The rise of a range of self-advertised, openly nativist “strong men” propelled to power on waves of nationalist and populist resentment across the democratic world has prompted much concern by the liberal commentariat about the future of precisely this “democratic” world.
Some with grim foreboding imagine an illiberal, authoritarian democracy along the lines of Victor Orban’s leadership in Hungary or a managed, celebritised democracy like Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy in Russia or the sui generis market authoritarianism of a China or Singapore as models for states in the developing world to aspire to rather than the free market, liberal democratic teleology so confidently predicted by Francis Fukuyama after the end of the Cold War (an optimism from which he has long since retreated).
Of particularly pressing concern for liberal agonists is the threat to the post-war rules based and cooperative trans-national order as these leaders, be they a Modi, Erdogan or Bolisanario, are openly contemptuous of the ethos of this institutional architecture. Most alarming of all for them has been the stunning successes of populist fueled nationalism in both the United States, with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 and in the United Kingdom which in the same year became the first member state to exit the European Union in a referendum. They rightfully view with horror President Trump’s appalling handling of the current Covid-19 pandemic and, to a lesser extent, the UK’s confused handling of it and wonder if they presage a complete collapse of these two actors on the international stage. Indeed, one commentator wonders if the era of Donald Trump is a foreshadow of the Roman Empire style denouement for the United States. [1]
In the words of one forecaster of the eventual death of democracy, “identity politics is fuel to the fire of populist frustrations’ (Runciman, 2019). There has certainly been no shortage of combustible material for such bonfires in the first two decades of the 21st century: the global financial crash of 2008 which exacerbated to an almost exponential degree the stark economic equalities generated by globalisation; the cumulative alienation of populations from their representative institutions including the European Union; clash of cultures engendered by mass migrations and the “War on Terror” and the dizzying speed of digital communications revolutions which has made so many local conflicts global and has given airtime not just to emancipatory movements in areas like the Middle East but to murderous jihadi narratives of white nationalists as well as Islamist fanatics and to all sorts of cranks, conspiracy theorists and disinformation specialists who have found ready constituencies amongst the legions of anti-expert; anti-elite cynics. But, arguably, the triumph of populism in the Anglo-American world would not have occurred but for the political entrepreneurialism of Alt-Right guru Steve Bannon who, after spotting the potential for such in the gaming industry, successfully weaponised the rage of young white Americans seething in the underbelly of the internet for his culture war for Donald Trump and for the brazen technological genius of Cambridge Analytica who illegally harvested personal data from Facebook under the less-than-watchful eye of Mark Zuckerberg in the service of both Trump and the Leave campaigns in the EU referendum in the UK.
But it is also arguable that, in a perverse version of the ‘return of the repressed’, that 2016’s double calamity for liberalism and globalism, represented the ultimate triumph for the supposedly defeated side in the US culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and, to somewhat lesser extent, Britain’s economic and cultural left-behinds (the “left” carries a potent double meaning in the context of the extent of the Brexit vote in what later became former Labour electoral heartlands). If this is to be the case then some inquiry is needed into the role of postmodern narratives in academe and the prevalence of subjectivity in popular culture as exemplified by the classic feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’ and symbolised by the confessional and self-help literature of Tom Wolfe’s emancipatory Me Decade or Christopher Lasch’s decadent Culture of Narcissism (depending on your viewpoint obviously).
Populism is a notoriously slippery concept. There is much dispute within political theory as to whether it is a political style which can be harmlessly deployed at certain junctures by political parties within the boundaries of liberal democratic norms, or whether it is a form of anti-politics which marks a decisive rupture with those norms and thus constitutes an existential threat to liberal democratic foundations and structures (Bolton and Pitts, 2018). However, there are a number of key and distinctive characteristics of populism.
In the words of one forecaster of the eventual death of democracy, “identity politics is fuel to the fire of populist frustrations’ (Runciman, 2019). There has certainly been no shortage of combustible material for such bonfires in the first two decades of the 21st century: the global financial crash of 2008 which exacerbated to an almost exponential degree the stark economic equalities generated by globalisation; the cumulative alienation of populations from their representative institutions including the European Union; clash of cultures engendered by mass migrations and the “War on Terror” and the dizzying speed of digital communications revolutions which has made so many local conflicts global and has given airtime not just to emancipatory movements in areas like the Middle East but to murderous jihadi narratives of white nationalists as well as Islamist fanatics and to all sorts of cranks, conspiracy theorists and disinformation specialists who have found ready constituencies amongst the legions of anti-expert; anti-elite cynics. But, arguably, the triumph of populism in the Anglo-American world would not have occurred but for the political entrepreneurialism of Alt-Right guru Steve Bannon who, after spotting the potential for such in the gaming industry, successfully weaponised the rage of young white Americans seething in the underbelly of the internet for his culture war for Donald Trump and for the brazen technological genius of Cambridge Analytica who illegally harvested personal data from Facebook under the less-than-watchful eye of Mark Zuckerberg in the service of both Trump and the Leave campaigns in the EU referendum in the UK.
