Donald Trump, who has made fools of those who wrote him off, is an important symptom. He appeals to those frightened and marginalized by economic change. They blame minorities and foreigners and see that political elites of both parties don't give a damn.
But the same is happening in much of Europe. In Italy Beppe Grillo, a professional comedian who once organized a "V-Day celebration (V for vaffanculo or "up your rear") turned this into a presumably leftist protest party that won a quarter of the popular vote in Italy's 2013 election. In France Marine Le Pen revamped her father's anti-Semitic National Front to make it more popular by advocating withdrawal from the Euro, blocking immigration, and returning France to a narrow, xenophobic, protectionist, and nationalist past. In England the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a rising force on the right, has similar goals: hostility to immigration, withdrawal from the Europe Union, and retreat into a little, closed Britain. In both Britain and France such policies would be a disaster, but mainstream politicians are too timid to defend rationality against the extremists who capitalize on widespread frustration with the status quo.
In Scandinavia new right-wing movements are thriving on anti-immigrant rage. In Hungary Prime Minister Victor Orbán has co-opted the far right by mocking democracy and the liberal values of the European Union, tolerating anti-Semitism, and promoting ultra nationalism.
This reflects a growing rejection of many of the principles of the Enlightenment that seemed, after two centuries of often bloody struggle, to be winning in the Western world and spreading far beyond it. Rationality, individual freedom of choice, moderate capitalism, religious toleration, and rejection of the most blatantly aggressive forms of militarism and nationalism were ideals that were enshrined in the European Union. In the United States it seemed as if the long fight to fully ensure the principles once laid out in the Constitution were getting closer to being institutionalized. But growing rage threatens all that, and too many in the political elite refuse to defend that Enlightenment, while some even join those forces of bigotry, irrationality, and resentment to win votes.
The last time there was such widespread discontent was in the 1930s, and this led in most of Europe and parts of Latin American and East Asia into fascism as well as to the parallel growth of the far left. In Europe and Asia this was the main cause of World War II.
Now the United States had a major recession, but has substantially recovered, and it was never close to being as dire as the 1930s. Despite its economic stagnation and financial problems, most of Europe remains immensely prosperous and peaceful. China has become economically and politically more powerful, but the United States remains by far the world's greatest power. Policy mistakes have involved America in useless and unwinnable wars that lowered its prestige, but that has never posed an existential threat. The Vietnam War was worse, and the United States overcame that defeat.
This drift away from the West's best ideals has occurred because Europe and America became too accustomed to decades of easy material success, peace at home, and politics that thrived on petty carping. Faith in the Enlightenment's ideas that proved so successful grew stale and uninspiring. Neither America nor Europe has remained politically dynamic. They appear paralyzed and uncertain. They no longer provide the ideal model they did for the rest of the world as recently as in the early 1990s. Defending the liberal Enlightenment in our universities became passé, and promoting its philosophical values around the world turned into mere public relations and tired clichés. Institutions that once worked became sclerotic in both the United States and Europe. The rest of the world, not least Russia, China, and Muslim societies have noticed, and summarily dismissed the Western democratic, liberal model that once appeared to be the universal future.
Who loves Trump? Many are among the most reactionary evangelical Christians who also deny almost all aspect of the Enlightenment, going so far as to reject modern science and toleration of differences. (And rather alarmingly, that kind of religiosity is rapidly gaining ground in much of Latin America and Africa.) As among similar supporters of his kind of politics in Europe, other Trump fans are just fearful of being overcome by foreign cultures brought here by supposed immigrant hordes. To this add resentment of elites, resurgent racism, and a general feeling of being left behind.
The Western world is slipping back into the demoralization and loss of faith in its own values that overwhelmed Europe in the 1930s and opened the way to catastrophe. Trump's success is a symptom of something very dangerous that will long outlive his present campaign.
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Daniel Chirot and Scott L. Montgomery teach in the Henry Jackson School at the University of Washington. They are the authors of The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2015).