Trump’s win is part of a mysterious — and ominous — worldwide trend

I keep having this feeling we’re missing something big: that none of the explanations for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election are capturing the whole story.

Most of the explanations for what happened have focused on recent events in the US — like Biden staying in the race too late, or Democrats being alienated from the working class. These are of varying utility, but they all suffer from a shared problem: The United States isn’t the only country where incumbents have lost power of late.

2024 was the first year in recorded history when incumbents have lost vote share in every single developed democracy that held a contest, with Vice President Kamala Harris actually performing better than all but one of her developed-world peers. Since 2020, incumbent parties in Western democracies have lost 40 out of 54 elections — meaning the odds of an incumbent defeat in the past few years have been just shy of 80 percent. Dominant incumbent parties have suffered election setbacks or even outright defeats in places as diverse as South Africa, India, and Japan. Even some of the exceptions to the “incumbents lose” rule of late bolster the point, as they tend to have some kind of anti-system credential (see the Morena party in Mexico, for example). 

Inflation has been the most common culprit named in the global anti-incumbency movement. But while that’s surely part of the picture, it’s also not the whole story. Incumbents have also recently lost votes in countries that experienced low post-Covid inflation, like Japan and Germany. So most of the best explanations don’t really work in the face of the sheer scope of the anti-incumbent wave.

Clearly, something bigger is happening here: Voters around the world are really angry about how their political system is working, and want to empower people who aim to wreck or transform it. Understanding why radical parties are succeeding on both sides of the aisle — but especially the right — requires understanding why, exactly, voters have become radicalized against the political status quo.

The truth is that we don’t actually know. But it’s something we should figure out quickly because the kinds of parties these voters are empowering threaten more than just the parts of the system that deserve to be overhauled. Their rise could damage institutions that have delivered some of the greatest accomplishments in humanity’s history.

The puzzle of anti-system voting

Recently, I’ve found myself dividing supporters of far-right anti-democratic factions into roughly two groups.

On the one hand, you have the diehards: people who, for example, voted for Trump twice in the GOP primary. Research suggests that these voters are overwhelmingly driven by hostility toward culture change and weakening social hierarchies. My book, The Reactionary Spirit, is mostly about these kinds of people and what makes them tick.

But while the diehards are often the majority of the far-right party’s supporters, they typically aren’t the majority of the electorate. To win, people like Trump need to win over other kinds of voters, ones who don’t share the hardcore base’s preoccupation with culture war. 

Of course, we’re all familiar with the concept of “swing voters.” What makes them more interesting today is that they’re increasingly swinging in much wider arcs. Whereas swing voters in wealthy democracies once bounced back and forth between the center-right and center-left, they now are willing to consider options on the extreme left and extreme right (or, depending on the country, both).

This, I think, is where anti-system sentiment matters the most. These swing voters are unhappy with how their systems are working. Though they’re not ready to give up on democracy entirely, they do want it to look very different. 

How should democracy be different? Well, they’re less clear on that. 

Anti-system voters are the sort of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and then Trump in the general election. They’ve likely been attracted to figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joe Rogan, Ron Paul, and Tulsi Gabbard — all people with very different ideas and approaches, but who generally share a hostility toward “the establishment” in one form or another.

The rise of such voters itself raises two questions. First, why are swing voters more open to radicalism? And second, why did it accelerate so much in the past few years?

Again, there are no easy answers here. But one interpretation is that the centrist parties of the left and right are reaping what they’ve sowed.

The 21st century can, in broad strokes, be described as a series of shocks: 9/11, the 2003 Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 European refugee crisis, and, perhaps most importantly, the Covid-19 pandemic. There is plenty of reason to be upset at how elites handled these situations, as they often directly caused the crisis or botched the response. When you layer deeper structural problems on top of that, like mounting inequality or the looming threat of climate change, it’s eminently understandable that voters would erupt in protest.

