Populism is merely a symptom.
Treatment must target the underlying disease
It is a form of
politics that educated opinion disdains. But it’s no good wishing populism
away. Wake up to the underlying condition of mis-governance that creates it—and
then shake up our institutions to fix the link between the governing and
governed
April 6, 2021
Over the past
decade, populism has emerged as an invasive species which has disrupted a
previously stable political ecosystem. Liberal democracies across the world
have been left in disarray, and occasional victories by establishment parties
offer only temporary respite from its onslaught. That is an interpretation
that Prospect readers—and all “right-thinking”
opinion—will by now have heard many times.
However, in
reality, populism is a symptom of the dysfunction, not the cause. It is a
corrective response to a political organisation that is already suffering from
an underlying pathology. Like many reactions, it can certainly sometimes end up
doing more harm than good. But there is no hope in dealing with it
decisively—still less of achieving full health to our polity—if the underlying
issue isn’t addressed.
To grasp the
nature of populism and how to address it, we must first understand what it
means to govern well. Opinions will of course differ on the exact criteria. But
there would surely be broad support for the inclusion of three qualities: it is
legitimate, effective and provident.
Legitimacy
relates to the extent to which a government has justly acquired and is trusted
to exercise power. There are competing philosophical accounts of what
constitutes a legitimate government, and different cultural traditions have
their own profound stories about what makes a ruler’s power legitimately
acquired and exercised. But any state which does not meet some plausible
account of legitimacy cannot be said to be well governed, regardless of how
effective and provident it is.
Effective
government is able to identify, prioritise, and meet the needs of the people.
Some of these needs are protected by legal rights which are enforced by the
legal system and the police. Material needs are met, perhaps through markets,
but with effective regulation and relevant “externalities” priced in, as well
as the collective provision of public services. Individuals also have symbolic
needs, such as self-respect and dignity. A variety of measures and public
interventions are required to fulfil these needs, including cultural
recognition by a state’s institutions and the story it tells about itself. A
functioning legislature and executive who are responsive to the changing needs
of the governed should bind them together. We can think of this component of
good governance as the ongoing internal regulation of the multiplicity of needs
and desires of a people, an attempt to reach and maintain a kind of
homeostasis.
Finally, a
provident government is able to meet the challenges of history as they present
themselves. Good governance is not merely about maintaining stability. Even a
legitimate and effective state needs to meet the particular vicissitudes of its
age—whether those are war, technological disruption or climate change.
Machiavelli described something similar to this future-orientedness when he
spoke of Fortuna—the energy and intelligence a ruler can bring to confront its
fate. There is no process for this. Rather, it is the capacity for foresight
and strategic action. Many apparently well-governed states have floundered in
the face of the pandemic, and death tolls present an indictment of what happens
when states are unable to mount an intelligent and energetic response to novel
circumstances.
It is unlikely,
perhaps impossible, for a government to be perfectly legitimate, effective, and
prudent at all times. Through force of circumstance, most governments in most
places will fail in one or more of these areas. But consistent failure can lead
to serious problems for the life of a state. And in fact, it is the significant
failure in all of these areas which has led to the flourishing of a global
trend in populism.
The literature
on populism, fittingly, is split. Some authors characterise it as a progressive
force that has its roots in the late 19th century American agrarian movement
which culminated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and—arguably—has
today resurfaced again in the US in Bernie Sanders’ European style social
democracy. Other authors see it as chiefly reactionary and authoritarian, with
close ties to fascism, and with contemporary strongmen like Jair Bolsonaro,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Donald Trump as populism’s modern incarnation.
It is certainly
a sprawling phenomenon, and some see it more as a “style” than anything fixedly
left or right. The Dutch political scientist, Cas Mudde, one of
Prospect’s Top 50 World Thinkers for
2019, has defined populism as an ideology that pits the true will of
“the pure people” against “the corrupt elite.” Populism is widely seen as
something undemocratic that needs to be managed, because it condemns the
institutions it challenges as illegitimate, weakening them and their governing
norms. It can hamper a government’s ability to act on the future through
misinformation and conspiratorial thinking. Most such arguments, however, get
things backwards.
