Populism in on the rise worldwide

But it's not the Friday the 13th-style horror spectacle our fear-mongering progressive neoliberal elites want you to fantasize about

“A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. All the powers of…Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.”

Thus wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, first published in German in February 1848.

Communism for the most part is now a dead letter – rightfully so in light of the atrocities committed over more than a century and a half under its banner.

But, if we were to substitute the word “populism” for “communism” in the above quotation the sentiment would not only hold today, it would perhaps prove even more trenchant.

The trend became first discernible almost a decade ago and gained prominence with the election of Trump in 2016 along with the vote in the United Kingdom for Brexit.

Trump’s failure to achieve re-election in 2020 did not really brake the momentum that has been building steam in recent years.  Elections in Italy in 2022, the Netherlands and Slovakia in 2023, and the EU parliament and France in 2024 have only whetted the edges of what appears to be a deep-running trajectory within within advanced liberal democracies.

Trump’s current surge in the polls, despite his felony convictions and even before Biden’s debacle in the Presidential debate last week, is obviously one more parcel of evidence.

Yesterday’s dramatic, landslide victory of the Labour Party in Britain would seem to be a strong counter-indicator, but what just happened in the UK turns out to be something of an anomaly. 

The choice of Kair Starmer, a bureaucrat and colorless lawyer, as the new prime minister, as various analysts have made clear, is less about ideology and far more about punishing the long-entrenched Conservative party, which has made a mess of the British economy.

In fact, that is what the populist revolt ultimately comes down to, according to Patricia Cohen and Jack Nicas writing in The New York Times.  It is indeed the economy, stupid!

A “common thread is clear”, the authors note.  It entails “rising inequality, diminished purchasing power and growing anxiety that the next generation will be worse off than this one.”

For the record such anxieties are not the distinctive preoccupation of voters in advanced economies.  They are also spread widely throughout the Global South, especially in countries like Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Argentina.

Yet, in contrast with previous global economic upheavals such as occurred in 2008, growing cultural and religious disparities have inflamed social divisions much more intensely.

Cohen and Nicas observe:

The economic anxieties are adding to divisions between rural and urban dwellers, unskilled and college educated workers, religious traditionalists and secularists. In France, Italy, Germany and Sweden, far-right politicians have seized on this dissatisfaction to promote nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas.

Unfortunately, the chattering classes that comprise the material max among global elites seem not only to be clueless about what is transpiring, but are scornful of it.  There is truly a “let them eat cake” hauteur that keeps festering among commentators.

The go-to maneuver among progressive neoliberal pundits is to rebrand populism simply as “the far right” or even “fascism”, conjuring up stock-in-trade film noir allusions to Nuremberg-style Nazi storm troopers or Il Duce with puffed chest and military bling on his Rome balcony whipping crowds into a murderous frenzy.

The distant, historic affiliations, for example, between National Rally and the occupation government of Vichy France, or the occasional explosion of retro romantic fascism among disgruntled Italian youth, has been routine fodder for message-amplification within the anti-populist mainstream media.   

But it appears to have diminishing returns.

In the face of this skepticsm toward the chorus of official gaslighting about an existential “threat to democracy”, the propagandists on the progressive neoliberal left have begun to deny that populism even exists.

As Mukul Kesavan opines glibly in Foreign Policy, it’s “something much worse.”

According to Kesavan,

 …populism is a term deployed by centrist commentators to claim a monopoly on political common sense for the moderate middle—an objective-sounding word for extremism and excess in the same way as centrism is a synonym for sensible moderation. But the currency populism has gained thanks to this rhetorical maneuver has been bought at the expense of coherence and precision.

So if it’s not “populism”, what is it?

Kesavan can’t bring himself merely to trundling out the hackneyed journalistic tropes of torch-carrying, antisemitic mobs rioting and rampaging through Jewish neighborhoods. Since October 7 of last year, that scenario has come to be proudly owned by the radical left.

Kesavan goes on to argue that the term “populism”, employed regularly by political theorists to encompass anti-establishment animus on both the left and right, should not be apply to the latter at all.

