Revolt Against the Elites | 2016

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

— Refrain from “The World Turned Upside Down,” a 17th century English ballad —

In his “Year in Review,” published in the Miami Herald on December 30, 2016, the popular columnist Dave Barry wrote, “We’ve seen some weird years. But we’ve never seen one as weird as 2016. This was the Al Yankovic of years. If years were movies, 2016 would be Plan 9 from Outer Space. If years were relatives, 2016 would be the uncle who shows up at your Thanksgiving dinner wearing his underpants on the outside.” Dave Barry was speaking for millions of people who had watched the previous 365 days unfold and wondered if someone had spiked their morning coffee. It seemed as though every time they turned on their televisions, checked their Twitter feeds, or talked to their friends or coworkers that someone, somewhere was predicting with utter certainty that an event would unfold in precisely one way, only to have the complete and utter opposite take place. Donald Trump was never going to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Bernie Sanders was never going to be a serious challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The United Kingdom was never going to vote to leave the European Union. And, most assuredly, the American people would NEVER elect an orange television star with the vocabulary of a fourth-grader to be the leader of their nation and of the free world!

But when the dust had settled, Donald Trump sat atop a heap of defeated Republican candidates—the strongest set of potential nominees in a generation. Hillary Clinton had to battle Bernie Sanders at every step along her path to the Democratic nomination and, some Sanders supporters believed, had to resort to unscrupulous and unfair tactics to reach the finish line. The Vote Leave campaign succeeded in convincing 52% of the British people to leave the European Union. And the orange TV star was President-elect of the United States of America! From Washington to London, from New York to Brussels, the professional predictors shook their heads in disbelief. What on earth had happened to the people?

Turning points in history are difficult to identify in the moment. Alexander the Great could not have foreseen his impact on world events when his father died. William of Normandy had no idea his victory at Hastings would reshape English, and European, history. Louis Pasteur simply wanted to help people—he could not know that his discovery would revolutionize modern medicine. As the Brexit referendum and the Trump-Clinton presidential election approached, both sides predicted that the outcomes would be turning points in their respective countries, but it is still too early to tell what the long-term impacts of 2016 will be. Nevertheless, in this last podcast of season three on 15-Minute History, we want to look back only a few years and explore the origins of perhaps the most recent turning point which you, our audience, witnessed firsthand.

Populism—Neither Right nor Left

Until very recently, the term “populism” was not widely known outside the halls of academia. It refers to political beliefs that transcend traditional right-left definitions of conservative or liberal and which espouses policies that benefit the people (often against “the elites” or those in power). At the turn of the 20th century in the United States, there was a populist political party, but it never really gained traction in this country because of the institutional power within the two main parties. Certain political figures are often associated with populism in America, and they are some of the most popular and successful political leaders of both parties: Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan to cite just a few examples. In the United Kingdom, populism was almost unknown until the 1970s, and the term was usually applied to radical groups in places like Germany and Russia for much of the 20th century. However, events in both the US and the UK combined to create a populist groundswell which reached their respective climaxes four years ago.

Britain Stronger in Europe vs. Vote Leave

On January 1, 1973, the United Kingdom joined what was then called the European Coal and Steel Community (the predecessor to the European Union). As part of the ECSC, Great Britain gained access to tariff-free trade with the other member states and, in return, aligned its trade and economic policies with those other nations. Nineteen years later, Britain and the other ECSC members signed the Maastricht Treaty, formally establishing the European Union. As the 21st century dawned, the EU began to implement a series of legal and constitutional reforms which strengthened the power of its five unelected commissioners against that of the European Parliament, made up of MEPs who represented various regions in each member state. In 2004, after ten states in Eastern Europe joined the Union, the EU decided to draft a constitution formalizing these reforms. However, a year later, voters in France and the Netherlands refused to ratify the proposed constitution. The European Commission then created the Treaty of Lisbon, which enshrined many of the reforms contained in the constitution without asking the citizens of member states for their input. Euroscepticism then soared in many member states, especially in Great Britain, where the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, and its leader Nigel Farage focused on the undemocratic nature of the European Union to appeal to British voters. Pro-EU politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties countered UKIP’s Eurosceptic rhetoric with plans to reform the EU from within, insisting that it was better to work with other member states to make the union more democratic rather than overturning the table, taking their chips, and going home.

