Days of disquiet: Why is the world so angry?

When 2024 began, the leading headline was that this would be the year of elections. There were elections in autocracies and democracies, in countries as diverse as Russia, India and the United States, giving a voice to over 1.6 billion voters.

As the year ends, the writing is on the wall and the people have spoken: they are all angry. Just take a look at how the elections have gone. In country after country, the ruling party was snubbed. In the UK, the ruling Conservatives were thrown out after 14 years in power. In the US, President Joe Biden’s Democrats suffered a clean sweep – losing the White House, the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. Opposition parties also had gains in South Korea, Ghana, Portugal, India, Japan, South Africa, France and beyond.

Meanwhile, wars have continued to rage in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and elsewhere. A coup was attempted in South Korea and another one succeeded in Syria. And just this month, a young man shot down the CEO of an American health insurance company in New York, presumably because he was angry with high healthcare costs in the US.

It’s hard to escape the perception that we are living in an era of widespread anger. Large parts of it are perhaps justified. For years, trade and immigration flows have remained flat, meaning that people in lower income groups and poorer countries now face fewer opportunities to climb up the economic ladder. The pandemic exacerbated those trends and bred further resentment by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Trade wars and military conflicts have also fueled high levels of inflation around the world.

These disruptions were perhaps inevitable. In his new book, Age of Revolutions, columnist Fareed Zakaria argues that after years of economics ruling politics, we now live in a world where politics trumps economics. Through the 1990s and the early 2000s, governments around the world followed the same policies of economic liberalisation, regardless of the party in power. In India, in the 1990s, one official told Zakaria that he wasn’t too worried about his party losing the elections because the opposition too would come in and enact the same policies in an effort to “attract investment, improve efficiency, and grow.”

That era is now long gone. Political parties are increasingly polarised, but not just on economic issues. Everywhere, voters have abandoned the consensus on economics and begun prioritising culture and class. Fear-mongering against minorities, immigrants and liberal ideas now dominates political campaigns, either at the expense of economic concerns or as an excuse for them. In the run-up to the US elections last month, a young Trump voter complained to me in Washington that immigrants are taking over his country. “If everyone can be American, then what does it mean to be American?” he asked me pithily.

Much of this angst is, perhaps, the inevitable result of economic distress. In an era of rising inequality and economic competition, people everywhere are resenting the success of groups that seem alien to them. Growth and prosperity is increasingly perceived as a zero-sum game: people automatically assume that if one country or community is getting richer or more powerful, it must necessarily come at the cost of their own wealth and power. The result is a series of policies that are designed to attack the perceived arch-enemy – tariffs, sanctions, and wars have ravaged much of the world.

But the lesson of history is that economic growth is a product of cooperation, not competition. If voters are hoping to secure their economic success by voting for cultural populism and paranoia, they are set to be disappointed.