These core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple. For most of the population, the last 40-odd years were either an experience of stagnation, or an experience of decline.
Understand clearly, by 79 people had lost faith in the post-WWII order. They were willing to try something new.
That order has now betrayed too many people, and it is falling. It will continue to fall. We are in the twilight of Neoliberalism (longer article on that later.)
But this is why people are going for “fake news”. This is why people are willing to listen to demagogues. This is why people don’t trust the press (why should they,
the press lied to them repeatedly, it is the original fake news). This is why they don’t listen when hundreds of economists say Brexit is bad (why should they, most economists missed the housing bubble.)
Neoliberalism has discredited everyone who bought in to it. Who didn’t buy into it? Well, the hard left and what people are now calling the “alt-right”.
So people are turning in those directions, though more to the right. Because people are ideologically and iden y driven, and most are not intellectuals, what they look for are signifiers that someone is not like the people who screwed them, who lied to them for 40 years.
Trump does not talk like those people. Farrage does not talk like those people. On the left, Corbyn does not talk like those people and to a large extent, neither did Sanders.
And so they are turning to people who don’t parse like the regular type of elite. Many of those people are also selling them a bill of goods (Trump, to a large extent), or are nasty pieces of work (Trump, Alt-Right), but that doesn’t matter to a lot of people: they can’t take the pain any more; the assured long decline and they will take a flyer on anyone who might shake things up.