In 2014, UKIP stunned many political prognosticators by winning the largest vote share in Britain’s European Parliament elections. Farage, who had been an MEP since 1999, used YouTube and other social media channels to spread his anti-EU message. A year later, in the 2015 General Election, nearly four million Britons cast their votes for UKIP. While the party did not win any seats in Parliament, the message to the winning Conservative Party was clear—the country was desperate for a chance to make its voice heard on the issue of Britain’s membership in the European Union. A month after the election, Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative Party passed the European Union Referendum Act, and in February 2016 he announced that the referendum vote would be held on June 23, 2016.

The Brexit referendum campaign was one of the most vitriolic in recent British politics. Both sides hurled abuse against their opponents and made wild claims—true and false—about the other side’s motivations and the effects which either leaving the EU or remaining a member would have on the country. On the Leave side, the Member of Parliament from Uxbridge and Ruislip, Boris Johnson, claimed that leaving the EU would save the British taxpayers £350 million each week (a dubious statement at best), while UKIP leader Farage ran ads and spoke in front of billboards with images of racial minorities while decrying continued Third-World immigration as a reason why Britain faced economic and cultural upheaval. The Remain side countered with wild claims that a vote to leave the EU would bankrupt Great Britain, and some Remainers—most famously senior Labour Party leaders Alister Campbell and Emily Thornberry —insisted that everyone who voted Leave was “either a racist or a moron.”

When referendum day arrived, Britain, Europe, and the world watched with baited breath as the results began to pour in. By 11:00 pm British Summer Time, the professional politicians and pundits were shocked beyond belief—the British people had rejected the Remain campaign’s warnings and had voted to leave. Across Europe, the elites were stunned. Their plans had gone awry because the people of the United Kingdom had been given a voice and a choice. Prime Minister Cameron resigned the following day and was replaced by Theresa May, who stated in her first speech to Parliament that the government would “take back control of our money, our laws and our borders” by implementing the results of the referendum. She triggered Article 50, the mechanism for leaving the EU, on March 29, 2017, and two years later to the day, she promised, Britain would be free to chart its own course in the world.

The angry rhetoric of the 2016 referendum proved to be just the beginning. In the months and years which followed May’s accession to the premiership, her government was repeatedly thwarted by both the opposition Labour Party and by elements within her own Conservative Party. Her deal with the European Union, which took Britain out of the customs union and single market (meaning that new trade deals would need to be negotiated and that tariffs might lead to higher prices for consumer goods) was rejected three times by the House of Commons. Calls from MPs in both parties for a second referendum gained popular approval, and amidst the deadlock, in Parliament, it seemed that another vote might be just over the horizon. Nigel Farage, who believed his work was done and had resigned from UKIP in November 2016, formed a new political party, the Brexit Party, in January 2019 to thwart a second referendum and fulfill the promise of the first. When March 29, 2019 came, the United Kingdom was still in the European Union. Two months later, after the Brexit Party won a majority of British seats in the European Parliament election, Prime Minister May resigned and was replaced by a leader in the Vote Leave campaign, Boris Johnson. His early months in office saw more resistance to fulfilling the wishes of the British people, so he called for a general election to take place in December 2019. Again, the political classes predicted doom for the Leavers, and again they were wrong. Johnson, having purged all Remainers from the parliamentary Conservative Party and campaigning on a platform of “Getting Brexit Done,” won a massive majority in the election. He then passed a modified withdrawal act containing a new deal with the EU, and on January 30, 2020, Britain formally left the European Union.

