Many people — enough to transform politics as we have known it — feel this system to be simply intolerable. Despairing that the sunlit promises made to them will ever come true, they now seek to turn the whole thing upside down, however they may.
It is no longer a question of the anger moving the “Overton Window,” the concept developed by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe what is seen as politically reasonable at any given time, as smashing it. The rapid, deep and relentless waves of creative destruction that have crashed over people’s heads have made some into winners — most spectacularly, the gilded 1 percent. But many others have experienced change as a profound and traumatic loss.
The neoliberalism that has been the economic orthodoxy since the Reagan and Thatcher era has hacked away at what would once have cushioned the fall of the new dispossessed. The decay of the welfare state, in Britain at any rate, has reached such a pitch that its agencies have become — as portrayed in Ken Loach’s latest film, “I, Daniel Blake” — institutions of conscious social cruelty.
The angry feel left behind as they have seen inequality explode. In 1950, top executive pay in Britain was 30 times that of the average worker; in 2012, it was 170 times. In their study “The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone,” Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated that extreme inequality is associated with rising illness, family breakdown and crime, mental distress and drug use — as well as a general fraying of what policy makers call “social cohesion.”
The angry feel the old parties no longer represent them. In truth, they don’t.
A global crisis of working-class representation is causing traditional party identification to plummet and voter volatility to skyrocket. In Greece, for example, Pasok, the country’s dominant party since the 1970s, secured all of 4.7 percent in an election last year, while the far-left Syriza party took its place in government.
In “Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy,” the political scientist Peter Mair pointed out that even political parties of the left no longer really aimed to represent people, but to govern them. Rather than champion the interests of their base to the system, they manage the integration of their base into the needs of the system, by means of trade deals, tax cuts, welfare reform and more restrictive labor laws.