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Tackling irrational populism in the West requires restoring spirit of common good
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I am writing to commend Ni Tao for his beautifully written, stimulating report on the recent fourth China-UK university think-tank dialogue held at Fudan University (“Experts ponder causes, impact of populism,” Shanghai Daily, December 8).
As one who has studied the Populist movement in the United States of the late 19th century, and who is also alarmed by the current rise of populist nationalism throughout Europe and the United States, I found the comments by both Kevin Featherstone and Huang Ping (in Ni Tao’s report) quite informative.
Despite how they each attributed the cause of current populist unrest to apparently different factors — Mr Featherstone to identity politics focused on the threat post by various “others” and Mr Huang to economic circumstances — I really see these as less opposites than two sides of the same coin.
I’ve just finished reviewing this very recent book by Dean Baker: “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.”
Although I am not a Marxist, I share the conviction that a primary — if not the primary — cause of most social discord, at base, is economic. But by that I also include the entire mindset of the culture which frames the way things are, the rules of the game as normative.
This mindset both allows those who most benefit from the current state of affairs to lounge in the comfort that they are, after all, only behaving as we are “meant to behave,” while it also reduces — at least for a considerable time — the rest of citizens to accept their less than ideal circumstances as also the invariable consequence of “the economy.”
For what it is worth, here is my own “take” on the current wave of nationalist populism sweeping the West.
The tremendous devastation caused by World War II led national leaders — and their capitalist economies — to embrace measures that massively rebuilt their devastated cities and industrial centers and also strengthened their “safety nets” for the majority of citizens, including well paying jobs, generous health and retirement benefits, and a commitment to providing relief to the unemployed and poor.
Earned ‘given’
Since the ‘70s, however, and varying somewhat in timing within individual countries, as “the people” became more comfortable with this generally more favorable economic climate — we do seem to take good fortune as an earned “given” — they relaxed both their vigilance in fighting to maintain this more egalitarian order even as they forget how different things had been just years before. Since then, most of the generations that actually experienced the harrowing years between 1914 and 1945 have either passed away or fallen silent by the ravages of increasing age: our social collective memory has been emptied out.
Enter from the far Right a new breed of unregulated capitalist favoring ideologues, including Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and Ronald Reagan of the United States. Bolstered by increased flows of money from the wealthy elite and by their adulation of a “new” (really quite old) economics that emphasized policies friendly to big businesses and hostile to both “big government” and generous social welfare (safety net) policies. It is clear, in retrospect at least, that from the ‘70s on their implemented policies are precisely those that have weakened workers’ unions, fragmented larger group unities into hyper individual atomization, and — in demonizing “government” while idolizing “free enterprise” — steadily delegitimized public office and the idea of government serving any kind of common good.
The globalization policies championed by this same group reflected the same assumptions and priorities. While it is true that in general globalization has benefited significant segments of the world’s poorer nations, it has done so in a very uneven way, both leaving behind significant populations in Western nations and benefiting immensely the already wealthy champions of further globalization.
Unlike China, which has deliberately prioritized the elimination of poverty among its people, Western nations — very much including the United States — effectively abandoned any such effort after the ‘60s. The populist earthquakes of this past year are, like our planet’s earthquakes, but the result of decades of building pressure. And, just as physical earthquakes release — for a while — the pressures that had become too great to maintain, they also do not eliminate the underlying reasons for the explosions. Unless those are addressed, we will see further eruptions, likely ever more virulent and violent in the months and years to come.
In examining both the Brexit and Donald Trump phenomena more closely, it is also very clear that populism gets its energy not from rational thought but, rather, from the depths of emotion, especially anger, resentment, and fear. These are easily channeled by the unscrupulous and, unless boldly faced by competent leaders with concrete alternative plans, easily are channeled towards blaming, barring, and even injuring “the others” among us. This, too, we have seen.
This is all alarmingly similar to what happened just a century ago. In addition, now like then, we have a dearth of compassionate, charismatic leadership just when such persons are desperately needed. When no one can be trusted but “the leader,” when it seems to become truly a state of “every person for him or her self,” true tyranny has arrived and chaos is sure to follow. May we somehow find the will and way to work together to forestall such a horrible future.
The author is a retired statesman from the US.
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