But it is also arguable that, in a perverse version of the ‘return of the repressed’, that 2016’s double calamity for liberalism and globalism, represented the ultimate triumph for the supposedly defeated side in the US culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and, to somewhat lesser extent, Britain’s economic and cultural left-behinds (the “left” carries a potent double meaning in the context of the extent of the Brexit vote in what later became former Labour electoral heartlands). If this is to be the case then some inquiry is needed into the role of postmodern narratives in academe and the prevalence of subjectivity in popular culture as exemplified by the classic feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’ and symbolised by the confessional and self-help literature of Tom Wolfe’s emancipatory Me Decade or Christopher Lasch’s decadent Culture of Narcissism (depending on your viewpoint obviously).
Populism is a notoriously slippery concept. There is much dispute within political theory as to whether it is a political style which can be harmlessly deployed at certain junctures by political parties within the boundaries of liberal democratic norms, or whether it is a form of anti-politics which marks a decisive rupture with those norms and thus constitutes an existential threat to liberal democratic foundations and structures (Bolton and Pitts, 2018). However, there are a number of key and distinctive characteristics of populism.
The basic idea behind populism, whether from the right or left, is that democracy has been stolen from the people by the elites. In order to reclaim it, the elites have to flushed out from their hiding places, where they obscure what they are up to by paying lip-service to democracy. Such logic can often lead to conspiracy theories (Runciman: p.65)
In their analysis of the ‘left-populism’ of ‘Corbynism’, the diffuse ideology attributed to followers of the erstwhile leader of the British Labour Party, Bolton and Pitts utilise the theory of the left-populist Chantal Mouffe[2]. For Mouffe, the central determinant of a populist project is the creation of a stark divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’. She argues that a successful populist political movement must bring together different social groups under the banner of a collective identity, a ‘we’ which in defining itself as such produces a ‘political frontier’ against the collective enemy, those who are not included within that ‘we’. (Bolton & Pitts, p.10).
In addition to this binary divide, Jan-Werner Muller states that the ‘logic of populism’ leads to ‘a particular moralistic imagination of politics’. In this vision ‘a morally pure and fully unified people’ are counterposed to ‘elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way’ morally defective.[3] For Bolton & Pitts the supreme benchmark though which the moral are distinguished from the immoral is that of productiveness. Populist rhetoric, whether of Corbynite or Trumpian staple or the ‘austerity populism’ of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government of 2010-15 (and its earlier 1980s vintage of the Thatcherite populist folk-devil of the ‘scrounger’ and the Reaganite counterpart of the ‘welfare queen’) routinely pits a ‘pure, innocent, always [4]hardworking people … against a corrupt elite who do not really work’. From this moralistic, productivist perspective (with its loud echoes of the Protestant work ethic)) – are regarded as undermining the internal solidity of the ‘we’. Corbyn’s (and Trump’s) routine denunciation of a ‘rigged system’ deliberately set up by ‘elites’ in order to hold back the ordinary ‘wealth creators dovetail perfectly with this construct. Indeed, Corbyn’s successful invocation of the unsullied ‘we’ against the nefarious ‘them’ was key to Labour ‘s unexpected successes in the 2017 General Election (Bolton & Pitts, pp.10-11) [as it was to an extent in Trump’s 2016 US Presidential election triumph].
The ‘austerity populism’ narrative was framed during the Coalition years on an opposition between a national community of ‘hard-working people’ and a feckless, Vicky Pollard, Shameless, Benefits Street type of underclass who had brought Britain to its knees – namely the ‘scroungers’, the benefit cheats, the workshy who chose to live off the munificence of the state. In the telling of this the 2008 financial crash was the outcome of the Labour government prolificacy in running up a huge national debt in order to subsidise the lifestyles of its indolent clientele. In contrast to this rotten threesome of a bloated state, corrupt liberal elite and workshy spongers, the Tories would take the side of the morally superior, economically active (the ‘hardworking families’, the inhabitants of ‘alarm-clock Britain’) to the parasitic, unproductive classes.
