Why the liberal expert class may be changing its tune in the wake of Trump’s re-election
Lee Jones is Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. He is also one of the founding editors of The Northern Star
This article originally appeared at The Northern Star
Doesn’t this time feel different? Is it possible that the liberal establishment is finally winding down its eight-year temper tantrum and coming to terms with reality? While it may be too soon to tell, reactions to Donald Trump’s re-election suggest that something is fundamentally shifting.
In retrospect, even Francis Fukuyama might now concede that 2016 was the ‘end of the End of History’, as Bungacast, the global politics podcast, has long maintained. But back then, the response to the Brexit referendum and then Trump’s first election could only be described as unhinged and hysterical.
In Britain, centrist politicians and commentators rebelled against the electorate, blaming everything from Russian bots and disinformation to voters’ stupidity and racism for the decision to vote Leave. As we recount in our book Taking Control, these accusations had no basis in reality but set the stage for a three-year confrontation between the electorate and those claiming to represent them, causing political chaos in which accusations of ‘fascism’ routinely featured.
States-side, the overwhelming response was that Trump’s election was an authoritarian backlash against cultural liberalisation: a ‘white-lash’ against a black presidency and a sexist rejection of Hillary Clinton’s candidature, spurred by Russian interference. These arguments simply didn’t stack up with reality, as I argued at the time. But it didn’t stop the ‘#Resistance’ recycling throughout Trump’s presidency. These tropes also resurfaced in the 2024 election, alongside characterisations of Trump as ‘fascist’ and claims that ‘democracy was on the ballot’ to try to terrorise voters into turning out against him.
These responses were hardly confined to the UK or US: they spread throughout the West through liberal-centrist media, with very similar reactions greeting populist electoral success elsewhere. Rather than ‘Brexit Derangement Syndrome’ or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, then, Bungacast proposed ‘Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome’ (NOBS) to describe a generalised hysterical reaction: ‘the inability of the liberal establishment to accept, explain or respond to political change’.
However, Trump’s re-election seems to mark a significant break from NOBS. To be sure, 35 percent of American voters said they would be ‘scared’ if Trump won, and 97 percent of those people voted for Kamala Harris. Some commentators immediately implied that sexism and racism were to blame, since Harris had run a campaign so ‘flawless’ that it had even drawn endorsement from Queen Latifah. CNN’s Van Jones – originator of the ‘white-lash’ thesis – said various minorities would be ‘terrified’. The Guardian – the UK superspreader of NOBs – has quit X (formerly Twitter) for Bluesky, accompanied by a million other outraged liberals.
But if the dominant affect in 2016 was shock, fear and hysteria, today it seems more like despair and depressed resignation. Even those who, days before, were warning that democracy was on the line have promptly turned around reasoned analysis on the flaws of the Harris campaign. The mood on social media is sombre, not hysterical; the X-odus is more a quiet protest than a temper-tantrum. As Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper puts it, ‘We have learnt pessimism since 2016. In fact, pessimism is now practically our worldview. This time, we are neither baffled nor energised. We just feel pointless.’ He and his friends lament on WhatsApp and retreat into private life.
Even pre-election, The Guardian, despite running one NOBSy column saying Trump was a fascist, ran two arguing he was not. Afterwards, its chief working class-whisperer, John Harris, grudgingly admitted ‘that the left is now alienating huge chunks of its old base of support’ among the poor, less-educated, and even minorities, with Trump’s ‘strongest asset’ being ‘the idea that, because they are so distant and privileged, modern progressives would rather ignore questions about everyday economics’ in favour of identity politics. Harris still draws the wrong conclusions – that what’s needed is a kinder ‘tone’, not a refocus on material concerns – but we can’t expect miracles.
American commentators make even stronger arguments in major NOBS-afflicted outlets. The Atlantic warned readers not to blame the result on sexism and racism, arguing wokeness ‘consistently alienates much of the rest of the nation’ and that ‘the only racial group among whom Trump lost any support at all turned out to be white people’, welcoming the defeat of the ‘stale politics of identity’.
Even more strikingly, in the New York Times, arch-centrist David Brooks argued that the result stemmed from his own class’s failure. The ‘educated class’ built a post-industrial economy and ‘tailored social policies to meet our needs’, creating a ‘vast segregation system’ which elevated the wealthy and well-educated and abandoned and disrespected everyone else. Anyone blaming sexism or racism must ‘love losing and want to do it again and again and again. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility’. The voters ‘have something to teach us… I have to re-examine my own priors. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.’
Perhaps most damning is the judgement of Francis Fukuyama, originator of the ‘End of History’ thesis, who, writing in the Financial Times, called the election a ‘decisive rejection’ of both neoliberalism and ‘woke liberalism’. The deep cause of Trump – and populism more generally – is that ‘The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests’, drifted to right-wing populism, and rebelled against a neoliberal system ‘that eliminated their livelihoods even as it created a new class of super-rich, and were unhappy as well with progressive parties that seemingly cared more for foreigners and the environment than their own condition.’
