While Turkey watchers point to Erdoğan’s Islamist appeals, nationalism, and anti-Western sentiment to explain his rise, a better answer may lie in a contemporary strain of what Friedrich Nietzsche described as ressentiment, or “a slave revolt in morality.” In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra traces the power of this idea through history, writing about the ressentiment the German romantics felt for the glamour of the French enlightenment, and of how the Ottomans and Russians felt the world was passing them by. Mishra calls the feeling an “existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.”

This feeling has been present in Turkey for centuries, and spans the entire political spectrum. And it’s a feeling that Erdoğan has mobilized to serve his needs.

In the 1960s, Turkey was a sleepy agrarian nation, with only about 31 percent of its population living in cities. By 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power, that number was 66 percent. While Turkey’s economy grew as it industrialized, mass urbanization led to great social and spiritual dislocation. People suddenly had to face the fact that they were born into a poor country. They were stuck living in towns that were lesser versions of Ankara or Istanbul, which, in turn, are lesser versions of Paris or New York. When asked why he didn’t have a formal education, the beloved folk singer İbrahim Tatlıses famously replied, “It’s not like we had Oxford in Urfa and I didn’t go!”

For many Turks, the world is split between its functioning and malfunctioning halves—and they know precisely which part is theirs. It’s humiliating to know that the other half of the world knows it too. Regular “Progress Reports” by the EU remind them that their country is constantly judged by people apparently occupying a higher civilizational plane. People will caution the government against jailing journalists, or caution the opposition against protesting it for doing so, not based on principle, but because it is “bad for Turkey’s reputation”—code for: Everybody is looking at us. Stop being uncivilized! It’s a culture of self-pity coded into the country’s fabric for centuries. Ressentiment is a rebellion against this destiny—and that rebellion, more than anything, fuels Erdoğan’s success.

Everyone in Turkey has heard Erdoğan recite perhaps his favorite poem, written by Sezai Karakoç, one of the most influential of Turkey’s Islamists.

Don't give in and say it is destined, there is a destiny above destiny Whatever they do, it is futile, there is a ruling coming down from the heavens No matter if the day ends, there is a design mending the night If I am ever scorched, there is a castle built from my ashes With every defeat heaped upon defeat, there is a victory ascending

Animating these lines is the sense of an epic struggle to push through defeat. The engine of that struggle is the mythical power of the nation. German romantics developed the concept of Das Volk, the common people who embodied the inherent values of the land—the antidote to all things divisive, metropolitan, and foreign.