“The word used of him, half-admiringly, is disruptor — half-admiringly because we’re supposed to welcome things being shaken up, if not being shaken into little pieces.” – Terry Eagleton on Donald Trump
Just the other day, I stumbled on an intriguing commentary on the most important political movement of our time: populism. Its author is Eric Kaufmann, the London-based political scientist who happens to hail from Vancouver B.C. In my view, his intervention deserves to be widely debated.
Kaufmann delivers a succinct critique of the US-administration’s foreign policy. What renders it remarkable is his national-conservative perspective; the fact that he does not allocate to Trump the part of evil dictator hellbent on taking down the liberal kingdom set on a path of moral perfection. In fact, as anyone will know who has read his book on Wokeism, Kaufmann is sympathetic to a good portion of Trump’s agenda. Most of all, he welcomes many of its cultural policies, particularly on DEI, migration, and free speech.
If Kaufmann is still worried, it is because he believes that Trumpism 2.0 is giving populism a bad name, thereby lending a new lease of life to the embattled left-liberal mainstream. In Kaufmann’s view, the US-government’s recent initiatives — above all its stance on Ukraine, Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland and absorb Canada, the imposition of tariffs on countries with real economic weight, but also the intervention by Elon Musk on the election in Germany — are bound to weaken democratic populism worldwide.
There is a broader conceptual underpinning to Kaufmann’s argument. He distinguishes between the political nationalism pursued by Trump and the cultural nationalism favoured by most mainstream populists. Cultural nationalism is primarily about the preservation of identity and therefore defensive. In contrast, political nationalism is about the imposition of an ideological mission and therefore concerned with power for its own sake. According to Kaufmann, most democratic populists are cultural nationalists who value self-determination. Yet what they truly dislike, for various (including historical) reasons, is political nationalism and its imperialist agenda.
The most compelling piece of evidence Kaufmann offers in support of his thesis concerns his own country, Canada, where Trump’s aggressive rhetoric accomplished within weeks what no liberal leader could have accomplished in years: it wiped out the clear lead in the polls enjoyed by the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre, sweeping to power Mark Carney, ultimate globalist insider and darling of the latest orthodoxies trumpeted annually by the great and good of Davos and their hangers-on.
Yet the most interesting question Kaufmann raises (and which he put more explicitly in another version of his essay) is whether populism can grow up. To which my answer is going to be: not if it remains reliant on (potentially unpredictable and corruptible) parties and charismatic leaders. For populism to become a productive democratic force — one that corrects the flaws of representative government and its increasingly thin democratic legitimacy — it needs to become an integral part of a country’s political system. Because that’s the only way, to use Terry Eagleton’s metaphorical allusion to Trump, that our institutions are being debated and questioned openly – which is what they need to retain their public legitimacy – but without being shaken into little pieces. Let me explain.
What is populism?
Populism, scholarly consensus has it, feeds on two ideological motifs: the first portrays politics as a struggle between (a good and honest) people and (a corrupt) elite, while the second defines both the people and the elite as homogenous entities. Populism is thus anti-pluralist, which is why it poses a danger to liberal democracy. This understanding of populism is not entirely flawed — few things are, after all — but it nevertheless reflects the kind of liberal self-flattery that characterises much of what Yascha Mounk has termed “undemocratic liberalism”. As I have recently argued in an essay on the new cultural colonialism, the claim that liberal progressivism can do without ideological binaries is, and always has been, baseless. What is beyond question is that their preferred biases differ from those of the populists.
Adopting a democratic stance, Thomas Frank has recently published a history of American populism. As he writes on how populism has been perceived by rival factions from the late nineteenth century onwards: “From the very beginning, populism had two meanings. There was Populism as its proponents understood it, meaning a movement in which ordinary citizens demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was Populism as its enemies characterised it: a dangerous movement of groundless resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable.” Frank argues that anti-populism arises “from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation”, and that it is this “tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn” that provides its seedbed to this day. On the current critics of populism in the US, he notes that, almost without exception, they are “employed by an American news outlet, university, or think tank”.
Frank’s argument on populism is broadly echoed by the conservative-liberal Dutch philosopher Frank Ankersmit. Ankersmit reminds us that some of the most important thinkers on democracy (including Hannah Arendt, John Dunn, Hannah Pitkin, or Bernard Manin) recognised “the aristocratic character of our representative democracies.” With the replacement of political ideology by institutional supranationalism – now deeply embedded in the EU’s legalist-technocratic culture – people began to grasp the nature of the democracies they helped legitimise from the moment they were invited into history as electors. Ankersmit puts it enviably well: “Nice, good old representative democracy now turns out to be a far less innocuous elective aristocracy – which, in fact, it had always been, but without our being aware of it. The people’s representative is now unmasked as someone with two faces. One of them is directed to the voter. But the other to all kinds of people for whom the voter will have little sympathy and whom he may even suspect to be a threat to his interests and to all that is known, familiar and dear to him. Such as the ladies and gentlemen of the EU and of the financial sector.”
