There is a long-running debate about the reasons for Donald Trump’s populist appeal. Is it about economic angst among the white working class, or is it primarily a cultural backlash?

Writers like the Atlantic’s Michelle Cottle worried that “Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy.”

But as my Vox colleague Dylan Matthews noted, “there is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class.” The median household income for Trump voters, as reported by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, was $72,000, roughly $10,000 higher than the median household income of non-Hispanic whites.

Pippa Norris is a comparative political scientist at Harvard University, and one of the leading authorities on populism. She’s also the co-author of a recent study on the rising support for populist parties in Western societies. Her paper examined the dueling theories about the causes of the populist surge and found that the cultural backlash explanation was the stronger of the two.

In this interview, I chat with Norris about her findings. Our conversation, edited for clarity and length, covers a lot of ground — from the distinctions between left and right-wing populism to the post-war cultural shifts that paved the way for populist candidates to the unique vulnerabilities of liberal democracies. We also discuss whether the cultural backlash in Europe and the United States represents a failure of multiculturalism as such.

Sean Illing

The term “populism” has become a vague catchall. What does it actually mean?

Pippa Norris

Populism for me has three dimensions. One of which is an appeal to popular sovereignty over and above liberal democracy. So the argument is that moral virtue and power should be with the ordinary people and not the elites.

The second dimension is anti-establishment, and this is opposed not just to political and economic elites but also to other perceived power-holders, like intellectuals or journalists or other groups at the top of society.

And then thirdly, even though it's about popular sovereignty in practice, there aren't that many mechanisms. Mechanisms like public opinion polls or other forms of democratic referendum are typically weak. So in practice, what happens is the power is seen to reside in the individual leader, the charismatic leader who represents the voice of the ordinary people.

So those three elements come together but they don't tell you a lot about what populists stand for. And here what you get is a variety of populists — from authoritarian populists to progressive populists, and they differ in their actual values.

So you can think of populism as a way to critique liberal democracy, which opens the door for a variety of leaders who have different ideologies, whether we're talking Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Donald Trump in America.

Sean Illing

Does “authoritarian populism” and “progressive populism” mean right-wing populism and left-wing populism?

Pippa Norris

No, that’s not quite right. I use the terms left-wing and right-wing much more economically, and it has to do with where people are in state versus welfare, where people are in markets versus redistribution.

Authoritarianism is actually a different dimension. Authoritarian values are those which uphold belief in a strong leader, in a strong state, and in robust law and order. These are traditional values like the family, home, religion, and then a variety of other values like nativism, the importance of national unity, the national community versus outsiders, whether defined by nationality or ethnicity or race.

I think we tend to use the terms “left” and “right” in a sloppy fashion, because it's the familiar way that we classify parties in the post-war era in Europe where you see the difference, for example, between social democrats and communists versus conservatives and liberals.

What we've got now is a new cultural cleavage which overlays that, and populists therefore can be left-wing or right-wing or in the middle. Basically they're very vague on economics, but it's the cultural values which are the critical aspects which differ for them.

Sean Illing

How do you distinguish Donald Trump from Bernie Sanders, both of whom seem to fall under the populist umbrella?

Pippa Norris

Well, this is why we have varieties of populism. Populism authoritarians — like Trump — open the door because they reduce the checks and balances in liberal democracy, but then they try to push through a range of traditional authoritarian values. Populist progressives, like Sanders, employ similar rhetoric but they work out of a progressive agenda, not just in taxation like in Chavez in Venezuela, but also on other economic issues as well.

So you've got these basic cleavages, and you can classify European parties along the same line. In Spain, for example, you have Podemos, which is populist progressive. They're on the left in terms of economic issues. They're progressive in terms of social issues, but they want a critique of the establishment power and the elites.

Similarly, the Five Star Movement in Rome is definitely progressive although approaching more authoritarian. Then you have others in Greece, Finland, Sweden and elsewhere which also tilt authoritarian.

So populists have a particular approach to politics, but what they support depends on where they are on the cultural cleavage.

Sean Illing

This is part of the reason why it’s so difficult to talk about populism in an analytically precise way. It really transcends our traditional ideological categories.

Pippa Norris

It transcends the 1950s classification that we're so used to. The post-war era is one in which people are very much divided between those who believed in economic redistribution, a strong welfare state, and a role for Keynesian economic management versus those who believed in markets and hands off, low taxation and more classical liberalism in the economy.