In their analysis of the ‘left-populism’ of ‘Corbynism’, the diffuse ideology attributed to followers of the erstwhile leader of the British Labour Party, Bolton and Pitts utilise the theory of the left-populist Chantal Mouffe[2]. For Mouffe, the central determinant of a populist project is the creation of a stark divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’. She argues that a successful populist political movement must bring together different social groups under the banner of a collective identity, a ‘we’ which in defining itself as such produces a ‘political frontier’ against the collective enemy, those who are not included within that ‘we’. (Bolton & Pitts, p.10).
In addition to this binary divide, Jan-Werner Muller states that the ‘logic of populism’ leads to ‘a particular moralistic imagination of politics’. In this vision ‘a morally pure and fully unified people’ are counterposed to ‘elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way’ morally defective.[3] For Bolton & Pitts the supreme benchmark though which the moral are distinguished from the immoral is that of productiveness. Populist rhetoric, whether of Corbynite or Trumpian staple or the ‘austerity populism’ of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government of 2010-15 (and its earlier 1980s vintage of the Thatcherite populist folk-devil of the ‘scrounger’ and the Reaganite counterpart of the ‘welfare queen’) routinely pits a ‘pure, innocent, always [4]hardworking people … against a corrupt elite who do not really work’. From this moralistic, productivist perspective (with its loud echoes of the Protestant work ethic)) – are regarded as undermining the internal solidity of the ‘we’. Corbyn’s (and Trump’s) routine denunciation of a ‘rigged system’ deliberately set up by ‘elites’ in order to hold back the ordinary ‘wealth creators dovetail perfectly with this construct. Indeed, Corbyn’s successful invocation of the unsullied ‘we’ against the nefarious ‘them’ was key to Labour ‘s unexpected successes in the 2017 General Election (Bolton & Pitts, pp.10-11) [as it was to an extent in Trump’s 2016 US Presidential election triumph].
The ‘austerity populism’ narrative was framed during the Coalition years on an opposition between a national community of ‘hard-working people’ and a feckless, Vicky Pollard, Shameless, Benefits Street type of underclass who had brought Britain to its knees – namely the ‘scroungers’, the benefit cheats, the workshy who chose to live off the munificence of the state. In the telling of this the 2008 financial crash was the outcome of the Labour government prolificacy in running up a huge national debt in order to subsidise the lifestyles of its indolent clientele. In contrast to this rotten threesome of a bloated state, corrupt liberal elite and workshy spongers, the Tories would take the side of the morally superior, economically active (the ‘hardworking families’, the inhabitants of ‘alarm-clock Britain’) to the parasitic, unproductive classes.
In this classic productivist fairy tale, George Osborne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was to ask in his speech to the 2012 Conservative Party conference:
Where is the fairness for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits… When we say we’re all in it together, we speak for that worker.
In this parable, austerity was deemed to be economically necessary and morally right with the savage benefit cuts and sanctions that were to be imposed on the poor through workfare (the inconvenient truth that the majority of the poor were in-work was never allowed to get in the way of the telling of the austerity gospel) and the shrinking of the state through public expenditure cuts proper prices to pay for the rebirth of society around the righteous desires of the productive (Bolton & Pitts: pp.33-36).
And tragically for the liberal-left, this productivist, populist narrative of austerity had sufficient cut-through to ensure the return of an absolute majority Conservative government in the 2015 General Election. Having shape shifted into a populist English nationalist party that was pledged to ‘get Brexit done’ and to put austerity behind it (the amoebic qualities of the Conservative Party have few counterparts anywhere in the liberal democratic world), the Tories were returned with an even more shattering majority in the 2019 General Election, perhaps the penny has dropped on the left that the left does not do populism very well nor should it try.
And tragically for the liberal-left, this productivist, populist narrative of austerity had sufficient cut-through to ensure the return of an absolute majority Conservative government in the 2015 General Election. Having shape shifted into a populist English nationalist party that was pledged to ‘get Brexit done’ and to put austerity behind it (the amoebic qualities of the Conservative Party have few counterparts anywhere in the liberal democratic world), the Tories were returned with an even more shattering majority in the 2019 General Election, perhaps the penny has dropped on the left that the left does not do populism very well nor should it try.