Those few of us who have been making comparable arguments for the past eight years – and frequently suffered denunciation and ostracism as a result – may well feel a mixture of disbelief, schadenfreude and pique at these reversals. It is galling to see previously hostile commentators suddenly profess great empathy and wisdom about poorer citizens. Most of them will never reflect properly on why they were so wrong or why they refused to listen for so long, still less acknowledge and make amends to those they insulted for so many years.
Nonetheless, even if the reversal is partial, it is also highly significant, because the guardians of public reason are influential. Their long tantrum has fuelled the wider spread of NOBS, resulting in political paralysis and chaos, instead of reflection and adaptation. Today, key commentators do seem able to accept that change is happening; they are groping towards explanations of it (which have a striking emphasis on class and material concerns); and they are beginning – albeit only incipiently – to respond to it. While we shouldn’t underestimate the distance required for the expert class to catch up, let alone develop meaningful ways forward, this seems a significant development. How should we understand it?
In part, the reversal must reflect the sustained and deep dishonesty of many NOBS sufferers. If one genuinely thinks Trump is a fascist, and a threat to US democracy, one should not be writing sober analytical columns a few days later. This is not a new problem: those making such claims after 2016 should have been forming citizens’ militias, not knitting pussy hats. Beneath the hysterics there was, for many, a lack of true belief in the histrionic judgements being uttered and, by 2024, more than a little cynicism in the way this rhetoric was being deployed.
The reversal also reflects a gradual adaptation to populism that has happened somewhat below the radar. One influential narrative of the past decade runs something like this: populists made big breakthroughs in 2016; everything went very badly; chaotic governance, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, brutally exposed the uselessness of populism and reinvigorated the case for expertise and centrist managerialism; post-pandemic election results show that the centre has, basically, held. Trump’s re-election (and indeed political developments in Europe) clearly blows this narrative out of the water. But, more importantly, the narrative is false because it presents centrist technocrats as unchanging defenders of a ‘liberal’ order.
In reality, centrists have been quietly adopting populist policies, while neoliberalism is mutating. Many centrists have adopted some of the ‘populist’ policies they once denounced, such as border closures and offshore processing. Perhaps most notable is Donald Tusk, liberal scourge of the Brexit process as EU Council president, and latterly Poland’s supposed saviour from right-wing populism, whose new government has suspended the right to claim asylum. Elements of Trump’s economic policy, particularly vis-à-vis China – including aggressive trade and investment restrictions, state-led investments in sensitive sectors, and re-militarisation – were scaled-up under Biden and normalised in many other Western countries. If ‘state capitalism’ is no longer confined to China but manifesting in the neoliberal West, so technocracy and populism are not diametrically opposed, with ‘technopopulist’ leaders like Macron attempting a synthesis of the two.
The ‘liberal’ order, then, is simply not what it used to be – if it ever corresponded to liberal imagination in the first place. That order is not simply ‘breaking down’ but mutating in such a way that the election of a right-wing populist provides less of a shocking break from the norm.
Indeed, Western politics has increasingly been restructured as a contest not between ‘left’ and ‘right’, but between ‘centrists’ and populists – and one that can be accommodated within existing power structures. If they are not already in government (Italy, Austria, Sweden), populist parties are typically the major opposition force and profit from any missteps or chaos (France, Germany). The recent election of a hard-right government in Austria was greeted with little more than a collective shrug.
In large part this is because right-wing populist governments have shown themselves to be far less disruptive and anti-systemic than the establishment initially feared. Above all, in Europe, they have all capitulated to the strictures of the EU, adopting a ‘remain and reform’ position. Unwilling to challenge neoliberal constraints and reorder their economies and societies, they confine themselves to culture wars that do not trouble those with real social power. The markets’ buoyant reaction to Trump’s re-election, and the billionaire class’s willingness to back his campaign and even serve in his government, also suggests that they fear nothing from him.
Clearly, what is still needed is a genuinely radical, democratic alternative to challenge Trump and his ilk, not more liberal handwringing. That seems as far away as ever. Nonetheless, in a society where liberal ‘experts’ and the wider professional-managerial class for which they speak, exercise outsized political influence, the waning of NOBS ought to be welcomed. We should not expect from them deep understanding of how we got here, still less any meaningful programme capable of getting beyond populist posturing. Their worldview remains deeply entrenched, particularly in the institutions tasked with doing society’s thinking. Nonetheless, if their panic attacks will no longer suck up all the political oxygen, it may at least create a little more breathing space for others to do the hard work of democratic renewal.
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