Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

From Trumpmania to Euroscepticism: Revenge of the Plebs

The Third Wayists are quaking in their boots. The middle-class, middle-of-the-road technocrats who have dominated politics for the best part of three decades are freaking out. These people who bristle at anything ideological, are disdainful of heated debate, and have bizarrely turned the word ‘moderate’ into a compliment feel under siege. And no wonder they do, for on both sides of the Atlantic their very worst nightmare — a revenge of the plebs — is becoming flesh.

You can see this sometimes clumsy but nonetheless forceful reassertion of pleb power in everything from Trumpmania to the staggering back to life of Euroscepticism — or what snooty moderates call ‘Europhobia’, because every point of view that runs counter to their own must be a mental illness, right?

In both Middle America and Middle England, among both rednecks and chavs, voters who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics. And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.

Consider their fury, or bamboozlement, with Trump’s army. Who are these strange creatures pumping their fists in the air for a big-haired billionaire who is most proud of being un-PC, they wonder?

They’re so perplexed by these plebs that they’ve taken to psychologising them. The Washington Post, America’s foremost purveyor of the bland post-politics politics, asked actual psychologists to give their take on the Trump-following blob. Their conclusion? That they love Trump because he tells them their problems are ‘simple and easy to solve’.

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