Why it’s time we learnt to think outside the box about populism
Paschal Donohoe gives no clues on how to identify a populist so we can avoid ever electing them, writes
‘It is hardly an earthshattering problem if they win the odd election here and there’
In his otherwise sharp and insightful analysis of the global populist wave currently gripping us, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe drew one slightly misguided conclusion. According to the Minister, populism, because it is inherently anti-democratic, constitutes a major threat to our liberal world order that must be fought against tooth and nail. This, I believe, is not necessarily the case. In fact, I argue the populism of today is not in the least bit anti-democratic, or even, in principal, anti-liberal. Rather than fighting it, the best thing we could possibly do to maintain a strong liberal order is normalise it; taking the points it raises with such bile and fury, and processing them into responsible policy.
But what of Donohoe’s argument? According to him, populism is anathema to de- mocracy because it presumes to have already grasped the will of the people. Populists, therefore, cannot legitimately be defeated in any election. If they find themselves on the losing end of one, the whole thing was rigged to begin with by the terrible elites who control these things. It is an unfalsifiable claim because no matter how much evidence there is showing things to be above board, the goalposts can always be moved further back. The conspiracy of the elites knows no discernible end.
This seems to fit some cases well enough. Vladimir Putin, for example, came to power nearly two decades ago on the back of a reactive wave of frustration with the liberal world order into which his country had failed to properly assimilate and since then he has produced a grossly defective dictatorship that we should do everything in our power to avoid imitating in this or any other developed Western nation. The problem is that Donohoe gives us no guidance on how to identify a populist so as to avoid electing them in the first place.
Take the supposed poster boy of contemporary populism; current US President Donald Trump. A fairly strong case could be made that his constant allegations of fake news emanating from the offices of CNN and The New York Times are a worrying manifestation, but suppose for a moment he were to articulate his concerns about their strong editorial bias against him in the more measured and statesmanly terms that President Obama used to routinely and, I think, quite rightly lambast Fox News.
Would he then cease to be a populist? If so, before branding him one, shouldn’t we ask whether his allegations could be more accurately interpreted as a sign of his own lack of intelligence than as an indication of dictatorial intent? It should be noted that he has done nothing to actually try and repress these organisations. I for one sus- pect he enjoys the banter he has with them far too much to attempt anything of the sort. In any case, more often than not I find that people’s main problems with him are his desire to build a wall across the Mexican border, his denial of climate change and his views on trade. Criticising the man on any of these grounds is perfectly reasonable, but pot meets kettle the moment it is suggested that merely holding wrong-headed views about policy makes one anti-democratic.
Indeed Donohoe’s logic here is almost as insidious as the unfalsifiable claim of his populist opponent. Voters are urged to reject politically incorrect candidates because we cannot be sure of the space between their uncouth rhetoric and a fully fledged dictatorship. Either this dissuades voters and the candidate loses or it does not and they win, causing the whole process to repeat itself again after they get into office, until such time as voters are dissuaded. Once that happens the election results are either rejected and the dictator reveals himself or they are accepted and an otherwise legitimate democratic politician is marginalised through fear-mongering.
Thus Donohoe’s dictum either fails to prevent us from falling into dictatorial rule or fails to rise above the status of a cheap centrist talking point. He is conflating the architecture of broad liberal consensus, wonderful though it may be, with the institutions of democracy. The two must be properly distinguished from each other in analysing the current moment because it is clear that what we think of as populism today stems from exhaustion with the consensus itself and not the democratic means through which it has been propagated. The narrator in Michel Houellebecq’s most recent novel puts this same point in cynical terms when reflecting on what the electoral process has become in his home of France as it reaches what Francis Fukuyama calls “the end of history”.
“A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms depending on how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.”
Houellebecq here makes no claims about whether or not this is the best system available to us on balance, and if Donohoe stridently believes that it is he will get no arguments from me. The exhaustion, however, is palpable. Donohoe is undoubtedly correct in identifying its origins in trends of broadening economic inequality and I’m sure that the palliative measures he outlines would go a long way towards fixing things. However, I also suspect that after a certain point promises of freedom and economic prosperity alone just won’t substitute for other communal and cultural values which people hold dear.
When large-scale unskilled immigration or labour outsourcing occurs in a developed country the problem is not simply one of money being transferred out of a worker’s pocket and into that of a faceless multinational executive. After all, this economic cost is often made up on the back end through the demand immigrants create for new industry as well as knock-on price reductions. Much more pernicious is the robbery of control over one’s life that occurs when one is forced to leap at a moment’s notice from job to job, as well as the breakdown of community that follows from this constant relocation.
For as nice as endless new individual rights are, it must eventually be recognised that they are not ends in themselves as the great liberal thinkers of the 18th Century — reacting as they were in many cases to the deeply entrenched despots of their day — so often assumed, but only a fairly reliable way of keeping us all from stepping on each other’s toes too often.
Questioning how much kowtowing needs to be done at any given moment to our many liberal norms and institutions is not in itself a rejection of liberalism as essentially the best game in town, and this, ultimately, is why I remain hopeful about what could still come of this strange little populist moment we find ourselves in. While the good old days to which the populists behind Putin’s rise fantasised about returning were fundamentally authoritarian, here and elsewhere throughout most of the developed west they rarely tend to mean anything before, say, 1950.
Though they’re wrong to think things were better back then, it is hardly an earth-shattering problem if they win the odd election here and there, especially if it means getting it out of their system and perhaps forcing the rest of us to think outside the box.