As lots of you will have noticed, the political process in the USA this election cycle has been dominated by two insurgent candidacies in each of the two major political parties.
In the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders attempted to win the nomination, gained a lot of votes, delegates and air time, and came close to winning. For the Republican Party, Donald Trump steamrollered his way to the nomination, with most of his more established and mainstream opponents withdrawing once it became clear that they could not win.
The popularity and success of those insurgent candidates shows that the mainstream leaderships of the two major political parties in the USA have lost legitimacy in the minds of many electors. Given the lack of traction of third parties in the US political system, the result has been the capture of the GOP by forces whose world view is both authoritarian and nativist. Many of Donald Trump’s supporters are deeply and viscerally hostile to many of the developments of modern international commerce such as technology, open borders and free movement of labour. They see many of those developments as a conspiracy to marginalize them, and ensure that their lives will be negatively impacted. Moving outside of the loud and aggressive Donald Trump support base, a lot of Americans are not happy with the economic progress of the modern USA, as this Guardian article shows.
Many people have been attempting to make sense of these insurgencies. many explanations have been offered, but most of them have little to say about the underlying root causes.
Without understanding those root causes, there is unlikely to be a solution that addresses the disconnection, cynicism and general discontent of many electors. This is corrosive to democracy, and will encourage further insurgent candidacies, some of which will, based on recent history, result in the appearance of demagogues and fascists offering simplistic solutions based on eliminationist approaches to out groups and opponents.
This article from Evgeny Morosov attempts to analyze the root causes of this discontent. His conclusion is that tech companies are the main underlying root cause.