That is because, he insists, right-wing “populism” boils down to what he idiosyncratically labels “majoritarian nationalism”, which applies to such diverse movements as Modism in India, or the military regime in Myanmar, formerly Burma.  About these movements Kesavan states unequivocally:

Every one of them has the same goal: to take the nominal majorities in their countries (defined by race or religion) and turn them into self-aware, supremacist majorities, determined to remake their nations in their own image and to reduce religious and ethnic minorities to the ranks of second-class citizens or worse.

Of course, “majoritarian nationalism” turns out to be something of a tautology, if one pays any attention to scholarly accounts of the legacy of the nation-state itself.

In his magisterial and classic analysis of the modern phenomenon we identify as “nationalism,” Benedict Anderson traces it to the breakdown of earlier empires welded together by a single religion and the quest for new structures of symbolic solidarity that would unite disparate groups and constituencies, particularly in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation that shattered the unity of the “one true church.” 

According to Anderson, “nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.”

The famous French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his groundbreaking work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life linked national loyalty and religious conviction indissolubly together.

And it is perhaps for this precise reason that Anthony Birch noted in 1989: “For all its limitations and problems, nationalism has proved to be the most successful political doctrine ever promoted.”

Nationalism, therefore, is not in even the most remote sense anything new.  Since the eighteenth century at least nationalism has been the resilient norm, and in the postwar breakdown of colonial hegemony from the Middle East to Africa and Asia it has showed itself to be the default mode for global governance.

Kesavan’s complaint about present day “majoritarian” forms of nationalism may fit his native India under the tutelage of Modi and the BJP party, but it hardly deserves to discredit populism as a whole.  Democracy has always posed the danger of a tyrannical majority.  Read your DeTocqueville.

It has also been prone throughout history to the trampling of minority rights by racial and religious supremacists from the Jim Crow American South to the Sinhalese domination of the Tamils in northern Sri Lanka.

The demonization of electoral populist majorities around the world has far more to do with the desperate attempt by international elites to divert attention from the rapid economic decline and dysfunction their flagging efforts to install for the first time since the nineteenth century a new global aristocracy of special privilege based on massive wealth inequalities, cultural cartelization, and a monopoly over both public and private education.

In contrast with all the current fear-mongering nowhere to date has the populist revolt turned into any kind of totalitarian dystopia akin to what arose in the 1930s.  In a country like the United States with its durable Constitutional heritage of checks and balances among the divergent  branches of government such a frightful future is even less likely. 

As Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin in their book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy emphasize, populism on the ground is a far cry from any jackbooted and “authoritarian” regimentation of the masses that progressive neoliberal proselytizers tiresomely harp upon. 

They write:

…most national-populist voters want more democracy – more referendums and more empathetic and listening politicians that give more power to the people and less power to established economic and political elites. This ‘direct’ conception of democracy differs from the ‘liberal’ one that has flourished across the West following the defeat of fascism and which…has gradually become more elitist in character.

An current example of such a catastrophic disconnect between rhetoric and reality is the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page “Presidential transition” proposal they have named “Project 2025”.

The names and ideas that adorn the sprawling document resemble some ponderous dust-amassing manifesto from the Reagan administration of the 1980s.

Even though Trump himself recently disavowed any direct association with the initiative, the progressive neoliberal left has cast copious shade on it from all directions as some disastrous political plot which one publication warned “will cement America as a right-wing authoritarian state.”

Project 2025 reads merely like a laundry list of Republican political priorities that go back well before the George W. Bush administration.

It also lays out a tabulation of anodyne, all-too-familiar Republican “promises” (remember Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America”), including “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”, “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”, “secure our God-given individual right to enjoy the ‘blessings of liberty’”, etc.

Ouch, that last one is premium select fascism.

Project 2025 is even so dangerous as to promise to “defend our national sovereignty”.

I’ll take the latter one with Freedom Fries, if you please. 

The background din with all those  stentorian sieg heils is downright deafening.