ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an analysis of the contemporary backlash against liberalism and its ideological drivers – in particular the failure of liberal progressivism and identity politics but also the rival ideology of nationalist traditionalism, which can be found in Trumpism as well as in the illiberal non-West. Liberalism brings about the kind of intolerant illiberalism that it ascribes to all non-liberal positions. What liberals demonise as populism is in large part a backlash against liberalism without democracy by movements that seek to institute a democracy without liberalism. Liberals patronise or simply ignore those who neither support economic-cultural liberalism nor benefit from its effects. Hillary Clinton’s jibe about half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” encapsulated the concept of liberal elites for ordinary people. For them as for other voters, free trade, mass immigration and cosmopolitan multiculturalism have meant greater economic hardship and unnerving cultural comprises, which threaten their ways of life.
