Tag Archives: populism

It’s More Complicated Than That

The MAGA movement is anything but conservative–and that assertion is supported by the number of genuine conservatives who identify as “Never Trumpers.” 

One of my favorites in that group is David French, whom I often cite on this blog. French self-identfies as an Evangelical Christian; he is also a lawyer who respects the rule of law, who understands that policy is complicated, and who recognizes that simplistic answers are almost always counterproductive.

French recently had a lengthy column in the New York Times on populism, in which he made a number of trenchant, important observations. I encourage you to click through and read the whole essay, but I particularly want to focus on a few key points. 

French began by rebutting a comment by the odious Steve Bannon to the effect that Americans really haven’t examined Trump’s populism. French finds that laughable; as he says, there have been countless focus groups of Trump voters, numerous “man-on-the-street” interviews and interviews with supporters at Trump rallies. Anyone who follows politics has read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts. “And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.”

French warns that “Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite. And that’s exactly where we are today.”

Populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.

Some of the problems, however, that motivate populists aren’t problems at all, and populist anger is rooted in something else entirely. Segregationist zeal fueled Southern populism for generations, for example. Xenophobia has always created fertile ground for populist demagogues.

But regardless of whether the grievances are justified, the real energy of populism is in its emotion — in its raw, unmitigated anger. It’s that passion that makes populist movements so vulnerable to charlatans and demagogues.

As French says, there’s a reason for that vulnerability– actually solving legitimate grievances with good policy is hard; inflaming passion is much easier.
 

There was no easy way to crawl back from the 2008 financial crisis. There are no easy answers in the Middle East, despite Trump’s faith in coastal real estate development in Gaza. The reasons for the loss of Midwest manufacturing jobs go far beyond the trade deals that “they” inflicted on “us.”

So populist politicians lean on the passion, reflecting populist anger back at the public. “The shared emotional connection delivers a singular message: I am your champion, and you are my legions.”

Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. 

The most effective populist tactics, or course, are deflection and racism: anything that goes wrong is “their” fault.

When the elected populists don’t fix everything (because they can’t), they lean back on their shared emotional bond to avoid accountability or consequences. After all, in the never-ending battle of us versus them, one can always blame the other side for every failure and frustration. At least for a while.

We’ve seen this clearly with Republican devotion to Donald Trump. He inherited a growing economy and maintained its growth for the first three years of his term. While he deserves a degree of credit for that continued economic success, Trump’s messaging was relentless — he had created the strongest economy in the world.

But what of the failures of Trump’s first term? Well, that’s a “they” problem.

The soaring murder rate in 2020 wasn’t Trump’s fault. That was all about B.L.M. and the left.

The confusion, incompetence and deception that marked Trump’s response to the pandemic were forgotten. The left was the real villain of the pandemic, with its school closings and mask mandates….So when America ended Trump’s first term deeply divided, with lower life expectancy, more murder, less economic growth, more deadly overdoses and higher unemployment than when he entered the Oval Office, none of that was his fault. All of it was due to circumstances beyond his control.

French reminds us that defeating populism doesn’t require defending the status quo. It does, however, require a polity that isn’t so consumed with hatred of “those people” that nothing else matters.

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It’s Not Just Putin

Most Americans think of the United States as  different from the rest of the world, with a very distinct political and social culture. That perspective far too often limits our preoccupations to issues within our borders. Academics may engage in comparative studies, but most of America’s “chattering class” confines its chatter to American politics and institutions.

These days, there are numerous articles, books and columns  devoted to the American Right, for example (especially about its current control of the GOP), but aside from a throwaway sentence here and there, there are relatively few efforts to tie that paternalistic, theocratic, nationalist movement to the broader, worldwide culture war that is pitting people who are embracing–or at least accepting– modernity against those hysterically trying to stop the (emerging) world so that they can get off.

Despite the lack of attention to similar movements elsewhere, there are significant similarities–and since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a couple of recent columns have traced the connections between our homegrown cultural Luddites and their fellow resisters around the world.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted Paul Krugman to consider the roots of Putin’s appeal to the American Right.

Krugman locates the sources of the right’s infatuation with a brutal dictator–an infatuation that he reminds us began even before Trump’s rise–to Putin’s championing of  “antiwokeness “— Putin is someone who (to quote Tucker Carlson’s recent defense of his pro-Russian propaganda)  “wouldn’t accuse you of being a racist, who denounced cancel culture and ‘gay propaganda.'”

Some of it reflected a creepy fascination with Putin’s alleged masculinity — Sarah Palin declared that he wrestled bears while President Barack Obama wore “mom jeans” — and the apparent toughness of Putin’s people. Just last year Senator Ted Cruz contrasted footage of a shaven-headed Russian soldier with a U.S. Army recruiting ad to mock our “woke, emasculated” military.

