The Populist Specter
Is the groundswell of popular discontent in Europe and the Americas
what’s really threatening democracy?
By Steven Hahn
The Nation, January 10, 2019
There is, many believe, a specter haunting the Euro-American world. It is
not, as Marx and Engels once exulted, the specter of communism. Nor is it the
specter of fascism, though some, including former secretary of state Madeleine
Albright, have warned of this. Rather, it is the specter of what journalists,
scholars, and other political observers now routinely call “populism.” To be
sure, there are few, if any, self-described populist movements afoot: no
“populist” parties seeking to mobilize voters and constituencies, no “populist
international” attempting to harness discontent as it spreads across national
borders. Nor is there any “populist” language, sustained “populist” critique of
the status quo, or “populist” platform as there once was in the United States
at the very end of the 19th century.
“Populism” is instead a term meant to encapsulate the rage often found
among white and native-born voters across Europe and other parts of the Western
Hemisphere, who regard themselves as victimized by established political
institutions, the corrupt practices of politicians, and the influx of migrants
from afar. Indeed, these “populists” appear to be united both by shared
grievances and by a disposition to place the blame not on the workings of the
economic system or the excesses of economic elites (though anti-Semitic currents
suggest some of this), but on the threats posed by immigrants to the national
culture and economic well-being.
In the current parlance, that is to say, populism is less a movement
than a menace. It seems to defy accepted political rules and norms, transgress
recognized boundaries, and veer toward authoritarian solutions. Most of all, it
threatens the institutions and practices associated with liberal democracy,
long believed to be the foundation of American political culture and imagined,
with the end of the Cold War, to have emerged triumphant over its rivals
throughout the world. But what can this presumed struggle between populism and
liberal democracy tell us about the making of our current political climate and
the future to which it may give rise? What, in fact, do these accounts really
tell us about populism and, for that matter, liberal democracy?
The presumed opposition between the two resides at the center of Yascha
Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy, although the book is chiefly concerned
with what Mounk calls liberal democracy’s “crisis” and “decomposition.” The
causes of this troubling state of affairs should be familiar to anyone who has
listened to or read political analysts—on any point of the political
spectrum—over the past several years. They include the slowing rate of economic
growth in much of the West since the mid-1970s; the corporate offensive against
unions and other forms of working-class power; the insulation of political
elites from popular pressure; the expanding power of the executive and judicial
branches of government; the emergence of new forms of social media capable of
disseminating extreme ideas; and the erosion of ethnic and cultural homogeneity
owing to new patterns of migration. Taken together, Mounk argues, these developments
have dramatically increased economic inequality, raised deep suspicions about
the integrity and responsiveness of political institutions, and encouraged the
rise of nationalist movements that place immigrants and other ethnic and
religious minorities at the root of their predicament. They have also, Mounk
continues, caused liberal democracy to unravel into two strands, “undemocratic
liberalism” and “illiberal democracy”—the latter another term, in his view, for
populism.
Although none of this will be news to many readers, more arresting is
the supporting data that Mounk offers up here. Polling and related surveys, he
argues, show not only the erosion of trust in political institutions and
democratic norms but also a growing support for authoritarian leadership,
including military rule. Indeed, according to Mounk, the data show this trend
to be especially notable among young people in a remarkable array of countries:
Britain, Chile, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Uruguay,
as well as the United States. Scholars of political development have long
argued that when a society achieves a stable form of liberal democracy, there
is little chance of it backsliding. But if Mounk is right, then all bets are
off. “Once upon a time,” he tells us, “liberal democracies could assure their
citizens of very rapid increases in living standards,” while “political
elites…could effectively exclude radical views from the public sphere,” and the
“homogeneity of their citizens…held liberal democracies together.” Now, all of
this has changed, leaving us on the slippery slope to authoritarianism.
Maybe yes, maybe no. As alarming as The People vs. Democracy is,
some of the data that Mounk presents has been subject to serious criticism—by
Cas Mudde, Jeff Guo, and Pippa Norris, among others—both for overstating the
popular disenchantment with democracy and for understating a wide range of
attitudes that may lend it support. As always, the salience of polling data
depends on what questions were asked, what choice of answers was provided, and
what we make of the responses. Also, there are reasons to doubt the extent and
depth of the crisis that Mounk describes. Elections during the past three years
suggest that millennials can be mobilized in large numbers for democratic
purposes; and, if anything, they seem to be moving left rather than
right—certainly in the United States, where socialism is now viewed by many of
them as an appealing alternative.
