Explaining the anti-incumbent backlash

Covid plays a crucial role

Biden unmasked while confirmed tested positive for Covid in his aborted presidential campaign of 2024

Many explanations of the US election results appeal to special characteristics Americans would have. They would be uniquely selfish, prone to hatred, or especially uneducated. But as John Burn-Murdoch points out, the US follows a well-established pattern among wealthy nations of anti-incumbent backlash. As he writes,

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records. (Financial Times)

While Burn-Murdoch points to post-covid changes such as inflation and high immigration, he does not point to the root cause of all these changes, namely the pandemic itself, and how these nations have reacted to it.

Looking at these reactions and subsequent changes can help explain voter sentiment in the following ways:

1. You cannot declare a pandemic over by social fiat

Many governments simply declared the Covid-19 pandemic over, even as the WHO has not. The problem is, a pandemic is not a psychological state of mind. It's a biological and social phenomenon. Simply declaring it over and resuming normal patterns of social interaction does not stop the unpredictable virus from wreaking havoc.

We are still faced with record levels of long-term illness, and this is so across the developed world. Long-term illness leads many people to leave the workforce and this leads to worker shortages, especially in key groups that are vulnerable to repeat covid infection such as teachers and nurses. News reports make no link to covid (except in terms of “postpandemic”) but if we dig a little deeper into growing medical literature on covid, the data are clear. For example, one in three UK healthcare workers has long covid symptoms. Covid infections also seem to make people more susceptible to other illnesses, heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes, leading to an overall much more ill population.

Incumbent parties tried to regain a feeling of normalcy by massaging people's behavior into pre-pandemic spending patterns. But they were unable to address the structural issues that covid still causes. They were keen to declare victory over the virus (very important for someone like Biden). But declaring victory hamstrung any response to address worker shortages, immigration associated with this, and supply chain issues and its associated inflation that are caused by repeat covid infections.

2. Slashing relief policies

Early in the pandemic, developed nations behaved in ways anomalous to the post-70s trends of privatization and liberalization. The crisis brought out collective responses. Rather than asking people to individually assess risk, they enacted a series of emergency measures that even now, in 2024, strike us as odd. For one thing, in the state of Missouri where I live, priority was given to homeless people and incarcerated people, as well as frontline workers to receive the covid-19 vaccine before wealthy people got their turn. The vaccine was distributed massively in various public places, and was accessible to people without health insurance. These vaccines were developed at at record speed due to a generously funded governmental program (Operation Warp Speed).

In addition, people received cash payouts, increases in the child tax credit, and pauses on their student loans. Kids had universal free school meals and no longer had to reckon with lunch debt. But all these special measures were rolled back when President Biden declared the pandemic over. The inflation combined with the halting of child tax credit extensions and other policies led many people to be materially a lot worse off than before the pandemic.

The message the US, and other incumbent governments gave with this was very clear: the pandemic is an anomaly. Business as usual is everyone for themselves. Indeed, there has been a retrospective demonizing of pandemic measures in the mainstream media, reducing all these measures to “lockdowns” and then attributing, without rigorous fact checking, any negative effects we still experience (e.g., children's lower tests scores) to these lockdowns. They conveniently forget to mention other pandemic measures such as healthcare accessibility and free school lunches to make people think that any collective response to a pandemic is bad. To put it succinctly: Don't expect us to help you. Help yourself.

If we now marvel at why electorates are voting in large numbers for parties that center egoism and greed, then we must take into account that this message was reinforced by centrist governments and their media for years, in part to get people to behave and consume in pre-pandemic ways.

3. The vulnerable are dispensable

With any surge of the far right, disabled people are the canary in the coal mine. While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were out campaigning with a message of joy and smiles, many disabled people felt abandoned by the total lack of covid protections. In the US, several Democrat cities and towns considered and enacted mask bans, thereby depriving vulnerable people of one of the few tools they have left to protect themselves. This abandonment did not make disabled people well-disposed to vote Democrat (though some did).

But the abandonment also influenced non-disabled people. The messaging, even of public health institutions such as the CDC, is that it is OK to remove all covid restrictions because healthy people will be fine. It's okay if the disabled and long-term ill “will fall by the wayside” because they are dispensable anyway. This form of reasoning falls dangerously close to eugenic ideas where societies actively make life hard for disabled people, even outlawing measures to protect themselves. It is allied to far-right parties which emphasize individual health and seeking success while actively disregarding, or even attacking, vulnerable minorities. In the US, as in many other countries, these minorities are undocumented immigrants and refugees.

If you have been telling voters for years that it's okay, indeed even the right thing to do, to trample on the vulnerable in pursuit of your own goals, can it be surprising that people straight out vote for parties that center such a message?

