Here’s a character rarely mentioned in the contemporary political debate. He (he’s usually a man) lives in a suburb or small town. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon, and he worked his way up, which wasn’t always fun. Now he owns his home and earns above-average income. He is scathing of big-city elites with posh accents who got easy lives handed to them. In short, he’s a middle-class anti-elitist.
You find him across the western world: in New Jersey and Long Island, around the English south-east, the Milan agglomeration and in the quiet suburbs of Rotterdam. The comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit and Italy’s Lega. Yet he’s largely ignored, while the conversation about populism revolves around an entirely different figure: the impoverished former factory worker.
Pundits are forever explaining why poor Sunderland voted for Brexit, but rarely why wealthy Bournemouth did. In most developed countries, populism is less a working-class revolt than a middle-class civil war. So why do well-off people vote against the system?