BILL EMMOTT: T H E F A T E O F T H E W E S T
Bill Emmott was the editor-in-chief of The Economist from 1993 to 2006, and is now a writer and consultant on international affairs. He is a regular contributor to The Financial Times, La Stampa and Nikkei Business. His latest book is The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World ' s Most Successful Political Idea.
T he surprise should be that the political earthquakes that hit America, Britain, France and other western countries in 2016 / 17 took such a long time to come. For the fault lines of politics had been created long before by rising inequality inside those societies, and then deep rifts had appeared thanks to the 2008 global financial crisis. We should marvel more at voters’ patience and resilience than at the shock results of Trump, Brexit and Macron.
After all, the financial meltdown of 2008 was the worst in 80 years, and to avoid a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression that had followed the 1929-31 crashes governments in Europe and America had to go deeply into debt, starving themselves of the resources for virtually all other public policies. Meanwhile real household incomes fell in most western countries and were still barely recovering nearly a decade later. The recipe for political volatility and for shock electoral outcomes can be summed up quite simply: faith in mainstream, traditional parties needs to have declined, sharply, and new political figures need to come along offering alternatives. Often those alternatives will be characterised by appeals to nationalism and by various forms of the demonization of outsiders, be they immigrants or foreign countries.
This was true above all of Donald Trump’ s success, although that had one added ingredient. This was that in reality the United States had already elected a populist president in reaction against rising inequality and the discrediting of mainstream politicians: Barack Obama, a man who won the White House in 2008 with barely any political experience, defeating the much more established Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and then the veteran Senator John McCain for the presidency.
Obama, however, had the misfortune to enter office just as the global financial
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