National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy PDF
Preview National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy
Contents Preface Introduction CHAPTER 1: Myths CHAPTER 2: Promises CHAPTER 3: Distrust CHAPTER 4: Destruction CHAPTER 5: Deprivation CHAPTER 6: De-alignment CONCLUSIONS: Towards Post-Populism Notes A Short Guide to Further Reading Follow Penguin Preface Across much of the West, especially in Europe and the US, national populism is now a serious force. Our argument in this book is that to really make sense of this movement we need to take a step back and look at the deep, long-term trends that have been reshaping our societies over decades, if not longer. We are academics who have researched this topic for many years. Roger Eatwell specializes in political parties, traditions and ideas, including fascism, which, for reasons that we will show, is different from national populism. Matt Goodwin is a political sociologist who looks at why growing numbers of people across the West are abandoning the mainstream for national populism. We hope to offer readers a unique insight into what has become, in only a short period, one of the most controversial yet misunderstood movements of our times. Many people have worked or talked with us about these issues. They are too numerous to name individually, but we would particularly like to thank: Noah Atkinson, Jonathan Boyd, Bobby Duffy, Harold Clarke, Stefan Cornibert, David Cutts, James Dennison, James Eatwell, Judith Eatwell, Jane Farrant, Robert Ford, Craig Fowlie, David Goodhart, Oliver Heath, Simon Hix, Eric Kaufmann, Marta Lorimer, Nonna Mayer, Fiona McAdoo, Caitlin Milazzo, Michael Minkenberg, Brian Neve, Mark Pickup, Jon Portes, Jacob Poushter, Jens Rydgren, Thomas Raines, Bruce Stokes and Paul Whiteley. Last, but by no means least, we would like to thank our literary agent, Charlie Brotherstone of Brotherstone Creative Management, for his helpful comments and encouragement, Chloe Currens, our editor at Penguin Books, who provided us with an extremely helpful set of comments on an earlier draft, Linden Lawson, our proactive copy editor and Penguin’s helpful marketeers Isabel Blake and Julie Woon. Any errors or faults which remain are entirely our own. R. E. and M. G. July 2018 Introduction This book is about ‘national populism’, a movement that in the early years of the twenty-first century is increasingly challenging mainstream politics in the West. National populists prioritize the culture and interests of the nation, and promise to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites. It is an ideology rooted in very deep and long-term currents that have been swirling beneath our democracies and gaining strength over many decades. In this book we explore these currents, setting out an overview of how politics is changing in Europe and the US. Our broad argument is that national populism is here to stay. We decided to write this book in 2016 amid two moments that shocked the West: when the billionaire and celebrity businessman Donald Trump was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate and then defeated Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House; and when more than half of Britain’s voters stunned the world by voting for ‘Brexit’, choosing to withdraw their country from the European Union (EU), an organization it had joined in the 1970s. Few pundits saw these results coming. Only two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times’s election forecast confidently told readers that Hillary Clinton had a 93 per cent chance of winning the presidency. Others put it at 99 per cent and pondered whether she might even turn Texas blue on her way to the White House. In Britain, more than 300 scholars, journalists and pollsters were asked to predict what would happen at the 2016 referendum and 90 per cent thought that British voters would choose to remain in the EU. Gambling on politics is legal in Britain, and so, had you bet £100 on Brexit on the day of the referendum, you would have made a £300 profit in the morning and £900 in the evening. The groupthink was certain that Remain would win, even though many of the online polls were suggesting the opposite. The American engineer W. Edwards Deming once said: ‘In God we trust; all others bring data.’ Yet though we live in an era when we have more data than ever before, hardly anyone successfully read the public mood. We think this is ever before, hardly anyone successfully read the public mood. We think this is because too many people are focusing too much on the short term and failing to take into account the historic shifts in politics, culture and economics that are now having profound effects on the outcome of our elections. National populists emerged long before the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. Their supporters are more diverse than the stereotypical ‘angry old white men’ who, we are frequently told, will soon be replaced by a new generation of tolerant Millennials. Brexit and Trump actually followed the much longer rise of national populists across Europe, like Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. They are part of a growing revolt against mainstream politics and liberal values. This challenge to the liberal mainstream is in general not anti-democratic. Rather, national populists are opposed to certain aspects of liberal democracy as it has evolved in the West. Contrary to some of the hysterical reactions that greeted Trump and Brexit, those who support these movements are not fascists who want to tear down our core political institutions. A small minority do, but most have understandable concerns about the fact that these institutions are not representative of society as a whole and, if anything, are becoming ever more cut adrift from the average citizen. Shortly before Trump won the White House, more than half of white Americans without degrees felt that Washington did not represent people like them, while just prior to the Brexit victory nearly one in two of Britain’s workers felt that ‘people like them’ no longer had a voice in the national conversation.1 Against the backdrop of major scandals over lobbying, ‘dark money’, the abuse of parliamentary expenses, lucrative speeches for major banks and ‘revolving- door politics’, when former politicians exploit their contacts to finance private deals, is it any wonder that large numbers of citizens today are openly questioning the