The basic credo of populism whereby the elite or the deep state has stolen democracy from the masses and that therefore, the swamp has to be drained of the ubiquitous elites and their administrative flunkeys creates the logic of the conspiracy theory. Writ through Donald Trump’s inaugural speech as President of the USA on 20th January 2017 were classic conspiratorial tropes and ominous signs of the possible consequences of the politics of the bully pulpit being unleashed from on high on the polity at large. His speech was replete with apocalyptic vistas such as ‘the rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation … the crime and gangs and drugs’. In the manner of a revolutionary figure from history, he reminded his audience that ‘we all bleed the same red blood of patriots while repeating constantly the notorious isolationist mantra from the 1930s- “America First”. Trump lacerated professional politicians for their betrayal of the trust of the American people thus:
He fulminated that ‘for too long, a small group of in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have born the cost … ‘Washington flourished – but the people did not share its wealth’ … Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.” He declared that his election marked the transfer of power not just from president to president or from party to party but from Washington, DC back to the people (Runciman: pp.11-12).
Runciman optimistically assures us that none of the words put in Trump’s mouth by his speechwriters, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, were explicitly hostile to democracy or to the fundamental premise of representative democracy, which is that at the allotted time the people get to say when they have had enough of the politicians who have been making decisions for them. He asks us to take comfort in the acceptance of the result of the 2016 US presidential election by the defeated candidate and popular vote winner, Hillary Clinton, and outgoing President Barack Obama and by America’s top military brass who were now content with Trump’s possession of the nuclear codes. But he does not ignore the most troubling counter-factual: Would a defeated Trump have accepted the election result and, concomitantly, will a defeated White House incumbent accept the result of the 2020 result. The clue lies in Trump’s repeated declaration throughout the 2016 campaign that he would only accept the result if he was the victor. Will American democracy again, in Runciman’s words, “dodge a bullet” in January 2021? (Runciman: pp.13-19).
Despite these reassuring words concerning the state of American democracy, Trump’s rhetoric in his inauguration speech aligns him with populist leaders elsewhere who frame politics in similar terms. In Turkey, President Erdogan's default explanation for political opposition to his rule that his enemies are conspiring against the Turkish people. The conspirators include not just the dissident cleric Abdullah Galen and his followers, but the EU, the IMF and the ‘interest rate lobby’, code for Jews. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) government repeatedly blames the “system” for the problems that confronts it. The system is made up of unelected officials and institutions that have been infiltrated by foreign agents and, in the words of the PiS founder and co-leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, democracy needs ‘to be able to make decisions ... ‘instead of a handful of people bought by foreigners and internal forces that don’t serve Poland’s interests. In India, Narendra Modi uses Twitter like Trump to rant against those supposedly plotting his downfall, from foreign powers to the Indian ‘deep state’. Modi’s opponents circulate even more outlandish conspiracy theories about him; his election victories were secured by ballot-rigging; he is a Pakistani secret agent; he is a Jew (Runciman: pp.65-66).
Populist leaders seek to use the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections to consolidate power. They claim direct charismatic connection to “the people” who are often defined in narrow ethnic “in-group” terms that excludes large parts of the population as “out-groups”. They don’t like institutions and seek to undermine the checks and balances that limit a leader’s personal power in a modern liberal democracy: courts, the legislature, an independent media, and a nonpartisan bureaucracy. The bloody extra-judicial war waged on drug dealers by President Rodrigo Duterte (“Harry”) of the Philippines is, in terms of human cost, the most egregious violation of liberal democratic norms and practices (Fukuyama, 2019). Less violent but no less consequential has been Victor Orban’s power grab in Hungary during the Covid-19 pandemic and Donald Trump’s multiple acts of aggression towards judicial and bureaucratic authorities and the “mainstream media” relating, not just to the alleged acts of collusion with foreign powers that led to his unsuccessful impeachment, but on so many other matters of public policy.
The greatest driver of modern-day populism has been the increasing salience and projection of identity. The terms identity and identity politics are of fairly recent provenance, the former having been popularised by the psychologist Erik Erikson in the 1950s and the latter coming into prominence only in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s. In his revision (but no mea culpa) of his End of History forecast, Francis Fukuyama formulates identity and identity formation as a process that develops, for starters, out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules that does not adequately recognise that inner self’s worth or dignity. Although throughout history individuals have always found themselves in conflict with their societies, it has only been in the modern era that the view that the authentic inner self is of intrinsic worth and that the outer society is systematically unfair and unjust in its valuation of the former. Accordingly, it is not the inner self that has to be fashioned to conform to society’s rules, but that society itself that needs to changed (Fukuyama: pp.9-10).
