The allure of populism and the demise of democracy

Don’t believe everything the media (mainstream or otherwise) tells you… Right now it’s become fashionable to state (and journalists do it with annoying frequency) that we live a “populist moment”, that populist politicians are in the ascendant, that populist policies are resurgent, that populist options are being (the horror of horrors!) chosen by electorates all the world over (normally with presumably dire consequences) and that even our most cherished form of government, democracy (a form, it has to be noted, that apportioning power in proportion to numbers, should be intrinsically populist, as by definition the populace is the most numerous stratum of the political body) is in danger of being subverted/ debased/ superseded/ abandoned by some unspecified populist alternative (see the las number of The Atlantic, under the ominous title “Is Democracy Dying?” it expounds at large what such abandonment may consist in, but don’t expect to find great clarity in most articles, except may be in this one by Anne Applebaum: What Americans can expect ).

As usual with intellectual fashions, there is a lot of nonsense being presented as common sense (albeit, when the former becomes common enough, one has to wonder if it qualifies as the later, but I digress), so in this post I’ll try to weight the potential truth of those alarmed denunciations by trying to better define what populism (as presented by the media) is purported to be, and then I will try to adopt the point of view of the populists themselves  to determine if the denunciations have some substance.

So, who are these evil populists?

Let’s start by enumerating the parties signaled by the MSM as embodying the current wave, all of them having been repeatedly declared populist (or, in one case, going through a marked phase of populism): of those currently in power, we have Fidesz (lead by Viktor Orban) in Hungary, Law and Justice (lead by the surviving one of the Kackzynsky brother, Jaroslaw) in Poland, Justice and Development (lead by Recep Tayyip Erdogan) in Turkey, whoever is in power (lead, regardless of party name and professed organization, by Vladimir Putin) in Russia and… the Republican party (lead, nominally, by Donald Trump) in the United States of America; with a more or less decent showing, and in some cases participating in government coalitions, we have the National Front (lead by Marine Le Pen) in France, Party for Freedom (lead by Geert Wilders) in the Netherlands, Alternative for Germany (lead, more or less, by Alexander Gauland) obviously in Germany, Swedish Democrats (lead by Jimmie Akkeson) in Sweden and both the five stars movement and the League and Forza Italia (led respectively by Luigi di Maio, Matteo Salvini and the incombustible Silvio Berlusconi) in, where else, Italy… quite a roster.

As you may expect, those parties have a number of differences, as they respond to electorates with different histories, institutional frames and expectations of what the democratic process (or, more widely, the process of forming a collective will from the separate strands of individual and group preferences) entails and permits. However, I think the common denomination is essentially valid, as they share a significant number of features:

·         Rabid nationalism, as each of them publicly states their “national identity” (a poorly defined set of features that supposedly distinguishes them from all the rest of the world, a conceit exposed by the fact that a significant number of those features -independence, rugged individualism, agrarian values, manly assertiveness to the point of aggressiveness, a recent or distant past of military conquest of foreign lands, etc.- are shared by all of them, hence losing a good deal of their differentiating power) has intrinsic value, and the nation itself that embodies such identity is distinctly superior to the rest of nations due to history, or culture, or economic power, or military prowess. I’ll have more to say about nationalism in a moment, but at this point it’s enough to remark that it is the source of the populists’ most noxious and unsavory attitudes.

·         Mistrust or disdain of traditional democratic institutions (free press and independent judiciary first and foremost amongst them) as part of an illegitimate cabal (the “deep state”, the cathedral) that has, for some time now, monopolized the levers of power and exerted a stifling control on what could be thought and publicly said in the favor of an elite that has grown foreign to the essence of the nation. This distrust is easily expanded to encompass any sort of learned or expert opinion (and the professed anti-intellectualism of certain American right would be its more advanced pathology), understood as darkly allied with such evil and scheming cabal.

·         Nominal adherence to free markets, but veiled intervention to “tilt the scales” of untrammeled competition in favor of perceived friends (or ideological allies), especially in the world of media or any means or influencing public opinion. Notionally, in economic matters all these populists tend towards conservatism/ neoliberalism (and thus towards lowering taxes rather than raising them, deregulation rather than substantial regulatory intervention or subsidies -although they don’t recoil from the latter, preferably directed towards mentioned friends and allies).

·         Exaltation of a whitewashed past when the nation was purer/ freer/ more authentic, not so influenced by foreign fashions and influences. Hence socially conservative, and opposed to any recognition of the existence of distinctly aggrieved (or historically discriminated against) subgroups within the national community, understood as monolithic and homogeneous. 

