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| (Clockwise from top left): Tony Blair, Pete Buttiegeg, Donald Trump, Victor Orban Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Emanuel Macron and Hillary Clinton. |
The long
read
The trouble
with anti-populism: why the champions of civility keep losing
With
rightwing demagogues gaining power and public debate getting nastier, many are
calling for a return to a more sensible politics. But this approach has its own
fatal flaws.
By Benjamin Moffitt
Fri 14 Feb
2020 06.00 GMT
You’ve
probably heard some version of it in recent years. Maybe you’ve even said or
thought it yourself. “Politicians are always fighting!” “Politics has become
totally irrational!” “Why can’t politicians just compromise, find some
consensus and solve our problems?”
For many
people, these views have come to seem like basic common sense. In this era of
extreme partisanship, the argument goes, what we need is more unity and
moderation to bring us together. And if there is one group of politicians who
have been blamed for the sorry state we find ourselves in, it is populists.
Since the
twin shocks of 2016 – the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump – a
cottage industry of authors, pundits and organisations has emerged with the
shared goal of fighting populism. Books with names such as The People vs Democracy:
Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How Save It, and Anti-Pluralism: The Populist
Threat to Liberal Democracy have been published on both sides of the Atlantic.
Tony Blair has set up his Institute for Global Change to find “an answer to the
new populism of left and right which exploits the anger and drives the world
apart”.
Elsewhere,
two of the most prominent politicians defeated by populist competitors, Hillary
Clinton and Matteo Renzi, have offered their tips about how to stop populists
(too little, too late). And in a truly remarkable bit of chutzpah, populist
extraordinaire Silvio Berlusconi has tried to reinvent himself as a pro-EU
unifier, here to save Italy from populism. Even the pontiff has warned against
populism, with Pope Francis stating that “populism is evil and ends badly”.
What unites
these self-styled defenders of democracy, ready to roll up their sleeves and
take the apparent populist scourge head-on? It’s certainly not a clear
ideology. Nor is it opposition to a particular variety of populism. It is
something far more disparate than that. So how about we just call this
phenomenon, simply, anti-populism?
While
populism itself has received an enormous amount of media attention over the
past several years, anti-populism has not. Yet this is somewhat curious, given
that anti-populism – with its call for a more sensible, moderate politics – has
become one of the most widely held views across the western political
mainstream.
It’s not
hard to see why anti-populist ideas are popular: they have intuitive appeal in
a time when two-party politics seems to be breaking down in the US, UK and
Australia; when genuinely dangerous rightwing populists are winning power
across the world; and when politics and public debate seem increasingly
divisive and volatile. In this context, the key values of anti-populism –
civility, maturity, deliberation – sound rather nice.
Yet it is
worth asking how we got to this point, and considering how opposing populism –
a term that in some contexts, particularly in the US, until recently had
positive connotations – became the supposedly sensible position to take.
Crucially, it is also worth asking whether anti-populism is effective. If the
aim is to defeat populists, do the solutions proposed by the anti-populists –
running the gamut from borrowing some populist policies to refusing to
negotiate with them at all – actually work? Or do they ultimately succumb to
what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has called “the populist temptation”: where
the self-declared opponents of populism end up becoming a watered-down version
of the thing they were fighting against in the first place?
Unlike
other “isms”, anti-populism is not a clear ideological disposition or mode of
governance, but rather an odd mix of ideological and strategic allies pulled
together in a temporary coalition. Anti-populism can draw together politicians
from all over the left-right spectrum. They don’t have a shared view of the
role of the state, military intervention, fiscal regulation and so on – but
what they do share is a broader vision of how politics should be “done”.
Although
populists on the left and right clearly have very different stances, there are
a number of things that tend to unite them – and mobilise anti-populists’
concerns.
First,
while populists appeal to “the people” against “the elite”, anti-populists see
this as a crude and patently false way to divide society. The political
theorist Jan-Werner Müller argues that populists’ “idea of the single,
homogenous, authentic people is a fantasy”. Instead, anti-populists argue that
we should acknowledge that there are many overlapping, competing
characterisations of “the people” in society, and that such collective
identities are only ever made up by individuals anyway. This liberal
individualism chafes against populism’s insistence on groups – the people and
the elite – as the primary actors in political struggles.
