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superseded/ abandoned by some unspecified populist alternative (see the las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!