·         Open enmity towards supra-national institutions (EU, UN, ICC, IPCC) including commerce and unrestricted flow of capital. Those institutions are understood by the populist in a similar way as the traditional internal (national) democratic institutions, with the difference that they cannot co-opt them to their own advantage.

·         Virulent denunciation of some perceived (and mostly fabricated) “other” that supposedly endangers the national unity and harmony. This alien other (alien in the sense that it has situated itself voluntarily outside the exalted national identity the populist is committed to uphold and defend) is uniformly painted as entirely evil, entirely opposed to all that is noble and good, entirely deluded (as having rejected the summum bonum that constitutes the national identity, it can only pursue debased, depraved and demeaning ends, applying its clouded judgment to such ends, in turn, can only lead him to a twisted logic and to contradictions and obfuscations), but at the same time entirely cunning and dangerous. The  diabolical “other” is at the same time very stupid and foolish (can have no intelligence or wisdom, because if he had any of them he would realize the wrongness and hopelessness of both his means and his ends) AND very resourceful and capable… he occupies all the levers of power, both within the nation and in international institutions, as we have seen, even after the populist faction is appointed to office, and even when they have been occupying it for years. He has a near monopoly over education, which it applies to corrupt and poison the minds of the younger generation. He also controls almost all the media, which uses to spread false information to justify its grasp of the state. Some feat, given its presumed intellectual disabilities.

This “other” is necessarily ill-defined, protean, shifting and adapting to the needs and expediency of the moment. It has some colorful and highly idiosyncratic instances, like the fixation of the Hungarian populists (Fidesz) against the progressive billionaire George Soros or the distaste of Putin-admiring Russians for gays, which they tend to see lurking behind any manifestation of distinctly Western initiative against Russia of the last fifty years, but there are two common elements in the “other” that every one of those movements have craftily constructed: their own countries’ left (widely understood) and immigrants (most markedly, those coming from poor countries, and even most markedly between them, those coming from poor Muslim countries  -because let us admit it, nobody virulently complains of the amount of ultra-rich Saudis thronging in their streets).

I think the key features of the populists that have political analysts, journalists and pundits more or less foaming at the mouth are the first (nationalism) and the last (fixation on a scapegoat that is blamed for all the ills of the polity). Indeed, any other feature seems negotiable, but a blind identification with a certain (very traditionalist) understanding of the national soul and the detestation of their own domestic lefties and foreign poor (and mostly Muslim) immigrants is absolutely essential, both a common thread of the narrative they tell to make sense of the world and a badge of honor for identifying themselves amidst a sea of potential traitors and defectors.

I cannot help pointing the inherent lack or credibility of the nationalistic discourse exhibited by supremacist of every stripe: If you are a white European guy, I would consider your opinion about the superiority of white guys and the Western civilization highly suspect. Ditto for women, Jews, Americans (just the most loudmouthed and obnoxious of nationalists), gays, heterosexuals, atheists and whatnot, each claiming the inherent and undeniable moral and historical rightness of their cause (which can be stripped down to the proud belonging to the group they identify with, regardless of the fact that such belonging is essentially due to chance, and thus carries exactly zero merit or dessert with it). Not that I consider a certain amount of healthy identification with one’s own group entirely unjustified.

I happen to be a Spaniard, and consider myself a Spanish patriot, out of fashion as that may be nowadays. I dearly love my country and would sacrifice without hesitation a number of things for it (effort, substantial treasure and in certain circumstances even blood), but I don’t for a moment think it has any valid claim to superiority over most other countries that occupy this populous planet of us. Yep, we had our moment of glory under the sun, enormous empire where the sun never set and all that, but dude, that was five hundred years ago, and since then things have gone mostly downhill for us (one could claim one of the most protracted and humiliating decadences ever as a sort of perverse distinction, but I’m not really into that kind of masochistic bragging). I don’t see my countrymen as especially clever, especially virtuous, especially hardworking, especially strong (or any other measure of physical health) when compared with any other nationality, current or historical. On the other hand, I neither see them as especially idiotic, especially vicious, especially lazy or especially infirm. As happens with almost any feature that follows a normal distribution within any population, our collective average in any of those characteristics (both good and bad) will be slightly higher and/ or slightly lower than the collective average of any other (my guess is that Americans are, likely, more hard-working than us on average, Lithuanians are stronger than us on average, Israelis are more clever than us on average, etc.) but that really doesn’t tell us much about how a particular Spaniard compares with a particular national of each one of those countries (or of any other) in each one of those features, as the intra-country variation is much, much bigger than the puny differences between national averages.

