Those who deplore the consequences of populist movements should pay more attention to their causes.
Those who deplore the consequences of populist movements should pay more attention to their causes.
‘P opulism” is a term that has accumulated a slew of negative connotations. In common parlance, the populist is a pseudo-charismatic leader, a demagogue who channels the infernal passions of the unintellectual populace, a wannabe tyrant who plays with the prejudices of “deplorables” for personal gain. Beyond these anathemas, however, proponents and opponents are mostly unable to define what populism entails, perhaps because it is nothing more than a deep-rooted sense of dissatisfaction vis-à-vis a disconnected elite. While populists may not share many programmatic positions, they all see politics as a zero-sum game, a gladiatorial contest between a virtuous “people” and a corrupt “system.”
Naturally, the fears that populism inspires are far from unjustified. In a classical-liberal framework wherein rational discourse underpins the practice of politics, those who sacrifice the civil exchange of ideas on the altar of indignation seem to threaten the established order. In fact, they explicitly do: Populists focus their engagement upon the malfunctions of the status quo, whose architects they promise to punish. To put it simply, they are not for as much as they are against. In this sense, populism as a mode of politics need not be ideological. While most commentators associate the term with nationalist resentment or Jacobin fury, every kind of populist discourse is but an iteration of a wider, malleable, diffuse conception of public life. In fact, the contours of specific populist movements depend upon the elite they aspire to combat: against cosmopolitan liberals, convinced chauvinists; against a disconnected bourgeoisie, enthusiastic socialists. In every case, the frustrations of the moment lay the foundations of the movement — which, without these frustrations, would be meaningless. Ultimately, populism first and foremost characterizes a resentful request for popular representation and recognition, a sense of disenchantment so significant that it distills an often-incoherent set of demands into a single political cry: Enough.
To many, the myopic embrace of radicalism explains the most pernicious ills of our age. The insidious dismemberment of our national conversation must have a cause, and populism looks like a promising suspect. But we should not blame populism itself — as a political practice — for our abhorrence of its supposed representatives. After all, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “populism” merely describes “a political philosophy directed to the needs of the common people and advancing a more equitable distribution of wealth and power” — that is, just the sort of thing that a true democracy seeks to achieve. While this definition may be particularly charitable, we would be reckless to associate manipulation and deceit with a political practice that, on its own, requires neither.
Populism suffers from the unfortunate predicament of being present in the very best and the very worst of our leaders. From Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aspiring populists fill both sides of American public life. But this frightening versatility does not suffice to explain why the very utterance of the word “populism” seems capable of generating revulsion.
After all, the galvanization of popular discontent is not a pathology of our time. When he delivered his masterful Funeral Oration, Pericles unleashed the Athenians’ chauvinistic pride, just as Churchill unchaperoned the emotions of the British public when he exhorted young men to fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields, and in the streets, as well as in the hills. The politics of “us versus them” need not be demagogic so long as the opposition they depict is real. Churchill was right to denounce the British elite’s futile pursuit of appeasement; as for Pericles, he aptly glorified Athenian exceptionalism to fuel the determination of fearful soldiers and their families. In this sense, the American Founding itself constituted a populist masterpiece: Charismatic leaders assembled to lead the frustrated populace against a British elite whose legitimacy they contested.
Populism is therefore a means to an undefined end. When used with tact, it represents a call to champion an ostracized public, an aspiration to make the many sit at the table of the few. When used carelessly, however, it inflames the darkest inclinations of mankind, allowing autocrats to hide their turpitude behind the veil of popular ire. In both cases, our moral evaluation should focus on what politicians use populism to accomplish, rather than on populism tout court.
Nonetheless, populism does act as a symptom of systemic malfunction. Public fury does not come out of thin air. When the marketplace of ideas finds itself replaced by ominous hyperbole, when civil exchanges turn into ardent battles, and when the politics of indignation suffuse every corner of the nation, the first question that concerned observers should ask themselves is why. Insisting upon the importance of root causes need not mean absolving angry mobs of moral responsibility. Instead, a rigorous genealogy of populism allows us to distance ourselves from the myopic present to look at wider cultural forces. As the French theologian François Bossuet put it, “God laughs at those who deplore the effects whose causes they cherish.”
