They are the two giants of the global financial press.

One, acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 2007, is clearly of the Right. The Wall Street Journal has been a champion of the Republican tax cuts package that Donald Trump signed into law at the end of last year.

But if the WSJ can see no wrong in the signature project of the American Right, we need only cross the Atlantic where, in the outlook of the FT, we find a business newspaper that sees no good in the flagship enterprise of Britain’s Right – Brexit.

I exaggerate a little in saying “no wrong” and “no good” but only a little. Crucially, it’s the one-eyed character of both platforms on such consequential questions that is so striking and depressing.

First, America. The US Right and the Journal have signed up to an economic theory of tax cuts that has a status only one step higher than “written on the back of a cigarette paper”. The Laffer curve, infamously scrawled on to a bar napkin in 1974, purported to show that government revenues actually increased when certain tax rates were reduced – because of the turbo charge that they gave to the encouragement of initiative, overtime and other economy-expanding activities. But despite the four decades of evidence which suggest few tax cuts ever come close to financing themselves, the Republican Party has fallen irrationally in love with a theory that says there need be no conflict between an aspiration to be a tax-cutting conservative and a fiscal conservative. And it’s a deep love. Not one Republican law-maker in Washington has voted to raise tax in any meaningful vote since 1991.

As for team FT, they may have been a model of prudence when compared to the Journalistas on the topic of tax, but they can’t claim to be less ideologically rigid on the issue where their own journalistic qualities are being most tested. When it comes to understanding why more British citizens voted for Brexit than have ever voted for any other cause, party or candidate in the nation’s history, you might be interested to know that not one regular FT columnist is a Brexiteer. However, when he was interviewed for Radio 4’s Media Show, the newspaper’s Editor, Lionel Barber, insisted the FT mind was not a closed one. To prove this openness he named three pro-Leave writers who graced his OpEd pages but oh dear – it wasn’t much of a proof. For a start he named me – even though I’ve never written on the subject for them. Second was Iain Martin – who has been an exclusive columnist for The Times for 12 months. And, third, Jacob Rees-Mogg – but who doesn’t publish the Moggster these days?

We got closer to the FT‘s true attitude to the oh-so scandalous project of giving Britain the same self-determination that the vast majority of countries in the world enjoy (and most would never consider giving up) when a former Editor of The Economist wrote to the FT, saluting it for performing its “duty” of pouring scorn on the Brexit project. Bill Emmott’s dismissive was Tweeted as “letter of the day” by Mr Barber.

Curiously, we pay huge attention to the role of Fox News in corrupting American conservatism, and of the allegedly corrosive impact of the Daily Mail on British political discourse, but seem to have forgotten that the deadliest rot within movements and systems of thinking starts from the head. It’s not hard to discern whiffs of decay from within both the Journal and pink ‘un.

Surely any media organisations that failed to anticipate 2016’s unexpected shocks to the system, and which had been leading proponents of the policies that had helped to drive the political revolts, would be expected to have subsequently undertaken extensive soul-searching? But there have been few signs of it from either publication. If anything, they hold even more firmly to their former beliefs.

From a commercial point of view, neither the Journal or FT has much incentive to, for example, revisit immigration policies that provide rich readers and big company advertisers with cheap labour. Nor to question the property and monetary policies that have put rocket-boosters underneath the market wealth of the kind of people who buy jewelled Cartier collars for their dogs and splash out on the many other varieties of luxury goods sold from the pages of both papers’ glossy lifestyle supplements. For certain high-ups at the FT, 2016 will live long in the memory for a 65% jump in digital revenues from the paper’s How to Spend It magazine. What’s not to like about a year, and an economy, that delivers such largesse for the bottom line – directly from the 1%’s platinum cards?

Putting aside the commercial factors that inhibit honest rethinking, though, the key intellectual weakness that the FT and Journal share for the task of understanding our changing and anti-capitalist times is a lack of interest in the “unmeasured”. Just as tax relief for the family makes no sense to the Journal’s GDP-number-crunching-podcasters, so the behaviour of Brexit’s voters seems illogical to groupthinkers at the FT who, living in a world of day-to-day press deadlines and quarterly company results, can’t see much beyond the short-term economic costs associated with the uncertainty of transitioning from the stability of EU membership to a new, as yet unknown, arrangement.

Average citizens – and this is borne out by fascinating opinion polling – are less focused on the near-future. They, perhaps, can see the likelihood of an EU emerging that will make the weakness and drift of today’s Theresa May government seem trivial in comparison. They’ve made the simple but wise long-term bet that a 27-member organisation operating on 27 different electoral cycles will probably struggle to agree on anything much at all – especially anything important.

A greater degree of long-termism might not be the only thing Brexit voters could teach people who are willing to buy $67,000 necklaces. Three drivers of the votes of 2016 may be particularly deserving of more reflection.

Changes to family structure.

Family networks are fracturing. In part because rising house prices mean that many young families can’t afford to live near their parents. And what has been the consequences for this fracturing for the care of children and the elderly? Could it be that in wanting to put some limit on immigration and its effect on house prices – or at least by ensuring inflows become predictable – voters wanted to defend something that the FT and the economics profession never worries about in any meaningful way? What’s the economic value of your child’s gran being within walking distance? What has been the economic cost and implications for inequality of the wastelanding of so many working class family structures? And, fundamentally, what’s wrong with a society and an economics journalism that doesn’t seriously try to design housing or immigration policies that protect such relationships?

Security.

This may be the first and last time I ever quote Ted Cruz approvingly but I’d like to think the campaign commercial from his 2016 run (above) might have caused a few financial journalists to shift uneasily in their seats. Globalisation, immigration and sometimes doctrinaire free market trade policies have created huge amounts of insecurity for many poorer citizens of advanced nations. It’s easy for people unaffected (so far) by competition from Chinese manufacturers or Indian call centres to say insecurity is a price worth paying for cheaper consumer goods and services – when they are not paying that price.

The UK’s Vote Leave campaign “got it” in 2016 when it chose Take Control as its rallying call to people who felt increasingly “done to”. And another person who has “got it” is the economic historian Niall Ferguson. Talking to UnHerd, he argued that there had been inadequate political management of the pace of globalisation. While we might want to eventually end up in the same freely trading world that we are already largely immersed in, it might have been more judicious to have approached the destination more slowly and had the time to help victims of it to adjust more smoothly to competition.

And then there’s the nation itself.

The FT has its headquarters in London but most of its readers are international. They may appreciate their own territorial identities but probably not as much as the people that David Goodhart described as “Somewheres” – more rooted in their communities and with less wherewithal or interest to jet regularly to other places.