By treating
populism principally as either an independent ideology or as a form of rhetoric
or a campaigning technique, they distract attention from the root causes of
populism. A recent report co-authored by Francis Fukuyama, released by the
Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs, offered typical
“solutions,” suggesting institutional reform, rhetorical changes in politics
and better coalition building. While institutional reform is certainly
necessary, the latter two are not obviously in the anti-populists’ gift when
the populists are in the ascendent, and anyway betray an undue fixation on the
significance of populism’s toxic rhetoric.
Understanding
populism as a reaction to problems in the body politic leads us down a
different route. Anti-establishment political movements that claim to speak in
the name of ordinary people against a corrupt elite, and aim to change the
system, will vary in how democratic they are, how coherent their programme is,
and how far they truly speak on behalf of their constituency. But if we
listen—really listen—to disparate movements of this broad sort, there is one
relatively consistent message coming through: “Our governing institutions and
elites have failed us. We no longer believe they are entitled to their
authority and we want change.”
If we take the
rise of populism in the US as instructive, it’s perfectly clear how the
government’s failure to act legitimately, effectively and providently has
directly led to the populist turn. The US electoral system and electoral
college are arcane, gerrymandering is rife, and the Senate filibuster a farce.
Voting has often seemed to change nothing.
The old
self-image of their Republic as a “shining city upon a hill” has come to seem
like a cruel joke to many Americans. US politicians and regulators are
routinely insulated from the consequences of their decisions. Take the two
significant crises that coincided with my political coming of age: the Iraq War
and the 2008 financial crisis. In spite of their association with the 2008
crash, Timothy Geitner and Larry Summers have continued to play prominent roles
in American public life. Even outside of the political sphere, virtually no one
with significant responsibility for the financial system in the run-up to the
2008 crisis has faced criminal charges. Similarly, the worst fate of the
architects of the catastrophic Iraq invasion has been to be comfortably
ensconced in a think tank. The point here is not to pass moral judgement on
particular individuals, but just to draw attention to the fact that the system
is not just extremely good at deferring responsibility, but that this is the
norm.
It ought to
still be possible for a state to be well governed if what it lacks in
legitimacy it makes up for in being effective. But again, the US political
system has struggled to meet the needs of many of its constituents. At a
procedural level alone, Congress is largely unable to pass significant
legislation. And when it does pass legislation, it does not consistently
satisfy the wants of the governed. When the most affluent Americans disagree
with the rest, laws are warped by wealth: a notorious 2014 study suggests that
US legislation which reflects the preferences of the most affluent is far more
likely to pass than legislation which reflects the preferences of the majority.
As a consequence, we see increasing financial insecurity. Wages have stagnated
over a generation for the typical American worker, and for two generations in
the case of the median working man. Even those rare reforms which can pass
often disappoint: Obamacare has not done much to put the US healthcare system
in line with those of other developed economies. So whether it be through
legislation, the economy, or service provision, evidence suggests that the
effectiveness of governance in the US was thrown into doubt long before the
rise of populism.
Lastly, has the
US system been provident in addressing the future? Again the record is poor.
The 2008 financial crisis was the result of short-term thinking at almost every
level. Faltering life expectancy has been driven by a rise in “deaths of
despair,” and more recently the out of control death rate of the current
Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare how frail America’s way of life has left many
of its people. The looming spectre of climate and ecological breakdown has long
pointed to a governing system which finds it difficult to cope with the
challenges of its age.
It is far more
credible to view populism as a response to decades of ineffective government
with questionable legitimacy and little innovation, rather than as some
self-standing ideology running amok across the body politic. And this is not
just an American story. The trajectory the UK has followed is strikingly
similar. Different political and constitutional traditions have meant that the
UK has more often been able to make some modest attempts to improve its
governance in the last generation—such as freedom of information, devolution
and the human rights act. But these have not fixed the overall sense of
disconnect. And the bottom line is that neither Brexit, nor Trump, nor a
Capitol insurrection can fix the failures in governance either. They are responses, driven by far longer standing trends.
The real
question is how to get back at least some way towards our trilogy of good
governance. It won’t be easy. On the legitimacy criterion, the complexity and
specialisation of the task of government makes it increasingly hard for
individuals to understand what exactly is at stake in different policy
prescriptions. But in many modern states, clunky institutional design makes
matters worse by failing to accommodate the increasingly diverse group of
people governed. New technologies should open up
better channels of communication with the citizenry, but often this chance is
still not taken.