All of which is to say, I’m OK with loving your country, when done with a clear, unclouded eye, which means loving it in spite of the very real shortcomings and vices of your countrymen (and, that goes without saying, of yourself), not because of their imagined virtues. What I see in the proclamations of the aforementioned populists is empty jingoism and boastful dissembling, thinly supported by a highly biased interpretation of their own History where their supposed ancestors did no wrong, were unfailingly courageous and right, but were hobbled by an unfortunate coalition of bad luck and deceitful enemies. I just, mostly, don’t buy it and neither should you.

OK, given who they are, have they real bite?

Or at least, should they? Consider this somewhat haphazard mishmash of well-known facts: Is America an oligarchy? : in the US alone, 4 guys own as much as the bottom half of the country, and 400 billionaires could buy with the wealth they currently hold the entire amount of goods and services exchanged yearly in France (a rather vacuous comparison, btw, but that’s what happens when you ask a journalist for shocking facts about inequality: they mix a static quantity -a stock- with a dynamic one -a flow-). Given that, we would expect people to be royally pissed off and to be willing to hear anybody proposing them to take to the streets armed with torches and pitchforks to correct such untenable state of affairs. But that is not really what we are seeing. The populist movements we identified above are not proposing to redistribute such skewed distribution of wealth, to go after the stupendously humungous fortunes of the few so they can be enjoyed by the many or to somehow level the playing field so the chances of so unjustifiable differences arising and perpetuating themselves are somewhat decreased. Not at all. Not a single one of them points the finger at the rich and powerful as the originators of the little man malaise, as the (quite likely) cause of its economic stagnation, of its shrinking life prospects, of its very likely not reaching the standard of living that his parents enjoyed. Rather the opposite, they all tend to celebrate and lionize the captains of industry, the titans of finance, the helmsmen of the all-powerful corporations that “create wealth” and that should be left to themselves so they can go on with the important business of amassing monstrous riches in the (vain) hope those riches will somehow trickle down to the rest of us.

They have, however, to offer an alternative explanation to the maladies affecting societies. Just to remember my readers, those societies where populism seem to be ascendant (and many where it still it doesn’t):

·         are increasing their productivity less and less, and expect it to go into reverse any time soon. That is the sad price to pay for a technology that is only developing its ability to manipulate data and, in the last instance, to keep people’s attention away from their real-life problems, which only keep growing in the meantime (the predictable price of not paying attention to them)

·         are less and less able to improve the technology that keeps their physical infrastructure afloat (energy production, transportation, consumer products manufacturing, building of homes and industrial facilities). The only thing they are consistently improving is their ability to command the people’s attention, by keeping it glued to screens big and small that monopolize it, barter with it, and fill it in the end with the most inane and unsatisfying (in the long-run) drivel

·         are growingly unequal, and thus improving their GDP per person without barely improving the median income (another way of saying all the gains are being corralled by the 10% at the top, and most of them by just a fraction of that 10%)

·         are incapable of reproducing themselves (average number of children per women going more and more below the replacement rate), are growing older, and are promising themselves a number of goods and services they are noticeably unable to produce, thus going into ever greater debt that they are ever more evidently not capable of honoring

·         are, in some cases (the US of A) in worse physical shape, and indeed erasing some of the health gains of the last century, seeing for the first time an actual decrease in life expectancy (I would expect more societies, both advanced and developing, to see similar trends in the near future, as the basic hopelessness of the situation of the majority of their populations sink in, and they start translating such hopelessness into self-destructive behaviors which in turn cause a spike in what Case & Deaton have termed “deaths of despair”) 

I’d say a good deal of those problems have a common cause: elites (I know what I’m talking about, I’m one of ‘em) have become the almost exclusive beneficiaries of what society produces, have sequestered the political process so it only deals with what concerns them (us) and steer it so they (we) keep on reaping the rewards of our technologically enabled social world. The solution, thus, would seem clear: kick those evil elites (again, for those of you with too thick a skull to have noticed, that would be me and my pals) out of power, confiscate their ill-begotten riches, usurped illegitimately from the toil and the sweat of the masses, and distribute them more widely so everybody is happy and contented again (and, in the process, they once again consider life worth living and thus devote some significant effort to increase it by, for example, reproducing). Yeah, I know, ‘twould never work, has been tried and caused even greater problems that what it attempted to solve (Socialism! Communism! Revolution and death and mass poverty! Yadda, yadda, yadda…) soooo, instead of thinking how we solve it in a different way that sidesteps those well-known (and very real and scary) problems, let’s delude ourselves thinking there is really another cause of society’s ills. If possible, one that is, like, really easy to eradicate.

