John E. Roemer has an old article, “Why the poor do not expropriate the rich” that, in my view, gives the best explanation of modern right-wing national-populism. In a democracy, given the distribution of income in any country, the median voter is poorer than the voter with average income: as a consequence, the median voter, the one that decides elections if there is only one dimension of voting under some assumptions, should be pro-redistribution. If the only concern of voters was material welfare, majority voting would yield strongly distributive policies, in the extreme the expropriation of the wealth of the rich. However, although at the beginning democracy was associated with the expansion of the welfare state, national democracies are today compatible with high levels of inequality.
There are several reasons for this paradox, most of them listed in a review article by Adam Bonica and others. But most of them go back to the answer that Roemer gave to the question in the title of his article: the poor do not expropriate the rich because the latter mobilize policy dimensions (cleavages) other than income and wealth, such as religion, ethnicity, "values" or scandals. In some cases, these dimensions correlate with income (South Africa) and redistribution is inevitable, but in many cases the poor majority can be divided across ethnic or religious lines, and that breaks the pro-distribution coalition. In addition, if there are winning coalitions for ethnic or religious reasons, these can be easier to mobilize because they include at least part of the rich, who have more resources to invest in politics (time, media, money). Modern right-wing national-populism is just the adaptation of this strategy to modern technologies and constraints. Here, there is no dilemma between "economic" and "cultural" explanations to populism: both are integrated in the same conceptual framework.
As Dani Rodrik has explained, when inequality increases (for example, in times of macroeconomic shocks), the incentive of economic elites to mobilize other cleavages increases: “as economic inequality increases in society, a party representing the rich is more likely to invest in strategies that appeal to identity and culture. Greater inequality means the median voter grows more distant from the rich in terms of where they stand on economic policy interests. For the party of the rich, there is now higher return from a political narrative that catalyzes identity around issues such as racial resentment, gay marriage, women’s rights, and immigration, all of which can give low-income voters a reason to vote against their purely material interests.”
Of course, reality is much more complex than a simplified model, but good models are useful because they can pose meaningful questions and test precise hypotheses. Roemer’s explanation can be enriched to incorporate irrationality (Trump’s, for example), in a world of trial and error by boundedly rational agents, where gains for particular groups are the result of selection and adaptation.
Fascism as an extreme case, when the powerful interests fail by democratic means, can be incorporated to the same model. Instead of focusing on income and wealth distribution, a sufficient part of the relatively poor focus on interethnic redistribution, and scapegoats, foreigners or ethnic minorities can be targeted. In all these cases, it is understandable that a lot of attention is paid to the political (typically pathological) leader, but there are powerful underlying forces behind his emergence.
Thinking about these theoretical issues may be seen as a luxury and a waste of time in dramatic moments. But it can also be seen as a way to think about how best to react. If the powerful compete in a multidimensional policy framework, the relatively poor majority must also become competitive in the battle for the dominant cleavages, in a way that will be different in different political contexts.
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