One of the greatest examples of national solidarity in modern times came when the Berlin Wall fell and the people of West Germany accepted a large tax hike to help pay for their fellow countrymen and women of East Germany to be fast-tracked through 40 years of economic falling behind.

When the people of Greece suffered austerity of a catastrophic kind from the euro crisis, did Germany offer similar solidarity or anything like it? No, despite the many ways in which the configuration of the single currency area has super-charged its manufacturing exporters. Exiting an artificial supranation in favour of something with so much more shared history, so many more shared institutions, and knitted together through familial interconnectedness wasn’t so dumb after all. This might well be proved during adversities in the years ahead – when Britain and/or the EU are called upon to make the kind of neighbour-respecting self-sacrifices that polities may depend upon to survive.

Adam Smith would not have made the same mistakes. He – through his own Moral Sentiments book and the overlaps of his thinking with that of Edmund ‘small platoons’ Burke – understood the importance of the non-material ties that bind.

But when the leading two newspapers of the business world are so indifferent to the social soils in which markets grow, it is no wonder that markets, market players and policy-makers can also become nine parts materialistic and only one part relational. They are obsessed with what the US commentator David Brooks has called resume values – values and decisions designed to power success in careers – rather than eulogy values – values and life choices of the kind honoured at a person’s funeral and in the remembering of the big, non-workplace choices they made for their families, neighbours and beliefs.

There is plenty that’s still brilliant in both of these newspaper titles. Unlike my colleague Douglas Murray, I wholly applaud the FT’s takedown of the President’s Club, for example. Saturday’s FT Magazine nearly always challenges and educates more than its rivals. Saturday is also the day when the WSJ shines. The Review section edited by Gary Rosen displays the intellectual curiosity that the daily comment pages no longer evidence very often. And, personally, I’ll never stop reading a paper which has the great Peggy Noonan on its books.

But, overall, mirroring the economics profession which has lost the humanitarianism of Adam Smith, the  footloose multinational firms that have no community roots, the tech firms which see childhoods as easy routes to greater market penetration, and the executive company boards under pressure to hit quarterly performance numbers, there is little commitment within the pillars of the capitalist system to the people-sized institutions which civilise, educate and care, or to the national identities which people are likeliest to make sacrifices for.

It’s a shame that the newspapers that should be so well placed to challenge rootlessness within capitalism are actually so very far away from even reporting the necessity of doing so.

THIS SERIES CONTINUES TOMORROW.

Yesterday evening's introduction to this series

Test article

By Tim Montgomerie

The seeds of today’s discontent were sown in the left’s response to the political victory of free market economics in the 1980s and the rise of globalisation. This right-wing economics inherently decreases the power, incomes, and dignity of working class voters, but rather than champion their cause in the face of this (as traditionally the left has done) it instead moved to compete with the right for the affections of middle and educated upper-middle income voters. Working class voters, in turn, abandoned the traditional social democratic left as their own situations worsened.  Furthermore, attracting the educated middle and upper middle classes meant adopting their views on internationalism, migration, and other cultural issues that further widened the gap between the left and its traditional voter base. This cleavage between high- and low-income voters has created an existential crisis for the left at the same time as it’s given political space for working-class, anti-establishment politics to emerge.

The modern left came to being after the 1848 revolutions in Europe, with the express purpose of redistributing wealth and power from the capital-owning few to the labouring many. Industrialization’s rise created increasing numbers who demanded greater political and economic power. The major party on the left in virtually every major OECD country was founded in this period by people experienced in organizing or championing the cause of industrial labourers. The political victories these parties started to achieve in the 20^th century were always upon votes from this class of people.

Later in the 20^th century, the left folded into its coalition groups that the right had shut out, such as women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and the LGBT community. Alongside this expansion of the left’s tent, its moral purpose remained unchanged. But in the post-Thatcher/Reagan/Kohl era, the left significantly shifted its focus from redistributing economic power to merely redistributing the proceeds of capitalism through taxation and public spending. As globalisation took hold of power and wealth across the world, the “Third Way” left of Clinton, Blair and Schroder sought to mitigate the worst excesses of the market rather than reshape or challenge it directly.[1.  This phenomenon was by no means limited to the UK, US and Germany as examples like the pro-market policies of social democrats in Australia and New Zealand demonstrate: see for instance Andrew Glyn’s Social Democracy in Neoliberal Times] In fact, these politicians went further by embracing flexible labour markets, free trade deals and free movement of peoples. Their adaptation of Crosslandite[2. Wikipedia] politics, whereby the market creates money that is taxed by the state to ameliorate its worst excesses, was magnified to an extraordinary degree.

The consequence of third way politics, globalisation and deindustrialisation was to detach working class voters from the left. As former Labour leader’s Ed Miliband pollster James Morris has noted, “Between 1997 and 2010 New Labour lost three working class voters for every one middle class voter that it lost.”[3.  The Guardian]

In the 2016 US Presidential election, Hillary Clinton grew her vote from Barack Obama’s 2012 level of support amongst high income voters, but lost support from Barak Obama’s standing amongst low income voters[4.  In the 2012 Presidential election, Obama won 60% of the vote earning under $50K. For Clinton in 2016, this dropped 7 points to 53%. Obama won 45% of the over $50K vote in 2012; Clinton won 47%. The swing to Trump amongst those earning under 50K outweighed the swing to Clinton amongst those earning over 50K.]: and with that, the White House was Trump’s.

In Germany, the embrace of Schroder’s labour market flexibility with his long-term vision in the Agenda 2010 Reforms[5.  For a quick primer on Agenda 2010 see Deutsche Welle and for its impact on the SPD’s working class support see London school of economics blog and for a fun counterfactual of a non-Agenda 2010 Germany with Chancellor Schroeder enjoying his second decade in power read Institute for New Economic thinking] was so catastrophic that it led to the creation of a split within the SPD[6.  For a straightforward explanation of the Die Linke see Deutsche Welle] and the consequent loss of every Bundestag election after 2002. For different reasons and in different ways, this experience has been mirrored across the European left. As of today, in 30 European countries, the left only holds majority or senior coalition partner power in eight capitals. 

What’s more, this experience is by no means limited to just the European left. The Democrats have only held the House of Representatives for six years since Third Way co-founder Bill Clinton won in 1992 whilst the Australian Labour party has only formed government for six of the last 21 years, and the New Zealand Labour party has only formed government for 9 years in the last three decades.