Surely, this is an important part of the story for some slices of the global electorate. But it’s a heavily Western and especially American narrative that makes less sense when applied to other democracies — like Mexico, South Africa, Japan, or Brazil — that have seen major anti-incumbent votes of late.

Moreover, it assumes a model of voting — where voters reflect and assess policy successes and failures rationally — that may not be accurate. Extensive evidence, compiled in books like Democracy for Realists, shows that voters often base their ballot decisions on identities, partisan loyalties, or plain old gut feeling. In the United States, this semi-rationality is especially acute for swing voters, who tend to pay less attention to politics than firm partisans and thus are generally less informed about the facts of what’s happening in any given election cycle — let alone what happened 10 or 20 years ago.

This is where the limits of our knowledge on the topic start to fray. A diffuse, emotional, gut-level discontent with the political system — which I suspect is what’s actually at the heart of global anti-system voting — is something that’s necessarily harder to study than simple dissatisfaction with specific policy choices or economic conditions. And we don’t really know why that feeling is arising now, or what can be done to address it.

The rancid vibes of human flourishing — or, what the right gets right

One group that I think has captured this feeling, at least to some degree, is the so-called “postliberal” right. 

These thinkers believe that modernity is, in broad strokes, a failure. Liberal capitalism’s work of “liberating” us from the restraints of traditional religion and community has instead delivered a society of aimless, depressed, and lonely people. People angry at the political system, in this narrative, are really angrier at something deeper: a soulless society.

I don’t buy the postliberal narrative in full. It depends in large part on the notion of “deaths of despair” — the idea of rising American deaths by suicide and drugs brought on by widespread unhappiness — that has largely been debunked by critics on the left, right, and center. Some of its other assertions, like the idea that we are in a uniquely lonely period in history, are also on questionable empirical footing.

But as much as I don’t buy some of the specific claims, I think there’s something directionally important in their diagnosis. 

There really is a sense, among people of all political stripes, that things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. You can see it in reliable data on (for example) trust in government, declining both in the United States and democracies globally. You can also see it anecdotally in the way that people talk about politics on social media, where “doomerism” dominates and people of all political stripes routinely indulge in despairing talk about the future of their countries. 

The political vibes have turned rancid — and we don’t fully understand why.

It’s a puzzle that’s especially important to solve given that, at this moment, humanity is living through the best period in its history.

The world is richer than it’s ever been. War deaths have risen during the unusually destructive Gaza and Ukraine wars, but they’re still well below what the world looked like prior to World War II. We’ve eradicated smallpox, a disease that killed as many as 500 million people throughout history. We’ve made extraordinary strides toward social equality and inclusion, with historical practices like slavery now formally abolished across the globe. Challenges like income inequality and climate change remain serious, but there has been some real progress in the right direction.

To see what all this progress looks like, take a look at this chart of life expectancy — perhaps the most useful metric of whether people are doing well. It shows a long-term trend toward people everywhere living longer lives, one that’s been consistently rising for decades.

There’s only one global dip in the trend — the Covid-19 pandemic — and that’s already been reversed. By the end of 2023, life expectancy globally was the highest ever in human history.

This is an important counterpoint to the grim story of the 21st century I told earlier. Our era has been defined as much by its extraordinary successes as its failures — both of which were made possible, in large part, by existing political systems. When anti-system political leaders start threatening the basic building blocks of the current order — including alliance networks, global trade, public health institutions, and democracy itself — you can imagine a world where the long trend toward human improvement reverses for good.

Yet simply saying “things are better” isn’t going to persuade people who feel like they’ve never been worse. What we need to do is understand anti-system voting better, and try to get a sense of why there’s such a sense of omnicrisis and what can be done to address it.

We — those who believe in the liberal democratic political order, imperfect as it is — are still missing something. And we better figure out what before voters throw the baby out with the bathwater by elevating politicians who stick it to the old elite by wrecking the parts of the system that are actually working.