Iván Farías of Oxford University writes for EA:


I am a Mexican who has lived and worked in the United States. I have studied, worked, and lived in the United Kingdom for nearly 10 years. I know first-hand what it is to be an immigrant in countries whose politicians — or, at least, some at the pinnacle of domestic politics — are openly hostile to foreigners.

While many pundits would certainly disagree, from my point of view there is not much difference between Republicans and Trump supporters in the US and Conservatives and the Independence Party (UKIP) in the UK. All of them aspire, and work, to turn their countries into unhospitable places for foreigners. Their dream is any liberal’s nightmare.

As someone who has lived in the two formerly self-proclaimed “most liberal countries” in the world, I can confidently state that there is probably nothing worse than imagining a world where the President of the United States is Donald Trump. Yet, I am almost certain that that nightmare is about to come true.

See US Analysis: Your Essential Guide to the Presidential Election

For the past 12 years, I have studied, trained, and worked to become a political scientist. Specifically, an expert in international politics. In our field, we want (and like) to think that there is a science – a logic – behind the behaviour, actions and choices of policymakers, parties, and voters. Nowadays, our field praises numerical data as the holy grail of all political truths. Many political scientists consider that everything in politics — from how voters decide for whom to vote to what political satire TV programmes will they like the most (The Daily Show or The Colbert Report?) — can be neatly studied, explained, and predicted if one can come up with the right questions, sources, and data.

Our field is dominated by quantitative-laden scholars. This is not a criticism of the quality of their work or their position as experts at the top of their fields. Instead, it is an existential question on our collective capacity as political scientists — and especially international relations specialists — to understand and foresee changes in the politics of our own and other societies. How are we, as a community, going to forewarn others about the big and perilous political changes that the world will face tomorrow, when we do not even think that the very detailed formal models, case studies, or quantitative analyses we produce are useful for policymakers or the population of our countries?

I think we have been missing the big picture. Many of us failed to anticipate, and some to even acknowledge, the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia in the 21st century in Europe and North America. These regions, which used to be considered the global beacons of freedom, tolerance and liberalism, have now become some of the most visible discontents of economic globalisation and political liberalism. Our collective obsession with analysing even the smallest policy- and decision-making mechanisms in the most advanced industrial democracies prevented us from seeing the big changes that were destroying their very essence.

There were many warning signs along the way. The murder of 77 people by a far-right ethno-nationalist terrorist in Norway in 2011; the emergence and mainstreaming of a neo-fascist party in the cradle of Western democracy, Greece, in 2015; the rise of a far-right nationalist party to mainstream politics in France in 2015; the decision from British voters to leave the European Union and the consequent rise of an uncontested, unelected, and openly anti-immigrant Prime Minister in the UK in 2016. These were all signs that something in our Western liberal democracies was not working in “the way it should”.

Our models were failing. We just did not want to concede it.

Now, just days before the US Presidential Election, the existence, rise and popularity of a candidate who has openly expressed his hateful views — of those with a Latin American (and especially Mexican) ethnic background, of black people, of women, of Muslims, of people with disabilities, of Asians, of prisoners of war — should make us pause and ponder: how did we not see this coming? And if we saw it coming, why did we not do anything about it, to prevent this from happening?

Granted, political scientists are not fortune-tellers who can see the future. But the very nature of our research and analyses is understanding changes in the political landscape of our countries. We have a moral and professional responsibility to be vigilant and vocal about the consequences of our societies’ everyday political decisions. Through our work, on a daily basis, we are duty-bound to make others well-aware that their day-to-day domestic political choices lead to large-scale global changes. By failing to make our communities sufficiently aware of the dangers of the progressive shift to the right and far-right in Western European and North American politics, we have been accomplices to the current state of affairs.

We would probably have difficulty accepting that a team of well-trained, well-equipped firefighters stood by while a human-induced blaze consumed a whole neighborhood. So why we did stand by when a “more socially acceptable” populist, xenophobic right-wing movement began sweeping across the Western liberal democracies? Why did not we raise an alarm when voters in France, the UK, and Greece cast their votes for these movements, when the AfD — which has won regional elections in Germany — called on the police to shoot refugees entering the country “if necessary”?

If we stood by when the right and the far-right began taking over Europe again, it should not come as a surprise to anyone if we stand by when the US follows suit. The Trump Presidency will be the embodiment of the growing threat we did not predict, or wanted to tackle.

I really hope someone will wake us up soon, because this nightmare is about to come true.