Until the technocrats give up their delusions, the populists will continue to gain.
Until the technocrats give up their delusions, the populists will continue to gain.
S houldn’t the anti-populists have started to rally by now?
If the responsible liberal technocrats are right about populism, and it is led by dim bulbs, or the corrupt, or the compromised, we should see signs of it falling on its face. Shouldn’t we?
The year 2015 was the year that shocked the system. It was the year when the very unserious Donald Trump came down the escalator and became a serious candidate for president. It was the year of Angela Merkel’s statement “Wir schaffen das” — “We can do it” — in response to the migration crisis that was roiling her country. In France it was the year of the massacres in the Charlie Hebdo offices and the Bataclan. It was the year Law and Justice won a major victory in Poland. The year that Viktor Orban gave his Fidesz party a new shot of life by building a wall on Hungary’s border with Serbia and Croatia. It was the year that ended with attacks on New Year’s revelers in Cologne. You know what comes next: Brexit and Trump’s victory.
There are several ways to defeat populism. You can allow it to fall on its face. You can bend before it, co-opting its most popular causes. Or you can try to shore up liberalism with a bit of authoritarianism and political brinksmanship of your own. Liberal European figures have tried mixtures of all these strategies, and they continue to fail. Since 2015, migration rates have collapsed, and the wave of terror attacks has subsided as well. But populists keep gaining more power, and liberals keep losing the ability to maneuver.
Emmanuel Macron has mostly tried the strategy of co-opting populist issues, and his victory over Marine Le Pen in the 2017 election — with two-thirds of the vote — was celebrated as the comeback of liberal technocracy. Instead of just defending the EU’s economic arrangements as they were, he proposed to reform them. On immigration he has taken a harder line than his predecessors. Even still, his proposed reforms of the French state and labor market are on life support he has lost the enthusiasm of half of his supporters. He now has an approval rating that matches Donald Trump’s at his depth.
Angela Merkel tried some concessions and a little authoritarianism. She tried to stanch the bleeding of her support by cutting a dirty deal with Turkey to stop the migration into Europe that was roiling the politics of the continent. Her government also worked with American tech companies to regulate speech on social media. The self-styled defenders of the “liberal world order” put all their chips on her leadership. And her party crashed into its worst electoral showing since World War II. Her Christian Democrats are now taking in water almost as badly as her center-left coalition partner is. Even as Germany’s situation somewhat stabilized this year, Bavarian elections saw the further rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) on the right and the Greens on the left. The election is the latest in a long line of results that show the center-left dying thanks to the increasing inability of cosmopolitan voters who are upwardly mobile in an era of globalization to share a coalition with traditional working-class voters who feel economically and culturally threatened by the same.
There are challenges ahead. Populists may fail where they achieve power and office, because their ranks are so filled with amateurs, cranks, and bounders. But even their minor political successes undermine their liberal establishmentarian opponents.
Further, each national political culture, rocked by the populist reemergence of native economic interests, has a hard time making the compromises that would ease its irritations in other nations. You can’t write down Ireland’s debts, because the French consider the country a co-conspirator with American tax avoiders. You can’t bring Greek tax-collection practices into line with the Northern European style because, worried about a structural lack of opportunity, Greeks horde the resources they have.
As Henry Olsen writes, the West is one economic crash away from chaos. Taking on massive public debt has been the only way for Europe’s center-left and -right parties to hang on at all, and now the debts of Italy and Greece are less sustainable than they were even five years ago.
But that is not even the most difficult problem that conventional politicians must solve. That would be self-delusion. Steeped in the meritocratic myth, the metropole class that benefitted from globalization and has come to dominate Western politics over the last generation confuses the privileging of its own interests with the laws of nature and the strict demands of justice. Thus all the political demands that fuel populism are received by them, not as a negotiation of competing interests, but as insolent insults from the congenitally backward, the intellectually inferior, and the perverse. Until these delusions are given up, the populists will continue to gain.