Stronger Together vs. Make America Great Again

By June 2015, the race to succeed President Barack Obama was in full swing. In the Democratic Party, former First Lady, New York senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had started her campaign and was already being touted by media analysts and political experts as the next President of the United States. At that point, her only major rivals, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland, were far behind her in the polls. On the Republican side, the crowded primary field already included four senators, three governors, a CEO of a major tech company, and a world-class pediatric neurosurgeon—and it would eventually include a total of seventeen major candidates. Former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida was the presumptive nominee according to the experts because of his record running his state and his family connections to the White House (he is the brother of one former president and the son of another). But then, on June 16th, the world watched with wild amusement as real estate mogul and star of The Apprentice Donald Trump descended a golden elevator in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City and announced his candidacy for President of the United States. His speech was filled with controversial statements and wild promises, and nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle laughed Trump off as a buffoon or denounced him as a racist. No one took him seriously at first.

On August 6th, the ten top-polling Republican candidates took the stage at the first debate of the primaries. After an opening question from the moderators about which candidates would support the eventual nominee, Donald Trump was asked about comments he had made about women in the past. His answer—in which he criticized the comedienne Rosie O’Donnell— shocked everyone who heard it. No one in modern presidential history had ever said anything like that while trying to win a presidential nomination. Trump’s debate performances continued to be rocky, filled with outrageous rhetoric and slights against other candidates and public figures. Political experts insisted that he would never be the nominee, despite the fact that in every debate in which he participated he was center-stage because he was ranked first in the polls. The Trump campaign also held dozens of rallies across the country in packed stadiums where the candidate would riff for an hour or two with little scripting or preparation. His messages were simple, and while the experts on cable television smiled and shook their heads and the activists on Twitter ranted and raged, the base of the Republican Party gradually warmed to the simple populism of Donald Trump. Eventually, other candidates began to drop out of the race, and in the Indiana primary in May 2016, Trump gained the delegates he needed to become the Republican nominee. Even after watching Donald Trump crush some of the most experienced professional politicians in his party, the experts on cable and online predicted a landslide for his opponent.

The Democratic race was soon mired in controversy as the party refused to hold a large number of televised debates. Sanders and O’Malley supporters insisted that the Democratic National Committee was shielding Clinton from scrutiny by limiting the number of debates. At the same time, Secretary Clinton was under investigation by the FBI over a scandal involving a private email server and the possibility of her sending classified information through unsecured channels. Governor O’Malley eventually faded from view as the progressive anti-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party coalesced behind Senator Sanders. Once the primaries began, Clinton and Sanders battled each other for months to secure enough delegates to clinch the nomination. Again, controversy erupted as the DNC was accused of helping the Clinton campaign by giving them early access to questions for a CNN debate. As the convention approached, Clinton ultimately amassed enough delegates to win the nomination, but Sanders refused to withdraw from the race. At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the chairwoman of the DNC, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign by Sanders delegates enraged at the committee’s biased attitude towards their candidate. (Wasserman Schultz was then appointed a co-chair of the Clinton campaign.) Secretary Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, gave their speeches and received the adulation of their party, and the race began. The 2016 presidential election was one media circus after another. The Clinton campaign was dogged at every point by questions surrounding the candidate’s use of a private email server and by reports from the controversial organization Wikileaks, which published numerous anonymous leaks and reports about corruption during the Clinton-Sanders primary campaign. Secretary Clinton did not help her campaign in September when she called some of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” showing clear disdain for a large swathe of the American people. Two days later, when she appeared to collapse at a 9/11 memorial event, her physical health immediately became a campaign issue as well. Trump’s problems during the general election were largely self-inflicted. He regularly used outrageous phrases and bombastic rhetoric which drew criticism from the left and right, and his tweets were treated as breaking news stories every single day. In the debates, Clinton appeared poised and in command of the facts, while Trump was often distracted by minutiae (such as claims he had abused a Miss Universe candidate for her weight) or interjected while Clinton was speaking (saying at one point that his opponent would “be in jail” if he was in office). The worst moment for the Trump campaign was leaked audio of the candidate making claims about what women would let him do to them which emerged days before the second presidential debate. Republican politicians ran from Trump as quickly as possible, and the Clinton campaign collectively breathed a sigh of relief. The American people, they reasoned, would never elect a man who said that he could grab women anywhere he wanted.