Anti-populists
also tend to object to the nationalist and even isolationist visions that that
idea of “the people” implies. While populists of both the right and left tend
to be critics of globalisation – variously blaming it for increasing migration,
weakening national sovereignty or lowering wages – anti-populists tend to
defend a world of free markets and free movement of peoples, as well as
acknowledging the important role of transnational economic and political bodies
in our globally interdependent era.
Second,
populists tend to champion political mechanisms that allegedly give voice to
the people (such as referendums, plebiscites and forms of direct democracy),
whereas anti-populists see such mechanisms as rather crude and divisive,
potentially leading to mob rule. For anti-populists, politics is a relatively
rational activity in which politicians debate one another, hopefully finding
consensus by convincing the other side with the strength of their arguments.
For them, politics is not a battle of passions, but rather something of a
puzzle to be solved. This is a supposedly rational view of politics – sober,
mature and graceful – against the allegedly immature, kneejerk and sensational
politics of populists.
This notion
of rationality is central to anti-populism. Populists are cast as peddlers of
lies, manipulating people’s emotions, playing on their basest fears and
whipping up hysteria, while anti-populists see themselves as taking a
clear-eyed view of the world. This is evident in the way “fake news” and
“post-truth” have somehow become synonymous with populism: while populists are
relativists who bend reality to their will, anti-populists see themselves as
concerned with the capital-T Truth.
Anti-populists
also share an opposition to the way that populists behave in the political
sphere. While populists are often defined by their bad manners – think here of
Donald Trump’s lack of respect for any modicum of decorum, or of President
Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines calling Barack Obama a “son of a whore” –
anti-populists find such breaches of the supposed rules of political conduct
inexcusable. Furthermore, they are dismayed by populists’ lack of respect for
proceduralism – that is, populists’ tendency to crash through the usual
processes of checks and balances. Anti-populists have a more West Wing-esque
vision of politics as full of people with (generally) good intentions, who
might have different ideological views, but who above all respect the rules of
the game.
Connected
to all this, perhaps the most important tendency of anti-populism, is a
valourisation of consensus in politics. For anti-populists, we are no longer
living in “ordinary times” in which consensus rules. Characterising these good
old days, the political scientist and journalist Yascha Mounk notes that for
decades, “developed democracies in North America, western Europe and beyond
appeared to be remarkably stable. Moderate parties and politicians were
dominant. Independent institutions were strong. A broad political consensus
created a sense that the future was highly predictable.” For anti-populists, a
return to this consensus would represent a healthy return to “normal” politics.
Yet it is
worth asking the question: when it comes to politics, what is normality anyway?
Behind such calls for consensus and order, there are some significant problems
with anti-populism. For one thing, there is little questioning of who this
particular consensus actually worked for. Some would argue that the alleged
consensus of post-cold war politics was actually the result of the capitulation
of the centre-left to the right, rather than any real moderation.
The
anti-populist call for consensus politics in many ways resembles the third way
“beyond left or right” position offered by Blair and the British sociologist
Anthony Giddens in the 90s, and adapted by parties and leaders across the
world. One cannot help but feel a sense of deja vu – in 2002, in the face of
populist Jean-Marie Le Pen’s progression to the second round of the French
presidential elections, Giddens wrote that “the renewed polarisation of
politics on the left and right is plainly threatening to political stability”,
and that “the third way can beat the far right by modernising, liberalising and
being tough on immigration”.
Fast-forward
16 years, and we find Blair singing from the same hymnbook, claiming that “the
political space for argument and debate has become very, very hard to curate
and understand because everything is just sucked into this vortex of highly
inflamed political rhetoric and exchanges of position without people trying to
really reach much common ground”, and arguing that the way to fight the far
right is by forcing migrants to integrate more. And it’s not only Blair and his
coterie: the international enthusiasm for Emmanuel Macron’s “not left, nor
right” politics in France is also evidence of an attempted rehabilitation of
the third way, with Macron decrying the “populist and nationalist leprosy” of
Europe.
