You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
Frustration with the political establishment isn’t only about economic issues and won’t be solved simply by focusing on Gross Domestic Product growth, inflation, or affordability. That’s the argument of Justin Gest, a policy and government professor at George Mason University. Gest has studied the rise of far-right and far-left parties both in the United States and Europe. The people drawn to those parties are not uniformly the poorest or those whose financial circumstances have worsened the most. Instead, populist sentiment springs from what Gest describes as “nostalgic deprivation”---the belief that a person’s social group has declined in wealth, respect, or influence over the past generation. So while Gest favors economic policies that help the working class, he argues that center-left and center-right parties also must connect with people’s sense of identity, history, and belonging. He calls for a “politics of recognition” that would emphasize what Americans have in common, such as largely been descended from other nations.