Regarding the
issue of effectiveness, after the 1980s, governments steadily developed an
almost pathological inability to appreciate the limits of free markets, which
has led to a dearth of imaginative policymaking. Many policy measures around
free trade that are pursued for the sake of (increasingly marginal) GDP growth
often have negative effects on the living conditions of many of the more
vulnerable sections of society. In the closing decades of the 20th century, the western states flattered (without fixing) their own books by
selling off their own assets at cut price, and imposed privatisation on poorer
parts of the world under IMF/World Bank “structural adjustment” programmes. The
long years of “Washington consensus” saw inequality soaring within many
economies, while—despite the promise—productivity growth mostly failed to pick
up.
As we look at
the issue of provident government, again we see certain global trends that have
mitigated against national politicians making specific commitments towards the
future. The dominant approach to good governance is focussed primarily on
protecting a minimal set of rights, so that very specific “market failures” are
fixed, while—by implication—assuming the market itself will fix everything
else. As a result, establishment political parties have tended to run on a
future agnostic platform with vague promises to make things better and fairer.
Meanwhile, the
political programmes behind populist campaigns have included very concrete
future actions. While slogans like “Make America Great Again” and “Take back
control” are suitably vague, these programmes did promise tangible changes,
like building a wall, cancelling trade deals, and “getting Brexit done.” Both
of these campaigns ran as bucking the economic orthodoxies of the
establishment, which, whatever you make of their objectives, they certainly
did. And it certainly seems like this “primary colour politics” might have
created new space to challenge old orthodoxies. President Biden is at the helm
of a fiscal package far more ambitious than anything pursued by his recent
predecessors, and has made unprecedented public interventions on issues like
the Amazon workers union drive which look like they could be aimed at
addressing long-standing financial insecurity and inequality. Likewise, the remaking
of the UK’s electoral map suggests a renewed focus on marginalised communities
outside of London and renewed interest from all sides of the political spectrum
on using government to shape the country. But we only have to look to the riots
at the US Capitol on 6th January 6 to see that this expansion of political
possibility also has a dark side.
Whether it is
possible to govern well in the face of populism is a question to which we can
give no useful answer. You may as well ask if it is possible to navigate well
in a sinking ship, or live healthily with a 39-degree fever. This is because
populism itself is, primarily, a reaction to bad governance, not a challenge to
good governance. The interesting question is: is it possible to improve
government so that the populist reaction subsides? And to this, I want to
suggest a cautious yes.
But this
requires at least three significant changes. Firstly, it will depend on our
ability to innovate democratic institutions so that they can be more open and
responsive to the demands of the governed. The challenge to government is to
pick up new approaches and experiment with them so that they can become part of
not just civic life, but of our political ecosystem. Secondly, as policy
makers, our activities and institutions must become the subjects of
comprehensible law, and more importantly, ordinary notions of responsibility.
Thirdly, future agnosticism must be abandoned. Political parties need to offer
real alternatives to voters that actually speak to the future, which go much
further than what markets alone can offer. The last year has shown some
progress on at least two of these fronts.
The necessity
for real political alternatives has come into stark relief over the last year
as unprecedented levels of state intervention have been vital to protect public
health. These measures have largely been restricted to dealing with the
immediate crisis. But the real political art will be leveraging an active state
to address that other looming challenge that is facing all of us: the climate
emergency. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that there are certain
crises which markets are too slow, too poorly coordinated, and just too fragile
to address.
Improvements
are also being made around innovations in democracy. One promising example is
the use of citizens’ assemblies. Alongside experiments run by nonprofits, there
are a number of successful assemblies linked to existing governing
institutions, such as “The Citizens’ Assembly” in Ireland. These assemblies can
help address the issue of legitimacy, and make government more effective by
employing a broader swathe of the governed in the design of policy and
services. Bold ideas like widening the franchise to children, as suggested by
David Runciman, should be tested and explored, in an attempt to revitalise the
relationship between institutions and citizens. The fact that during a
pandemic, mass demonstrations, riots, and protests have been the absolute norm
suggests there is some untapped appetite for political participation.
Crucially, these kinds of democratic experiments can play a role in absorbing
and redirecting the energy unleashed in the populist age, but also in solving
some of the actual policy challenges we face.
Provident
governance demands that policymakers take responsibility for making politics
more interesting and more connected to the lives of citizens. We must be
creators of new kinds of democracy, not passive inheritors of an existing
system. So long as populism is treated as an ill to be cured rather than a
systemic response to be channelled, the age of populism will only be prolonged.
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