During the peak of his contemporary popularity, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived abroad – mostly in France – for five years and eight months, much of that time pursuing a frenzied social life that impeded his literary work. His European travels included lengthy stays from May 1924 through the end of 1926 and then from March 1929 through September 1931, as well as a five-month sojourn in mid-1928. On foreign shores he experienced misery and elation: his wife Zelda's romance with French aviator Edouard Jozan; completion, publication, and celebration of his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925); new friendships with Ernest Hemingway and with Gerald and Sara Murphy; innumerable alcoholic binges and embarrassments; false starts on a fourth novel and increasing self-doubts; domestic rivalry and acrimony; Zelda's first nervous breakdown and treatment; his hotel life and fugitive magazine fiction. Only after returning to the United States did Fitzgerald publish Tender Is the Night (1934), a work that despite its flaws plumbs the paradoxes of desire more profoundly than did Gatsby. Understandably, Tender has preoccupied scholars and biographers seeking insight into the author's life abroad, for its thinly veiled treatment of the Fitzgeralds' domestic calamities, set against the crazy violence of postwar Europe, reveals much about the author's own identification with expatriate culture. But the many short stories set at least partly in Europe likewise merit closer attention, less for their biographical connections than for their representations of the American migration to Europe after World War I.

The Introduction lays out the book. It introduces the concept of democratic discontent, explaining how it differs from milder forms of political displeasure and how it can manifest in different forms like populism, ethnonationalism, conspiracism, and antipathy to democratic regimes. It then briefly describes the conflict between economic and cultural approaches to discontent, showing that both make valid findings, yet neither hypothesis is totally consistent with existing research. To overcome this impasse, the chapter introduces the affective political economy theory of economics, emotions, and culture, where emotions induced by economic troubles prime large groups of citizens to embrace culturally discontented narratives; cultural discontent then produces various forms of discontent, based on local conditions. Finally, it lays out the book’s empirical approach, discussing the use of mixed methods to test the theory, including experiments, observational surveys, and qualitative analysis and comparison of cases; this section also justifies the case selections. This section advises different kinds of readers about which sections they might find most interesting and which might be less relevant, especially regarding statistically dense sections of the book.

This chapter begins applying the theory to the core cases, starting with Trumpism in the USA and Euroscepticism and Brexit in the United Kingdom. It traces the evolution of the populist radical right in both countries; throughout the process, economic trauma, compounded by inadequate or imprudent political responses to the unfolding crisis, stoked and inflamed cultural tensions. Yet in both cases, discontent failed to break through the political status quo as radical right antecedents like the Tea Party and the UK Independence Party (prior to Farage’s ascension to leadership) failed to embrace their supporters’ cultural radicalism. Only when Trump and Farage began to explicitly connect economics, culture, and politics did radical right populism manage to provoke a rupture. We support these arguments using original survey data in the USA, the British Election Study, and analyses of Trump’s rhetoric.

This chapter describes and justifies the book’s theoretical framework, which proposes that economics influences democratic discontent by fomenting cultural discontent, with emotions connecting economics and culture. After briefly discussing the economic consequences of the Great Recession and the collapse of the commodities boom, it explains the affective intelligence theory (AIT) of emotions. AIT conceptualizes emotions as continuously operating surveillance systems, producing specific motivational and cognitive patterns that are not tied to the situation that aroused them. Given this, the chapter proposes that economic turmoil generates resentment and anxiety, which primes large groups of citizens to become aggressive, hostile toward outgroups, and hyperattentive to threatening information. Individuals so influenced gravitate toward social narratives that emphasize group conflict and prejudice against opposing social groups, thus fomenting cultural discontent. This, in turn, produces democratic discontent. The chapter concludes by discussing various contextual factors that may inhibit or intensify this theoretical process or prevent discontent from manifesting in certain ways.

This chapter tests every step of the book’s theoretical framework using survey experiments. It uses profiles of three hypothetical citizens: Left Leaner, Right Leaner, and Tuned Out. As a narrative device to show how the theory is tested, the chapter then takes these citizens through the steps of our theory using experiments, which use writing exercises, videos, and text vignettes as treatments. The results of these analyses are presented using simple graphs and figures that are relatively understandable for readers with limited statistical expertise. We find that economic discontent does significantly increase populism, regime antipathy, and conspiracism, and that these effects are mediated through cultural discontent, resentment, and (in the case of conspiracism) anxiety, as expected. The chapter further shows that economic discontent increased negative intergroup attitudes, but only among conservatives.

