The USA voted in Donald Trump as a populist who promises help for the working man (mainly in rust belt states and cities) and economic prosperity. Voters say he spoke to them. He is a wealthy man, it is said, with business interests in many foreign lands. Now The National Front in France is hoping to elect Marine Le Pen as French president. The English and Welsh voted for Brexit (notably the Scots and Northern Irish voted against it). Turkey is slipping further and further into President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's religious influenced statist political philosophy. Syria is fighting a civil war. Egypt is under military dictatorship. Libya is hovering on renewed civil war. Iraq is partly occupied by Islamic State. Malaysia is in political turmoil. China is a communist/capitalist one party state showing signs of economic trouble. Russia is engaging in military renewal. The EU is troubled both economically and politically. Africa is unstable, South America is in recession and moving to the right.
Almost everywhere the right is growing in strength and asserting nationalistic identity as their theme and catch cry. This is all happened before, back in the 1930s after the Great Depression. I wonder if the world is heading for wars and more wars. Maybe end-times oriented religious folk will read the signs of the times and pray for the end to come. What do you think is happening?
What would make a lot of sense is to try and understand why people are voting for candidates who appear to be, if they aren't clearly, somewhat extremist to highly extremist. When people vote for such candidates in huge numbers it suggests something is desperately wrong with the status quo.
In the case of the recent US election the Democrats must shoulder a large part of the blame. They fielded a candidate who was widely despised and who had no cross-party appeal. It seems fairly likely that just about any Democrat candidate could have beaten Donald Trump but the DNC chose probably the only candidate who would lose to him.
Elsewhere it seems that the increasing push towards open borders and globalisation works very well for the wealthy and the people at the top and merely crushes the people at the bottom. If you're an investment banker it makes sense to be able to trade with people from all over the world because you can do it without leaving your desk. If you're a software engineer and can work for any company anywhere in the world it's an improvement - even if you are a local(ish) guy and find yourself competing with people from India and China who will work for 20% of what you need to make it worth getting out of bed you've got an inherent advantage that you can be on site without visa issues and speak the local language natively. If you're an architect it's good to be able to design prestigious buildings around the world. On the other hand if you're a bricklayer or a carpenter or an electrician the last thing you want is immigrant workers doing the same job for half the rate because they're only here to earn money for a few years and send it back home, on the basis they could still only earn a fraction of their reduced rate while they are here.
Throw in the way that what passes for discussion online is little more than the really useless activities of throwing around names like "libtard" for anyone who even remotely supports a left-leaning candidate and the increasing tendency to assume anyone who supports right-leaning politics must be racist/sexist/xenophobic/misogynistic and it's easy to see why the masses get sick of being insulted. And given the way (particularly noticeable in the US) cities that are densely populated tend to support left-leaning candidates while the countryside that is sparsely populated tends to support right-leaning candidates. It's remarkable to see the US vote broken down by county, where the map shows a vast sea of red with precious few islands of blue dotted around it. It shows how Democrat support is highly concentrated in a few cities, and also highlights why a constitutional republic (as opposed to a democracy) was set up to avoid the tyranny of the majority whereby a few cities could outvote the rest of the nation. The notion, thrown around a lot online, that anyone who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton must be sexist is particularly inane, especially given the people who make such a claim can reasonably be assumed not to have supported Sarah Palin in 2008. If people truly believe that it's impossible to oppose Mrs Clinton's policies without being sexist, or indeed to oppose Barack Obama's policies without being racist, it's hard to see how they will learn from the lessons that the electorate is clearly trying to teach the system.
A major problem with a lot of the left-leaning policies is the way they so easily crush the middle classes. Those at the very top of the economic spectrum are pretty much insulated from financial worries. Those at the very bottom are largely insulated because of welfare systems that make sure they don't go without things like healthcare or food. Those at the lower edges of the middle class, who earn enough to not qualify for benefits but don't earn enough to pay their own way, are the ones stuck in a situation where they are paying for other people to have stuff (via their taxes) that they struggle to afford themselves. Specific example - a couple of friends of mine have two children (a boy and a girl) with a third on the way, and live in a two-bedroom apartment because it's the largest they can afford that's anywhere near their work. Sooner or later their children will need their own bedrooms but despite the fact they can't afford a three-bedroom property they still get to pay taxes so that someone in a comparable situation who doesn't work can have a property they themselves can't afford.
To be fair a number of right-leaning groups have a depressing tendency to cut back on personal welfare while handing out corporate welfare like candy, which also does nothing to help the middle classes on the basis that regulation keeps new entrants out of the market thereby allowing established operators to raise prices with little to no fear of competition, and exacerbating problems in broadly similar manners to what I just described.
Hence it's not entirely surprising that increasing numbers of people have had enough of established politicians and vote for candidates who offer a change. It shows just how badly fed up national populations are when they would rather overturn the apple cart entirely and hope that something better with come out of it, than support a candidate associated with the establishment. And there Hillary Clinton fails again because she's about as establishment as it's possible to be. It's rather curious that the billionaire Donald Trump managed to present himself as anti-establishment - I'm sure from his penthouse in Trump Tower he can fully identify with the single mother in Harlem who desperately wants a better life for her and her children but struggles to break the cycle of poverty.
Perhaps this is a sign of the end, but the end didn't come about because of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mau Tse Tung etc so there's no reason to automatically assume that the current crop of candidates, however distasteful they may appear, must necessarily be the ones to usher in The End.
