All around the world, nationalists are gaining ground. Why?

"The most recent example is Donald Trump, who persuaded 61m Americans to vote for him by promising to build a wall on the Mexican border, deport illegal immigrants and “make America great again”. Noxious appeals to ethnic or racial solidarity are hardly new in American politics, or restricted to one party."

Wow. Enforcing the laws as they are written is now characterised as a "noxious appeal...."

Such is the self-righteousness of the left. Sell out their country for their 'new world order'. Where is the globalist proof that the elitist-led new world order will respect freedoms? Much the opposite, actually, as the elite just plays off one group against another (witness identity politics).

Not all cultures are equal. Not all people share the same values. Countries protect their citizens. A world government would be as corrupt as it would completely inefficient.

Around the world, patriots are rising up against globalists who may be seen as traitor/predators.

The middle class is crashed and is trying to find roots, any root, between the lower working class whose condition has drastically improved and the wealthy ones who have increased their wealth tremendously.
As in the 30s' the middle class other option is to fall down to the lower class.

Any group with an unsatisfactory standard of living will eventually form a ‘movement’ to protest. All protest want someone with more power to help them get their way. The only way for any country to raise their standard of living is to become more competitive. Only if everyone is near equally competitive will the standards of living be nominally the same. Reality says there will be a wide margin between the most competitive and the least. Losers don’t like this, thus, they protest.
Globalization opened the world to greater competition. As a result, the least competitive have seen their standard of living drop and trade has become very unbalanced. The best you can hope for is that each country has a comparative advantage sufficient for them to live well. This is often not true. In this case, futile economic measures may be taken, but they are doomed to fail. If you want a good standard of living, you must beat the competition at something. Protest against this reality are a waste of energy.

I believe the left has missed the point. Many who voted for Trump are not against other cultures or races coming here. We are for a immigration more balanced with controlled legal immigration that isn't overwhelmed with poor and under educated. In addition, those who are Christians and are grieved by abortion. There is constant expanding of "women's rights" to abort even to the point of birth and partial birth abortions. Then my tax dollars pays for it. President Obama has spoken to Christians with obvious contempt and our views were dismissed. In addition, the people who lost jobs because of the changing global environment was not addressed. We were told to get over it. We have been called racist, bigots, and everything else. I wonder if anyone in The Economist knows a blue collar worker, other than your auto mechanic that is.

Today intellectuals, secularists and liberals are sitting in shock. They are wondering how they got things so wrong. Modi, Brexit, Putin, Trump...It appears to them that the world has an exact 180 degree opposite view than theirs. For long this bunch of people have controlled the thinking of our societies. They've controlled newspapers, magazines, TV channels, publishing houses. They have a common world-view and they promote writers, thinkers, reporters, TV anchors who feed into this common world view. In this world view the right is painted as evil, wicked killers and minorities shown as harmless innocents. If you profess to be a thinker, a senior bureaucrat or a politician in a democratic setup you had to be singing this tune...and in English please. If you are a writer and you book is on these lines, it gets snapped up, made into Oscar-winning, national award winning movies. They held the loudspeaker and we were isolated audience who were made to BELIEVE that this was the right way, even when we felt otherwise. That's the way the world worked till yesterday.
The Biggest Bloody change of the digital world is that it destroyed the power of these few who controlled all the loudspeakers. Suddenly the isolation between us, the audience broke down and we began speaking to each other. We've realized that these guys, the so called liberals are a minuscule number who have cleverly manipulated us into believing that their view was the World-view.
But it is not.
This here is an extract from another biased, one-sided product of the so-called liberals. It might still become a Oscar-nominated movie. But one thing is for certain, it's a body of lies and half-truths.

Great! A country ruled by the witch and her seven witch sisters. Ha.

You say:

"Some perspective is in order. Comparisons with the 1930s are fatuous. Totalitarian nationalism is extinct except in North Korea, "

This reveals why this article...intelligently written and data based...

...is in some ways at least as "fatuous".

Any reading of history reveals that the most important predictor of collective anxiety....

....is the current fear compared to the current baseline of "normal".

For example, all the citations of "dictatorship" above were in a world before antibiotics.

Hmmm...

You might say this out-of-the blue comment on antibiotics is "fatuous".

But if you dug deeper into reality, you would find that the "pre-antibiotic" era had a NORMAL baseline of extremely common death, and short life span.

Before antibiotics, most people had experience of small wounds resulting in death.

So societies of that era, who saw significant portions of their population die from influenza, infection, malnutrition, birth defects....etc...

...had a very different concept of death and risk.

The baseline of "brutality" was also considerably different up through the 1950's.