The introduction highlights the attraction of the idea of human rights. It affords insight into the development of the new international standards, considers the philosophical foundations, presents matters of cross-cultural interpretation, and broaches the subject of controversies. The controversies reveal the underlying tension between cultural relativism and universalism. By turning to difficult challenges, it is possible to come to grips with shared values or cross-cultural universals. The powerful idea of human rights appeals because of the peremptory norms, known as ius cogens, e.g., the rights against slavery and genocide.

Carole Fleuret offers a vision of social injustice and racism in France during the 1980s by recounting her experience of  the denial of the languages of migration at school, including the language of her grandfather. Through her research, she fights against the loss of the linguistic capital using children’s literature, pluriliteracy repertoires and invented spelling to rethink school programs.

Ethnocentrism is an attitudinal construct that involves a strong sense of ethnic group self-centredness and self-importance. It is a universal phenomenon found across cultures and time periods. Although ethnocentrism can be expressed in many domains, it finds its expressions particularly significant in the political domain. This chapter provides a comprehensive review of ethnocentrism, with an emphasis on its implications for the field of political psychology. The chapter defines the concept and explains its unified theoretical approach, the group strength model of ethnocentrism. It discusses the role of ethnocentrism in political domains, such as nationalism, policy preferences, and political party and candidate support. Although ethnocentrism has been described as a 'delusion' by Gumplowicz back in 1879, it is a forceful delusion, which has a strong grasp over humans and is unlikely to disappear. Political psychologists, therefore, need to more carefully study ethnocentrism and its political implications across societies and political systems.

Nations and individuals vary in their support for human rights. International surveys face difficult issues (e.g., acquiring comparable samples, insuring equivalent meaning of survey questions in many languages), and these surveys are limited in the range of human rights issues examined and number of countries surveyed. Internationally, support for different kinds of human rights (civil and economic rights) correlate positively, although the rights that receive stronger support are shaped by a nation’s religion and culture. Individuals’ support for human rights is strongly positively associated with 'identification with all humanity', other universal values (e.g., 'protecting the global environment'), and the moral foundations of care and fairness, and strongly negatively related to ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, the social dominance orientation, and right-wing political ideology, A number of other constructs are also weakly associated with human rights support either positively (e.g., dispositional empathy) or negatively (e.g. need for structure).

Research exploring public opinion dynamics in the domain of immigration has exploded in recent decades, and for obvious reasons. Policy debates in developed democracies have intensified as barriers to movement fell in Europe and the USA and as populist leaders began to capitalise on, if not stoke, public anxieties about the influx of newcomers. A central question is why some individuals are so much more willing than others to allow immigrants into their country, and the debate has centred primarily around real economic consequences versus deep-rooted group identities and animosities. Given all the welcome attention to this fundamental question, we can only review a small slice of this burgeoning literature. To these ends, we provide a broad overview of the impact of real immigration contexts, economic versus symbolic group attachments, and the role of the media and elites may play in triggering either or both forces by triggering powerful emotions. Since these explanations are so difficult to causally untangle, and since the literature has focused so much on the USA and a few other countries, we pay special attention to recent, comparative research that goes beyond simple observational designs.

The rising wave of nationalism and xenophobia in the world triggers interest in processes underlying ethnocentric tendencies in humans. In this chapter we focus on the issue of ethnocentrism in perception of places and describe processes that facilitate the ethnocentric closure to the presence of the ‘other’ in the city space. We present data that demonstrate that one of the factors responsible for this ethnocentric closure is type of the perceived continuity of a place: essentialist vs anti-essentialist. We show, on the basis of studies carried out in cities of Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, that perception of places in terms of essentialist continuity facilitates place identity but is also a powerful trigger of the ethnocentric bias in perception of the places’ multicultural past and present. In contrast, interpretation of the place continuity as a chain of interconnected events (anti-essentialist continuity) helps to accept the ethnic and social diversity of places.

