The Ezra Klein Show is a free, semiweekly podcast by Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, and author of Why We’re Polarized (my review here), now podcaster and editorial writer for The New York Times, and an all-around very sharp guy. (And he lives in Oakland.)
From a week ago, here’s an item called A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe, subtitled “The political scientist Pippa Norris explains how a ‘silent revolution in values’ is fueling the global rise of the right.” Again, it’s a podcast, so you can listen to it (I did partially), but there’s also a transcript, from which I am quoting.
It’s very long; the podcast is an hour and a half; the transcript is about 50 screens on my computer monitor. So I have not examined the entire piece in detail — just tried to find the gist, the conclusion. Why would the far right by thriving around the globe?
Can we guess? The pace of change, especially in social values, in recent decades, and the resentment of that by older people?
Well, basically, yes.
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Klein’s intro acknowledges T****, the processes of American politics, and Biden’s polling, but then notes many other countries and turning reactionary as well: France, Sweden (!), Brazil.
And so we need theories that explain more than one country, or more than one situation, which brings me to Pippa Norris. She’s a comparative political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And in 2019, she and her co-author, the late Ron Inglehart, published what I’ve come to see as a really crucial text for thinking about the rise of global populist authoritarians. It’s called “Cultural Backlash,” and I asked her on the show this week to explain it.
In the ’40s and ’50s
There was a basic sense that what was important there was materialism. In other words, growth — economic goods, better housing, better welfare states, making sure there were pensions and national health services and those sorts of things.
That changed in the ’60s and ’70s. People took economic prosperity for granted. Technology was taking off. Priorities changed. Social issues rose to the forefront.
They moved on to other issues and other values, which they regarded as much more important, in particular, freedom and autonomy, the ability to live your own life and to enjoy diverse lifestyles, to enjoy gender fluidity, for example, not simply fixed gender roles or fixed sex roles in the family.
It became much more of a secular focus rather than religion, much more of a cosmopolitan focus rather than one that was based on nationalism or nativism. And so a generation grew up.
In particular, as Klein asks for three data points: women’s rights; the decline of religion; the rise of environmental awareness.
Norris goes on about generational tides and shifts; how early values stick with you. “The idea from Maslow of a hierarchy of values.” (I’ve written about that here.) That society’s values change as older people die out.
Much, much more. Very long article. Looking at the end and trying to find some summarizing remarks:
So secular changes, long-term changes by generation are pretty evident. You can see these patterns across many different societies, across many different surveys and across many different time periods, where we have panel surveys and so on. And they are things like greater secularization and the decline of religiosity, which has been evident. The problem is that generational changes take a long time to have any sort of effect.
[…]
It’s not clear to me that the long-term generational rise of liberal values, which I do think is happening, and which there’s solid evidence in the polls, is necessarily going to trump all these other aspects which are changing the political institutions in America and really are weakening democracy and the public’s faith in the norms of democracy in America.
This of course aligns with many of my themes in this blog, not to mention the current American political situation, and short-term thinking. But let’s leave it at that for now.
