“The problem is not just the existence of populists, but the unpopularity of alternatives to populism”

The American-German political scientist Yascha Mounk, professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (Maryland), published, in 2018, The People Against Democracy (L'Observatoire), before denouncing the excesses of the radical left in The Identity Trap (The Observatory, 2023).

How do you explain Donald Trump's large victory?

The American left is in a deep epistemological crisis. The Democrats have fundamentally misunderstood their country and the political trend of the world. They applied an identity-based thinking pattern that cut them off from reality.

They thought that the country was divided between whites and people of color, that they would always benefit from the vote of ethnic minorities and that the way to mobilize them was to accept rather identity-based comments. This turned out to be a big mistake. It's a perception fundamentally erroneous about the realities of society.

Donald Trump's victory is also due to young voters, who come from ethnic minorities and who have profoundly lost confidence in institutions.

Is this a vote against the elites?

It is a vote against a part of the American elite, against the institutions which had had the confidence of the majority of the population until recently, but which lost it very quickly. If we look, for example, at American universities ten years ago, a clear majority of Americans, among those who said “They do a good job”, “we can trust them”, “they accept students from different ideological points of view”no longer have this perception today.

The day after the American presidential election, you underline, on the “Persuasion” website, that the argument of defending democracy was not effective in this election. What happened so that such an appeal no longer affects voters?

If we look at the exit polls in Pennsylvania, we see that a majority of voters consider that democracy is in danger. However, a good number of them are Trump voters! For ten years I have been trying to warn of the very real dangers posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump. But the left needs to start looking in the mirror.

If not only does this argument not influence people, but those who embody this threat can make it their own, it is because voters are so suspicious of the current elites that they are ready to do anything to bring them down. This shows that the problem is not just the existence of populists, but the unpopularity of alternatives to populism.

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