The Rise and Fall of the People’s Parties: A History of Democracy in Western Europe Since 1918

Contemporary threats to democracies from populist far-right parties, this book argues, are simply the effects of a deeper problem: the decline of the mass centrist parties of the center-right and center-left. In postwar Europe, Christian Democratic and Socialist parties moderated their ideologies to win support outside their traditional political bases—the church and organized labor, respectively. This practice created a broad and stable consensus that upheld liberal democracy, the welfare state, and private ownership of the means of production. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, environmentalism, human rights advocacy, and gender-based activism began to erode this consensus. Today, the rise of a conservative identitarian backlash among older, more religious, and more rural voters threatens to shatter what is left of the consensus. This book adds little to a half century of sophisticated and detailed historiography and social science grappling with the causes of this change, and it offers no distinctive explanation of its own. But it does provide a readable summary of critical late-twentieth-century political trends up to the edge of the current crisis.