The Arab Spring of 2011 disrupted dictatorships throughout the Middle East, but then profoundly disappointed hopes for greater democracy in the region as Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria descended into civil war.

The terrorist upsurge that produced the September 11 attacks was not defeated by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather, it mutated into the Islamic State, which emerged as a beacon for profoundly illiberal and violent Islamists around the world. What was as remarkable as ISIS’s resilience was that so many young Muslims left lives of comparative safety elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe to travel to Syria to fight on its behalf.

More surprising and perhaps even more significant were the two big electoral surprises of 2016, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. In both cases, voters were concerned with economic issues, particularly those in the working class who had been exposed to job loss and deindustrialisation.

But just as important was opposition to continued large-scale immigration, which was seen as taking jobs from native-born workers and eroding long-established cultural identities. Anti-immigrant and antiEU parties gained strength in many other developed countries, most notably the National Front in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Alternative for Germany, and the Freedom Party in Austria. Across the Continent there were both fears of Islamist terrorism and controversies over bans on expressions of Muslim identity such as the burka, niqab, and burkini.

The Politics of Resentment

The proportion of national output going to the top 1 percent went from 9 percent of GDP in 1974 to 24 percent in 2008. But as important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment.

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilised followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

Thus, Russian president Vladimir Putin has talked about the tragedy of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and how Europe and the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s weakness during the 1990s to drive NATO up to its borders. He despises the attitude of moral superiority of Western politicians and wants to see Russia treated not, as President Obama once said, as a weak regional player, but as a great power.

Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, stated in 2017 that his return to power in 2010 marked the point when ‘we Hungarians also decided that we wanted to regain our country, we wanted to regain our self-esteem, and we wanted to regain our future’.

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilised followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded.

The Chinese government of Xi Jinping has talked at length about China’s ‘one hundred years of humiliation’, and how the United States, Japan, and other countries were trying to prevent its return to the great power status it had enjoyed through the past millennia of history.

When the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was fourteen, his mother found him fixated on Palestine, ‘tears streaming down his face as he watched TV from their home in Saudi Arabia’. His anger at the humiliation of Muslims was later echoed by his young coreligionists volunteering to fight in Syria on behalf of a faith they believed had been attacked and oppressed around the world. They hoped to re-create the glories of an earlier Islamic civilisation in the Islamic State.

While distant in time and place, the feelings among Putin’s supporters over the arrogance and contempt of Western elites were similar to those experienced by rural voters in the United States who felt that the urban bicoastal elites and their media allies were similarly ignoring them and their problems. The practitioners of the politics of resentment recognise one another. The sympathy that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have for each other is not just personal but rooted in their common nationalism. Viktor Orbán explained, ‘Certain theories describe the changes now taking place in the Western world and the emergence on the stage of a U.S. president as a struggle in the world political arena between the transnational elite—referred to as ‘global’—and patriotic national elites’, of which he was an early exemplar.

One of the striking characteristics of global politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that the dynamic new forces shaping it are nationalist or religious parties and politicians, the two faces of identity politics, rather than the class-based left-wing parties that were so prominent in the politics of the twentieth century. Nationalism may have been sparked initially by industrialisation and modernisation, but it has in no way disappeared from the world, including in those countries that have been industrially developed for generations.