you are not the lesser evil
approaching the problem of right-wing populism by telling people to vote the lesser evil is unlikely to be a winning strategy. in the first place, the people susceptible to this kind of politics do not believe they are supporting an evil of any quantity.
populism is not something that emerges overnight. if you look at europe, you’ll find that Le Pen, Farage, Wilders et al. did not appear one day and immediately captured the hearts and minds of millions. instead, they built their political empires over the years, in the case of the UK, culminating in convincing a majority of the british electorate to follow his (Nigel’s) lead only after a quarter-century lobbying effort.
support for populism accumulates slowly. it is not a car crash, but a cancer. every broken promise, every compromise, every election that comes and goes and does not change people’s lives for the better makes the ranks of populist reaction swell.
the working’s of consensus-based, multi-party democracies produce frustration on a mass scale, but more to the point, they produce known quantities. many americans believe both of their parties are the same, and now extrapolate this to three, four, five, many parties. where do you go when every imaginable coalition has been tried and did not bring about change? where do you go when voting Third Party does not guarantee the victory of your even-less-preferred option?
europe’s answer is that you go as far right as humanly possible. not at all once, but enough every cycle that over time, you produce serious contenders for public office. but populists don’t immediately go and convert electoral success into public office. they don’t need to, the panic of centrist politicians, especially center-right ones, about their new competitors ensures that they get their preferred policies through hopeless pandering.
and hopeless it is, because trust once lost cannot be restored by aping somebody else. the strategy of trying to pre-empt populists in rhetoric and policy has not stopped their advance, much less won back any support to the center.
the truth is, the choice between trump and hillary, between brexit and bremain, between Le Pen and Hollande is not one between two evils. it is a choice between a known and an unknown quantity. people have grievances with the status quo, with the establishment, both in terms of the system and the people staffing it. these grievances have grown so large that they’re willing to follow somebody, anybody, by sheer merit of them being the only option left untaken.
