Editor’s Note: Part 1 of “Politics Will Return” was published on Wednesday, November 20.
If anybody ever gets around to making those Remnant bingo cards that Jonah Goldberg keeps promising us, one of the items will be his repeated reminder—and I am grateful to him for repeating it—that financial crises such as the one the United States (and much of the rest of the world) experienced in 2008-09 tend to pull long, enduring populist episodes in their wakes. One of the things that turbocharged populism does, or can do, is speed up the usual pendulum swings between parties as electorates grow quickly frustrated or bored with the incumbents and then throw them out—only to turn around and throw out the new guys the next time around.
The U.S. election just (almost) concluded is an example of that, but the anti-incumbent wave has been nearly universal: The British rejected the Conservatives and Rishi Sunak for the left-wing Keir Starmer and his Labour Party; the French delivered a beating to Emmanuel Macron and his allies in elections for the European Parliament and then in the National Assembly election; the Dutch saw off their longest-serving prime minister and replaced him with a government that will include the party of anti-immigrant demagogue Geert Wilders; the Australians went from right to left, as did the Brazilians; in South Korea, the opposition won a landslide; Italians gave the boot to the technocratic Mario Draghi and put their boot-shaped country under the uncomfortable high heel of Giorgia Meloni; etc. Americans threw out Donald Trump for Joe Biden in 2020 and then threw out Joe Biden’s proxy in 2024 for Donald Trump.
And so it goes.
Kevin D. Williamson is national correspondent at The Dispatch and is based in Virginia. Prior to joining the company in 2022, he spent 15 years as a writer and editor at National Review, worked as the theater critic at the New Criterion, and had a long career in local newspapers. He is also a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. When Kevin is not reporting on the world outside Washington for his Wanderland newsletter, you can find him at the rifle range or reading a book about literally almost anything other than politics.
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