This dimension has closed over the years. It's closed particularly in Europe, as many parties move toward the center, becoming catchall parties. What has emerged is a new dimension, and it started again in the ’60s and ’70s with the Green parties, which became more progressive and affirmed a different set of values toward cosmopolitanism and the environmentalism.

Then we saw, as a reaction against this new progressivism, the growth of those who believe in nationalism and authoritarianism. These parties, especially across Europe, have grown in strength in more recent periods even though in most countries they remain a minority.

Sean Illing

So, in many ways, we’ve got a new left and a new right struggling to absorb a different constellation of political values.

Pippa Norris

That’s right. The old distinctions don’t quite fit any longer. Conservatives have sought to adopt some of these new values, particularly the aggressive nationalism, but they pay a price for that. It’s very difficult for the old left to know how to adopt these values because they're on the progressive side and they don't know how to respond and hold on to their core beliefs about tolerance and cosmopolitanism.

Sean Illing

Populism isn’t tied to any particular ideological project, but do you consider a populist a demagogue by definition?

Pippa Norris

You can have authoritarian demagogues who aren’t populists and you can have populists who aren’t demagogues. But clearly it's often closely related. So some people argue that populism is a style and a language which appeals very much to ordinary people; it's short discourse and very straight language. It's often transgressive discourse, which uses language that is seen as unacceptable by traditional politicians, and that's an appeal again that the leader is part of the everyman.

Populists, and this is key, make a very deliberate effort to show that they’re of the common people. They’re not pointy-headed elites or cultural sophisticates. There are many demagogues who are populists and populists who are demagogues, but the two things are obviously separate. You can get demagogues who have other basic ways of expressing themselves.

Sean Illing

The transgressive part seems to me important. Populism, whatever else it is, is about disruption, about shattering the status quo.

Pippa Norris

That's right. In a liberal democracy, it's about shattering the established parties, the established cooperations and the established intellectual forms of power and hegemony. In some other countries, of course, you can see this is more democratic but it depends very much on the regime which is in power.

So if you think of revolutionary radical Muslims seeking to out some of the traditional leaders in authoritarian regimes, they're often populists but with a very different set of values behind them.

So populism is rather an empty shell when it comes to what its positives are, but it is always clear what it is against: established power.

Sean Illing

I want to return to what you said earlier about the cultural roots of modern populism. In one of your recent papers, you tell a familiar but troubling story: Since at least the 1970s, Western societies have emphasized what you call “post-materialist” and “self-expression” values among the young educated strata of society. This has produced movements toward greater gender and racial equality, equal rights for LGBTQ people, more acceptance of diverse lifestyles and cultures, etc. It’s also resulted in less focus on redistributionist economics.

You argue that we’ve reached something of a tipping point culturally as less educated and older citizens, particularly white men, are now increasingly resentful of a society that no longer privileges them or their values.

Pippa Norris

The idea that values are being changed has long roots going back to the 1970s, but it has new traction, if you like. The argument is that you adopt the values at the time that you grew up and it’s part of your societal conditioning. Look, for example, at the actual groups who were growing up in Europe when there was a welfare state from cradle to grave. The arguments were about meeting basic material needs — full employment, free education, free health care, etc.

In many of these countries, values changed from a focus on material needs — jobs, economic growth, and the things people who lived through the Great Recession and the period of war cared about — to a different set of values, which was environmental, gender equality, participation, democracy and a whole range of other post-material values. This is a long-term change which my co-author, Ron Inglehart, has predicted for many decades.

What we think happened is that there's been a tipping point in terms of where majority values have become the new minority. So it's really about population change more than anything else. If a generation grows up with certain values, those values gradually take over that culture. We can see the manifestation in many policies.

Think, for example, of gay marriage and the way in which marriage rights were something that was not even discussed 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. They weren't mainstream in the political agenda. And now many, many countries have equalized gay marriage, although affluent countries are still going through that process. Similarly, tolerance of homosexuality, ideas that women should have equal values, secular values as well, the idea that religion is no longer central to people's lives. So those are values which are shifting.

Those people that are benefiting from these shifts take them for granted as they grow in their status and their power, but there's been a tipping point when those groups and the values around them are no longer being reflected and, what's more, they can't even talk about them.