Recent populist iterations share a pronounced distaste for globalization. Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and others do not have much in common programmatically, but they all showcase an unwavering aversion to transnational institutions, multiculturalism, and unregulated immigration. The academic literature on the topic supports the conclusion that the effects of globalization play a major role in the development of populist movements. Without oversimplifying, let us divide these explanations into two broad categories.
First are cultural effects. The systematized blending of cultures erases local particularisms, turning each and every corner of the earth into a multicultural landscape. The central district of Casablanca, once a jewel of Islamic architecture, now resembles New York’s Upper East Side. Because cultures come to be found everywhere in their plurality, they exist nowhere in their entirety. Unconstrained immigration may accelerate the phenomenon, but it need not shoulder the bulk of the blame: Given that the native-born inhabitants of globalized cities fail to preserve their own national identity, we should not expect newcomers to adopt a culture that their hosts have already relinquished. As the Cato Institute showed in a 2019 study, for instance, naturalized American citizens are more likely to declare themselves “proud” of the U.S. than their native, suburban, college-educated counterparts. If anything, immigrants are more patriotic than America’s very own elite. In fact, while three-quarters of native-born, upper-middle-class Americans say that they are “ashamed” of some aspects of America, less than 39 percent of immigrants agree. In other words, the U.S. — like most Western liberal democracies — does not even manage to make native-born citizens “assimilate” into their own culture.
The likes of Roger Scruton deplored this generalized abandonment of cultural norms. If, following the French historian Ernest Renan, we think of a nation as an aggregation of people embracing a common heritage, we have to view this phenomenon as a threat to the very idea of nationhood — which, as Scruton aptly observes, acts as an accessible source of meaning and inspiration for all. But the most pernicious political consequence of this cultural denationalization is that it creates a rural–urban split of ever-expanding magnitude. In his Reflections, Edmund Burke praises Britain’s landed aristocracy for its connection to local commoners. Dukes and barons did not relate to their servants’ life experiences, but they did share a certain cultural commonality that bound them all together and allowed civil order to persist. Yet there is a world of difference between contemporary elites and the 18th-century landed aristocracy that Burke defends. While the latter were grounded in regional traditions and community-specific bonds, the former represent a new kind of technocratic establishment that is neither culturally nor socioeconomically close to the people it governs. As Burke observes, socioeconomic inequality requires some kind of counterbalancing force. To accept the weight of financial hierarchies, people have to find common ground elsewhere. And the widening gap separating the disenfranchised countryside from suburbia destabilizes this necessary equilibrium.
An electoral map of Europe would reveal this cultural clash with utmost clarity. During the 2017 French presidential elections, the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron won in Paris and other major cities by extraordinary margins, but his nationalist opponent Marine Le Pen captured the rural vote without effort. In other words, while Parisians supported a pro-globalization, pro-gay-marriage, pro-free-trade, and pro-EU candidate, their fellow citizens in rural villages cast their votes in favor of an anti-globalization, anti-gay-marriage, anti-free-trade, and anti-EU candidate. This kind of ideological Grand Canyon has become so common as to be unsurprising, but let us think carefully about the implications of having a country whose inhabitants have very little to share culturally. In the U.S., the autonomy of individual states allows these differences to coexist. But not anywhere else. When the arch-conservative president Andrzej Duda won the Polish elections two weeks ago, his reelection generated a sense of trauma in large Polish towns. Had his liberal opponent been chosen instead, the exact same phenomenon would have been observed in the Polish countryside.
This divide is nothing new. In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the narrator laughs at those Russian aristocrats who speak French, dance to Italian music, recite English poetry, and have long forgotten the suffering of their people. In many ways, the aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries was already made up of detached “citizens of the world.” When Louis XIV launched the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702, for instance, he knew that his attack would serve the interests of the transnational aristocracy at the expense of the French people — many of whom died in this conflict in which they had no share. He nevertheless chose to go ahead, as would other monarchs who saw the nation-state as an instrument of private power. The problem, of course, is that the populace ultimately responded to the disconnect of this aristocratic elite by launching a series of revolutions all across Europe. And we should not want our civil order to collapse because of ever-expanding cultural gaps.
The economic and institutional effects of globalization also reinforce this rural–urban split. For years, enthusiastic free-marketeers argued that unregulated free trade and competitive advantage would usher in a new world of prosperity. In many ways, they were right. From an exclusively material standpoint, no one should deny the prodigious advances achieved by the global economy over the past 20 years. But these impressive accomplishments have come at a cultural cost. On paper, competitive advantage benefits everyone. If China produces medical supplies more efficiently than we do, our consumers will enjoy lower prices; similarly, if our agricultural and/or manufacturing sector is uncompetitive, we should accept the necessary transition to a service-based economy.
