"Donald Trump’s emphatic victory means populism can no longer be dismissed"
Spiked: 6th November 2024: Spiked Editor, Tom Slater, explains why Trump won and why popularism is going nowhere
"...Since 2016, America has endured a top-down attempt to delegitimise half the country, particularly the working classes, for daring to disobey their ‘betters’.
In the process, the Democrats have gone from being an inept, snobbish party of the ruling class to a vengeful and unhinged one – latching on to absurd conspiracy theories... and a reactionary identity politics... to try to explain away their failings and burnish their crumbling moral authority.
You do not need to buy into the Trumpists’ fear-mongering talk of this election being America’s last stand against Dem-led dictatorship to see why this emphatic victory matters. It shows that populism is going nowhere. That 2016 wasn’t a blip that can be quietly moved on from. That working-class voters are ‘not going back’, to pinch a slogan from the Harris campaign, to being ignored and having their concerns about deindustrialisation, immigration and the woke cultural revolution dismissed as the death rattle of old, white dinosaurs. (Trump’s gains among ethnic minorities have certainly put paid to that caricature.)
After all the smears and gaslighting and censorship and demonisation, the ‘deplorables’ have refused to get back in their basket. They have turned what was hitherto dismissed as a one-off emotional spasm into a sustained challenge to the complacency, neglect and cant of a rotten political establishment. The unthinkable has become the thinkable. And things will never be the same again..."