This post was begun over a year ago, 6 December 2016, but I never finished it. All I had was the title, and the opening words: "It is easy to identify hysteria in..." I will briefly summarise roughly what I think I was going to say, although it seems much less relevant twelve months later.
It is easy to identify hysteria in much of the Centrist press regarding the current surge in Right-wing populist movements in several countries currently: brexit and Trump's victory are lumped together, along with a few other examples such as France, Austria, Poland and the Netherlands. At the time, when it was relevant, I would have argued firstly that the Leave and Trump campaigns were very different kinds of movements. Although both are anti-immigration and nationalist, Leave was strongly pro-free trade, while the Trump campaign was strongly protectionist, for example - the similarity disintegrates as soon as it is interrogated. Meanwhile, the examples of countries with strong populist movements mostly do not exhibit neither majority vote shares, nor do they account for a majority of countries across the West, never mind the globe.
While there does seem to have been a recent uptick in Right-wing populism in the West, it should not be overblown any more than it should be underestimated - or oversimplified: there were times in the wake of Brexit and Trump, perhaps in the six-month period either side of Christmas 2016, when even respectable news sources with a reputation for cool and rational analysis - I am really talking about The Economist - seemed almost hysterical about the rising tide of cognitive dissonance (too flippant?). It was an irritating, uninformative and un-pragmatic phase, which often seemed to be generally tarring a wide array of political constituencies in very broad-based movements in many different countries with the same brush of quasi-neo-Nazism; the sort of tone one would rather expect from The Guardian than TE (which is not to say that The Guardian never writes anything good)...
Thankfully it seems to be mostly over. One does not have to become subsumed by the feared "new normal" to analyse trends in public opinion with the proper objectivity, even in the interest of combating them...
