In Europe we criticize Donald Trump every now and then and praise his authoritarianism. We have many and objective reasons for doing this. But we have to listen to his voters. Otherwise, we will very quickly find other little – or even big – Trumps in front of us. Even at our door.

Shortly before Trump’s first term in the White House, Arlie Hochschild’s fascinating journey to Louisiana, the heart of the American Right, entitled “Strangers in Their Own Land” was released in the US. With her particularly penetrating writing, Hochschild describes, in 350 pages, the silent rage of the bio-wrestler who could not realize the “American dream”.

He talks to the worker who was fired at working age from a chemical factory without even being compensated for the damage to his health. With the 60-year-old once well-to-do employee forced to fill in as an hourly accountant. With the occasional gospel performer, who loves the Fox television network “like her family.” Many of Louisiana’s downtrodden staff the “Tea Movement,” the ideological hotbed of Trumpism with references to the 1773 patriotic uprising in Boston.

New dividing lines

A noted sociologist and feminist, professor emeritus at the iconic University of Berkeley, Hochschild certainly cannot be accused of being an apologist for Trumpism. He is merely the bearer, not the perpetrator, of the unpleasant news. And the unpleasant news is that, while the traditional Left-Right dichotomy is beginning to fade (which is by no means a given, as it was only established at the time of the French Revolution), at the same time new dividing lines are being projected that are dangerously eroding social cohesion, beyond outside conventional ideological starting points.

These are dividing lines between the winners and losers of globalization. Between qualified self-replicating elites and so-called “own bosses” chasing casual wage earners. Between promising startuppers and working veterans who feel useless after 50. Between those who do everything to secure “passive income” from their earnings and those who are unable to do anything to service their debts.

The messianic speech of the Democrats and the vague hope that things will one day improve hardly contain the accumulated anger of the marginalized. Of course, it is questionable why Donald Trump benefits from it and above all why the “non-privileged” identify with a man who seriously claims that “I am self-made. When I started I had absolutely nothing except a million dollars my father left me.”

The number of ethnic saviors is increasing

But that is another analysis. The bottom line is that anger is pouring out against “those in Washington.” And that similar phenomena are also occurring in Europe. More and more people are angry with “them over there in Berlin”, with the “colonialists of Paris”, with the “state of Athens” or with the “bubble of Brussels”.

Some react impulsively, voting for all kinds of uninvited national saviors. Others do the same after getting to know each other. They want to awaken the traditional political forces and reflexes of healthy parliamentarianism, which it seems cannot be awakened in any other way. Or maybe they can?