danger, we are all to blame.

Politics comes to life more vividly when we seek to understand how the world looks from inside the minds of the Clintons, Merkels, Blairs and Camerons: at their dashed hopes and fears quickly realized, their sense of what is possible and what is not, their outdated assumptions and, in some cases, their shallow philosophies. It does not get us very far to condemn them all as useless, stupid, mad or criminals, although such condemnation is fashionable.

I perform a live one-man show on politics. In the second half I ask the audience to become a specific leader and to get into his or her mind, to see the world as they see it. I then present the audience with a current dilemma faced by the leader. Quickly the evening changes from one in which we are laughing at the tragic absurdities of political characters, or getting angry at them, to an exploration of what it is like actually being one of them – and the risks they face as they contemplate making their moves. As columnists, we urge leaders to do this or do that, and express bewilderment when they are foolish enough not to follow our advice. But from their perspective, they must contemplate the dangers of making each move. As journalists, we file a column urging them to act and move on. For leaders, there are always consequences.

As one of Blair’s senior advisers once said to me: ‘Each day he faces decisions that come down to this – Do I cut my throat or slit my wrist?’ There are few easy answers, or clear routes towards the resolution of dilemmas. This was in the late 1990s, when Blair was twenty points ahead in the polls and facing an Opposition in bewildered disarray.

But empathy with the struggle of mainstream politicians has its limits. They are culpable, too. For decades the mainstream on the left has been too timid, acting as if it was still adapting to the 1980s – the era of Thatcher and Reagan and the light regulatory touch. In contrast, the mainstream on the right has become too daringly ideological, especially in the US and the UK, as if it too was still in the 1980s, determinedly anti-government when voters cry out for government to do more. In both cases the consequence is the same: a lack of clarity about the role and purpose of the state. The mainstream left is too scared to frame arguments around the benevolent potential of the state, and the mainstream right is ideologically disinclined to do so. Outsiders fill the vacuum by pledging to pull a thousand levers – even if some of those levers no longer exist. They are statists, and sometimes fantasy statists, but they get away with it because the mainstream parties have given them the chance to do so.

The failures of the mainstream, and our reluctance to understand or seek to understand the vocation of democratic politics, combine to create an era of heightened danger. This is not because outsiders are bound to seize power across the democratic world. The dangers lie in the framing of the electoral battles – contests increasingly perceived to be between so-called outsiders and elected insiders. By implication, the elected insiders become the villains. The juxtaposition works on the basis that elected insiders in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and the rest are loftily cocooned, indifferent to the voters, compared with the noble, in-touch and yet-to-be-elected outsiders. There can be no more sinister dynamic in democratic politics. Those we elect become cut off, arrogant to the point of near-indifference to the electors.

The dynamic is not true. In reality, the supposedly powerful are nowhere near powerful or secure enough to make sense of the new global order. They are too weak to address daunting questions about how democratic states can flourish when the old levers of power are no longer reliably available. How to pay for increasing demands on healthcare and elderly care? How to compete with countries where wages for some workers are much lower and hours at work much longer? How to address climate change – a global phenomenon that no country can address alone? How to pay for a modern transport system? How to address the terrorist threat in the era of the suicide bomber?

In addition, elections, opinion polls, the media, constitutional checks and balances and the near-impossibility of managing a party’s internal tensions mean that elected power is fragile and often fleeting. Most leaders or governments in democracies rule precariously, partly because they pay so much attention to the voters. Yet voters regard the democratically elected as out of touch, part of a lofty, arrogant elite. The opposite is closer to the truth. So how has an untruth reshaped electoral politics? How have the elected insiders allowed themselves to be seen in a fatal light, when that illumination is a false one?

