Half a decade on, “Brexit and Trump” remain shorthand for the rise of right-wing populism and a profound unsettling of liberal democracies. One curious fact is rarely mentioned: the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain in 2016 had similar-sounding slogans, which spectacularly failed to resonate with large parts of the electorate: “Stronger Together” and “Stronger in Europe”. Evidently, a significant number of citizens felt that they might actually be stronger, or in some other sense better off, by separating. What does that tell us about the fault lines of politics today?
Conventional wisdom has it that cultural divisions now matter most, and that plenty of people feel they have nothing in common with liberal, supposedly “globalist” elites. Yet that idea is not only empirically dubious; it also uncritically adopts a cultural framing of political conflict that plays into the hands of the right, if not the far right. The divisions that threaten democracies are increasingly economically driven, a development that has been obscured by the rhetorical strategies of a right committed to plutocratic populism.
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