trustworthiness of their representatives? Some national-populist leaders, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, speak of creating a new form of ‘illiberal democracy’ that raises worrying issues about democratic rights and the demonization of immigrants. However, 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, as we discuss in Chapter 3, has gradually become more elitist in character. National populism also raises legitimate democratic issues that millions of people want to discuss and address. They question the way in which elites have become more and more insulated from the lives and concerns of ordinary people. become more and more insulated from the lives and concerns of ordinary people. They question the erosion of the nation state, which they see as the only construct that has proven capable of organizing our political and social lives. They question the capacity of Western societies to rapidly absorb rates of immigration and ‘hyper ethnic change’ that are largely unprecedented in the history of modern civilization. They question why the West’s current economic settlement is creating highly unequal societies and leaving swathes of people behind, and whether the state should accord priority in employment and welfare to people who have spent their lives paying into the national pot. They question cosmopolitan and globalizing agendas, asking where these are taking us and what kind of societies they will create. And some of them ask whether all religions support key aspects of modern life in the West, such as equality and respect for women and LGBT communities. There is absolutely no doubt that some national populists veer into racism and xenophobia, especially towards Muslims. But this should not distract us from the fact that they also tap into widespread and legitimate public anxieties across a range of different areas. This movement needs to be explored as a whole because it is international in character. Many of our debates about politics are very insular: we focus on our own countries in isolation. Americans often interpret Trump solely from the perspective of American politics. But they can learn much from Europe, as their national populists are already doing. This is why, in 2018, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon went on a tour of Europe and met with several leading national populists, including Marine Le Pen in France, in countries that have been grappling with national populists for some time. Well before this, Trump himself had close ties to the Brexiteer Nigel Farage, the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), who in turn has links to populists in Europe, such as the Alternative for Germany, which broke through in 2017 and shattered the old myth that populism could never succeed in the country that had given the world National Socialism.2 Other controversial populist figures frequently visit the US, such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who infamously alleges that Europe is being ‘Islamified’ and has garnered the support of Republican members of Congress like Steve King, while members of the Le Pen dynasty in France have journeyed to the US Conservative Political Action Conference. In the EU, a broad alliance named the ‘Europe of Nations and Freedom’ brings together national populists from an array of countries including Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. If you looked only at Trump or Brexit, then you would miss the broader trends. Why Is this Book Necessary? Trump, Brexit and rebellions in Europe have fuelled an explosion of interest in populism – what it is, who votes for it and why it matters. In the years to come there will be countless books, articles and no doubt movies about these political crusades that are being waged in the name of the people – what Trump calls the ‘silent majority’, Farage ‘the people’s army’ and Le Pen ‘the forgotten France’. Yet we see problems in this debate as it is currently unfolding. It is often distorted by flawed assumptions, bias and an overwhelming obsession with the short term – with the here and now. Much that is written embraces misleading claims about national populism’s roots and supporters, such as the idea that this turbulence is merely a passing protest in response to the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, the austerity that followed, or the refugee crisis that has swept through Europe since 2014. These are comforting ideas for people who cling to the belief that ‘normal business’ will soon resume once economic growth returns and the flow of refugees slows or stops altogether. But these ideas are wrong. Many writers who claim to be impartial also find it hard to avoid being influenced by their own sympathy for liberal and left-wing politics (in the US, ‘liberal’ is often used as a synonym for ‘left-wing’, rather than in its historic sense of defending individual freedom and rights, which Americans refer to as ‘libertarianism’). This is not to say that everybody who writes about populism is biased. There have been important contributions. Scholars who might not be familiar to some readers, like Piero Ignazi and Jens Rydgren, pointed out how these revolts in Europe were a long time in the making. Thinkers like Margaret Canovan have shown how populism is an alternative form of democratic politics, and will be with us for as long as we have democracy. But many are too quick to condemn rather than reflect, buying into stereotypes that correspond with their own outlook rather than challenging claims by consulting the actual evidence. Consider a couple of common reactions to the election of Trump. David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has written about ‘Trumpocracy’, which he sees as an authoritarian threat to liberal democracy and world peace, led by a president who accused Hillary Clinton and the ‘Washington swamp’ of endemic corruption before establishing his own kleptocratic and nepotistic White House.3 Or the professional psychologists who came forward to diagnose Trump’s behaviour – in spite of the American Psychiatric Association’s prohibition of diagnosing politicians they have never personally evaluated – as being symptomatic of fundamental problems like anger, malignant narcissism and an impulsiveness which raise major questions about his ability to govern and safeguard world peace.4 While there are good reasons to be concerned about
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