Whether or not Mounk’s data hold up, he is hardly alone in raising the
warning flags for liberal democracy. Political theorist William Galston, a
domestic-policy adviser to Bill Clinton during his presidency, does likewise in
his concise and pointed Anti-Pluralism, which echoes many of Mounk’s arguments.
During the past 25 years, Galston writes, partisans of liberal democracy have
moved from “triumphalism to near despair,” as elites have grown skeptical of
the need for popular consent and “populist movements” have erupted to express
their opposition.
Current Issue
Like Mounk, Galston attributes the present dangers to the faltering of
economic growth and to the “waves” (this appears to be the metaphor of choice
these days) of immigration that have washed over Europe and the United States.
Like Mounk, he focuses on how liberal democracies can be “deformed” by
demagoguery on the one side and elitism on the other, and he remains committed
to resuscitating the liberal-democratic way. Yet Galston seems even more
worried about the threat that populism represents, and he writes about it
almost in the language of contagion. Populism, he insists, is tribal: It feeds
on feelings of economic and cultural vulnerability and thrives on binary and
simplistic portraits of the world (“us” versus “them,” the “people” versus the
“elites”). It draws strength from the “incompleteness of life in liberal
societies” and attacks vital norms, pluralism chief among them. An “antidote”
must therefore be found, preferably in what Galston calls liberal democracy’s
“capacity for reinvention.”
For all their fretting and concern, however, neither Galston nor Mounk
offers a compelling definition of populism or explains why the term is a useful
rubric for the political discontent that has grown so powerful in recent years.
Nor does either give us much of a sense of where populism comes from, whether
it has a meaningful history, or whether a deeper historical perspective would
serve our understanding better.
For both writers, those designated as populists can be disposed to
immigrant-bashing and to various forms of nationalism and anti-elitism; and the
word “populism” seems most useful as a demeaning and uninterrogated epithet
that Galston and Mounk have embraced to express their own hostility to liberal
democracy’s apparent enemies. So far as they can see, both populism and the
crisis of liberal democracy are of relatively recent vintage—products of the
end of the post–World War II boom, or the end of the Cold War, or the rise of
terrorism and terrorism-related warfare. It is a perspective that offers some
comfort in these volatile and unpredictable times: The shallower and more
peculiar the roots of this noxious growth, the fewer the obstacles to plucking
them out.
The ambition and appeal of Barry Eichengreen’s The Populist Temptation
are to be found in the historical framing that Mounk and Galston avoid. A
distinguished economic historian, Eichengreen looks to Europe as well as the
United States and takes us all the way back to the Luddites of early
19th-century Britain and the Greenback and Populist parties of late
19th-century America, who all mounted serious political projects or electoral
challenges. Eichengreen’s net also catches the German Social Democrats of the
1870s and 1880s, the American Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and demagogues like
Father Coughlin and Huey Long in the 1930s and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and
Donald Trump more recently.
Eichengreen cautions that not all of these phenomena are necessarily
examples of populism. Yet over the course of his book, virtually every movement
or voice—whether of the left or the right—that pushes back against the dominant
social and political system is lumped into a category of disruption whose
toxicity, he argues, tends to be the product of economic insecurity and whose
impact can best be limited or curbed by economic turnarounds and wise
governance. The policies of Bismarck and Franklin Roosevelt, Eichengreen
suggests, provide good illustrations of how the wind can be taken out of such
movements.
Still, whatever is historically and analytically valuable in
Eichengreen’s approach comes apart because his unbridled animus toward the
populism of the current moment plays havoc with his apparent interest in
contextualizing it. The “taproot of support” for the various expressions of
populism today “is in each case fundamentally the same,” he writes, and for all
intents and purposes this also appears to be true of the past.
Eichengreen is no less confusing than Mounk or Galston in attempting to
characterize the populism and populist leaders of our day. Acknowledging that
populism is difficult to define, he nonetheless echoes Justice Potter Stewart’s
1964 take on pornography: “I know it when I see it.” But what is it that we
see? According to Eichengreen, populism is marked by anti-elitism, authoritarianism,
nativism, bellicose nationalism, demagoguery, and destruction. Populism is
“corrosive” and brings out the “worst in [its] followers,” arraying the general
public against the intelligentsia, natives against foreigners, and majority
groups against minorities. Populists revel in flouting restraints and
disregarding expert opinion, and although they are willing to have the
government advance their agenda, it is not clear what their agenda is, beyond
punishing their enemies.