In seeking answers to these questions, ubiquitous phrases recur: the ‘left behind’, the need to ‘take back control’, ‘the end of liberalism’, ‘elections are won on the centre ground’. Their very ubiquity obscures a lack of clarity. Left behind from what? What institutions or individuals take back control, and in what form? As for liberalism, the writer Edmund Fawcett, author of Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, an elegantly readable survey of this evasive creed through the years, attempted a definition on the BBC at the end of 2016:

At the risk of sounding abstract as a set of ideals, it’s all about improving people’s lives. Treating them and their enterprises with equal respect… and ensuring protections against undue power… whether it’s the power of the state, of wealth, or popular majorities. Liberals also have a picture of society… they take moral and material conflict as inevitable… For liberals they hope to contain conflict and make it fruitful if they can in argument, experiment and exchange.2

There will be no more impressive attempt to explain this vague term, but even this one leaves lots of gaps. How does it guide leaders or their followers to a decision about how to run a health service, or to intervene in a market that appears to be failing? How does it reconcile a country that votes against austerity, and yet is part of a single currency in which a non-elected Central Bank demands spending cuts on a scale never before imposed? There has been a lot of speculation about the ‘death of liberalism’, an epoch-ending drama. But the term ‘liberal’ acquires so many forms that it becomes almost meaningless. Can a meaningless term define an era that has died? On the right, or at least the mainstream right, most representatives would regard themselves as liberal. David Cameron described himself as a Tory liberal. On the left, there are social democrats who see themselves as liberals – believers in greater equality and a state that provides decent services free at the point of use. There are other liberals on the left who are more wary of a robust state, regarding the big division of the era as being that between ‘open’ and ‘closed’, with the liberals backing free trade and international institutions. The term is flexible.

The same problem afflicted the Liberal Democrats, when they were faced with the choice of coalition with the Conservatives in 2010. They had pitched themselves to the left of New Labour in that particular election, and yet some of its leadership felt closer to the social and economic liberalism of David Cameron, or felt they did at the time. Voters turned against them in the 2015 and 2017 elections. They felt betrayed whereas senior Liberal Democrats felt they were being dutiful liberals. For the leaders of the UK’s third main party, ‘liberalism’ had been an unreliable guide.

There are common themes that link the disparate groups that speak for ‘liberalism’, and they are internationalism, tolerance, open-mindedness and a vaguely defined support for freedoms of various forms. This is not enough to sustain a political movement at times of sweeping change. What does it mean to be a ‘liberal’ today? Here is a question the mainstream parties across the world have avoided answering with precision – even those with the term in their title.

Lack of clarity can be an advantage in democratic politics, widening a party’s appeal on the basis that different voters recognize entirely different attributes. But to what extent is this related to a deeper and disturbing question: How is it that we quickly loathe and mistrust those we elect?

Much of the investigation that follows seeks answers about the nature of power in the era of globalization. Who rules, and in what form? Answer that question and we start to get to the heart of the matter: the failure of the mainstream to reassure and inspire voters, as change erupts.

If the answer to the question ‘Who rules?’ is not clear, there are bound to be openings for those who appear to have no problems in offering clarity. ‘I will rule’ was the essence of Trump’s message, and is the thrust of most outsiders’ pitch. The simplicity of the assertion is powerful, but leads to silly pledges: building walls between countries, and the rest. Wielding power is more complex. Mainstream leaders are acutely aware of the constraints they face, to the point where some overestimate their powerlessness. Their assumptions, and our assumptions about them, help to explain the rise of the outsiders. The political brilliance of the outsiders cannot be an explanation for their ascent, because the outsiders are usually not politically brilliant.

But that is where we must begin, with the new (or newish) political forces that at the very least influence policy, and in some cases secure national power. Outsiders-versus-Insiders sounds like an innocent game. The juxtaposition has lost force, from overuse. But the game is deadly serious. When voters view the more orthodox elected politicians with indiscriminate disdain, the elected politicians are not the only ones who are vulnerable. Democracy is threatened, too.

1

THE OUTSIDERS ON THE RIGHT

Globalization is a consequence of revolutions in technology and transport. It is not a government policy. No party leader can say credibly, ‘We will introduce globalization.’ Globalization is happening. But the political consequences are inevitably huge. The challenge for governments, and those that aspire to govern, is to address many of the thorny questions that arise from tumultuous change.

