Edoardo Campanella and Robert Z. Lawrence
Few analysts studying the West’s political landscape saw a populist earthquake coming a decade ago. But then, with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States later that year, the earthquake hit. Observers were quick to see the rise of a new “silent majority” in the West, one bent on repudiating an out-of-touch elite that was either oblivious to the suffering their policies had caused or entirely indifferent to it. The effects of globalization, deindustrialization, and the financial crisis fueled the discontent at the heart of the populist wave. But other forces drove upheaval in particular countries, including concerns relating to immigrants, tax increases, budget cuts, regulatory excesses, and the general view that government programs unfairly favored the ruling class.
Now, a new populist front is opening in Western politics. Anti-establishment leaders are singling out for scorn efforts to avert global warming. Attempts to curb climate change make an almost perfect target for populist rhetoric and conspiracy theories because policies to forcibly reduce carbon emissions rely on expert knowledge, raise costs for ordinary people, require multilateral cooperation, and rest on the hard-to-prove counterfactual that such policies would stave off disasters that would otherwise happen.
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