Ankersmit is no romantic thinker. He is no champion of the maxim that the majority is always right. Nor does he believe in the homogenous people, or that pure direct democracy is either viable or desirable. That’s the liberal in him. But he’s also honest enough to concede that the system we habitually describe as “representative democracy” now often resembles an “elective aristocracy”. That’s the democrat in him. His conclusion is remarkable and poses a challenge to much of the scholarly literature on the subject:
“The dangers of populism, though real enough, should not be exaggerated. Notice, above all, that populists never demanded the abolition of representative democracy. With populism, as it presently is in the West, we’re not on the threshold of a new 1789, 1917/1918 or 1933. Although, what is not yet, may come. Anyway, for the time being there are many excellent reasons for being deeply worried about the future, alas, but populism is not one of them.”
Swings of the pendulum
So, can populism grow up – or does it just turn up one day, smash things to pieces, then leave? Let me try to sketch something that resembles an answer to that crucial question. My first point is that, historically speaking, populism is an integral part of a living democracy, not its aberration. The push to include more people in the democratic process was invariably justified by a reference to “the people” conceived as a sovereign political agent. The real question is thus not whether populism is good or bad, whether it is in full swing or absent. The real question is how populism manifests itself, which largely depends on the institutions underpinning democraatic systems: how institutionally closed (or elitist) they are. The more a political system relegates citizens to the status of occasional voters of large parties, the less room it leaves for populist concerns to affect the legislative process directly, thus allowing social tensions to accumulate.
Democracy, in such a system of government, will come to resemble a political tit-for-tat. If the pendulum is pushed too far in one direction — if the holders of power overreach on significant issues, as progressivist liberals did over the last two decades in the areas of culture and migration — populists of the democratic right or left will try to correct that, usually by applying the same belligerent mindset as those they oppose. The more blatant the overreach, the more drastic will likely be the means employed by populist movements to what they consider righting the ship. In classical representative systems, and hence in almost every liberal democracy under the sun, populism is thus bound to take the form of a counter-movement that goes against everything that embodies, or can be portrayed as embodying, the established status quo. But its proponents tend to remain outside government, not inside of it.
That’s why the US — where billionaires have jumped on the populist bandwagon to advance the sort of political great-power nationalism Kaufmann rightly laments — is rather exceptional. Much more typical are Europe and the UK, where populist movements and parties have made strong inroads recently, to the dismay of politicians from the established parties, who respond by clinging on to their power come what may. The main concern of the European populists are immigration and political sovereignty. The more the established parties ignore or exclude the populists, the more the legitimacy of the political system as a whole will suffer. Political cultures who work that way are rarely boring — on the contrary, they tend to be intellectually exciting: just look at the U.K., where politics proves highly destructive yet never boring. But these cultures are not conducive to building institutions and infrastructures that can sustain social cohesion and boost economic productivity. Not everything that inspires debate in the Oxford Union is a boon to the country at large.
How populism can grow up
I happen to live in a politically boring country that is highly successful on the economic and social fronts. It features an education system that equips the average person with the skills he or she needs to succeed in the 21st century labour market, and where social cohesion is still comparatively high. Remarkably, that country owes none of these undoubted strengths to its (on the whole) Europhile political establishment, which would have taken us into the European Union in the 1990s, and which is now trying to place the country firmly within the EU’s legal orbit. Nor does it owe its success in these areas to strict neutrality or banking, as a resentful global left would have us believe – although historic luck and craftiness certainly played its part, as they tend to in a dangerous world.
So who does it owe these benefits to? The answer is: to its participatory democracy. To the fact that people can use initiatives or referenda to challenge parliamentary legislation or to initiate a change in constitutional arrangements. It owes it to what, at least by European standards, is a low degree of centralisation, and an extensive system of consultation. All this is to the chagrin of a professional political class whose sense of status and self-worth relies on the steady accumulation of power. But, within the system as currently set up, they just can’t satisfy that urge for power. Although, of course, that may change if Switzerland gets subjugated under the ECJ. When it comes to satisfying the status aspirations of professional politicians, post-nationalism beats the nation-state hands down.
In fine: populism can grow up, provided it becomes embedded within a country’s institutional fabric. But, in much of Europe as well as in the UK, that would require a revolution. And the odds that this will happen are rather slim. Why? Ankersmit, the non-conformist Dutch philosopher, gives us the most plausible answer: “Self-evidently, a class having once gotten hold of political power is not likely to abandon it again.” But that, I hasten to add, also applies to the populists, should they ever make the transition to forming a government. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only thing that can make populism grow up — along with the rest of us — is not professional politicians, but a people who is able, as well as willing, to correct the prejudices and blunders of politicians behaving like an elective aristocracy.
Dieser Beitrag erschien erstmals am 26. März auf Oliver Zimmers Substack und wird hier mit seiner freundlichen Genehmigung wiedergegeben. Oliver Zimmer ist der Autor des von uns unterstützten Buches «Prediger der Wahrheit».
Hier der Link zum Substack: https://oliverzimmer.substack.com/