Here, one
starts to get the feeling that addressing the so-called populist threat is less
about fighting actual populism, and more about rehabilitating and rebranding
the third way for a new era. But it’s not clear that the third way’s vision of
consensus politics is actually desirable in a democracy. As the late political
scientist Peter Mair argued, a world in which major parties ideologically
converge is one where party democracy becomes hollowed out and politicians
become unresponsive to the demands of voters.
The second
weakness of anti-populism is that it creates an atmosphere where any politician
that deviates from the “norm” – that is, the centre-left or centre-right –
risks being tarnished with the populism label. This can have sometimes end up
delegitimising worthy challengers to the existing political consensus, which in
turn means that we get stuck with more of the same.
The
populism label is also often used to bundle together very different figures or
parties. It is true that anti-populists usually acknowledge, correctly, that
the threat posed by radical right populists, with their often explicit threats
against minorities, tends to be far greater than that posed by populists on the
left, who focus their anger on the economic elite. To see just how dangerous
rightwing populism can be, look to India, where the prime minister, Narendra
Modi, has passed new laws that effectively make the country’s Muslim minority into
second-class citizens, or the US, where Trump’s incendiary rhetoric has
inspired a spate of violent attacks on minorities, journalists and opponents.
Yet that
doesn’t stop some of the more fervent anti-populists drawing an equivalence between
the populist left and right. Take, for example, the Democratic presidential
candidate Pete Buttigieg’s comments, from 2019, about populist sentiment in the
US: “It just kind of turns you against the system in general, and then you’re
more likely to want to vote to blow up the system. Which could lead you to
somebody like Bernie, and it could lead you to somebody like Trump. That’s how
we got where we are.” The message here is that Trump and Sanders are the same
in being expressions of democratic discontent: the subtext is that such
anti-system sentiment is immature, destructive and dangerous.
Similarly,
Mounk, who bills himself as “one of the world’s leading experts on the crisis
of liberal democracy and the rise of populism”, argues that there are good
reasons to worry about the “authoritarian tendencies” of left-populists
“whether it’s the Chavistas in Venezuela or even Podemos in Spain”. This is
because “the populist logic ultimately works the same way on the left as it
does on the right: once you’ve said that you alone speak for the whole of the
people, any form of opposition to you immediately becomes illegitimate.”
While this
may be the case in Venezuela, it is absurd to claim that the likes of Podemos,
or more importantly, left populists who have actually held government – such as
Syriza in Greece or Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico – pose as great a
threat to democracy to someone like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Viktor Orbán in
Hungary, who have well and truly set about dismantling liberal democracy in
their respective countries.
A third
weakness of anti-populism is that when it becomes a dominant frame in our
thinking about liberal-democratic politics, it tends to reinforce the false
opposition between liberalism (with its rule of law, freedom of speech and
checks and balances) and democracy (with its popular sovereignty and
majoritarianism) – a binary, ironically, that populists also tend to promote.
On one side, populists tend to argue that within liberal democracies, we’ve
gone too far towards the liberal side of things, with unelected bodies and
elites undermining the voice of the people. On the other side, we have
anti-populists seeking to fight populism tooth and nail, even if this means
playing into arguably not-so-democratic solutions (such as attempting to rerun
or ignore referendums that give the “wrong” result) or rigidly defending
distant and not particularly representative or responsive institutions or
bodies (such as the European troika in the battles over the Greek government
debt crisis).
But this
opposition is too simplistic. As the political theorist Chantal Mouffe has
argued, the very strength of liberal democracy is that it is characterised by
the productive tension between these two forces. If we go too far towards majoritarian-style
democracy, we end up with mob rule; if we go too far towards liberalism, we end
up with detached technocracy. Instead, we need liberalism and democracy to keep
one another in line – pushing the other back when it oversteps its mark or is out
of balance.
Setting
aside these criticisms of anti-populism, there is a much simpler question that
needs to be answered: does anti-populism actually work? Is it an effective way
to stem the rise of populists? When it comes to opposing individual populist
leaders, the answer often seems to be no. With Trump, for instance, the
anti-populist approach favoured by Hillary Clinton in 2016 – symbolised by her
disastrous “basket of deplorables” comments – enhanced the feeling of ostracism
and victimhood among his supporters, and burnished Trump’s claims that he is
hated by the elite, which only added to his populist appeal.
