I study guys like Trump. Theres a reason they keep winning

Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions - the "establishment" - that most voters distrust.

- Ben Rhodes

In December 2019, I travelled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest against the encroachment of the Communist Party of China on what was supposed to be a self- governing, democratic system. On walls, they had scrawled: "Save Hong Kong! If we burn, you burn with us!" All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order that saw democracy as the enemy within.

I met a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. "The nationalism in the US and Europe is somewhat different," he told me. "Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That's when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn't working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think - should we really follow a Western model?"

We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. "The nationalist movements in the East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model," he added.