How high income voters split from low income voters

This decline can be explained in large part by the divergence in views between high income and low income voters in the left’s potential coalition. These cleavages are easily seen on hot button issues like national identity, family level economic confidence and immigration.

Low income voters are more likely to have a national-only identity as opposed to a mixed national and European identity.

Low income voters are also more pessimistic about their economic situation and to think it is getting worse. Here the numbers tell broadly the same story across a range of countries.

Low income voters are also less likely to think that freedom of movement for EU citizens is a good thing.

Taken together, these class divides illustrate the growing feeling of detachment and disassociation working class voters feel towards the left. From identity to immigration, the left has come to seemingly prioritise its internationalism over its economics.

In the case of the UK this manifested less in the left’s opposition to Brexit and more in its complete bewilderment at the pro-sovereignty, anti-status quo feelings of many low income voters.

In Germany, its taken the form of a fragmentation of the SPD vote. Die Linke, the Greens and the AFD are each able to either outflank the SPD (on the environment and spending, for example) or occupy political space the SPD cannot enter (anger at Chancellor Merkel’s million plus refugee policy as exploited by the AFD).

In France, the middle class/working class schism is so profound as to lead the Left’s votes to split along middle class defection to Macron’s En Marche, along with a smaller but worrying switching by low income voters to Le Pen’s Front National.

The disruption politics expressed by low income voters from Brexit to Trump to Le Pen and AFD is proof the left breaking its connection with working class voters. Instead of organising side-by-side as equals, the left too often adopts a position of patronizing dismissal – like the ever-present suspicion that concerns about immigration are simply code for racism. This creates a clear and present danger not just for the left but for the Western liberal democratic order: Low income voters, believing they have been dismissed as “deplorables” by leaders like Hillary Clinton, are moving to embrace radical, dangerous alternatives be it Trump or the AFD.

The politics of the contemporary left

The post-Third Way Left is now seeing the rise of Back to The Future leaders like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders who embrace of 1970’s-style statist socialism with fresh billions.

Despite this, they continue to struggle to attract working class voters. Their embrace of a borderless world over all other politics heralds little care for the concerns of working class voters about place and identity. As for economic policy, the idea of Universal Basic Income neatly epitomizes their disconnect from working class values. Simply put, this is a concept antithetical to the left’s original principles of contribution, value and dignity in the workplace. In many ways, it represents the ultimate surrender to the market as it abandons any attempt to respect and empower low income or low skill workers in the economy and instead embraces welfarism in its most terrifyingly pure form. Not surprisingly, adoption of the UBI or similar variants has failed to dilute the appeal of populist parties or figures for working-class voters who want dignity as much or more than a check.

Where the left should go next

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the left’s future is without hope. For as Corbyn’s rapid and dramatic transformation of a twenty point poll deficit into a narrow defeat demonstrated, the left still has the capacity to surprise and change.

Corbyn and Sanders are in some ways throwbacks to the classic left. Their successful embrace of movement politics to activate huge numbers of activists, particularly within the Left’s youth, green and trade union wings, is a modern version of what social democratic and labour parties did a century ago. Furthermore, while flirtations with ideas like Universal Basic Income may belie their welfarism, they have been far more willing to challenge the market than their Third Way predecessors. They have demonstrated a certain blue collar appeal to voters left behind by Globalisation whom the regimes of Clinton, Blair and Schroeder alienated with their embrace of free trade deals, deregulation and labour market flexibility.

But just as the Corbyn/Sanders Left fails to understand the importance of the dignity of work with its welfarism, so to it fails to connect with the working class on issues of identity and place, instead prioritising, as the writer David Goodhart has said, the citizens of Everywhere over the citizens of Somewhere.[10. David Goodhart: The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics]

To address this disconnect, the left should look to ideas like Britain’s Blue Labour thinking, with its emphasis on faith, family and flag as hallmarks of a left that could both understand and participate in the politics of place and identity. The left should seek to grow the political space it occupies, moving out of its comfort zone in areas like equality, fairness and the state into areas that in recent years it has ceded too easily to the right: contribution, responsibility and community.[11.  For the origin story of Blue Labour see Rowenna Davis’s Tangled Up in Blue and Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst’s Blue Labour: Forging a new politics]

A good example of this politics is the Dutch PvdA leader, Lodewijk Asscher, who experimented with a politics that sought to reassemble the left’s middle and working class coalition. Whilst Asscher’s rise to party leader mere months before the March general election meant that there was little time for his pro-work, pro-contribution politics to take firm root, the messaging and policy examples of his campaign are worth studying to understand how the left might put Blue Labour ideas into practice. For example, when it came to refugees, Asscher both embraced the in-country refugee community while demanding future refugee flows be shared equitably across the EU. Asscher also applied his pro-contribution politics to demands for ‘paying in before you take out’ on welfare alongside a hardline on multinationals that fail to pay their fair share of taxes and exploit workers.[12.  For more on the determined but belated efforts of the PDVA to reconnect with working class voters and reforge the coalition between them and their middle class compatriots see: The Guardian and Nl Times and Dutch News] In each instance, Asscher sought not to pit low and high-income voters against each other but rather to create a politics acceptable to both.

The left would do well also to heed the words of former US Vice President Joe Biden. Long a champion of blue collar voters in the Democratic Party, since leaving office Biden has been exploring a politics that emphasizes the centrality of work.[13.  University of Delaware] As Biden writes: “My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‘Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your self-respect. It’s about your place in your community.’ And every coal worker in West Virginia or steelworker in Scranton who lost their job will tell you they didn’t just lose a paycheck but much more.”

In putting work at the heart of the left’s renewal, it could embrace the responsibility of actors beyond the state to help bring about change – be it community, charity, churches or trade unions. The left has a rich tradition of organising for change without relying on the magic money tree of state public spending to solve every problem. This matches the instincts of many working class voters who do not look to the state for a hand out but might welcome allies on the ground in a fight with bosses for better pay and working conditions. Here, the work of the US’s Industrial Areas Foundation[14.  Industrial areas foundation], and particularly the community organising traditions of the left as exemplified by leaders like Arnie Graf[15.  The Guardian] are sources of hope for reconnecting with working class voters in terms of organisational tactics.

In creating a new politics for the left, ideas like that of the left thinker Jon Cruddas[16.  The NewStatesman] about how “power is the new money” should be embraced. In an era in which “Take Back Control” is a startlingly effective political message, the left should embrace a dramatic devolution of power and money not just from central to local government but from the state to the community with ideas like participatory budgeting[17.  Participatory budgeting project] or Total Place experiments[18.  The Guardian] representing just a fraction of the potential of a politics of redistribution of power. The common thread in all of these ideas is the promotion of agency at the individual and community level.

