Daniel Drache - Has Populism Won?: The War on Liberal Democracy

It didnt start with Donald Trump and it certainly wont end with him. But he gave the global populist movement a blast of dark energy and launched it into the popular consciousness of people everywhere. While Trump didnt invent conservative populism, he certainly grabbed onto a rising movement and rode it to electoral victory in 2016. He showed seventy million angry Americans how to win elections by being outrageous with a constant barrage of hate speech and lies designed to divide an already polarized electorate.

Undeniably, we have been here before.

A good example to recall is Silvio Berlusconi, an early avatar of the dark arts of hypocrisy and three-time Italian prime minister between 1994 and 2011. He was often ridiculed for his vanity, corruption, sex scandals, and blatantly authoritarian style of leadership. With his larger-than-life personality, he dominated Italian politics even when he was not prime minister.

During his prime, Berlusconi controlled six out of the seven main television channels in Italy. In a country where fewer than 10 percent of people buy newspapers, he maintained an iron grip on Italys political discourse, shaping his public image as an everyman who climbed the social pyramid on his own, and apologized to nobody for his enormous appetite for wine, women, power, and money. His main supporters, like those of Trump, were working-class people who considered themselves to be apolitical, but who admired his riches, chest thumping, and talent for puncturing the aristocratic pretensions of Italys upper classes.

So the conventional explanation of populism leaves much to be desired. For one thing, we cant pin all the blame for populism on a few self-interested cynical fat cats. We need to think about populism as the progeny of three forms of political action. Angry voters choose political leaders who paint simple solutions to complex problems. Celebrity-seeking social media activists celebrate voters anger with images of revenge and score-settling. Opportunistic leaders jump in to stir division, raise the temperature, and profit from all the lies and accusations. After Putins murderous invasion of Ukraine, will the populist movement continue to gain steam, or will vociferous publics turn against the insurgency now that Putin has shown his true colours as one more megalomaniac with delusions of imperial grandeur?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine drives home the point that global populism is not a singular movement, but rather a broad front of many movements, events, victories, and setbacks. Even when the pro-democracy populist Volodymyr Zelensky defends his country against the worst, Vladimir Putin, we gain little clarity about the future. Win, lose, or stalemate, populism is relentless. Many will turn against Putin, at least in the short term, saying that they admired his traditionalism but oppose his militarism. Then they double down on their own movements, building the new tomorrow for their tribe. There is a political magnetism and psychological appeal to populism that many experts dont understand.

Right at the outset we need to clarify four key concepts: populism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and nativism. We will examine them more closely later, but we should introduce them right now. People often use the terms populism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and nativism interchangably, but they are very different concepts. Populism is a way of speaking about politics that sets up a moral dichotomy and creates a conflict between the true people, who are honest and good, and the elite, who are evil and corrupt. Authoritarianism demands obedience to state authority at the expense of freedom. As a form of government it rejects pluralism in favour of centralization around a charismatic leader and hand-picked loyalists. The populist leader is an authoritarian who believes that centralizing his own power requires undermining democracy. The solution he offers is a mix of nationalism and nativism. Nationalism is the love of ones country to the exclusion of others. Nationalists want their country to always win, even if that means others must always lose. Nativism is a fear of foreigners and a belief that ethnicity is part of what makes a country great. The populist system smashers use racism and xenophobia to demand a new social contract based on skin color and cultural domination, protecting the privileges of the plurality at the expense of the rest.

The common denominator among each of these key concepts is the perception that big dogs are gobbling up societys pie, and the honest, hardworking people are getting cheated out of their fair share. And the prescription is always the same: an authoritarian leader promises to save the people from the evil elites and foreigners. The authoritarian bargain is one in which obedience to power will supposedly free the people from the clutches of their enemies.