The End of Populism? Don’t Bet on It

D onald Trump has exited the stage, for now. Does it feel as though populism has gone away with him? Not really.

The latest revolt is people day-trading stocks and posting to Reddit. They are betting strongly against Wall Street short sellers and thereby forcing hedge funds into ruinously expensive margin calls. Then there is the ongoing skepticism about public-health advice and the pandemic, which will soon move into skepticism or simple disinterest in the vaccines that have become the key requirement for ending lockdowns and restrictions.

It feels like a high tide for populist sentiment. The COVID-19 pandemic has set the populist imagination alight. The sudden collapse of our settled patterns of behavior and the drastic — once unthinkable — impositions on businesses and individuals have knocked away people’s sense of normality. Maybe more important, they have knocked away our sense of safety. The disease itself has been a source of fear. But even those people who have refused to fear COVID-19 have been subject to the fear and the moral panic among their friends about masks or social distancing, or the machinations of elite leadership in the crisis.

And the restrictions have forced everyone to rely more and more on social media, not just for socializing but also for learning how to navigate the dangers ahead of them — whether the perceived dangers were disease and death, the collapse of their business because of indifferent health authorities, or Bill Gates’s microchipping them.

If the virus is stomped out by summer, though, populist energy could ebb substantially and normal life might return in a giddy rush as we all race back to entertainments and head toward full employment once again. The Fed’s book may be a mess, but stocks are high, and household balance sheets tell us that spending and splurging are on the way.

But I doubt that populism is going away for long.

First, because there is always a populist streak in American life. We are a people who routinely cook up new religions, quack cures, and strange theories. Our modern media just make these more visible. But what’s mainly driving populist energy today are the errors, arrogance, corruption, and intransigence of our leaders.

The continued breakup of traditional institutions and the segmentation of news media into enterprises that focus on serving a dedicated customer base rather than “the public” have driven trust in the media to an all-time low. Not a surprise when all media are seen as a commercial scam, led by a cliquish, self-protecting bevy of insiders. Journalists are becoming the new lawyers — despised by the public for serving themselves even before their customers.

In the culture today, failed politicians never retire into humiliating disgrace. They rarely even do genuinely penitent charity work. Instead, they fail upward into corporate board seats, where their previous authority is prostituted for their private benefit.

And in our business culture, the largest corporations squeeze profits and exert dominance by ensnaring employees and customers alike in thickets of human-resources rules, alongside terms of service meant to confuse and ultimately demoralize us.

Social media are another source of populist energy. And not just because they allow the people to speak back — or perform as if they are speaking back — to authority. Social media have a way of facilitating too much impulsive, disinhibited commentary among different segments of society, which increases mutual bitterness and hostility. An annoying neighbor is just an annoying neighbor — but on social media, being an annoying digital neighbor makes you a symbol of “the other guys” who are ruining everything. Have the past four years shown much conciliation between populist and elite factions, or increasing contempt and cynicism about them?

This is all exacerbated by the obvious way in which social media can literally derange people by overstimulating the portions of the brain that rely on social cues to navigate the world.

What quells populism? There are usually two things that do it. The unpleasant one is that populists elect a leadership class of fellow populists who wreck the economy, and then the whole project blows up in their faces, scattering populist energies and passions to the wind. The other, usually better end to populism comes about when populist energy effects a transformation of the elite, partly by substituting in new members and partly by inducing incumbents to reform their ways for their own survival.

So if we want to see populism ebb, we need the mass of people to turn away from their phones, which overstimulate our fight-or-flight instincts, and invest in real-world relationships. We need to repair the mechanisms of social mobility that Americans identify with the best tradition of our nation. The genuine possibility of rising or falling in America would ease class tensions. And we also need our leaders to be more genuinely public-spirited, even humble in the way they exercise their authority. They must demonstrate a lack of self-interest as well as a willingness to pay a concrete price for mistakes.

Yeah, I don’t see any of this happening, either.

So it’s likely that the populist energy in our culture is only going to spread and grow. We see it in politics, medicine, financial markets, and popular culture generally — the “fan” culture is a populist revolt against professional criticism. We’re just getting started.