These ideas are necessary, but not sufficient, to return the left to its founding partnership with the working class. For the breach to be fully mended and the relationship to be restored anew will take a new political economy by the left, one that does not kowtow to the market as the Third Way did or seek merely to replace the market as a bullying force for individuals and communities with the state as a new bully.

Rather, what is needed is a political economy that redistributes power, not just wealth, within the economy itself, granting workers agency over their work lives, their pay and their organisation’s future. If the virulent strain of globalisation, automation and mass movement of workers is the loss of agency by workers than the left’s new political economy must make the expansion of worker agency the litmus test of all its politics.

Here state action is to be welcomed with vocational education raised to the same level of respect and funding as academia, worker representation on company boards as in Germany, regional banks to ensure thriving economies beyond capitals and financial services, a highly interventionist industrial policy and greater regulation of markets (including and especially the labour market) as well as a more pro-worker position on trade deals. By so doing, the left can use the strengths of both state and of organising to fundamentally rebalance power between the forces of globalisation and workers themselves.

The left at its best is about ensuring that human dignity receives equal hearing in the public square with utility and excellence. The left’s political economy should promote the agency of workers, the creation of value and contribution and must resist the despair of welfarism even in the face of globalisation, deindustrialisation and automation. A left that returns to its roots will see the grandchildren of our founders work once again in partnership between middle and working classes alike. Failure to do this, coupled with the inherent inability of free marker economics and globalisation to confer that dignity and respect on all workers, will not only mean the continued failure of the left but will lead to yet more anti-establishment politics of the Brexit, Trump and even AfD variety. That fear alone should motivate a more creative and conciliatory new marriage between the middle and working classes.

“Populism” defined: The good “people” are being oppressed

The word ‘populist’ has become so commonly used by journalists and pundits that its meaning is often vague, so it’s worth defining at the outset. The academic consensus is that populism is a form of rhetoric which claims that legitimate authority flows from ‘the people’ (‘us’) rather than the establishment elite (‘them’). In itself, it is not an ideology such as liberalism or socialism, but is rather a strategy used by politicians of all leanings. Populism is largely empty of specific policy proposals regarding the economy, foreign policy or welfare. What unifies all populists is the moral claim of democratic legitimacy and a call to give more power to ‘the people,’ either through democratic or constitutional reforms.

For populists on the right, the rhetoric is often nationalistic – bringing together anti-immigration, anti-EU, and anti-welfare propositions. In addition to the anti-elitism, the divide is between ‘us’ the sovereign people, and ‘them’ the immigrant outsiders, assisted by a second “them,” the politicians who betray their fellow citizens to show preference for the outsider “them”. For left-wing populists, the rhetoric is largely anti-globalisation, where bankers, corporates and ‘neo-liberals’ are the villains. Here the “them” are those who allegedly plunder their fellow citizens for ill-gotten gains, again assisted by a corrupt “them” of politicians who share in the loot.

In both cases, there is an overlap between economic, cultural and political factors which have led to a growing divide between what are sometimes called the cosmopolitans or globalists on the one hand, and the nationalists or anti-globalists on the other. The latter, concentrated among certain demographics and those holding authoritarian views, have taken to voting for populists to express their discontent. Taking each of these three elements in turn helps put together a bigger picture.

Economic factors: The rise of the “left behind”

Populism’s economic drivers have often received the most attention, coined in a phrase as being the ‘left behind.’ The general argument is that globalisation has led to rising prosperity overall, but that working classes have failed to benefit from it. With automation replacing or reducing the secure and relatively well-paid jobs of the past, less-educated and lower-skilled members of society have been living with stagnant wages and health problems. Meanwhile, the success and affluence of major cities like London, Paris, and New York have been breeding resentment.

In the UK and US, for instance, analysis by Claudia Chwalisz and James Kanagasooriam demonstrates that the key variables associated with voting for either Brexit or Donald Trump are low median income, older age (65-74), having no tertiary education, and having health issues. Inequality is not necessarily a problem for these voters: rather, it is low absolute pay. Michèle Lamont’s research about the working class’s differing perceptions of professionals and the wealthy further supports this: while they are resentful of the former, they tend to admire the rich for being hard-working and earning their money.

But economic factors only one part of the story. Cultural change is as important as economic pain in explaining populist appeal.

Populists think it does

The populist backlash is in many ways linked to the anti-globalists defending their traditional values. In recent decades, certain issues have brought the cleavage between these two groups to the fore, notably immigration and the refugee crisis.

While the globalists embrace diversity, welcome immigration and enjoy change, the anti-globalists value their ties to local community, see patriotism as a virtue and feel a bond to their country. As Jonathan Haidt argues, they see this as a two-way moral obligation: “Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people.” We saw the geographic divides of this contrary point of view with Brexit, for instance. Centre for European Reform analysis shows that in UK cities and regions, as positive sentiment towards immigrants increased, the desire for Britain to leave the EU decreased; Inner London was the extreme outlier on both accounts.

Modern cultural changes activate latent authoritarian tendencies

The additional cultural element alluded to in the introduction regards authoritarian values and how they interact with support for populists. Rather than being a binary question of whether one has them or not, however, there is convincing scholarly research, notably by Karen Stenner, which demonstrates that authoritarianism is not a constant personality trait. Her work shows that it is “a basic predisposition concerned with the appropriate balance between group authority and uniformity, on the one hand, and individual autonomy and diversity on the other.” Those who are more predisposed in this way are likely to hold more prejudiced attitudes on matters concerning race, civil liberties, morality and crime, but they are not always manifest; they are activated. Essentially, authoritarianism is dynamic – it is a psychological predisposition of becoming intolerant when one feels threatened.

The research also highlights that those with authoritarian tendencies are psychologically distinct from more classical conservatives. It is why many Republicans and conservative intellectuals are opposed to Donald Trump; he is the antithesis to many of their values. However, the fact that some Republicans have supported Trump, or that conservatives as part of Vote Leave were fighting for the same result as Nigel Farage’s populist-authoritarian Leave.EU campaign shows that the two can sometimes find themselves fighting on the same side.

Understood in this way, it becomes clearer how demographic, economic, geographic and cultural factors interact when an issue like immigration becomes salient. Particularly in the form of the refugee crisis, where it was primarily Muslim immigration which became the hot-button topic. For the anti-globalists, it was not just the security threat associated with the risk of terrorism, but also a normative threat of Islam that triggered a backlash. Many see the religion as being particularly difficult to integrate into secular Western societies.

