What Happens When a Democratic Populist Backlash Doesn't Work?

What lessons did our rulers learn from the last decade?

“The Massacre of the Innocents” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The movement by respectable politics against a free and open internet where the public can speculate in an ill-informed manner about whatever they choose, circulate any video, or organise on any political issue has become such a monotonous thrum that it’s easy to forget that it’s going on even as it intensifies. As a reminder, here’s how norm-cherishing Very Serious People have been speaking of the masses in just the last couple of weeks.

At the end of April, besieged German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opined in a speech on Social Media Regulation that “on social networks, anyone can say what they think. I find that regrettable.” (I’m struggling to find the exact date for this - it may have been in February.)

At the end of March, British MP Max Wilkinson gave a talk in which he noted that Twitter was “a massive problem” because it allowed critics of mass immigration to “have their voices heard in a way they wouldn’t in the past”. Wilkinson is a member of The Liberal Democrat Party.

As I noted in my monthly round-up, during the April fuel protests in Ireland Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan publicly and repeatedly threatened to use the power of an independent Media Commission against radio stations who had platformed too many critics of the government. A few days ago O’Donovan noted in the Dáil that Ireland would “go it alone” on internet restrictions for the U16s if the European Union cannot reach an agreement soon.

The Under-16s restrictions sound innocuous (maybe even good) but need to be viewed in the context of, and the entry point for normalising, the new and suddenly ubiquitous transnational war on internet anonymity; efforts that are pretty obviously driven by a desire to stamp down on political agitation and dissent rather than any concerns about children. Just as the easiest way to justify an aggressive war is to say we’re about to be bombed by a rogue state, the easiest way to initiate free speech restrictions with a cry of “won’t someone think of the children”.

The various comments quoted above are selected more or less at random - any three month period in the last ten years would have yielded a similar bumper crop, and the crop gets more bumper with each passing month. It’s easy to look at these comments as the balancing yin to the yang of ascendant populism; the question of how ascendant populism is in structural terms seems an open question.

If a global populist movement existed Trump was its leader, but destroyed his position on that with his agitation on Greenland - as I said at the time:

This episode has shown the hard philosophical limits of the revolt against liberalism, and the internal tensions that will undo that revolt in time. Trump did the one thing that mainstream parties and their ideological counterparts in the media, academia and activism have been trying to do but couldn’t - position themselves as the defenders of a traditional idea of national sovereignty and national dignity. This had the accidental (and for those parties, welcome) side effect of positioning the local European representatives of populism as allies of a hateful and contemptuous globalising force.

The impact came quickly; in Denmark, the polling indicated an immediate benefit to parties of the centre and left. Nigel Farage took the unusual step of mildly critiquing the decision, as did Meloni in Italy, though she’s a slightly less outsider-ish figure than she used to be. So too did Alice Weidel the AFD, who have already learned the hard way the electoral consequences of being too close to Trumpist personalities. The leader of the National Rally in France spoke in terms of resisting American vassalage. (There’s a good summary of the general reaction here.) All of these actors recognised that the problem was not merely a bad application of the Art of The Deal, but something deeper and more serious; and that for them, uncomplicated association with the US on this point was an extinction-level event that required the kind of distancing that had not been needed in the past.

I don’t credit myself with any particular insight there, though it’s interesting that it was European commentators who understood how devastating the Greenland episode was for the right internationally and not American ones.

If the prospect of a coordinated and coherent international populist movement was shot in the head by the Greenland controversy then the Iran war was like someone drone-striking its corpse into a million pieces. Being linked to Trumpism is now directly associated with a universally loathed Israeli government, soaring fuel prices, collapsing economies and cancelled summer holidays. (You laugh, but the latter really counts.)

Victories contnue to stack up regardless. Reform was one of the key winners in last week’s UK local elections; based on polling in Germany it seems inevitable that the AFD will win power there as soon as they become big enough to transcend the cordon sanitaire that’s been placed around them. But if the Trump administrations have shown anything it’s that electoral success isn’t the same as power. America is the one western country where populism has gained the power it needed to execute its agenda and it’s been a mixed experience. Trump’s lesson in his first term was that picking people from within the system (even the ones who declare for you) will only result in system outcomes. To address that, in his second term he has relied on people for whom personal loyalty is their only qualifying criteria. That makes a lot of sense but it’s had a number of negative impacts. A lot of people in change (including Trump himself) haven’t thought very deeply about, or worked very hard at bringing about, long term structural change within the system. They often simply aim at, and have to settle for, a highly visible dramatisation of the change they want rather than the change itself.