4. The people are reduced to voters

By abandoning the briefly-lived collective responses and support for poor people in the wake of covid, the people have once more been reduced to voters. When we think of governing the people, traditionally this has also meant looking out for them and their wellbeing. For example, in ancient Chinese philosophy the idea is that to govern the people well is to “love the people.” In the Da Xue (Great Learning), a classic Confucian text and one of the four classics people had to learn for the imperial exam, we read:

The way of the great learning
means enlightening your enlightened virtuous power,
loving (親) the people (民), 
and finding repose in the highest excellence.

The character 親 does not mean love in general, but love the way you love a family member of relative, so a close love of familiarity. The character 民 means folk or people in a state. Rulers need to show a concern for people. They must install good measures, and the people will reap concrete rewards. These rewards will then make the people to be well disposed to the government. This is clear in another passage from the Da Xue,

The Odes say: We will not forget the Kings of old. 
The prince values what they valued, and cherishes what they cherished. 
The common people delight in what they delighted and benefit from their benefits.

Or, as the anonymous author subtly points out, a current ruler can adopt the good values of benevolence and integrity of the earlier rulers. The people do not need to know what's all going on in the background, but as a result of those ethical principles, they will be well taken care of and will reap the material rewards.

We can see this in the building of welfare states post World War II in various developed countries, which coupled free enterprise and economic growth with various social welfare policies such as expanded healthcare access, improved educational standards, and insurance against disability and unemployment.

This model slowly became eroded in favor of a more exclusively economic growth-based model, looking at how one can improve profits without necessarily improving the welfare of all. The result of this, as Eribon documents in Returning to Reims, his memoir on growing up poor, white, and working class, was that the poorer middle class and working class began to regard socialist and center governments with suspicion, as having abandoned them collectively. The people are now not anymore the populace governments have to be concerned about and bear responsibility for. They are now reduced to voters, and voters are powerless except at the ballot box. The result has been swings in first-past-the-post systems, and an increasingly fragmented landscape of coalition partners in countries with proportional representation, such as Belgium.

People have increasingly used the ballot box to voice their discontent with how their lives and those they care about are going. When centrist governments warn them not to vote for far-right political parties or policies (such as Brexit) and tell them it will end in chaos, this does not have a deterring effect. Indeed, the idea of voting for chaotic change, a clean slate, and for a realignment of existing situation is welcomed. When you are reduced from the people to be cared for, to a voter who is expected to vote a certain way every few years, you might just vote for chaos. There is no other social contract, after all, than the tenuous short-term tenure following elections. Other modes of civic participation are also reduced. For example, democratic debate in the free press is in decline given the evisceration of quality journalism, local newspapers, and the capture of journalism by billionaires. So there's little left in the way of communication of the people to their government except by voting. And voting for chaos sends a clear message.

5. Powerlessness vs empowerment

The countries that recently suffered anti-incumbent backlash have done nothing concrete to counter the climate crisis, which is now increasingly showing its violent effects in those very countries: hurricanes, floods, draughts, a palpable feeling in rise in temperature… Incumbent governments have done nothing except, in some cases such as the UK, criminalize climate protests.

Pedestrians stand next to piled up cars following deadly floods in Sedavi, south of Valencia, on October 30, 2024. © Jose Jordan, AFP

The climate crisis is yet one more symptom that the governments that are supposed to be responsible managers have abandoned their people.

In the face of this, is it a surprise that people vote not for total abandonment and vague promises of going carbon-neutral by 2050 but for parties that simply deny there's a climate crisis? That fakery seems more attractive, especially given our powerlessness in the face of it. Bruno Latour in Down to Earth has recently argued that we should not see the current far-right as direct heirs of fascism such as Mussolini, but as an entirely different beast. The central element is climate change denial. By projecting a nostalgic past that never was (Make America Great Again etc) they give people at least an illusion of control, a way to escape the never-ending misery of daily life.

Most of all, far-right rhetoric promises empowerment and control. I still think the slogan “take back control” (Brexit) was brilliant strategizing, showing a deep insight into who might be attracted to the chaos of Brexit. They were people who were suffering under decades of unrelenting austerity, with more hardly-hit towns and regions more prone to vote for Brexit.

My daughter tells me that Trump voters her age (first-time voters) are attracted to this message: they are mostly young men, already indebted, or with poor economic outlook who like messages of individual control, individually getting fit and wealthy, as is propagated in Youtube content of fitness and working out—the pipeline from these to far-right content is very short, apparently.

In the wake of the pandemic, incumbent governments across the developed world have clearly given the message: it's everyone for themselves, if you fall ill or poor no one will help you and we find it ok you fall by the wayside, we will not address major crises that affect everyone. In that climate, the individual voter, who is already primed to think selfishly finds in the far-right an attractive message. In the bleak world of increasing chaos that incumbent governments are sustaining, you are either a victim and vulnerable (not a good way to think about yourself) or someone who is strong, independent, and sticking it up to those you do not like.