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I study guys like Trump. There’s a reason they keep winning
Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions – the “establishment” – that most voters distrust.
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People watching President-elect Donald Trump’s election night speech in Times Square, New York, in the early hours of Nov 6.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
Ben Rhodes
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In December 2019, I travelled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest against the encroachment of the Communist Party of China on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls, they had scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn, you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order that saw democracy as the enemy within.
I met a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the US and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think – should we really follow a Western model?”