See data at "our world in data, war and peace"

Several years ago I stood at a small section of Gettysburg Civil War battle site in the US, where several thousand people killed each other by crawling over the bodies of dead comrades. Visualizing their doing this while looking at the small space was completely mystifying to me in today's world (except for the overtones of ISIS).

The Battle of Verdun killed perhaps 300,000 to more than 500,000 people, depending on the source.

In that era, it was "normal" that considerable numbers of people would die. If you study the early takeovers of dictators, their early beatings and murders were small, compared to baseline hostility, and not that shocking to the general populace.

(Read the early accounts of Hitler - who was seen as a "social innovator" when he first began his rants.)

So the baseline of that time was so horrid, that "normal" anxiety had completely different meaning.

The "deviation from baseline" was the most important thing then...

...as it is now.

Today - the world is much more peaceful. Its hostile "body count" is extremely low compared to history.

Our governments have sold us on the concept of "zero risk", which has created a baseline against which we compare change and novelty.

Despite massive reductions in air pollution, we fear "tipping points of climate change".

In a world of extremely low hostile death rates, a knife-wielding crazy at Ohio State makes national headline news.

We just had the largest financial shock in recent times..and recovered comparatively intact.

Two former poverty stricken nations ("colonies") are taking over the largest economic, technological, and employment shares of global human activity.

This is emotionally de-stabilizing to former imperialist cultures, but it is not nearly so bad as if they attacked Europe.

A possibly borderline New York business person - now President-elect..

... terrifies the world even though there is a bureaucracy of more 15,000,000 people and $3 Trillion between his campaign fantasies and their daily implementation.

Our objective baseline of life, compared to that of the 1920's is virtually risk free - which is exactly why it is so easy for people to freak out about even minor deviations.

(Have you noticed that President Obama had very little experience when he took office, BTW?)

Objectively, compared to history it is silly for people to fear such small things.

But the fear people feel is not "fatuous". It is real for the time and place.

Just as the hyperbolic fears of the editors of the Economist were evident in their "forecasts" of doom in the few hours after the apparent election of Donald Trump.

"Fatuous-ity" is relative and egalitarian. It affects even the educated, intelligent, and well-to-do.

Interesting that you never bring up Japan. They virulently oppose any Muslims entering or gaining citizenship. The issue is not nationalism the issue is identity and values without xenophobia. The more we label people who want to retain a national identity as racist the more we invite the alt right to gain power. We can accept refugees and people and immigrants. We need them to assimilate and embrace democracy and equality. Asking them to do so is not racsit it is survival. There is no middle and your job as journalists is to find that by exposing nothing sides fairly. Please do your job.

I think if Trump has demonstrated anything about his ideology clearly, it is that he has no ideology. A lifelong liberal democrat New York racket man who listened to what all the voters who looked like him complained about, won the presidency by parroting it back to them, and is now flip-flopping on every last promise.
Lots of supporters of nationalism have valid points. But doesn't it bother you guys that your posterboy so obviously just fed you what you wanted to hear in order to take office? What part of anything he's ever done gives you the idea he's going to work to dismantle the system that made him rich?

Please read 2Timothy 3:1-5 and Revelation 12:9-12 to understand what is leading to all these developments in the world.

About the time native populations become despised racial minorities in their own countries, they will discover that multiculturalism was a short lived political fad unique to their culture and generation.

Then the fun begins.

The foolishness of liberal youth will crash into a future where jobs are scarce, due to AI and Automation and immigration, food, energy and living quarters are also scarce, all cause by climate change. When that reality arrives at the middle of the century where will all these ultra liberal views go? Most likely to next generation of foolish youngster.

The current nationalism wave is just the people's attempt of returning power to their hands.
Today the power is located in the hands of non-elected bureaucrats of the EU, UN ans similar organizations supported by politically correct press. As soon the wrong thinking candidate puts his head above the ground, press opens the hunting season, allowing only the properly thinking to rule. It was very well described by Orwell.
People want the power back and the nationalism is the tool.
That explains the Economist's rage.

AFTER the sans culottes rose up against Louis XVI in 1789 they drew up a declaration of the universal rights of man and of the citizen
----------------------------------------------------------------
Theoretically they declared the universal rights of man and of the citizen. Practically they provided the equal right to the guillotine. It was the starting point of the political correctness culture and European hypocrisy. Obviously Economist prizes that moment.

"All around the world, nationalists are gaining ground. Why?" Well, this is an easy one to answer. They have simplistic solutions, with catastrophic consequences, to very complex problems that society as a whole everywhere were only too happy to ignore. For example, when cash was easy to come by and credit cards available to every single financially-challenged pinhead, everybody forgot about something called economic cycle. When the tide turned and idiots everywhere were caught short, loonies of every political stripe sprang up, marketing their snake oil. The sad thing is that snake oil is in high demand nowadays.