The modern concept of identity fuses three different phenomena. The first is thymos, a universal aspect of human personality that demands recognition. The second is the distinction between the inner and the outer self, and the raising of the moral valuation of the inner self over outer society. This emerged only in early modern Europe. The third is an evolving concept of dignity, in which recognition is conferred not just to a narrow class of people (for example, the aristocratic warrior classes of Ancient Greece and other antiquitarian societies), but to everyone. The broadening and universalisation of dignity has turned the private quest for self into a political project. The most explicit endorsement of this quest in early modern political thought was made by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Hegel conceived of human beings as morally free agents who are not simply rational machines pursuing the maximum satisfaction of their desires. But unlike Rousseau or Kant, Hegel put recognition of that moral agency at the centre of his description of the human condition. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, he argued that human history was driven by a struggle for recognition; recognition was achieved by the acquisition of dignity through labour or some other capacity to transform the world into a place suitable for human life and flourishing (Fukuyama: pp.37-40).
Living as he did in the aftermath of the French Revolution and as a witness, as a young man, to Napoleon’s triumph at the battle of Jena in 1806 which for him represented the triumph of the Revolution’s principles and the universalisation of recognition (notwithstanding its imposition by a conquering general on horseback). Hegel thus illuminated an intrinsic truth about modern politics, that the great passions generated by moments such as the French Revolution were fundamentally about struggles over dignity. The self-determining status of the inner self would be embodied in rights and law in the two centuries after the French Revolution and the democratic upsurge of the modern era was driven by peoples demanding recognition of their political personhood, that they were moral agents capable of sharing in political power (Fukuyama: pp.40-41).
This dynamic has been particularly true of the new social movements that have emerged and developed since the late 1960s over racial equality – the Civil Rights movement and the contemporary Black Lives Matter in the US; the women’s movement agenda - abortion rights; outlawing of rape within marriage, equal pay and universal childcare; the gay and transgender agenda – legalisation of homosexuality, proper treatment of HIV; education about gay and lesbian rights and relationships in schools and civil partnership and marriage equality and disability rights movements. These and phenomena like the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the ‘colour’ democratic revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in the 2000s; the successful revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the unsuccessful student Tiananmen Square protests in China the same year were all powered by the cries for the recognition of one’s inherent human dignity and agency through democratic empowerment and citizenship. On university campuses in the UK and US students and academics of colour as well as female scholars and students have sought to highlight their demands for dignity and agency by successful lobbying for the opening of the canon to women’s and black scholarship.
More problematically. religion and ethnicity have also been potent signifiers of dignity driven identity politics as the rise of global Islamism and the resurgence of nationalism today and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s shows. How a nativist nationalist narrative drawing upon the language of dignity and exclusion was successfully weaponised in the Trump and Brexit campaigns in 2016 will be the subject of Part II of this article.
Bibliography:
Matt Bolton & Frederick Harry Pitts (2018) Corbynism. A Critical Approach. (SocietyNow.) Bingley, West Yorkshire: Emerald Publishing
Francis Fukuyama (2019) Identity. Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile Books
David Runciman (2019) How Democracy Ends. London: Profile Books.
[1] Fintan O’Toole ‘Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again’ Irish Times 25th April 2020.
[2] Chantal Mouffe, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s Left Populism,’ Verso, 16 April 2018.
[3] Jan-Werner Muller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) p.19
[4] The Latest Pejorative of the Elite
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter seeking the Promised Land of the Premiership!
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter seeking the Promised Land of the Premiership!
Barry,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed that, well written. Throughout your commentary you have the same bogey men, Trump, Brexiteers, Orban Putin etc without highlighting the similar failures of their opponents. You constantly give a mention specifically to anti-Semitic racism, regardless of the initial subject matter. Is this in itself not a symptom of the worst elements of identity politics?
David
ReplyDeleteThanks or your comments.
Because this is an essay on pupulism and the things that have created it, then those 'bogeymen' are gloing to be central to the story. I menmtioned antismeitism since the stereotypical assocaitions between Jews and control of finance and their supposed global power fits into the antielsitist narratives.
I do rdefer throughout the articlde to the reapons behind the rsie in populism and idneity politics such as the gloibal economic crash of 2008; the loss of ttrust in and malcfunctionming of representative democracy and the abandonemnt by the left of working class communities and concerns for tnhose bzased around race, gender and sexuality detc.
Barry,
ReplyDeleteI was referring more to your continued comments on other articles, but I take your point. Leave this essay as a standalone piece