So while the World Values Survey shows a general trend towards openness and tolerance, it is these very conditions which activate the authoritarian tendencies in those predisposed to them when they feel either physically or normatively at risk.

Political factors: Distrust of politicians growing in the West

There is one more element which explains the anti-establishment appeal of populist parties: a growing discontent with politicians and current political institutions. While often ignored as a core recipe of populist success – after all, politicians have never been loved by the masses – it is the direction of the trend that matters. For instance, research by Stoker, Jennings, Clark and Moss shows that since 1944, the proportion of people in the UK who think that politicians are out for themselves rather than the interest of the country has been increasing steadily: by 2014 (the latest survey), half (48 per cent) of the population thought that politicians are in politics to further their own interests.

Distrust in political elites is not a sentiment limited to the UK either. A 2017 Chatham House report finds that across ten EU countries surveyed, only eight per cent of the public feels that politicians listen to people like them. Chwalisz’s 2015 study in the UK had similar findings, showing that those who support UKIP and the SNP were more likely than anyone else to feel that their voice does not count in the decisions taken by those elected to represent them. While her study does not group people into globalists and anti-globalists, given what we know about the demographics of UKIP and SNP voters, it is arguable that anti-globalists are also the most disillusioned with politics as usual.

The Norris and Inglehart study cited earlier also points to a relevant finding: that while support for authoritarian positions and values is strongest among the old and less educated, mistrust of political institutions and support for anti-establishment populist appeals is strongest among the young and less educated. This may be why the National Front in France and the Alternative for Germany have also been popular with young people, for instance.

This growing political discontent is one of the reasons why populist calls to give ‘the people’ a voice, often by electing populists to represent them or by calls for more referendums, have become appealing to many.

Hearing the unheard: policy and rhetoric must change

Understanding this mix of economic, cultural and political reasons, rather than considering each in isolation, is the only way of getting to the heart of why certain populations have been “unheard”, leading the populist phenomenon to take hold across most Western societies. With most of the political elite – on both sides of the political spectrum – holding globalist values, greater empathy for those who have reaped fewer benefits from globalisation is essential.

On the economic front, it requires policy changes which ensure that the contemporary working class can enjoy a good life, from more affordable housing to access to secure employment.

On the cultural side, one concrete step was suggested by Stenner back in 2005:

“[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference – the hallmarks of liberal democracy – are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant… Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.”[1.  ‘The Authoritarian Dynamic’, by Karen Stenner (2005, New York: Cambridge University Press).]

It seems this advice is all the more relevant today. Greater attention to integration policies, which help bring immigrants from the ‘them’ to the ‘us’ side would make a difference. Looking to Canada might offer some inspiration: the country has one of the highest rates of new immigrants becoming Canadian citizens within a few years of moving to the country – almost 90 per cent. Policies that encourage civic responsibility also have a positive impact: high rates of volunteering begin with high school students completing a mandatory 50 hours of civic service before they can graduate. An immigrant and refugee mentorship scheme also facilitates a faster appreciation of cultural norms and practices.

Finally, on the political front, democratic reforms to give citizens a more genuine voice in shaping the decisions that affect their lives must equally be a priority. Innovations such as randomly selected citizens’ assemblies – used often by governments in Canada and Australia – are one option. Greater use of referenda would be another (but I don’t expect this to be taken up in the UK).

Taken together, these could be powerful steps to make people feel heard.

I once had a well-rehearsed line when asked where outside London I lived. “The Oxfordshire border” or “the edge of the Cotswolds” was usually enough to establish social commonality, acceptance into home counties ‘commuter life’. Now I delight in the looks of bewilderment when I admit my secret. I live in Swindon.

I understand the scepticism. Based on official statistics, Swindon is completely and perfectly average. It is a microcosm of the UK. Someone should tell Dylan Jones, editor of GQ magazine, who once said of Swindon that “in all its pebbledash and Anaglypta glory, it has to be the ugliest town in England”[1.  Dylan Jones, Dylan Jones visits the ugliest town in England, Daily Mail, 1 February 2008].

We are used to the sneering. After all, Swindon is the UK equivalent of a ‘flyover state’, a drive-past place on the M4 corridor between London and Bath. Swindon is an odd paradox of being forgotten and yet known. Our infamy stems from our Magic Roundabout and our cult-like cultural status as Britain’s quintessential “s**t town”.

Yet turn off the M4 or catch the train from Paddington, and you will see that Swindon is anything but average. At one end of the town centre is the area that has earned us the title ‘pop-up brothel capital of the UK’. At the other is the old railway ‘village’ from which came the blueprint for the NHS. This average town is nothing but unexpected. We are the home of the UK Space Agency and the final resting place of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. In this, Swindon is perhaps the best illustration of the problem of averages.

The attraction of average

There is a certain attraction in average. Averages are simple and easy to understand. They help us give context to information that may otherwise seem random. If you get 73% on a test, it is hard to tell whether it is good or bad without the class average. The ability to compare proves important for things like well-being. Studies show that income relative to peers has more of an effect on well-being than how much you actually earn[2.  The Easterlin Paradox, see more recent discussion in: Z Yu and L Chen (2016). Income and well-being: relative income and absolute income weaken negative emotion, but only relative income improves positive emotion. Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 7].

Averages also solve the problem of limitations on data collection. Pollsters can’t poll everyone, so they poll 1,000 people who collectively are a good ‘average’ of the wider population. Averages also help solve temporal restrictions on data. We can’t, by definition, measure how many Swindon residents are going to need hospital care next year, but we still need to make a decision about health services. However, we can measure on average how many people were admitted in the past and adjust that average to predict and plan for the future.

Average also fits well with the general operation of post-war social democracy, particularly in heavily centralised states like the UK. The idea of a single approach to a problem reflects the notion of an ‘average’ person or outcome that can be targeted. How else do you measure the impact of a policy to reduce the prevalence of diabetes, or lift educational attainment, other than through average rates of diabetes and educational attainment?

The limitations of average

There is a certain attraction in averages, but they are fraught with problems. Firstly, they are highly influenced by extreme values. Take 99 nurses and the average salary in the room is unlikely to be much above £20,000. In walks Lionel Messi, earning £500,000 a week, and suddenly the mean average income has risen to more like £270,000.

