National Post (National Edition)
Confronting the dark side of populism
Wednesday's chaos in the U.S. Capitol building was a shocking display of political extremism in action. A relatively small yet radical group of Americans who were no longer satisfied to merely traffic in fringe ideas online. As a joint session of Congress sought to certify November's presidential election results, these pro-Trump activists traded their social media zealotry for real-life violence. They were openly encouraged to do so by the sitting president.
Political extremism isn't new. There's always been small, radical and even conspiratorial subsets of ideas and voices on the outer margins of our political life. That's inevitable in large, pluralistic democracies.
The main difference today is that while in the past the political class has generally been counted on to isolate and marginalize political extremism, President Donald Trump has instead consistently chosen to affirm and elevate it. He's given countenance and license to those who would normally dwell in the forsaken shadows of American politics. Wednesday's turmoil was the consequence.
It's hard to diminish the gravity of what happened. An angry mob breached the House and Senate chambers. The peaceful transition of power was disrupted. An air force veteran was shot and killed. The American president was complicit in these tragic events.
But we should also be careful not to overstate the scale of this political extremism. Although polls show that a considerable number of Republican voters have doubts about the election process, only a fraction actually showed up in Washington and an even smaller number (media reports have described it as between “hundreds” and “thousands”) stormed the U.S. Capitol.
This wasn't a broad-based, popular movement. It was a fringe group propagated in an online echo chamber and emboldened by a reckless and self-serving president.
That in no way minimizes what happened. Even a small minority can do major damage to democratic institutions, norms and values. At a minimum, the whole, despicable episode is bound to have lasting consequences for American conservatism and the Republican party, as National Review writer Matthew Continetti has rightly observed.
But the bigger questions, it seems to me, relate to the role of politics more generally. The rise of modern populism (which, of course, is most pointedly expressed in the Trump presidency itself ) had already led to renewed debates about the proper role of legislators, the responsiveness and representativeness of Western democracies and the need to distinguish between legitimate and unjustified grievances among the electorate.
I've struggled with these questions since Trump's surprise election in 2016. His unexpected win was a powerful sign that American politics had drifted too far from the interests, concerns and aspirations of working-class voters.
That he ran and won on a heterodox agenda caused me to rethink my assumptions about politics, policy and governance. There seemed to be a clear need for a democratic correction to the technocratic elitism of the postCold War, pro-globalization consensus.
Wednesday's riotous outburst is a reminder of what a delicate balancing act this necessarily involves. It requires us to make our democracies more responsive to those who've been harmed by recent cultural, economic and political trends. But in so doing, we must also continue to isolate and marginalize political extremism.
A big part of this involves distinguishing between legitimate and false populist grievances — in effect, to differentiate between the nihilism of the radicals who stormed the Capitol and the real and observable concerns of millions of populist voters. As conservative thinker Yuval Levin recently put it: “It is the task of leaders in populist eras, and especially leaders within populist movements, to distinguish these different kinds of complaints from one another as clearly as possible.”
A related priority must be to rethink the role of legislators in the populist age. Populism can help us do a better job of connecting policy-making to the lives of ordinary citizens. That would be a healthy contribution to our politics. But populism's weakness is the other side of the coin: it can ultimately succumb to the passions of the society's most vociferous voices.
It can, in effect, bring expression to the loudest minority at the expense of the quieter majority, even as it purports to be the voice of the democratic will. This has been in full display in the Trumpian argument that the Congress ought to unilaterally overturn million of votes for Joe Biden in an oxymoronic quest to protect the will of American voters.
It's one thing to better orient political attention to those who've been neglected. It's another to give sanction to political extremism as Trump has done throughout his presidency. That's not democratic leadership; it's dangerous demagogy.
American democracy will eventually move on from Wednesday's unprecedented chaos. But it won't get fully back on track until the country's political class recommits itself to the difficult yet essential work of responsible leadership.
IT'S HARD TO DIMINISH THE GRAVITY OF WHAT HAPPENED.