On election night, the early states’ electoral college votes went as everyone predicted. Secretary Clinton won the liberal states of the Northeast, while Mr. Trump won the conservative states of the lower Midwest, South and Great Plains. Everyone was watching three states in the upper Midwest, what Democrats called their “blue wall”—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In the wake of the Trump audio leak, the Clinton campaign had largely abandoned those states, while Trump had campaigned aggressively in each during the closing weeks of the election (including a midnight rally the night before the election in Michigan). The American people watched as one state after another was called for either Trump or Clinton, and media experts continued to examine the exit polls from the blue wall states and wonder why they were not being called one way or the other. Finally, at 3:00 am on Wednesday, November 9th, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin went for Trump, and Michigan was called later that day. After shattering the blue wall, Donald Trump took the stage about twenty minutes later as President-elect of the United States of America.

Turning Point: The Revolt Against the Elites

In 1945, as much of the world lay in ruins after the Second World War, new international organizations like the United Nations offered the promise of peace and cooperation among nations. The rise of globalism as a new ideology to replace nationalism during the second half of the 20th century lies at the root of the dramatic events of 2016. Globalism is a very controversial term, and it must be understood that we here at 15-Minute History are not using the word in a conspiratorial or new world order-esque manner. Increased international cooperation has indeed kept the world safe from global conflict and led to major periods of economic growth which have benefitted billions of people.

However, once the Cold War ended, a new trend emerged alongside globalism which, many historians and commentators assert, have not been as beneficial to humanity as some might believe. This was the use of corporate power to promote business interests over those of average people. For example, free trade agreements between developed and developing nations which led to lower costs on consumer goods, as they were now being produced in factories staffed by lower-paid workers, also meant millions of lost jobs in manufacturing industries in places like the Midwestern United States and the north of England in the United Kingdom. Free movement of peoples across international borders brought in waves of low-skilled workers, who further displaced national citizens in the service industry across the developed world, but it meant cheaper labor costs to those who employed these migrant workers. Did this new corporatist trend benefit nations? Yes. Did it also create serious problems? Yes. The biggest question of all is this—did the countries that adopted these policies find ways to help those who were hurt by them? No. In the United States, both Republican and Democratic urged people who had lost jobs to low-skilled workers or outsourcing to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” or “recognize that these jobs aren’t coming back.” In Great Britain, both parties introduced vast new spending programs to compensate displaced workers rather than help them find new jobs.

This is the root of populism’s rise in the 2010s in the US and the UK and it at least partially explains the revolt against the elites seen in the Brexit results and Donald Trump’s election. Nigel Farage and his UKIP supporters wanted to restore British greatness, to free it from the regulations imposed by undemocratic commissioners in Brussels, and to forge a new path in the world where Britain could limit migration and create new trade relationships which benefitted British citizens. They were willing to risk everything the Remainers warned against, to take back control of their money, their laws, and their borders, and to move together into the storm and through the storm. Trump’s promise to “build a wall,” to replace NAFTA with new, “America First” trade deals, and to rebuild American industry-led millions of Americans to lay aside their disgust at his personal life, their frustration with his tweets, and their revulsion at some of his comments about others. They believed he would fulfill his promise to “make America great again.”

As I have told you many times this season, history is not pre-determined and the future is not set. To our audience in Great Britain, I hope that you have enjoyed this summary of the events of recent years in your country as much as I have enjoyed watching them from afar. I hope that now you are out of the European Union that you will be able to fulfill the promise of Brexit and will prosper in the new situation in which you find yourselves. I also look forward to returning to your country soon for a visit! For our American listeners, as we continue through this election season, I hope you will carefully consider the person for whom you plan to vote. Remember that you have been given an incredible gift, a voice in how your nation is being governed. This podcast is not an endorsement of Trump (or of Brexit) but an exploration of what brought about the events which we are living through today. If we have opened your eyes to the lessons which the past can teach, have shown you how even the most unlikely of people can turn the wheel of history and have made you think about our world today in a deeper way, then we have done our jobs.