The distortion caused by this ‘power law’ reflects one of the biggest problems of averages. Once Messi walks in and the average income jumps, that average bears no relation to the actual income of anyone in the room. Nor does this problem improve when you increase the number of people involved. In the 1950s, the US Air Force designed cockpits to fit the ‘average’ pilot, one whose key body measurements were all within the middle 30% of the range of measurements recorded. But when these averages were compared to the measurements of 4,063 pilots, not a single pilot was within the range for all attributes[3.  Todd Rose. When US Air Force discovered the flaw of averages. Toronto Star, January 16th 2016]. Average does not exist.

Worse than that, average hides what actually exists: inequality. Some of these inequalities are irrelevant. Some people are significantly taller than others, so what? However, some of the inequalities are anything but trivial. Swindon may be the average town, but outcomes here are anything but average.

Swindon is actually a town of halves. The original settlement, the ‘Old Town’, sits on top of the hill overlooking the ‘new town’ that grew around the railway when the Great Western Mainline opened in the 1840s. Old Town is home to thriving cocktail bars and organic flat whites. In the bottom of town, vacant buildings host the homeless in their doorways, and migrant communities live in dilapidated terraced streets. There is little in between.

The lack of average is not just physical. I am not sure what the average job in Swindon would be, but it would have to be some combination of car manufacturing, financial services, distribution, and socioeconomic research. Differences in attitudes and opportunities match, further complicating what ‘average’ means for policy:

Simon worked in IT all over the world before settling in Swindon. “People constantly talk down the town, they are so negative. But it is a great place to live. Jobs are good and everything you need is here.”[4.  Interview with the author, Swindon, 25 September 2017]

Cameron is an apprentice at Honda and while he sees opportunities at work, he is less convinced by Swindon. “If anyone asked me what the best part about Swindon is, I’d be hard pressed to think of one. Most of the place looks like a run down junk yard.”[5.  Interview with the author, Swindon, 28th September 2017. Name changed to protect the anonymity of the individual.]

The average between Simon and Cameron’s views bears no relevance to either’s life.

The consequences of average

The problems of average have consequences. First, if average doesn’t exist, plans based on averages are likely to fail. If hospitals don’t have enough beds, operations have to be cancelled. If they have too many beds, then resources are not being used properly. There is a cost associated with mismatched supply and demand. Rather than planning hospital beds based on past averages, studies suggest that you may need 30% more beds than average to be able to absorb fluctuations in demand.[7.  De Bruin et al. (2007) Modeling the emergency cardiac in-patient flow: an application of queuing theory. Healthcare Management Science Volume 10 (2), pp 125-137.]

Second, averages are ambiguous, which means at best they are easy to misinterpret and at worst easy to game. Rising averages can hide bad news. Let us assume that average hours of physical activity in Swindon have risen. Good news for health outcomes, right? Well not necessarily. It could be that everyone in Swindon has become more active, or that new services aimed at getting the least active to do more exercise have been successful. Both would be good. However, it could also be that a new gym has opened for fitness fanatics. Those doing a lot of physical exercise already are now doing even more but with marginal additional health benefits. At the same time, those who are doing barely any physical activity have decided to do none at all. Average hours of physical activity have gone up, but they have actually fallen in the group where health gains are made. Averages make us worry about the average, when actually we should be worried about the tail.

Averages also make measuring the impact of government intervention quite challenging due to issues like the Simpson Paradox. This is where the average trend within a population can be the opposite of the trend when that population is broken down into groups. For example, one intervention A may prove more successful than B overall, but only because it was applied to less challenging cases. When the challenging and the less challenging cases are separated, intervention A may have been less successful than B in both groups. Government may press ahead and roll out intervention A thinking it is the best option, when actually it is less effective all round.

These ambiguities make averages easy to game. Let’s assume there is a target to lift average income in Penhill. If you were to move the ten poorest families from Haydon Wick (who are still richer than the Penhill average) into Penhill, then average income would rise. But here is the perverse thing, so too would average income rise in Haydon Wick. A double success story, but no family has actually seen their income change.

Swindon’s communities are strong, but distinct, the result of the progressive development of the town, new ‘village’ by new ‘village’. Retired industrial workers who used to press panels for Britain’s most iconic cars still live near the plant (now part of BMW’s mini production) in Stratton. Affluent, aspirational young families live in Priory Vale, one of the newer parts of Swindon. If you are looking for average, you won’t find it.

The evolution of Swindon as a series of communities perhaps makes geographical inequalities more extreme. In an affluent corner of Haydon Wick is a community who are the 1%. That is, they live in the 306th most affluent part of England, out of 32,844[6.  Lower Layer Super Output Area, including approximately 1500 people. There are now 34,753 LOSAs in England.]. Walk past these large detached homes into the scrubland that divides Swindon’s developments and you cross a brook into Penhill. This is the bottom 4%.

Penhill is one of Swindon’s estates, a close and friendly community to the north of the town. Wide streets of post-war council houses and fenced gardens lead to greens dotted with tower blocks. Here, 53% of children grow up in income deprived households and a staggering 98% of under 21s do not progress to higher education, the 20th highest rate in England. The education deficit here is clear. Penhill Central has the 33rd highest level of education and skills deprivation in England, putting it in the bottom 0.1%.

The brook is small but it may as well be an ocean. The distance is less than 100m, yet the act of crossing that bridge sees life expectancy for men fall by nearly 10 years. These inequalities matter, and they are totally hidden by broad averages. Even within these small clusters, the average hides the different experiences and attitudes of families. David has three children and is currently working and studying. “I went back to college, to get better skills so I can get a better job. It is important for my family to have a good life.”[6.  Interview with the author, Swindon, 28 September 2017.] But other children in the same street are sent to school with no jumper. Some haven’t eaten since the previous day. This is the average’s worst crime. From social challenges and the decisions taken to address them, it removes the human face.

Thirdly, averages can lead to perverse incentives. For example, education policy has more recently focused on punishing schools that get ‘below average’ results. On the surface this seems sensible, however, the reality is that schools then face a disincentive to teach harder subjects in which students are less likely to get a good mark. It also incentivises the chasing of a goal that can never be realised, for the very act of trying changes the target. As results improve, so too does the average. Not everyone can be ‘above average’.

But perhaps the biggest problem is the way averages make us view individual progress. We define an individual’s achievements relative to those of a mythical ‘average’ person. In Penhill, some children start school with no language skills at all. One boy is often late to school because he must first dress his mum. Sometimes she is in such a catatonic state of depression he rings the school office to say “I can’t get mum dressed, help”. The boy is eleven. David is seven and he sleeps at school some afternoons. At home he has no bedroom, nowhere safe to bed down. At night he sits upstairs listening to man after man come through the house for sex. When life is like this, how is average even remotely relevant?