But before we pivot to that cause, let’s consider first, the contradiction that populists have to accept once they are in power: the economy (and the whole society) that was terrible and going to hell and amidst a “carnage” a few years ago (before their accession) suddenly is all hunky -dory, without any of the key underlying variables having changed at all (in the US you can see that delirious triumphalism from Victor Davis Hanson in his shambolic National Review to the editorial page of the WSJ). If you look at GDP growth, unemployment numbers (real ones: percentage of working-age population actually working, as opposed to percentage of adults accepting to be declared by the state as work-seekers when such acceptance gives them no discernible benefit), crime statistics, percentage of foreign-born population, divorce rates, percentage of kids born out of wedlock, prevalence of drug use, life expectancy or growth of TFP in any of the countries where populist poster-boys are in power (namely, USA, Poland, Russia, Hungary and Turkey, with the UK sitting uncomfortably in a gray zone), they all stay roughly where they were before the populist takeover. Either they were wrong back then, and things were not so dire, or they are wrong now and things are not so rosy (actually, both positions have some elements of truth in them, and both are not the whole truth…).

In our previous analysis we asserted that the common feature of all current populism is their fixation in a scapegoat at the base (instead of at the summit) of the social structure. We have to now note the obvious inadequacy of those scapegoat to explain/ justify everything that seems to be wrong (which seems to be a lot): immigrants are simply not enough to be causing our societies malaise. Not in the USA, not in England, not certainly in Poland or in Hungary (as expounded in Applebaum’s Atlantic article I linked before). Ditto for gays which, highly visible as they now are, still constitute less than 20% (and probably less than 10%) of the total population, and not particularly powerful or influential outside of the entertainment industry. Women may be a more credible root cause (they are the ones not having the babies after all, although I’d argue that’s more an effect than a cause, and one shared with their husbands to boot, btw), but not even the most wild-eyed chauvinist would accuse women in toto as the culprits of our extended malaise, as they reserve their most venomous verbal darts for those between them that claim to be feminists. And feminism is a most flexible and imprecise category (hell, a substantial number of men nowadays claim to be feminists too, so depending on how you define the concept it encompasses most of the non-fringe population). The relationship between women, feminism and politics is pretty convoluted, and although most populisms are (explicitly, like in Turkey, Hungary and Poland, or implicitly, or at least more mutedly, like n the USA and Russia) against most tenets of XXth century feminism (free access to abortion, explicit protections against wage discrimination based on gender in the law code, harsh punishment of sexual harassment understood in a most comprehensive way, active encouragement of equal representation of men women in all institutions, etc.) they cannot (and typically do not) can use all women as scapegoats, and although feminist are much maligned and signaled as the culprits of a good deal of what is wrong with society (decline of traditional family, slackening of the moral fiber, disrespect for authority of the younger generations…) you cannot easily and conveniently distinguish a feminist woman from a non-feminist one (outside of feminist marches and protests, that is), which somehow blunts its usefulness for those in power.

So let’s recap and see where we’re at: dominant reason has painted us into a corner, and shaped a social compact that is inherently inimical to the flourishing, and nationalism/ populism/ traditionalism won’t cut it to restore the system’s frayed legitimacy.

Because that’s the real trouble here: legitimacy. Democracy is losing it, and the mild authoritarianism that naturally comes with the populists' package is attempting to regain it, but will of course fail (remember, scapegoating evil immigrants, or supranational organizations, or liberal billionaires, or what have you, can only cover so far your own lack of solutions for a society that runs its member to the ground because of the internal structure of the desires it condones, the hierarchy it recognizes and the ultimate reason for living it provides), so the question is if hard authoritarianism will follow… of course, according to both Alt-right and SJWs, we are already in a hard authoritarian state, they only differ in who runs it: the Cathedral according to the former and the patriarchy and multinational corporations according to the latter. 

But… if you ask to an unreconstructed sexist father of a traditionalist family or to a starry-eyed liberal or to the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation how they feel running the world and bossing over everybody else they will all confess to you they feel powerless and excluded from the decision-making centers of social life. Even more, they will most likely complain (yep, even the powerful CEO) of their unfair treatment at the voluble hands of public opinion, that seems to be unfailingly against them and what they stand for.