Sean Illing

Hence the political correctness battles are really just another front in the broader culture war.

Pippa Norris

Right. Political correctness is really about the belief that people’s values are being suppressed and that they're no longer respected. They no longer have status. So there’s a group, rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, that feels left out.

They tend to be concentrated amongst the older generation, not inevitably but broadly. They tend to be concentrated around the less educated who haven't benefited from college and the changes that brings. And they also tend to be men more than women, whites more than minorities.

Those groups have gone into a kind of minority cultural status, and I think this is the best way to make sense of their reactionary posture.

Sean Illing

Broadly speaking, I think you’re right, though a lot of this, in my view, is just rank hysteria ginned up by xenophobic opportunists. But what you’re describing seems to capture what happened in our most recent election.

Pippa Norris

Trump supporters suddenly got liberated and they felt free to express all of these latent resentments. With Trump, they could express these feelings loudly, and of course Trump himself said these things in a transgressive way. At the same time, those groups that have been benefitting but haven't been voting, like younger people, suddenly felt like their values were under threat and these values are also things which express themselves and then get turned into politics through the ballot box.

Sean Illing

And here we have a recipe for our current dilemma: Older people represent a cultural minority but they vote more than any other group, which is how we end up with a president who is disliked by a majority of Americans but still managed to win the election.

Pippa Norris

Old people vote, young people protest, and those trends mean that older people's values have become disproportionally represented through the political system, and parties and younger people are now out there on the street every day in their pink hats because they feel that their values are under threat.

Basically they think that the America they were complacent about, that was changing, is no longer necessarily representing their views.

Sean Illing

As you know, there are dueling theses about what's really behind the Trump phenomenon: It’s either about economic insecurity or it’s a cultural backlash among older, whiter Americans. You seem firmly in the latter camp.

Pippa Norris

That's right, and the solutions are very different depending on how you interpret what happened. If it's economics, you can go along with the Bernie Sanders solution. You can think of job apprenticeships, such as we've had in Germany, to make sure that blue-collar workers have the skills they need, building up community colleges, improving the minimum wage. You can think about economic redistribution. Parties like Labour under Jeremy Corbyn have certainly adopted those policies in a way to try to get back to the electorate and build up their support, but it basically hasn't worked.

On the other hand, if it's cultural factors, then there's a much deeper problem. It's a problem for liberals in particular. Many of the leaders and members of parties who are active on the left are actually part of the progressive left. They’re well-educated and won't go back on issues like gender equality or issues of race and racism or Islamophobia. So they’re limited in terms of how they can respond to this cultural backlash.

On some of the basic values which Trump's supporters and authoritarians believe, they're not going to reverse. They're not going to simply abandon all evidence-based policy, the emphasis on education and expanding college education or emphasis on gender equality, women's rights or social tolerance in the broadest sense for social diversity because that's built into their DNA.

So progressive forces leading social democratic parties can try to build their support back and they can do some things, but it's much easier for parties on the right to adopt some of the similar language.

Sean Illing

A few months ago, I spoke to another political scientist, Justin Gest of George Mason University, and he was making what seems to me a crucial point, one you’re making here, and that is that Trump voters aren’t opposed to the welfare state or entitlement programs. What they're opposed to is the idea that minorities or other “out” groups are receiving those benefits.

They’re wrong, of course, in believing that minorities are “taking” all of the benefits, but the perception is real nevertheless.

Pippa Norris

That's exactly right. This is welfare chauvinism. It’s about who should get the benefits. Think about Trump: He slashed all sorts of things like the arts, for all the people who go to the opera, or for people like myself, who like NPR. But he doesn't touch in any shape or form Social Security, because Social Security is for the older voters who are voting for him.

On other economic issues, other welfare issues, the budget slashing will have mixed effects on the poorest sections of society. But the perception among a lot of Trump supporters is that these outside groups have come in and “taken” benefits that they don’t deserve, and that therefore they should be penalized.

Sean Illing

Are we witnessing what amounts to a failure of multiculturalism, first in Europe and now in the United States?