Will a steelworks close, with lifelong jobs no longer lifelong, as it struggles to compete with cheap imports? Will immigrants distort a jobs market that is already changing and offering few of the old, familiar securities? Will the housing market make it impossible for voters, or their children, to buy – or even to rent in some areas? Is it safe to fall ill or become old, when health provision fails to meet demand? Will machines make human beings redundant in vocations that traditionally provided long-term security? The turmoil is bound to fuel the insecurity of voters – many voters, and not just those in the US Rust Belt and equivalent regions in other countries. How do politicians respond to such complex questions in ways that are both reassuring and candid? The right-wing outsiders appear to have the answers.

In one respect, they do. Compared with the timid mainstream left and the small government mainstream right, they are statists. They are willing to intervene in markets, or at least pledge to do so. They will manage immigration. They will protect their industries against cheap imports. They will be tough on crime and security. Their nationalism propels them almost leftwards in their faith in government, at a point where those on the mainstream – guided by an attachment to imprecise liberalism – have become confused about the role of the state. The outsiders on the right prefer to talk of the nation state rather than ‘the state’, but it is their promises to be highly active in government that resonate. Their faith in the state has connections with left-wing outsiders, except that they struggle to make sense of their attachment whereas those on the left espouse a more coherent argument about the significance of a more active state.

The ideological pitch of right-wing outsiders is combined with an erratic charisma – enough of a distinctive public personality to get noticed, even if the attention derives from their unpredictable eccentricity. Some voters like the eccentricity, as it stands out from the cautious, determined normality of the orthodox insider. The character details become irrelevant. The difference from a perceived robotic norm is what matters.

The far-right candidate in the 2016 Austrian presidential election, Norbert Hofer, was disabled in a paragliding accident. Although slim and youthful, he often walks with a stick. Hofer said he had been deeply hurt throughout the first presidential campaign by how often his disability had been used against him. ‘They have repeatedly abused me, saying I’m a cripple,’ he said. ‘But I tell you, the stronger the pressure they put me under, the stronger I become.’1 The vulnerability helped to humanize him, an important part of the right-wing outsider’s allure: the tough leader who suffers, just as voters suffer. He was his party’s spokesman for the disabled. At the same time he was a gun enthusiast and carried a Glock pistol, conveying an enigmatic machismo.

Geert Wilders, the founder of the Party for Freedom, is one of the more telegenic leaders in Holland, known mockingly – or admiringly – as the ‘blond bombshell’, although the colour of his luxuriant hair is closer to grey. Frauke Petry, the chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany party until the 2017 election, with a pixie haircut and a trim, athletic build is also telegenic. Fluent in English, after studying at Reading University, she is a patient, gracious interviewee, even in the face of aggressive interviewers. But she is not a gifted orator. Her speeches tend to be dull, with ornate sentences and technocratic talking points. She is more comfortable citing economic studies than discussing the lives of ordinary people. Still she stands out as a figure who does not conform to the caricature of a far-right leader, if the stereotype is closer, say, to the undisciplined exuberance of Donald Trump.

Trump’s candidacy was based largely on his own unpredictably wilful charisma. At the start of 2016 he declared, with a provocative flourish, that he ‘would gladly accept the mantle of anger’.2 Anger was the driving force of the candidate and of his followers. Voters were angry, and he was equally angry on their behalf. At the beginning of the presidential campaign The New York Times noted that Trump’s supporters ‘directed their wrath toward career politicians, unlawful immigrants, terrorists and people who they said were taking advantage of welfare’.3 That was a lot of anger and a lot of targets. Trump promised single-handedly to protect them. He was the mighty business leader who could make the US great again. Crucially, Trump became the personification of the state. He did not make overt left-wing arguments about the benevolent potential of government. Instead, he framed an argument about the benevolent impact of himself. Here is a sequence from a typical Trump rally in the summer of 2016, shortly before he was confirmed as the Republicans’ candidate – an address he had been making, with few variations, since announcing that he was standing for the candidacy on 16 June 2015:

TRUMP: Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories any more. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.

[APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We want Trump. We want Trump.

TRUMP: When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.

When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.