Even when
anti-populist leaders who claim to be beyond left or right have prevailed, such
as Macron in France, the recipe has quickly soured. Macron’s politics have
taken a rightward turn; his popularity has taken an enormous hit; he faced
sustained protest from the gilets jaunes; and some have accused him of
“enabling the populism he was supposed to defeat”, as the standing of Marine Le
Pen, the leader of National Rally, continues to rise.
On the
level of party politics, the evidence of anti-populism’s efficacy is more
mixed. On one hand, the most explicit form of anti-populism has come in the
form of the cordon sanitaire, a French phrase that was originally used to
describe the use of barriers to stop the spread of an infectious disease, but
now means refusing to co-operate, negotiate or govern with the populist right.
This worked in Belgium throughout the 1990s and 2000s, leading to the demise of
the far-right Vlaams Blok and the poor showing of its successor party, Vlaams
Belang. However, the same tactic has failed in Sweden, where a cordon sanitaire
against the Sweden Democrats has played into their voters’ sense of aggrievement.
The party’s share of the vote increased from 12.9% in 2014 (when the cordon
sanitaire began) to 17.5% in 2018.
A very
different anti-populist tactic has been to try to beat populists, particularly
rightwing populists, at their own game by co-opting their policies on
immigration or multiculturalism – in the hope of stemming the “demand” for
populist alternatives to mainstream parties. In the Netherlands’ 2017
elections, centre-right Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte sought to stem the
challenge from the populist radical right Geert Wilders and his Party for
Freedom by telling immigrants who did not integrate to his liking to “behave
normally or go away”, and defending racist traditions such as the Dutch
Christmas character Black Pete (Zwarte Piet). When his party won the election,
Rutte then claimed that his “good populism” had defeated the radical right’s
“bad populism” (a tactic he has since abandoned as new right-populist
challengers have emerged in the Netherlands). Similar debates are currently
taking place in the Labour parties of the UK and Australia following their
recent electoral defeats, where some are suggesting the left needs to move
rightwards on immigration.
The problem
with this tactic is that while it might sometimes work in the short term, it
doesn’t defeat populism in the long term. In my native Australia, the centre-right
Coalition shut down the political success of the populist radical right One
Nation party in the late 90s by co-opting many of its policies. While One
Nation itself suffered, its ideas were transferred into the political
mainstream and legitimised, leading to a depressing race to the bottom by the
major parties on issues of immigration and asylum seekers in Australia. The
result is that Australia now has one of the most punitive asylum detention
regimes in the western world – to the extent that Trump, in a leaked
conversation with Australia’s prime minister in 2017, admiringly said of the
system: “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
When you are attracting the praise and adulation of Trump, along with other
radical right populists, this does not seem like a great anti-populist victory.
This is the
great danger of co-opting populist policies: it is hard to avoid ending up
actually doing many of the things that you criticise populists for. In the name
of staving off the threat of National Rally in France, the centre-right
Republicans party has adopted much of its platform; mandatory assimilation or
integration classes have been put in place by several European governments,
such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, that otherwise present themselves
as active in the fight against populism; and while the leader of the European
People’s party in the EU parliament, Manfred Weber, has presented himself as an
anti-populist and defender of liberal democracy, he has in reality shielded
arch-populist Orbán and his Fidesz party from any serious sanctions for years.
The hypocrisy on show here is unavoidable.
The
populist temptation is strong for a reason: the elite often deserve their
unpopularity and disdain; the media landscape favours populist messaging; and
we seem to be pinballing from crisis to crisis. All of this plays into the
hands of those who can speak cannily in the name of the people against the
elite.
Anti-populism,
by contrast, struggles in this context. It is clear that we are not living in
times conducive to consensus politics. Rather, it seems that populists and
anti-populists alike are driven by a nostalgia for days gone by. Populists seek
a simpler imagined time, where jobs were plentiful, national sovereignty was
intact and borders were stronger. Anti-populists, too, are stuck in the past,
imagining a time of consensus politics, a supposedly sane and rational period
where consensus reigned, and representatives worked together to solve political
problems for the greater good.
The reality
is that we are no longer living in either of these situations. The question is
which side will snap out of its daydream first – and in the long term, what the
ultimate cost will be if we choose to stay asleep.
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