Do you have suspicions and maybe fears about any movement labeled populist? If so, you join most responsible intellectuals, probably since the dawn of modern political and financial institutions in the 16th century.
The very word populism conjures up pitchforks and torches, unmitigated anger, cruel violence against marginalized people based on crude caricatures, bigotry, and demagoguery. Level heads are against all that.
Looking back, however, the danger of such an expansive rendering of such a simple word is that it provides an opportunity for any entrenched elite to smear any and all who oppose an establishment.
Painting any movement as populist is a recruiting tool to rope in thoughtful people above a certain line in the class demarcations to rally on behalf of the elites to beat back the great threat to social and political order.
Populist is how many reform movements have been portrayed over the past 10 years. Sometimes such movements have indeed reinforced the above caricature. But one should keep in mind why precisely such movements come to exist. They are a reflection of genuine problems, mostly having to do with a perception that the game is rigged for the elites at the expense of everyone else.
It most certainly is—and ever more so. These movements sprang up out of a foundational belief that people should have some influence over the structure of the regime that rules them and not be forever forced to be part of a system that someone else has constructed.
That is the hallmark of modern populism. It is not necessarily left-wing or right-wing. It is merely an insistence that people should not live in cages. Nothing more than that. These cages can take many forms. It can be a thing called “Europe,” which is really a distant central state overriding national and local rights. It can be an agency-riddled central government that exists nowhere in founding documents such as the U.S. Constitution. It can be a central bank that exercises vast power over which the ruled have no control.
It’s too bad that there is not another word besides populism, but that is the word with which we are stuck. If you think of it as meaning nothing other than a desire by the people to have control over the systems that rule them, it’s a fine word. It doesn’t need to be characterized by the stereotyped ugliness of witch burnings, the bonfire of vanities, the red scares, or the stoning mobs of a “Monty Python” skit.
It can be more like the Founding Fathers, the French resistance to the Nazis, the Russian refuseniks, the solidarity movements of Poland, or the voters who pushed for Brexit in defense of the national sovereignty of Britain.
The trouble with the rejection of all populist movements is that it lands you squarely on the side of entrenched elites while blocking all pathways to reform. If you keep it up and take it to its ultimate conclusion, you end up constructing a totalitarian society that is good only at keeping the regime in power regardless of the cost, even if it means crushing civil liberties, human rights, prosperity, and traditions of law. Truly, if your fundamental principle of government is that the regime must be stable and uncontested no matter what, this is where you end up.
Think, for example, of the advice given in “The Prince” by Machiavelli, the earliest entirely secular example of realpolitik to which we have access. It was written in 1513 as a guide for a ruler on how to tighten and retain power at the least cost. It advised absolutism and cruel methods for crushing any challenges to power while suggesting also that granting basic liberties and property rights is a useful palliative to keeping the people happy.
The core principle here is the sovereignty of the ruler, not the sovereignty of the people. The experience in Florence 20 years earlier figured highly into the analysis and counsel. In the 1490s, a Dominican Friar named Girolamo Savonarola had whipped up the Florentine working classes against the Medici banking family and driven them out, and then took the next step of purging the community of all forms of decadence: fineries, makeup, fancy dress, and so on, ending in the famous bonfire of the vanities. “The Prince” was written as a manual to avoid all such disasters through an iron fist devoid of moral concern.
Bump forward half a millennium and you still have the same dynamic at work, with an elite absolutely convinced that resentment against the status quo represents an existential threat to all existing power, industrial configurations and dreams, and concentrations of wealth. No entrenched elite wants to expend resources retaining and reinforcing power structures, but they do what they believe they have to do when the time comes.
Two important shocks came to the United States, the UK, and the European Union in 2016. The first was the shock of the election of Donald Trump, who was not supposed to win. The whole of the mainstream media had predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton, and all the polls showed that she was an easy win. Election night revealed that people had other ideas in mind. They would vote in a famed business tycoon who was not part of the elite structures but was rather a renegade who had been fighting the establishment his entire life.
