Politics and Populists
Chapter 4 examines the transatlantic political space, with special attention to the rise of populism. Particularly since 2016, analysts have been obsessed with the dawn of a new era of post-truth politics and illiberal democracy. Refusing such pessimism, the chapter asserts that the rise of transatlantic populism is part and parcel of the reshuffling of democratic politics after 1989, when labels like “left” and “right” no longer carried the meaning they once had. Moreover, the transatlantic nature of populism—like the rise of the so-called Third Way in the 1990s—speaks volumes of the degree of interconnectivity between Europe and America in the post–Cold War world. While each country’s domestic politics can be idiosyncratic, the “macro” trends have grown increasingly similar in the past three decades. There is, the chapter contends, a transatlantic political space in which ideas resonate and “travel” at increasing speed.