Clearly written, well-organized, and mostly well-argued; other reviewers have allowed their heads to explode over the idea that people who vote for nationalists and populists might actually have reasons for doing what they do, and I will confess that I was a bit put off by the authors' unwillingness to supplement their factual claim (people like national populists because they don't like immigration, and arguing that immigration is great won't change that) with a moral claim (something like, "insofar as this is motivated by racism, this is not something that anyone should try to capitalize on"). And yes, I'm as amazed as you are that people take Jonathan Haidt seriously, and the book does engage in far too much dubious "well actually"ing (e.g., they like the research that suggests the Nazis took power because people really like Nazis; they ignore basic facts like the violence, intimidation, right-wing capitulation, straight out deception etc that were involved in Hitler's becoming chancellor).

But the second one starts thinking that national populist voters are a basket of deplorables, well, we know what happens. For that reason alone this is well worth a read, because it lays out, systematically and straightforwardly, a sociological explanation for the rejection of liberalism and the embrace of nationalism and xenophobia.

( )

With the success of Trump and Brexit, and with right-wing parties from outside the political mainstream getting significant chunks of the popular vote in many European countries, it's becoming obvious that we can't go on dismissing the "national populism" of the new far right as something that attracts only extremist criminals, deranged cranks, and the stupid and gullible. There are clearly millions of otherwise well-adjusted, intelligent and responsible members of society who are voting for these people.

Yet, from where I'm sitting, Trump and Boris are bumbling oafs without a coherent achievable policy between them, Brexit is economic suicide for the UK and the abandonment of the system that defines my identity and rights as a European citizen, Wilders is a hateful racist, and so on. It's impossible to imagine myself or anyone I know wanting to listen to any of them for five minutes, let alone vote for them. Somewhere, there is a huge disconnection going on, and until we've worked out what's driving that we're clearly not going to be able to have any meaningful attempt at putting the political system back on the rails again.

This is the question Eatwell and Goodwin are trying to dig into in this book: rather than explore in detail how populist politicians operate and what policies they are promoting, they look at the "demand side": what are the factors that are pushing voters in the US and Europe towards populism, and which groups in society are providing those votes?

In a classic social-science rhetorical flourish, they come up with "the four D's":
- distrust: a feeling of estrangement from a "political elite" that is no longer drawn from your part of society/your part of the country, and doesn't pay any attention to your views; meanwhile, important decisions are increasingly perceived as being taken by distant entities outside direct democratic control (IMF, EU, etc.)
- destruction: worrying and apparently irreversible social changes, in particular immigration, but also things like women's and minority rights, that seem to be threatening treasured national and cultural identities
- deprivation: the sense that you are losing out economically or in terms of opportunities/jobs/housing, etc. compared to other groups in society; inequality seems to be much more important here than absolute prosperity
- de-alignment: (*) the general loosening of traditional (inherited) party loyalties caused by a succession of ideological shifts over the past thirty or forty years

What's clearly important in the data they present, and the point I found hardest to come to terms with, is that these factors are all based on perceptions that are subjectively true for the people concerned, and play a big part in their experience of life, quite irrespective of whether or not they reflect any kind of objective reality. (This is obviously why you get such blank stares when you try to explain the democratic accountability of EU institutions to someone who has been conditioned to think that a contradiction in terms.) It's also striking that the standard assumption that votes are mostly driven by economic self-interest is clearly way off in the current climate. And bizarre how wealthy, privileged figures like Trump, Boris and Farage can get away with making the claim not to be part of "the elite"!

What I missed in this discussion was any sense of how these attitudes are affected by political rhetoric — do people become more opposed to immigration if they hear speeches by anti-immigration populists? Can their minds be changed in the other direction by a different kind of campaign strategy...?

Eatwell and Goodwin also caution against oversimplifying the social stratification of the populist vote. Profiles are very different in different countries: the US pattern is not the same as that in Western Europe, and that is different again from Poland and Hungary, with Germany, for obvious historical reasons, somewhere between the two. Age, gender and income group play a part, to different extents in different places, but they tend to be fairly weak indicators. The authors don't trust the "generational correction" theory, that support for populism will be wiped out as older voters are replaced by millennials, pointing out that there is already a significant chunk of right-wing support in the younger generation in most countries, and that people tend to shift to more right-wing positions as they get older anyway. The one reasonably strong and reliable indicator for potential populist voters seems to be education: very few people with university degrees vote for populist parties anywhere.

Since they don't discuss populist programmes in detail, they also don't have much to say about how support for populists is affected by their actual performance in government (they probably don't want to get into another book-eating scenario by predicting whether or not Trump will be re-relected). It might have been instructive to look at — for example — the way attitudes have or have not been changed by Australia's anti-immigration policies. But they do point out the way mainstream conservative parties in a number of places have recaptured part of the populist vote by embracing populist rhetoric, as in Rutte's last-minute lurch to the right in 2017 and the British Conservatives' reinvention of themselves as a more extreme (and less organised) version of UKIP.

A depressing book, on the whole, but quite illuminating. If the authors are right, it's difficult to see how the educated, liberal, voting-with-its-rational-mind part of society can ever get back together with the rest, when our political attitudes are so far apart.

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(*) sic. — Rhetorical flourishes don't always have to respect the traditional rules of language, it seems ( )