The U.S. president is not all-powerful, but he can appoint agency heads, appoint federal judges, make trade policy, and, most importantly, set the tone for the nation.
After his victory, there were cries of anguish and hysteria from all the usual sources. It seemed disproportionate to the actual threat. Indeed it seemed unhinged, such as when the staff of Google broke down in tears and established news anchors had the blood drawn from their faces.
What in the world was going on? What they did not say but thought in their hearts was their real fear that President Trump was not the stopping point. We had seen the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, the Bernie movement, the Ron Paul movement, and growing restlessness in all sectors year by year. Now it had even reached the presidency!
What was at issue here was not really about ideology. It was about who and what gets to exercise power: which sector of society, which industrial interests, and to what end. The labels and philosophies are merely a veneer.
Something drastic, many people came to believe, might have to be done now to stop this movement before it really got out of hand.
Later in the spring of 2016 came the vote against UK participation in the EU scheme and for Brexit. What was that about? Elites the world over had been working for 30 years to create a supranational state to govern all of Europe, including the UK. It would come complete with a central bank, a single regulatory apparatus, and migration rights to and from every member country. It meant the end of national sovereignty and the construction of a new sovereignty in Brussels over everyone.
The idea was always fragile, which is why it took so long to implement. But with Brexit, the house started burning down. If the UK could do this, so could any other member state, and the whole edifice would go down in flames. Still, it happened, and Boris Johnson came to power in 2019 to achieve it.
Another problem was developing in Russia, where a very popular leader was determined to resist the expansion of NATO into countries and regions once controlled by the former Soviet Union. Russian President Vladimir Putin saw NATO as a threat to Russian national sovereignty and was popular enough in his own country to rally a serious resistance.
It was at this point that powerful elites in the industrialized West started to panic.
They took recourse to Machiavelli’s playbook: Any means was justified to crush this thing that was rising up in resistance. The most cockamamie idea at the time was to say that President Trump was actually elected by a plot emanating from Moscow. The too-clever-by-half idea here was to bring back Cold-War-era anti-Russian fears, but that scheme didn’t really strike the right chord, and the entire scheme fell apart for lack of evidence.
Still, the race was on. In 2018, matters got worse with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and there was mounting evidence of the same taking place all over the world. People were starting to take the idea of democracy—that the people should rule themselves—seriously, and that was a major problem, since everyone in high circles had already established that democracy was just supposed to be a slogan, not a reality.
Of course, all the movements the world over were called populist, as a signal to elites that they were dangerously intolerable and had to be crushed. From 2018 onward, all crazy trends in policy, media, tech, medicine, and practically everything else were deployed toward the end of stopping these movements all over the world.
Consider just how extreme this became in 2020: the simultaneous announcement all over the world from every reliable statesman that a “great reset” was taking place, and that included the most egregious and brazen displays of despotic power we’ve seen in modern times, including even the shuttering of churches, small businesses, and schools, the closing of travel and hospitality, and the censorship of all media.
Just to illustrate how far they were willing to go, they even attempted global mandates to receive an experimental vaccine that any knowledgeable medical professional knew for sure would not contribute anything to public health. It was a way of underscoring the main point: We are in charge and you are not. Comply with dictates, no matter how arbitrary or crazy, or else.
We might ask the question: If the world’s most powerful people, and especially agencies tasked with ensuring “national security,” had to resort to such extreme tactics and all under the implausible claim of having to control a virus, just how fragile is their rule? Just how afraid are they of what they are calling this populist movement?
There should be another word, but it is all we have. The new populism is nothing more or less than a growing, global, and probably unstoppable demand by vast numbers of people around the world for a restoration of their rights and liberties and a basic Enlightenment-era conviction that people should control the regime under which they live. There is nothing extremist about that. The extremists are those who are willing to resort to any measure to keep their power.
