On Monday, I was having a conversation with Pavithra Suryanarayan, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, about what fuels far-right populism, when she suddenly stopped, midsentence, and gasped. She had just seen a news alert, she told me: the TV host Tucker Carlson had been fired from Fox News. The moment was an object lesson in the bigger point that she hammered home in our conversation: that to understand the rise of far-right populist politicians around the world, we need to think about institutions that did not check them. Much of Suryanaryan’s work has focused on the reasons that expanding democratic rights often produces a political backlash from groups that fear losing their status and privileges in a more equal society. (Such as the response of White Southerners in the United States during the Civil Rights era, for instance, and members of the Brahmin caste in India after the government instituted affirmative action in the 1990s.)

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