The western world political landscape is changing fast as neoliberalism enters its final stage after five decades in which it influenced political strategies of right and left wing political parties. Those who write off the present frustration among ordinary people as a passing phase of ‘populism’ are failing to understand the big changes that have happened since the western financial crisis of 2007-2008.

In the three decades that followed World War II, the politics of the western world were dominated by opposing but not so different political philosophies of Christian democracy and social democracy.

They were the decades when welfare capitalism and Keynesianism defined the programmes of centre right and centre left political parties in Europe and the US.

In Europe the welfare state in its various forms took root in various countries. In the US it was the era when the Democratic Party had strong affiliations with moderate labour unions.

Then came Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s.

They ushered in the era of neoliberalism that was characterised with the declining role of the state in western economies, the spread of globalisation, the advent of monetarism in economic policy, the encouragement of immigration, the cutting of regulation to a minimum, the reduction of taxes and a blind eye turned to corporate tax evasion. Equality was scorned.

Most western political leaders of the left and the right saw Reagan and Thatcher as role models and put all their faith in market forces and monetarism. In Britain, New Labour under the leadership of Tony Blair embraced the ‘third way’ that basically saw the State retreating from its role in the economy.

Populist leaders have so far been better at identifying the problem than propose workable solutions

Ordinary people were encouraged to cut their dependence on the welfare state safety net and to ‘get on their bikes’ to find work when they were made redundant as the advance of globalisation and technological reforms changed the face of the labour market.

Yet this new act of faith in what was perceived as a more effective political philosophy produced worse economic and social results in the past four decades than social and Christian democracy produced in the previous three decades.

Many political and economic analysts agree that the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. The globalisation era worked in favour of capital against labour. International trade agreements favoured the export of jobs to low-cost countries; trade unions were ostracised partly because of their own inflexibility in the context of technological advancements that were affecting the labour market; large scale immigration undermined the bargaining power of domestic workers in Europe and the US; and most retraining programmes failed to reintegrate redundant workers in the active labour force.

This is the historical backdrop to today’s growth of ‘populism’.

Most traditional political leaders refer to populism in a denigratory and dismissive manner. As Francis Fukuyama wrote in an article in the periodical Foreign Affairs: “‘populism’ is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like”. It is now fashionable for crafty politicians to claim that they are ‘anti-establishment’. Yet it is populist movement that is against the status quo.

As The Guardian political columnist Martin Jacques rightly asserted: ‘Populism is a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market’. While many current politicians wait for divine inspiration on how to resolve the increasing inequality in western societies, populist leaders have so far been better at identifying the problem than propose workable solutions.

Donald Trump is undoubtedly a controversial leader with little to offer in the way of style of communication but has certainly identified the issues that trouble many US families. Up to some years ago few Americans described themselves as ‘working class’ as almost everyone harboured the ambition of being described as ‘middle class’. But a Gallup poll conducted in 2015, 48 per cent of Americans called themselves ‘working class, a rise of 15 per cent from 2000.

‘Working class’ in both the US and Europe is no longer associated with support for left or centre left parties. In the UK most disgruntled working class voters switched to UKIP rather than the Conservatives in the Brexit referendum.

The death knell of neoliberalism is indeed becoming louder.

johncassarwhite@yahoo.com