International Relations

Steve Bannon may have lost his perch in the White House and Breitbart; but the themes of white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and anti-government extremism that drive radical nationalist populism survive his fall. In The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality Justin Gest attempts to explain how this movement has been able to draw support from white working class men and women -- often in support of policies that are objectively harmful to them. Here is how he describes his central concern: In this book, I suggest that these trends [towards polarization] intensify an underlying demographic phenomenon: the communities of white working class people who once occupied the political middle have decreased in size and moved to the fringes, and American and European societies are scrambling to recalibrate how they might rebuild the centrist coalitions that engender progress. The book makes use of both ethnographic and survey research to attempt to ...

A democracy allows government to reflect the will of the people. Or does it? Here I would like to understand a bit better the dynamics through which radical right populism has come to have influence, even dominance, in a number of western democracies -- even when the percentage of citizens with radical right populist attitudes generally falls below the range of 35% of the electorate. There are well known bugs in the ways that real democracies work, leading to discrepancies between policy outcomes and public preferences. In the United States, for example, we find: Gerrymandered Congressional districts that favor Republican incumbents Over-representation of rural voters in the composition of the Senate (Utah has as many senators as California) Organized efforts to suppress voting by poor and minority voters The vast influence of corporate and private money in shaping elections and public attitudes An electoral-college system that easily permits the candidate winning fewer votes to noneth...

Social Europe is a vibrant publisher of current progressive thought in Europe. Readers can find data, opinion, and policy analysis on the site, highly relevant to the core priorities of progressives across the continent and Britain -- social opportunity, inequalities, work, the threat of right-wing populism, the refugee crisis, and the future of the European Union. Here is the Twitter feed for Social Europe ( link ). SE also publishes a bi-annual journal called the Social Europe Journal . The most recent issue is focused on a recurring theme in Understanding Society , the menace posed by the rise of extreme-right populism. The volume is available as a digital book under the title, Understanding the Populist Revolt , edited by Henning Meyer. Several chapters of Understanding the Populist Revolt are particularly interesting, including Bo Rothstein's contribution, "Why has the white working class abandoned the left?". Rothstein's title poses a critical question, which...