the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris spotted similar patterns in their analysis of 268 political parties in thirty-one European countries. Economic issues, they found, have been playing a smaller role in party manifestoes for decades, and non-economic issues a larger role. The same was true of the distribution of voters. Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority… Inglehart and Norris concluded that supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share… The silent revolution launched in the 1970s seems to have spawned a resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 340