There is really no telling what Trump will do once in office. If his past is any indication, he will negotiate and compromise as necessary to achieve his goals. This is actually what should happen in any government and is something that Obama never even attempted. What he couldn't jam through Congress in the 2 years that he had a completely free hand, he attempted to implement through Executive Orders as a means of circumventing the will of the people. The fact that the Democrats have been losing seats at both the federal and state levels is a clear indication that they are out of touch with reality.

All the angst from the Democrats in the US is simply their irrational reaction to losing the election. This article is just another in a series of vapid, knee-jerk, pseudo analytical, writings that are popping up in the usual liberal dominated news outlets.

For goodness sake, he isn't even officially the President elect until 19 December. But you can already see how the news media is trying to whip up a new bogus theme. Already, within days, the mantra on the left is the election of Trump has emboldened hate groups and xenophobes. Idiot Governors such as Andrew Coumo have even set up special task forces to give this story a fig leaf of credence. Funny how none of the local news agencies have reported any upswing in violence associated with the so called alt-right.

The stories I see on a daily basis are all about the protestors from the left who are destroying private property in their quest to get their way, like children throwing a tantrum. Or, they are about the targeting of our police officers by forces that seemed bent on destabilizing the peace. These are not random acts of violence either, and they are being carried out by individuals or groups associated with the left.

Because the material advance of humans has taken place in precise contradistinction to their psychic decay, the two being symbiont. This obliges our civilisation to decline, which when manifested in daily life excavates its perceived but illusory origin. Blood and land, as the Germanic barbarians of another age would have phrased it.

The struggle between primordial sentiments and civil society is a very old one. It is as old as man himself in his struggle to be more civil.It is too facile to focus on the symptoms. I am surprised that this wide ranging article does not indicate anywhere that globalisation has not benefited huge sections of society in many countries. In fact it has been steadily eroding the economic power of the middle class, enriching largely a small group of oligarchs and some other less powerful elites. In Britain and the USA house price inflation has reduced the ability of many young people to buy their own houses and if they move into rented properties the rents in many places forms a very large part of their income. The middle class is the foundation of a democratic society.
The erosion of their purchasing power has left many working and middle class voters angry and bewildered. In addition the critical faculties that education and mass media should promote has been declining. Into this sad situation the unprincipled as well as the 'simple solution' people have jumped in with two easy offers. One is to channel the anger and disappointment towards the unresponsive to their needs ruling 'elite' political class. The other is to define sections of its own people as the cause of the problem e.g. Muslims or Mexicans or East Europeans.
In addition the growth of robotics has cut deep into the skilled working force whose jobs have disappeared with advanced robotic production. A rise in over all GDP does not necessarily translate into a rise in GDP per person person. The wages of average American workers has not risen in the last ten years. It may be possible to argue that absolute standard of living has actually risen in many countries as can be seen in the life expectancy of average person. But as studies have shown it is "relative depravations" that is significant not absolute in moving the electoral to the right of the political spectrum.
Mike Madha

I blame 50 years of leaded gasoline.
The statistics clearly show an increase in young crime (shifted 23 years) in direct proportion to lead use in gasoline.
I would not be surprised of a related drop in intelligence and self-control.
See data charts here: https://gyazo.com/125da468c3f6e33f08ba5061a31500f4

Wonderful article, in general.

But...as many are...it is heavily, tribally biased.

See the form of "nationalism" assumed in this article.

It has a new "brand" but is just the same as the history chronicled here.

Tribal factions fight each other with a deeply held internal sense of "tribe".

Here is where the bias in the article is best revealed.

"The most recent example is Donald Trump, who persuaded 61m Americans to vote for him by promising to build a wall on the Mexican border, deport illegal immigrants and “make America great again”."

This is a tribal war cry.

But...

Hilary Clinton was/is doing exactly the same thing...war-crying to a different tribe.

Clinton's "nationalism" and "populism" was/is:

"We, a tribe of educated and all-seeing, gentle people....know that connecting our kind across many of those local, unseeing tribes....like the Brexit and Trump tribes....will bring the best things to all people."

The root causes of this tribalism are evident, and although the "brands" of tribes change, the process remains constant over history.

Luckily this war is more about words than nuclear weapons.

Luckily the hostile death toll does not begin to approach that of recent world wars.

But this article is still written from one tribal viewpoint that asserts the writers, and "global" politicians are not just another form of "nationalist" or "tribalist"....and that the Good Tribe is fighting the Bad Tribe.