These are problems with Trumpism but likely endemic to populism itself, and when populist groups (like Reform, or AfD) take power, the same issues of being outmatched by an entrenched system will emerge. It’s possible despite its supposed ascendancy, that Populism has entered a kind of morbid phase where the frustrations of the electorate - mostly but not entirely based around immigration - are going to keep getting politicians from populist parties and backgrounds making promises, getting elected, forming governments. But they won’t have the administrative expertise or experience, or really even the temperament to make the long term structural changes their voters want - and in any case the system won’t let them. For all it’s faults the system is reliant on and was built by people who care about the details of things work and why, and who have spent a long time planning, organising, and thinking about how to achieve their desired outcomes using that system, in a way that populist candidates haven’t and maybe can’t.

The only solution one could have hoped for in these circumstances is that the respectable Powers That Be, and their colleagues in activism, the media, and within institutions, would look at populism and think “we don’t want to implement the style or the temperament but simply in order to survive and prosper we need to change some of our policies and our orientation - to deliver enough populist outcomes in a non-populist way that we keep the electorate off our backs”. Some people have described the theoretical style that could result as “pantsuit nationalism”; a way of scratching the populist policy itch, in a respectable centrist style, and with respectable centrist competence and knowledge of the system.

That is part of what is so disturbing and discouraging about the ongoing trend for speech restrictions, and the desire to manage public dissatisfaction as though it is solely a communication or narrative problem - rather than as a symptom of a material democratic deficit, and an outcome of long-term policy choices. One would like to think if we could press a button and immediately find ourselves back in 2015 watching Trump descend on his escalator, that the party of respectability would think - ah - we’ve been given a chance to do things differently - let’s use our accumulated knowledge and insight of what is to come to change course. The intervening ten years would have given us (the people who run the system and take it as their natural position to do so) greater insights into what drove the rupture between the elites and the people.

But it demonstrably hasn’t, and I think that’s weird. After any populist eruption, from Brexit to Trump’s first election, there was a wave of think pieces about what had happened. It’s Economic Anxiety; it’s because we’re not listening to men; because we’re not listening to white people; because we’re not listening to the working class; because we’ve been too overbearing in forcing our boutique value systems on to an uninterested public; you can add to this list that the various autopsies that have been carried out by the mainstream political parties after failed election bids that plunged them into existential crises, see Biden 2020.

But the point of the stages of grief is that you’re supposed to move through them to eventually land on understanding and acceptance. For all the upheavals of the 21st century, no firm conclusions have been reached from inside the system as to how we got where we are, other a kind “bitches be crazy” attitude about the public and what the internet did to them. The decision seems to have been (perhaps unconsciously) made that there is nothing to change or learn from the past other than you have to stop people from saying and thinking terrible things online and if you can hold that line hard enough then maybe the problem will go away by itself (it won’t). The system is stuck in the denial stage of the grief process.

This is damaging for a number of reasons not least because it has revealed that the people who regard themselves as being primarily as wardens of basic democratic accountability really dislike the dirty essentials of democratic life, and believe that if their ideas are given a fair hearing in the public alongside rival ideas that theirs simply cannot win on their own merits. From Merz to Wilkinson to O’Connor they have no faith at all that if they put their position to the public they will win the argument. We need urgently to get to the bottom of what drives that belief. My guess is it’s another kind of internet psychosis in itself - that exposure to a particular kind of populist has convinced the sensible centrist that those people are irredeemable so the feeling is not only “why even bother”, but to engage is to lose.

It’s also a testament to the fact that, in the past, the upper ranks of politics, culture and society would have been formed of people with all kinds of temperaments and all kinds of experience (from the military, industry, from churches…). It’s relatively recent that we developed a ruling class made up only of risk-averse academic strivers and administrators who only mix with people of the same type. This is the logical outcome of a process of sorting that has been described on a personal level by Charles Murray and as a conscious political programme by Peter Mair. By temperament they (as with progressives and liberals generally) tend uniformly to be neurotic, avoidant and sensitive in a way that was not the case for the rulers of yesteryear. I’m not judging - I’m like that too, and I recognise my people. But we have selected people to run the show whose first choice when faced with an argument is a neurotically-driven desire to silence your opponent rather than face and beat them, or even better to be beaten and take on some part of the winning argument.

To summarise the problem: Populists (or whatever you want to call them - normal people, fascists, the new right, the unWoke, National Conservatives, etc etc etc - we all know who I mean) don’t have the skills or the personality types necessary to change the system in the way their voters want. Any current or impending success they are having at the ballot box is kind of illusory because the system will try to stop them and it will win. I think they will try to plug that gap between what they have promised and what they can do, and vent their frustration at it, by performing an extreme version of the desired change rather than actually enacting it. That is what has happened in America and it is likely to happen elsewhere. This impasse is self-reinforcing - voters will keep selecting populists, because the fact populists can’t make the changes the voters want (especially around immigration) is proof that the populists are right, and necessary. System insiders have the ability and the expertise to make some of these changes and have them stick, but they simply won’t do it under any circumstances which seems insane to me. We need them to accpet defeat and change, or it seems likely that we’re in for ten or fifteen years of gridlock until some new and as yet unknown equilibrium is reached. It’s not just all going to blow over, and it’s not simply a matter of who wins an election.

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