It is a testament to the efforts of Penhill’s primary schools and other services that a lot of these children do achieve the ‘average’ as they transition to secondary school. However, the average hides the struggle. In the words of one local headteacher, “average is hard won for these kids”. Being labelled as ‘average’ does not do them justice. Progress is by definition relative, but it is relative only to the individual.

AUDIO FROM PENHILL

https://soundcloud.com/user-970100804/harriet-maltby-audio-essay-on-swindon

An alternative to average?

At the heart of the problem of average then, is a problem of relativity. Progress, policy, and their measurement need to be more personal.

There is no reason why they can’t be. Averages certainly solve the limitations on the collection and use of data, but so too do digital tools. Historically, the idea of individual level data was fantasy. Not now. Some governments are already embracing technology in a bid to gather more individual data to inform policy making. The New Zealand Treasury developed an online platform through which communities and individuals can report their progress and needs direct to the government. The days of statistics being modelled by statisticians in national agencies aren’t quite over, but they are definitely numbered.

The consequences of this is that it will be perfectly possible for progress to be measured relative to potential and ambition, not the ‘norm’. There is some value in averages like GSCE results, but there is even more value in being able to see the extent to which students are achieving their potential and ambition, rather than the threshold pass marks. The same headteacher in Penhill remarked that “data for a child is unique, like a fingerprint. We need to look at how education is working for that child’s unique situation.”[8.  Interview with the author, Swindon, 4 October 2017] In such data a real insight into education outcomes can be attained.

As data localises and individualises our understanding of progress and problems, policy must adapt to reflect this. The devolution agenda is beginning this process. In Swindon, the Council has gone further, negotiating the devolution of services with existing and new Parish Councils. Talking to the Leader of Swindon Borough Council, David Renard, it is clear that policymakers saw an opportunity to better reflect the needs of Swindon’s distinct communities:

“Working more closely with parishes means that decisions about the local services people see and enjoy everyday are made by communities and tailored and delivered to meet local needs. It also means that taxes raised in each community are ring fenced specifically for those services and are not in competition with town-wide budget pressures such as social care.”[9.  Interview with the author, Swindon, 7 October 2017]

Local need is better reflected in local decisions. Haydon Wick has a relatively elderly population. To combat physical and social isolation, the parish runs a community bus for shopping and lunch trips.

In giving more ‘state’ power to local areas, there is an increasing acknowledgement that government is not necessarily the go-to instrument for change. The omniscient state is as mythical a concept as the average. If policy is to be truly personal, then civil society is best placed to make a difference. Some of the most successful local projects in Swindon are a marriage of community and state. In Penhill, local green thumb and community leader Glynis started a community garden. Penhill Haven grows vegetables for the local food bank and has worked not only with young offenders and community payback, but also with the Council’s young wardens scheme to involve the estate’s kids. In average Swindon there are extraordinary people.

The problem of average perhaps has one final relevance for Swindon, one that is at the heart of the town’s existential crisis. Just as the average is meaningless to the individual, so too is it irrelevant to the ‘average’ town. In being labelled ‘average’, this town of exception struggles to shake the stain of post-industrial decline. In that way it shares many similarities with the old mining towns of the North East. It is not just its long terraced streets and retired labourers, but its wistful obsession with past glory. When the pride and focus of the town is gone, what is left but nostalgia for the pits? Everything that Swindon is and was, came from the railway. The steam has gone and Brunel’s great engine sheds are a shopping centre, but Swindon’s search for its identity goes on. In the minds of Swindonians, Swindon is not average. The challenge is educating the world.

Swindon is perhaps ironically ‘average’ in just one way. Its social challenges and inequalities are not exceptional, but replicated in many towns, cities, and rural communities across the UK. But we shouldn’t worry about how we compare to other towns. If we forget about the average, and instead try to lift the tail and support the individual, then the average will rise anyway. The best we can hope for is that no-one notices.

How often have we heard that over the past decade from those self-anointed experts who, from economics to politics and beyond, have assured us their elite educations and mastery of data enabled them to skilfully manage our political economy? Their failure to foresee and prevent the largest financial collapse of the last century would be damning enough but their continued failure to either anticipate or understand the popular decisions that are ripping the West apart, and with it the world, is more damning still. How can people so well-trained and so well-equipped be so consistently wrong?

The problem is not that they don’t how to think; it’s that they are thinking about the wrong things.

Too often they have failed to consider the manner in which low probability but high impact events arise from a confluence of circumstances.

Too often they have looked at the median or the average and ignored the tails of our circumstances, ignoring that the tails move human history.

Too often they have viewed humans as mere material beings who look only after the well-being of their bellies. The populist rebellions show us what the ancients always understood, that people are, in the end, primarily concerned with their souls.

Hope and dignity are the most important aspects of the soul that ought to concern us in this populist moment. Over a century of experience with mass, democratic governments provide us with a wealth of evidence that people seek radical political change only when they lose hope that they can live comfortable and dignified lives of their own choosing. If populisms of left and right are truly radical, as many fear them to be, then they must result from a dramatic loss of hope and belief among many whom we call our fellow citizens.

The experts were looking in the wrong places

Our experts could have foreseen that a large subset of people was losing hope. The statistics upon which they rely for their analyses and pronouncements all contained the information that could have shown this. The reason the experts missed these trends was not that they did not have the tools: it was that they did not know how to use them properly.

Take the most basic measures of economic health: employment and income. Governments and economists have known since the Great Depression that societies become unstable when too many people are without work or earn too little to support themselves in a reasonable manner befitting their times. No expense in time or money is spared so that politicians and economic decision makers have the information about unemployment and income that will allow their economic policy thinking to be properly informed. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean they know how to read data once they have them.

A poor job with the data

Employment data is an example. Almost all news reports focus on the headline unemployment rate, that share of people looking for work who are unable to find it. That rate is low in the United States (4.4% in August) and has been broadly on the decline for seven years. If low unemployment is a measure of economic health, Americans should have been happy rather than angry in the last election.

They weren’t happy. Many were angry – because the rate doesn’t tell the real story. A better statistic is the employment-to-population ratio (EPR), that share of Americans over 16 years old who have any sort of job. That rate remains historically low at 60.1%. This is the lowest rate since 1987, and that is after six years of incremental gains. The ratio stood at over 64% in April of 2000, meaning over ten million Americans who could be working no longer are.

