Cultural Backlash

Cultural Backlash is aimed at sorting out the roots of the recent rise of what the authors call authoritarian populism, which is much the same thing as plutocratic populism.

They locate its origins in a backlash against the social consequences and policies that grew from socio-economic shifts that began in the 1960s and 1970s.

These include, obviously enough, the sexual revolution and changing gender norms, the civil rights movement and the increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural character of modern societies, and the turn toward values that Inglehart, decades ago, termed post-materialist.

The book is distinguished by the vast amount of quantitative… show more.

Since the rise of the likes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro, there has been no shortage of research that has studied authoritarian populism. After Brexit, many studies argued that globalization-induced economic dislocations were leading to grievances, which political entrepreneurs tapped into. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart make the argument in their book, Cultural Backlash, that these grievances are driven by a cultural backlash to post-materialist values of liberalism, pluralism, and tolerance. This book does a great job explaining how authoritarian populist voters want to feel part of a tribe that shares their identity and… show more.