Pippa Norris

No, we're actually witnessing the success of multiculturalism: It's taking over in the broader sense in the population and in society. I can give you lots and lots of trends on that. You can look at various polls and surveys measuring things like tolerance of minorities, cosmopolitanism, the attitudes toward the United Nations, toward NATO, toward the European Union, and you find that young people are incredibly cosmopolitan, incredibly multicultural. They see their lives as being one where you work in one country, you live in another, you end up in a third.

But, predictably, there is a reaction against multiculturalism, which is a sign that it has succeeded. Social changes have accelerated multiculturalism, and that is perceived as threatening to those opposed to it. There are immense pressures to adapt and adopt.

We have to think about how best to adapt to multiculturalism, but in terms of broad social attitudes, there's no evidence that, for example, attitudes toward homosexuality or gender or religion are in any way going in a more traditional direction.

Sean Illing

That makes plenty of sense, but this period of disruption could be far worse than anyone anticipated. If, as you seem to suggest, we will get more populism, does that mean we will get more constitutional crises in Western countries?

Pippa Norris

This is a difficult issue. You have to consider three factors when you talk about the impact of populism. You have the institutional rules of the game, things like the Electoral College. If we didn't have the Electoral College, then we'd have Hillary Clinton in the White House. There’s also how parties respond to each other, and that's what you might term the supply side of the equation. Then you also have the public demand, which is the value shifts and the cultural changes.

A lot depends on the type of system a country has. Different systems will respond in different ways to populist pressures. In most European systems, the party system is flexible. In the United Kingdom, for example, you have 13 parties sitting in Parliament. In Netherlands, Germany, and other countries, you've got a multi-party system. In a few countries like the United States, you've only got two parties. Now those parties themselves are umbrellas, so they're ideologically indistinct in certain regards, but it's also very difficult for other parties to break through.

Are there going to be populist parties in the future? Absolutely. They're not going to go away. How successful they are depends on the institutional rules and depends on how other parties respond to them in terms of either taking over their issues, ignoring them, or trying to isolate them in certain regards. But the American system is resistant to major shocks because of the strength of the two-party structure.

Sean Illing

I take your point that America’s two-party system creates high hurdles for outlier parties or movements, but I think this election made clear that institutional barriers won’t save us. It turns out that norms and customs are every bit as important, and those only exist to the extent that people in power respect them.

Pippa Norris

There was a paper written recently by two political scientists, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk. The New York Times actually reported on it. They argued that Western democracy was in danger because young people around the world don’t support democratic values. In a paper that will be coming out soon in The Journal of Democracy, I challenge this argument.

To say that Western democracies are under threat, there are three kind of factors you need to look out for, and this goes back to our theories of democratic consolidation from the early ’90s. Democracy is stable if, culturally, the overwhelming majority of people believe that democracy is the best form of government, meaning they adhere to the values. Secondly, constitutionally all the basic agencies and organizations of a state have to reflect those democratic norms. Thirdly, no significant groups actively seek to overthrow the regime.

I go through all the evidence and argue that there is some reduced support for democracy amongst young people, but it's mostly under Anglo-American democracies; it’s not universal. I also look for evidence that democracy is slipping at the institutional level across Western democracies. It turns out there is not much evidence for this, and indeed most of the trends go in a positive direction. Most of the slippage that has occurred has been in hybrid regimes in countries like Poland, Hungary, Venezuela, and Mexico, all of which have been under threat for some time.

The biggest threat comes from populism and terrorism. The two things go hand in hand and they feed on each other. They're mutually parasitic in some ways. So those two things together pose the greatest threat to Western democracy. But so far we can't say that they are destroying democracy because there has been pushback.

The ways in which the resistance has organized, the ways in which the courts have been asserted, the ways in which the media has been so critical of the Trump administration. All of our mainstream and legacy media — the New York Times, Vox, the Guardian, the BBC, and many more — are behaving the way they are supposed to behave in resistance to an authoritarian presidency.

Sean Illing

So it’s not time to panic yet?

Pippa Norris

That’s right. It’s not yet Chicken Little time. The courts have done what the courts should do. The media has done what it’s supposed to do. Civil society is still vibrant. The protests are amazing. Young people are energized. Opposition groups like the ACLU are seeing a tremendous spike in contributions.

But we haven’t yet been properly tested. The tests are not in the good times or safe times. The tests are when the major crises occur. There will be another crisis in the next four or eight years, another terror attack or some other emergency.

This will be the real test.