We examine the emergence of a new party, UKIP, which exploited the new political opportunity presented by growing identity divides, mobilising discontented identity conservatives to secure the strongest electoral performance by a new British party since the 1920s. We unravel the puzzling timing of UKIP’s surge. If immigration rose to the top of the political agenda in the mid-2000s why did it take nearly a decade for a radical right party to fully capitalise on public discontent over the issue? This delay was the consequence of an older reputational legacy from the first wave of immigration. Since Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives had been seen as the party of immigration control. The Conservatives were able to use this reputation in opposition in order to win over the anxious identity conservatives. But doing so required setting up expectations of radical cuts to immigration, expectations the party was unable to meet once it returned government. It was the collapse in the Conservatives’ reputation for immigration control at the start of the Coalition that opened up space for a new party, space that UKIP rapidly filled as disappointed identity conservative voters abandoned the Conservatives and turned to the radical right.

In Chapter 3 we look at the differences in the values and worldviews of identity conservatives and identity liberals. The ethnocentric worldview of identity conservatives has two aspects: attachment to in-groups and hostility towards out-groups. They have clear ideas about who belongs to ‘us’, and strong suspicions of groups deemed to fall outside the tribe. Conviction identity liberals see this worldview, and the political stances which flow from it, as morally wrong, a conviction that is reflected in their commitment to anti-prejudice social norms. Ethnic minority ‘necessity liberals’ also strongly oppose ethnocentrism and its effects, because the suspicions and hostility of ethnocentric white citizens often fall upon them. They ally strongly with conviction liberals on identity conflicts, but do not share their broader socially liberal agenda. The politics of identity is a tug of war over social norms, with identity liberals seeking stronger and more expansive definitions of racism sanctioning a wider range of attitudes and behaviour, while identity conservatives push back against this process, attacking it as the unjust imposition of excessively stringent rules, which they believe stigmatise the legitimate expression of group attachments and anxieties about change.

This chapter explores race as a prevalent theme in American puritan literature. How did puritans understand human difference in early America and how did those understandings affect the literature they produced about their interactions with black Africans and Natives? That is to say, what did puritans mean when they employed race in early America? And how might their encounters with black Africans and Natives have impeded their efforts to represent race? Despite the fact that race as an idea and social structure was not stable through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, puritans endeavored to differentiate themselves from those black Africans and Natives with whom they interacted in early America. To establish difference, they modified racialized ideas that were already circulating through Europe. This chapter highlights several of those ideas as they appear in American puritan literature. It ends with a discussion about the ways in which the material world encounters between puritans and those they deemed inferior because of their race challenged their racial notions and shaped the literature.

The EU Referendum and its aftermath further polarised identity politics by forging two new political tribes: ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’. The 2016 referendum was the first national political choice to be structured primarily around identity divides. Traditional conflicts over class, income, economic ideology and economic competence were pushed into the background. Instead, it was the conflicts over identity and values which split graduates and school leavers, white voters and ethnic minorities and young and old which primarily drove voters’ Brexit choices and informed their Brexit identities. The intense referendum campaign and polarising political aftermath proved to be a moment of awakening, making voters aware of just how deeply divided they were from their political opponents. They now knew what kind of people fell into each Brexit tribe, and began to display all the classic symptoms of partisan bias when asked to judge their tribe and its opponents, seeing their own side through rose-tinted spectacles while dismissing their rivals as fools and knaves. These attachments have been consequential not only for political views but also for social life since the referendum, as the identities forged by a single political choice have taken on a life of their own.

In Chapter 2, we trace the demographic developments that have driven both the rise of new ‘identity liberal’ electorates and the decline of the formerly dominant ‘identity conservative’ group. Educational expansion has opened universities, formerly the preserve of a small elite, to the masses. Migration and rising ethnic diversity have dramatically increased Britain’s ethnic and cultural diversity. The combined effects have transformed the typical experience of a young person growing up in Britain. A typical citizen growing up in the 1950s had little prospect of attending university and had little or no contact with people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds. But her granddaughter growing up in the 2010s knows a society where ethnic and religious diversity are a part of everyday life for most young people, and university was an experience enjoyed by the majority of her peers. The generational structure of both these changes and hence of the identities and values associated with them, drives the third demographic trend: growing generational divides. Finally, we show how the geographical distribution of the different demographic groups adds to the electoral polarisation between identity conservatives and identity liberals, who not only think differently, but also increasingly live apart from each other.