Finally, many on the right simply like the idea of authoritarian rule. Just a few days ago Trump, who has dialed back his praise for Putin, chose instead to express admiration for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Kim’s generals and aides, he noted, “cowered” when the dictator spoke, adding that “I want my people to act like that.”

In one of his more perceptive columns, David Brooks also delved into the mind-set of the pro-Putin Right. According to Brooks, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the continuation of identity politics by other means.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the writings of conventional international relations experts to be not very helpful in understanding what this whole crisis is about. But I’ve found the writing of experts in social psychology to be enormously helpful.

That is because–as Brooks points out–the war in Ukraine is primarily about status. “Putin invaded so Russians could feel they are a great nation once again and so Putin himself could feel that he’s a world historical figure along the lines of Peter the Great.” Along the way, Putin has increasingly portrayed himself as not just a national leader “but a civilizational leader, leading the forces of traditional morality against the moral depravity of the West.”

Right-wing populism hasn’t been confined to the United States and Russia; these movements can be found throughout the Western world –and for that matter, probably in every country that is experiencing significant modernization and liberalization, which are seen as undermining “traditional values.”

Populist movements are generally associated with rejection of science, particularly the science underlying environmentalism, with nationalism and nativism, and with anti-globalization fervor. (Trump’s protectionism fit right in.) As Wikipedia defines the European variant of the populist movement,

 In Europe, the term is often used to describe groups, politicians, and political parties that are generally known for their opposition to immigration, especially from the Muslim world, and for Euroscepticism. Right-wing populists may support expanding the welfare state, but only for those they deem are fit to receive it; this concept has been referred to as “welfare chauvinism.” 

Here in the United States, research confirms that our homegrown populists cling to the belief that only White Christians can be “real” Americans. These people–terrified of losing cultural hegemony– have their analogues around the globe. (It’s one more way in which we aren’t “exceptional.”)

What’s scary is recognition of how widespread that terror is–and how powerfully motivating. Obama’s  much-criticized observation that frightened, disoriented people “cling to their guns and their bibles” may have been politically unwise, but it wasn’t wrong–and the phenomenon isn’t limited to the U.S. Islamic fundamentalist cling to their Korans and bombs…

Global populism is just one more reminder that–despite different geographies and cultures– humans are essentially similar mammals…

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Voting For Chaos

Posted by accident. This is tomorrow’s post. Next one on Thursday. Sorry for cluttering your inboxes.

An intriguing–and frustrating– aspect of our current political climate is the persistent search to understand Trump supporters. What accounts for the loyalty of voters to this man who is personally repulsive and officially incompetent?

We’ve had the economic theory, which was pretty thoroughly rebutted by the data; we’ve had the “racial anxiety” theory, which–again, according to the data–clearly does account for a significant percentage of those supporters. We’ve had the “partisan identity” explanation that I shared a few days ago, which seems valid so far as it goes, but doesn’t explain the origins of the partisan divide.

In September, columnist Thomas Edsell shared another explanation, offered by a trio of scholars in a paper given at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting: a “need for chaos.” The efforts of people who display this need have been facilitated by the ease with which social media allows transmittal of “conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns.

The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos, a perception that has enhanced his support while seeming to reinforce his claim that his predecessors, especially President Barack Obama, were failures.

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux find that those who meet their definition of having a “need for chaos” express that need by willingly spreading disinformation. Their goal is not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to “mobilize others against politicians in general.” These disrupters do not “share rumors because they believe them to be true. For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc.”

We used to have a word for this: nihilism.

The authors of the study surveyed voters in the United States and Denmark, and uncovered disquieting, all-encompassing hostilities. Twenty-four percent of respondents said society should be burned to the ground; 40 percent agreed that “When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’ ”; and 40 percent agreed that “we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”

The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called “chaos voters” helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.

Trump’s “talent,” according to another scholarly paper,  is his ability to capitalize on the fear of chaos, rather than the desire to trigger it.

“Populist movements,” McDermott and Hatemi write, “rely on inflammatory rhetoric to create a tribal ‘us versus them’ condition — this type of environment instigates neural mechanisms from the evolutionary desire to be part of the group.”

The abrupt rise of social media has played a crucial role, they observe:

In many ways, as we have technologically advanced, we have also regressed to more immediate, emotional, and personal forms of political communication. And it is only in understanding the nature of that personal political psychology that we can begin to grapple seriously with the challenges of today, including the consequences of global populism.

The common element in all of these studies and theories is the extent to which fear–fear of change, fear of the “other,” fear of the unknown–feeds hostility to “the system” and to the  “elites” that supposedly benefit from that system.

There are clearly a lot of disaffected people out there, and the Internet facilitates their expression of rage.

What we can do about it is another matter.

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