Donald Trump in America, Rob Ford in Canada, Brexit in the U.K., and (maybe) Marine Le Pen in France—as I wrote on Tuesday, populism is tied to a cultural backlash reinforced by our increasingly uneven geography. These growing divides generate the anger and backlash that translates into backward-looking, reactionary populist politics.
The economic strategies of populists are territorial: walls, immigration restrictions, and rules based on national origin. But populism’s rise in Europe as well as the United States is less a product of economic inequality per se or even of economic anxiety; it is a cultural backlash against urbanism and the values of openness, globalism, tolerance, and diversity that are the hallmark of great cities.
I last spoke with Josef Konvitz, author of the book Cities and Crisis, here in May. A former head of urban affairs and regulatory policy at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Konvitz recently gave a seminar at the OECD on the forces driving this populist uprising and the fates of cities caught up in it; our follow-up conversation on what has been happening in the U.S. and Europe since has been condensed and edited.
[For more of this story, written by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/politi...-of-backlash/520056/]
Comments (0)