Some of this has occurred because America is aging, but statistics for prime-aged workers (those aged between 25 and 54) show a similar trend. The EPR for those workers was 78.5% in May, down from the high of 81.8 in April 2000. About 126 million Americans are within this age band. If 2000 levels of employment still held, over 4 million more people would be at work.

Tellingly for our story, these trends had been present even during the supposed boom in the naughts. Unemployment in May 2007 was only 4.4%, the same as it is today and nearly as low as the 3.8% reached in April 2000. But the prime-aged EPR was only 80.1%, much lower than the April 2000. Despite a supposed economic boom, over 1 and a half million people had stopped working over that foregoing seven years. They knew thing were tough for them, but the experts focused on national averages missed them completely.

A below average understanding

The use and misuse of American income statistics is even more damning. It was well known and reported that median incomes had stagnated or declined (starting in 1999) and it was further well known and reported that the share of income earned by the top 20% had risen dramatically over that period. But it is one thing for growth to be arrogated by people at the top; it is quite another thing to experience real declines in income. That’s what happened for millions of US households, and it was virtually ignored by policymakers and the press.

The US Census Bureau reports that median incomes are still below their late 1990s-era peaks for all households headed by someone with less than a four-year college degree. Moreover, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show how the decline in employment after that period was concentrated among non-college degree holders.

Employment among young men without a college degree dropped especially far after 2000. Whereas in 2000 the employment rates among men 25-34 years old did not differ much for those who had at least completed high school, by 2012 it has plummeted among those who had dropped out of college or merely completed high school while it had barely budged among four-year degree holders. Suddenly Trump begins to make more sense: a whole segment of Americans was losing jobs and income at a rapid rate, all in potential plain view of the people who were supposed to look out for them. But most of them didn’t notice because they weren’t looking in that direction.

Dropping out of the statistics

Policymakers have noticed that income increasingly correlates with education and so they have been leading the charge to increase college enrollment and completion. This is what is behind the increasingly popular drives in the US and UK to make college completely free. Unfortunately, this again ignores what the statistics are telling us. Young people have been enrolling in colleges for years in larger numbers. In the US, college enrollment increased by 40%, or over 6 million people, between 2000 and 2011. The problem is that they are dropping out in record numbers too.

In the United States, the share of 25-29 year olds with at least a four-year degree has barely increased in 40 years despite the massive increase in enrolment.

Only a little more than half of students who enrol in college end up with a degree. This statistic is rarely discussed. Whenever it is discussed it always seems to be framed as a problem of how to get these people to complete their education. Rarely, if ever, is it mentioned that the issue might be that they were poor candidates for completion to begin with.

Trump was roundly criticised for promising to bring back manufacturing jobs for people in hard-hit communities (see Ian Birrell’s report from Indiana) but from these folks’ perspectives, maybe that is exactly what the government should do. If they aren’t good candidates for college, and their employment and remuneration prospects are dimming, public funds and policies should, perhaps, try to help them instead of pushing them to emulate the lives and values of the people reporting on them. They may be wrong, but from a political perspective that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they perceive the system isn’t working for them, and the statistics you never heard about show they are right.

Missing the woods for the trees

The focus solely on individuals is another shortcoming of most expert use of statistics but individuals live within geographical communities. If the community as a whole is in decline, people who live there will notice and develop their views of hope and dignity from their surroundings. No major government statistics look at the sort of things that measure the health of communities. This was and remains a serious oversight, as populist movements are nearly always strongest in stagnant or declining communities.

Healthy communities tend to be growing communities, but throughout the United States vast swaths of the country have ceased to grow. Population has been dropping or slowly increasing for years in counties that swung massively to Trump. These places also haven’t seen many new houses in decades. In this chart, we see that the age of the housing stock is much higher in Midwestern states that swung from Obama to Trump than in most of the rest of the country and even here new housing was concentrated in the metropolitan areas rather than the small towns where enthusiasm for Trump was highest.

People living in these areas could see – each and every day – the decay of the old buildings, the boarding up of another abandoned house, and the slow deterioration of a once proud neighbourhood. But a national press corps and an expert community comfortably ensconced in large cities never saw this and thus never bothered to ask if their daily experiences were typical.

Unhealthy statistics

Health itself is also a crucially overlooked dimension to America’s populist explosion. As with most of the developed world, life expectancy in America has been rising for the last few decades. But it has been stagnant or falling in many regions of the country, especially in those areas in the rural and small-town South and Midwest where Trumpism caught fire.

Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton created a firestorm with the publication of their late 2015 paper detailing how mortality rates had been rising since 1999 for 45-54 year old white men, largely from diseases of despair such as suicide, overdose, or alcohol-related conditions. Opioid addiction is an epidemic in many of these communities, but it was only “discovered” when presidential candidates and national media went to these areas in the 2016 campaign. Again the truth was out there but only if people had sought to look.

Even political statistics get misinterpreted. Most observers covering the British 2010 election focused on David Cameron’s victory, but few noticed where it came from. Cameron’s Tories won few of the seats they had targeted as part of their vaunted modernisation strategy. Wealthy areas that had voted for New Labour or the Liberal Democrats rarely shifted but working-class seats like Cannock Chase – supposedly number 198 on the Tory target list – swung into Cameron’s lap. Vote shares of UKIP and the racist British National Party also soared in these areas as working-class voters sought ought radical change, away from their historic home in the Labour Party. Cameron’s continued obstinate pursuit of a higher-classes majority in the face of the political demand for change from these voters was in fact the cause of his eventual offer of a referendum, that produced Brexit, and then his resignation.

In conclusion

Elite failure to see populism’s power stems has many fathers. Harriet Maltby’s article on Swindon in Wiltshire, England, which we’ll publish tomorrow, explores one of these: the tendency to look at averages when the story is in the tails. Nick Cater’s piece explores another, the massive cultural bubble that envelops most decision makers and analysts, not only preventing them from seeing another’s views but too often pushing them into seeing those views as threatening and hostile.

But readers should not despair. If the experts and analysts were late to the party, nothing prevents them from getting it right from now on. Nothing, that is, but themselves.

The key to the failure to see populism’s causes and potency stems ultimately from a very human failing, the difficulty in seeing others as beings as precious as ourselves. The oft-unspoken, but always present, sense that “they” deserve their fate – because “they” are “racist”, “lazy,” or “backward” – lays behind all of the failures to grasp the populist potential. “Take the beam out of your own eye before you take the mote out of your neighbour’s” is a fine sentiment to guide future discussion of how to understand, and adapt to, our populist moment.