The political landscape of the last decade has confused a lot of people who understood the previous one. The old categories, left and right, liberal and conservative, don't map cleanly onto what's happening in most democracies anymore. Coalitions that held for decades are fracturing. Parties that seemed permanent are either collapsing or transforming into something unrecognizable.
The clearest underlying dynamic is the breakdown of trust in institutions. Not just government, but media, science, education, and any authority that presents itself as credible without being easily verifiable. This breakdown isn't irrational, even when it produces irrational outcomes. Institutions have, in many documented cases, been wrong, self-serving, or captured by interests that don't reflect the people they claim to serve. The skepticism is often earned. The problem is that skepticism without alternative sources of reliable information creates a vacuum that fills with whatever is most emotionally compelling.
What's filling that vacuum, globally, is nationalism. Not always in the form of explicit ethnic nationalism, but in the form of leaders who offer a simple story: the problems are caused by outsiders, elites, or enemies, and the solution is strength and protection. That message is working in countries with very different histories and cultures, which suggests it's responding to something structural rather than local.
The structural thing is displacement. Economies that used to absorb people into stable, predictable work are producing more volatility and less security. People who feel economically precarious tend to support political movements that promise protection, even at significant cost to other values.
The path back to more stable politics probably runs through more stable economics. That's a slower fix than any election cycle allows for. In the meantime, the most useful thing most people can do is resist the pull toward simple stories, stay skeptical of anyone who claims the problem is simple, and pay attention to what's actually happening rather than what they're being told is happening.