Eichengreen’s intention here is to find the “wellspring” of populism by
looking back at the dissident movements of the past. Yet he looks to the past
mostly to confirm what he already believes or to identify direct links and
lessons. Like Mounk and Galston, he circles the wagons around established
institutions and firmly believes that populism must be combated and
quelled—tellingly, the title of one of his chapters, “Containment,” evokes the
US strategy toward the Soviet Union—and its grievances addressed. Otherwise, he
warns, populism may descend into fascism.
Although Mounk, Galston, and Eichengreen recognize how liberal democracy
and the international liberal (or neoliberal) order can be dismantled and
reconfigured, none of them show an interest in mounting a critique of modern
liberalism itself. Far from it: The gravity of the present crisis has made them
feel all the more protective of liberal institutions, domestically and
internationally, as though they were the last guards on a virtual Maginot Line
for our civilization. It is a disposition shared by many liberal and
left-of-center commentators, who have, of late, found new allies against the
forces of populist darkness in the FBI, the CIA, and the national-security
state. Small wonder, then, that one of the most thoughtful critics of the
liberal project and its results steps forth from the right side of the
political spectrum.
Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed isn’t a new take on the
subject; readers acquainted with the work of Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch,
and Amitai Etzioni will find much that is familiar here. But in a measured and
humane way, Deneen allows us to think more deeply about where we are and why,
and about how we have become complicit in the making of developments that we
claim to revile. “Liberalism,” Deneen writes, “created the conditions, and the
tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the
self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.” The current crisis of
liberal democracy, in short, “is the culmination of the liberal order.”
Deneen is a political philosopher who decries what he sees as the
long-term erosion of community standards, cultural life, and especially the
means of self-governance. In his view, social bonds, shared commitments, a
reverence for tradition, the cultivation of moral virtue, and the recognition
of human limits have been steadily undermined by a hegemonic liberalism that
regards the individual as the basic social unit and the state as the vehicle of
progress. Denizens of liberal societies are instructed to act more selfishly,
to hedge their commitments, and to regard relationships as flexible and
fungible in pursuit of a liberty that, in the end, depends on the expansion of
the state to secure its very prospects. Although “conservative” and
“progressive” liberals may differ over how to use the state and the limits of
such interventions, they share a commitment to the state as an essential means
to achieve their ends, one designed to transcend the limitations of a
particular local practice or norm. By celebrating personal emancipation from
established authority and arbitrary cultural or religious traditions,
liberalism creates its own forms of dependency, Deneen argues, forcing
individuals to look increasingly toward an ever more distant and bureaucratic
state that claims to advance their liberties while ultimately restricting them.
The practices and institutions of liberal democracy therefore obscure
the disempowerment of those who try to register their political aspirations at
the same time that globalization eviscerates popular control over the dynamics
of economic life. Liberalism, Deneen contends, thrives on the flattening of
culture and the reifying of technology; eventually, it undermines the
relational webs that make for social and political cohesion. Thus, as liberal
democracies lose legitimacy, they often “generate demotic demands for an
illiberal autocrat who promises to protect the people against the vagaries of
liberalism itself.”
As compelling as some features of this argument may be, Deneen also
tends to resort to some rather tiresome critiques, especially of liberal learning
and the universities. Joining many other conservative culture warriors since
the 1980s, he rails against multiculturalism, the abandonment of the “great
books” curriculum, and intellectual uniformity on campus, while longing for
what he imagines are more traditional communities. For him, as for Wendell
Berry, communities are the obverse of liberal estrangement: They sustain
cultural bonds, self-governance, social humility, and spiritual nourishment.
But neither Deneen nor Berry (or others who embrace this view) confronts the
negative aspects that usually attend these communities: insularity, demands for
conformity, hostility to outsiders, entrenched hierarchies organized around
gender and race, and the infliction of so-called rough justice. Even so, Deneen
does offer a useful counterpoint to the liberal-crisis theorists of our moment,
who often miss how liberal democracy can undermine access to meaningful forms
of power and, during times of stress, lurch toward some type of illiberalism.
The critical assessments and warnings that mark these works are
accompanied by a raft of remedies designed to stave off the worst of what their
authors see coming or to reverse the tendencies that pose the gravest threats.
Deneen, despite his conservativism, doesn’t favor a return to a “preliberal
age” and suggests that we acknowledge liberalism’s achievements. But the path
forward that he offers seems fanciful at best: He urges us to “outgrow” our
“age of ideology,” to nurture “practices of care, patience, humility, reverence,
respect, and modesty,” and to transform our households into small economies
(“household economics,” in his words).
