Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond
The language of politics, it seems, is inadequate. Just as the pundits found it difficult to get their heads round the political events of 2016 – the Brexit vote, the Trump triumph, the popular rejection of received wisdom in such countries as Italy and Colombia – so they now find it difficult to get their tongues round the explanations they have identified. ‘Populism’ is the word that many have chosen, not least David Cameron, who has said ‘the rise of populism’ cost him his job. But others reject it with some vehemence.
‘What on earth did he mean?’ asked Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, even before Prince Charles too used the word in the context of religious persecution. ‘Populism has become a euphemism for exploiting the people’s will, supposedly by facile, short-term solutions to complex problems … The reality is that the political words we learned in our childhood are turning to dust. Left and Right are losing all meaning, as are liberalism and conservatism, globalism and nationalism.’
The Daily Mail doesn’t like ‘populism’ either. It’s ‘the BBC’S new buzzword, being used to sneer at the “uneducated” 17 million who voted for Brexit … But, make no mistake, it is now being used as a sneering, pejorative term to describe the … phenomenon [of millions of people in Europe and America expressing] their anger at the ballot box over the indolence, corruption and complacency of their nation’s political elite.’
The Mail explains that the dictionary definition of ‘populist’ is ‘a politician … who claims to support the interests of ordinary people’. Unobjectionable, you might think, so what term would the
Mail, or indeed Sir Simon, prefer to see used to describe the political winners of 2016? We are not told. We are left to infer that the Mail’s real objection is to a perceived sneer and Sir Simon’s to a perceived euphemism. Since euphemisms are usually adopted to avoid any implication of the pejorative, we may suspect that the word isn’t so bad after all.
‘Populism’ came to Britain, and British English, from America, where it is used to describe those who want to identify with ‘the little man’. The Populist Party, organised in 1891, grew out of the People’s Party, which drew its strength in the South and West, especially among farmers and union members who argued that ‘the railroad corporations will either own the people, or the people must own the railroads.’ The party won more than one million votes in the 1892 presidential election and survived until 1908, by which time most of its followers had defected to the Democratic Party. By then the Democrats had chosen a populist candidate, William Jennings Bryan, three times as their presidential nominee. More recent American populists have included Huey Long, George Wallace, Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan.
Pundits might have asked how people so different in many ways could all be called populists. Bryan was a pacifist and prohibitionist by Christian conviction, whereas Long was a ‘share-our-wealth’ demagogue. Wallace was for years a white segregationist, whereas Jackson is a black activist. Buchanan is an old-fashioned conservative, hostile to gays, immigrants and Jews. All, despite the diversity of their views, are considered populists because they have cast themselves as champions of the ‘forgotten’ man (and sometimes woman) and scourges of academics, experts, immigrants, the media, Wall Street, international organisations, big companies and elites of every kind.
Not all these bugbears were in the sights of the angry voters of 2016, who no doubt made their decisions for a variety of reasons, but you can see why pundits reach for the label ‘populist’ to hang on them. Donald Trump, to the Left of some and the Right of other American populists, sits naturally among them and so, I believe, do many Brexit supporters.
‘Left’ and ‘Right’? Sir Simon might ask. Well, yes. These adjectives do not describe today’s politicians with perfect precision, but we still know what they mean in many contexts. They were never exact. Was Churchill a Right-wing Liberal or, later, a Left-wing Conservative? Neither, really. Charles Moore, writing in the Spectator recently, said reasonably that he didn’t mind being called Right-wing.
Words may yet be found or coined to improve the explanation of modern politics, but there is still room for some old terms, ‘populism’ among them. ‘Nosethumbers’ might be another – and I haven’t even mentioned ‘tribal’, ‘luddite’, ‘chauvinist’, ‘poujadism’ and ‘flat-earthers’.