Power  /  Argument

Forget Trump – Populism is the Cure, Not the Disease

Populism is typically presented as a new threat to liberal democracy. But properly understood, it is neither modern nor rightwing.
Trump speaks to auto workers.
Shealah Craighead/The White House

In my lifetime, the politicians who have most loudly proclaimed their solidarity with the humble producers have been rightwingers. Hypocritical rightwingers, yes, but by and large they have put the fiction over. Today it is the turn of Donald Trump, the “blue-collar billionaire”, to act as tribune of the plebs. In 2016, he won millions of votes from unfortunate toilers in hard-bitten places. Over the affluent zip codes of the US, meanwhile, a wail of aghastitude hangs in the air, a constant moan over Trump’s unfitness for the high office he holds. Aghastitude’s scholarly analogue is my subject here: the devil theory of populism.

Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy, is a man of impressive establishment credentials: a lecturer at Harvard, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist at Slate. According to his website, he is “one of the world’s leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism”.

By “populism” Mounk means the species of nasty rightwing politics associated with Trump and various European bad guys such as the leaders of Hungary and Poland. He uses the word as a kind of synonym for racist tyranny, and in his account populist politicians are villainous in ways that go beyond the profession’s conventions. Populists, he informs us, tell lies. They dislike the press, they shatter “norms”, and they aspire to be dictators. They carry what he calls, in a revealing phrase, “the populist disease”.

If Mounk represents social-scientific professionalism coming to cure what ails us, however, I fear we are in big trouble. He repeatedly tells us, for example, that rightwing populism is a new, consensus-smashing thing; that before Trump and co came along the politics of the western world were “frozen”; that things “barely changed”; that leaders respected “norms”. He never divulges who invented this hateful populism thing, but he does inform us that “one of the earliest populists” was Jörg Haider, a far-right Austrian politician who died in 2008.

I read all this with mounting incredulity. History wasn’t just a nice centrist monotone before Trump and the gang got started. There was a momentous turn in the west that began about 40 years ago; it involved the triumph of business interests over rivals such as the unions and the regulatory state. You know: Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Blair and so on. Take my word for it: the rightward turn was a big deal. And it’s still going. It dwarfs Trump; indeed, it subsumes him. Trump’s presidency is just the latest chapter in this ugly story, not some new thing altogether.