Mounk, Galston, and Eichengreen are far more policy-oriented and offer
more practical programs. To defeat populism, they insist, liberals must promote
robust economic growth and focus on full employment and higher incomes for
working people. They must shift tax burdens to the rich and invest in
infrastructure, education, and health care. They must also encourage worker
participation in corporate decision-making, confront the appeal of nationalism,
and rethink the organization of both national and multilateral political
institutions (like the European Union) so that influence is more widely
distributed. It is an impressive and likely helpful to-do list. But the irony
is that these are precisely the sorts of programs that liberal regimes have
long resisted, and their achievement would require both a serious critique of
modern liberalism and popular mobilizations that might well appear “populist”
in character.
The literature of the current moment is a bit reminiscent of the
immediate post–World War II era, when historians and political scientists began
to construct an idea of the American liberal political tradition and heaped
scorn on movements like late 19th-century populism, which they likened to
fascism and blamed for the rise of McCarthyism in their own time. Populism,
they argued, was backward-looking, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, prone to
conspiracy theories, and a product of status anxieties and economic insecurity.
Richard Hofstadter, one of the most distinguished historians of the period, not
only wrote about populism in this way but also saw it as part of a wider
“anti-intellectualism in American life” and a “paranoid style in American
politics.” Fears of popular unrest abounded (tied to communism and socialism in
particular), while the importance of the “vital center” was proclaimed. It
wasn’t until new movements on the left emerged, especially those in pursuit of
civil rights and against the Vietnam War, that a more sympathetic reassessment
of 19th-century populism gained traction—and that reassessment was soon
superseded by growing interest in a new populism of the right, beginning with
George Wallace (who mostly goes unmentioned in the books under review, as in
many others like them).
Still another meaningful historical perspective is, quite remarkably,
ignored by liberal analysts and observers who associate the spread of populism
with the recent “waves” of immigration: empire. It is true, of course, that the
international circuits of migration causing much of the stress took shape well
after decolonization and the Cold War. But it is a mistake to overlook the
relationship between Western empire and the longer-term movement of people from
colonies and former colonies that has been diversifying the populations of
Britain, France, and the Mediterranean for decades. It is also a mistake to
overlook how the movement of laborers and their families from Mexico, Central
America, and the Caribbean to the United States has been produced, in part, by
the US’s domineering presence in the Western Hemisphere during the 20th century
and, in part, by its continental conquests during the 19th.
The term “globalization” quite simply obscures the power relations
across continents and on the ground that have been producing massive
inequalities of income and wealth, while the nationalist responses obscure the
global vision and politics that will be necessary to create a more secure and
equitable world, especially in the face of climate change. There is a need,
that is, for a version of what Henry Wallace prescribed during the Second World
War: not just an American New Deal but a global one.
No less sobering from a historical vantage point are the deeply laid
traditions of illiberalism that have helped define our political culture since
the time of the American Revolution. It has been commonplace for observers to
assume that liberal democracy has characterized our politics across the last
two and a half centuries and that illiberal impulses have erupted fairly
recently and under unusual circumstances. But that simply ignores the powerful
strains of anti-Catholicism that shaped American politics from the 18th century
until at least the 1930s; the centrality of slavery and racism to organizing
relations of political power locally and nationally; the violence that
routinely accompanied electoral contests throughout the 19th century, even when
political parties were robust and voter turnout very high; the community and
associational harassments that denied outsiders and nonconformists, especially
of a religious nature, their standing and rights; and the many efforts to
disenfranchise working people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
In 1838, just at the time that Alexis de Tocqueville was publishing Democracy
in America—long considered a basic statement of America’s liberal
exceptionalism—a young Abraham Lincoln spoke to an audience in Springfield,
Illinois, of an “ill-omen amongst us.” By this, he explained,
I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the
growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the
sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive
ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and
that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would
be a violation of the truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.
Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of our times.
They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana…. Alike, they
spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of southern slaves, and the order
loving citizens of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is
common to the whole country.
These Lincoln viewed as “dangers” to American institutions more than two
decades before a rebellion of slaveholders, on his watch, nearly tore the
country apart in one of the 19th century’s bloodiest conflicts.
The populist phenomena of the present day appear heir to these
unsettling currents of illiberalism. But there has been resistance too, mounted
mostly by those who have been the targets of illiberal attack, but also by
movements that called themselves (and could reasonably be called) “populist”: movements
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and of the 1930s and ’40s, that did
take on the inequalities of wealth and power in American society; that did
mobilize constituencies which had been cast out and marginalized; and that did
struggle to construct a more democratic future. Unless we come to terms with
this complex history, with its burdens and inspirations, we are surely lost.
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