In Barry Jones’ latest book, What Is To Be Done, he quotes William Davies, an English sociologist, on why he believes that affluent older people and poorer white workers in Britain and the United States are now voting in the same way (Brexit and Trump).
Two factors unite them: hostility to immigration and physical pain, related to age in the one case and poverty in the other. People in both sectors experiencing regular pain are unhappy with life and express their anger, frustration and disappointment politically.
Donald Trump and Boris Johnson appealed to those who were not seeing their lives improve.Credit:AP
Psychologist Abraham Maslow ’s Hierarchy of Needs posited that human beings can’t advance to fulfil their higher-order needs, such as self-actualisation, until their more basic needs are met. Insecurity of income and employment therefore keep most of the poor at the lower levels of potential achievement.
Politically, the poor vote for those politicians who say that they, too, hate the system that keeps them down. The comfortably affluent vote similarly because they fear losing their advantages to the culturally strange immigrants surrounding them. Nothing yet has seemed to bridge the gap in such divided societies besides the cynical exploitation of resentment and fear.