The problem is that these displacements and relocalizations decimate rural communities, many of which represent the last bastions of American traditionalism. Where metropolitan cities atomize the crowd into an undistinguishable mass of anonymous nobodies, smaller towns and villages forge profound cultural bonds. By embracing unconstrained globalization, we have not just accepted the methodical dismemberment of the countryside in the name of utility. We have also sacrificed an authentic way of life on the altar of interconnectedness. Naturally, conventional economic theory would respond by having these people move to big cities. Yet, surprisingly enough, families with deep-rooted ties to a particular community are reluctant to give up centuries of traditions to settle in a place where the ideological mainstream looks nothing like what they are used to. But if they do choose to stay in disheveled towns, the future of their children is jeopardized, which further galvanizes their resentment against those who defend this ever-moving, ever-changing world.
This vicious cycle results in a cultural and socioeconomic malaise that becomes more evident in times of crisis. Globalization does not merely cause a series of dislocations along economic, cultural, and social lines. In fact, political systems throughout history have successfully overcome sociocultural shocks without using the populist playbook. However, the gradual erasure of the nation-state is different in that it threatens the political itself. Not only does the ever-expanding gap between the elite and the people continue to grow, not only are their respective interests increasingly at odds, but the very idea of a representative system able to wield democratic power against transnational forces seems antiquated.
Consider the case of Poland, where several democratically elected local governments have chosen to impose a series of anti-LGBT measures. In response, the EU has deprived these Polish towns of structural funds allocated to promote socioeconomic ascension and lift disadvantaged regions out of poverty. Now, many would argue that LGBT rights fully justify such a reaction. But let us for a moment focus upon the political effects that this kind of response generates. The Poles have just reelected an ultraconservative government that ran against gay marriage and other progressive proposals. The city councils that have adopted these “anti-LGBT guidelines” also benefit from tremendous popular support. Does the EU’s response actually change these laws, no matter how discriminatory they may be? No. All it does is to encroach upon national sovereignty, deprive the disenchanted poor of much-needed structural funds, galvanize nationalist sentiments, and confirm that European technocrats stand ready to use economic coercion when voters reject their vision of the world. Even the most liberal activists should realize that this sort of intervention is as careless as it is counterproductive.
But they do not. Instead, commentators deplore the effects of populist forces whose causes they choose to ignore. The term “populism” now functions as a handy negative epithet, as a rhetorical weapon used by condescending politicians who refuse to address uncomfortable questions. Gone is the respect for steelworkers’ legitimate dislike of international trade agreements. Gone is the empathy for small-town voters who have been economically ostracized and culturally stigmatized for decades. Instead, by charging those who champion these causes with “populist sympathies,” reckless commentators disqualify the validity of well-founded questions. Combating the methods of Trump or Sanders is one thing; demonizing their voters is another. Stigmatization, insults, and visceral disdain have never convinced anyone of anything.
Populism is not a disease so much as it is a symptom — the symptom of a political caste that, in light of its own incompetence, has chosen to elevate moral posturing over problem-solving. Part of the reason why the British intelligentsia despises Brexiters is because they have effectively exposed the failures of a floundering government. No matter how supposedly uneducated some Brexiters may be, they are — partially, at the very least — right. The EU has become overly technocratic and anti-democratic. The EU has abandoned workers to serve the interests of a select pack of lobbyists. The EU has imposed disastrously inhumane austerity measures on countries whose demise had largely been caused by Eurocrats themselves. And accusing those who worry about these issues of racism, myopia, stupidity, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white supremacism does absolutely nothing to advance the national conversation in the right direction.
Naturally, none of the above requires us to applaud populist movements or cheer their leaders. We can lament their unidimensional vision of the world, deplore the polarization they encourage, expose their flaws, fight their ideas. As the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, we may want “to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down.”
We should never forget that without concrete responses, popular anger is here to stay. Naturally, empathy for the discontents need not mean abandoning the pursuit of globalization altogether. But it does mean questioning its ramifications, its cultural effects, and its ideological underpinnings. Then, and only then, will we emerge from this moment of perpetual indignation and rebuild our institutions together.