So the answer to the question I posed to myself at the beginning of this section is a resounding “no”. Populism has no real bite. By misdiagnosing the problem of our current social compact they are at best delaying the inevitable collapse of the society enabled by our current dominant reason, and at worst making it both more probable and more violent. As I determined long ago, scapegoats do not reenergize societies beyond the short adrenaline rush caused by their collective obliteration (an exercise that, as requires the application of violence against our fellow human beings, usually leaves the perpetrators morally tainted forever). Populists today may run globalization to the ground (not that I would lament that particular outcome) erecting barriers to commerce, free movement of people and even ideas. They may even triumph in creating more racially and culturally homogeneous societies (which may require, as is the case in the USA, the breakdown of today’s culturally and racially diverse nation states into more manageable, less diverse units) but they will not triumph in reviving the arcadia felix they promise to their deluded followers. Those homogeneous societies will be as little innovative, as unjust, as unhealthy, as unequal, as hopeless and as inimical to human flourishing as today’s. You may kick the browns, the blacks and the Jews out of the country, you can reinstate the patriarchy and the social and sexual mores of the 50’s (not necessarily of 1950’s, mind you, but of whatever century that suits your fancy) and get all the gays back in the closet… as long as 1% of the population owns almost all the wealth, directs all research and development to improve their amusements and life expectation alone and firmly controls the ideology production and distribution mechanisms, the life of the suffering masses (the populus that so nonchalantly put or maintained that 1% in power) will not improve, and they will resort (as they are resorting now) to their last freedom, the freedom to vote with their gonads not to perpetuate such abysmal and unsatisfying state of affairs.

But, ah! You may resort, once the aliens are kicked out and social norms of propriety and tradition have been restored, once we are wholly one people, professing one faith, respecting one monarch (one undisputed source of authority that prevents us from going back to the self-destructive habits of disunion and faction)… only then, say you, we will undoubtedly build together a more just, more healthy, more fair and more hopeful society! Homogeneity and sharing common values are, for the enlightened reactionary (let’s call them the “thinking man’s populist”, which sadly implies they end up being the “populist without the population”) the precondition for the more responsible behavior of the elites, which only then would stop acting exclusively in the pursuit of their selfish interest and would instead redirect their genius and unbound potential for good to the betterment of the lives of their fellow-subjects, and that is what would cause a new bout of human flourishing and a new sense of collective purpose and a new wave of contentment that would at last reverse our current collective trajectory of decay and degeneration. Well, if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’m interested in selling. Elites will be elites, in this society as in any other, including utopia, the Pays de Cocagne (English equivalent: Cockaigne), Schlafferendland and Neverland. Will they be more virtuous and less self-interested if they see their largesse benefitting exclusively those that think like them, believe like them and, most pointedly, look like them? According to those that would like to speak for them (i.e. the whole American Alt-Right and Neoreaction), sure they will! According to myself and roughly half a million years of hominid history, not a chance in hell!

Before I finish, I’d like to clarify that I’m not simply taking sides here, and declaring that a certain flavor of “revolutionary conservatism” that favors discarding the current political consensus and choosing “alternative” views (espousing, in an expression cherished by the American Alt-right, opinions outside the current “Overton window”) is necessarily suspect, and to be rejected because the only morally legitimate political options go in the direction of a bigger role of the state in a more drastic redistribution (the opposite opinion, anathema to all populism, traditionally ascribed to the left). Redistribution by the State has a very poor track record, and is indeed wont to cause more problems than what it solves (in my pointing to the evils of current dominant reason and how to overcome them I have never said that the State had a bigger or smaller role to play, I tend to entirely leave it aside), starting with increased chances for corruption, cronyism and moral hazard. This post has been mainly critic with movements that identify themselves as “rightist” or “traditionalist”, but I could very well write a similarly long one criticizing the shortcomings and hypocrisy of their specular image, movements that identify as “leftist” or “progressive”. I’m not intending here to “positively proselytize” and convince anybody of the superiority of any given (existing) political position. What I’m trying is to open up people’s eyes, and make them realize that almost any political movement on offer today (left or right) is trying to dupe them dishonestly into adopting positions that are internally incoherent, depicts its opponents as cartoonish villains without sufficient basis, would if adopted turn out again their own interests and, in the process, make the rich richer and cause unnecessary suffering on a number of innocent bystanders, unjustly signaled by those wont to profit as the cause of all evil.

Guys (and gals)… just don’t fall for it!