The writer teaches politics at Princeton University
Might there be a political silver lining to the pandemic? Some liberals have valiantly sought one. They hope that Covid-19 has demonstrated that populists are completely incompetent when it comes to complex policy challenges. The failures of US president Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro ensure that the supposed “wave” — or, as Nigel Farage once put it, the “tsunami” — of populism will finally recede.
But such optimism is misplaced, because there are populists — and then there are populists. Smart ones, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and India’s Narendra Modi, who are actually interested in administration as opposed to TV antics, have combined the arch-populist strategy of culture wars with a draconian approach to the virus. They have also used the pandemic to take their countries further in an authoritarian direction.
Populism is not primarily characterised by distrust of experts or by pandering to the desires of the great unwashed. This view echoes longstanding liberal prejudices against mass democracy as such. Populists often bring in their own experts, or at least people with some technical experience. Mr Bolsonaro’s initial cabinet had plenty of technocrats, even if Mr Trump’s remains a rogue’s gallery of lobbyists.
Rather, what is distinctive about populists is their assertion that they, and only they, represent “the real people”. One consequence of this is that they condemn all other politicians as corrupt. Less obvious is the insinuation that citizens who do not support them and disagree with their understanding of the people, do not belong to the people at all. Mr Trump usually doesn’t bother to defend his policies. He simply attacks critics as “un-American”.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, then, the political business model of populists is not “giving the people what they want”. Rather, it is an exclusionary form of identity politics, where incessant talk about “unifying the people” coexists with a strategy of dividing the citizenry on the basis of a relentless culture war. In the face of the pandemic, Messrs Trump and Bolsonaro have simply defaulted to this standard strategy. They deem face masks as cultural symbols of elitism, cowardice or whatever, and attack vulnerable minorities.
It is also not quite true that they do nothing else. Contrary to the image of total passivity they sometimes invoke — Mr Bolsonaro has even asked critics: “what do you want me to do?” — they double down on their economic programmes. Deregulating industry under the cover of the pandemic’s chaos pleases business backers, who understand the promise of plutocratic populism. Distract the masses with culture war, while letting, say, agribusiness in Brazil or oil and gas in the US have their way.
The Trump and Bolsonaro presidencies may well be judged colossal failures because of their disastrous responses to Covid-19. But that will be because neither is much interested in the mechanics of governing. That is not true of experienced populists such as Mr Orban or Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They have combined culture wars with a hands-on approach to the pandemic, all the while increasing their power. Mr Orban, under cover of fighting the virus, has clamped down further on free speech. Mr Modi has gone after critical media.
While some of these leaders talk of resisting neoliberal globalisation in the name of ordinary folk, the reality has been crony capitalism. Outside investors are welcome, so long as they do not undermine the rulers. Mr Orban has no problem with the German car industry, leading critics to call his regime an “Audi-cracy.” He has drawn a careful line between international parts of the economy, where rule of law matters, and domestic companies, which can be incorporated shamelessly into an expanding empire of oligarchs.
Liberals have spent the past decade underestimating populists. They have clung to the notion that populist policies are necessarily irrational and over-promise. They have thus assumed that populists in power would fail automatically. They have also complacently held that, by definition, populists in government would cease to be populists because, as the new establishment, they could no longer criticise elites. They failed to realise that no populist has ever run out of scapegoats. Even if all domestic opposition is disempowered, populists can blame “shadowy international elites” for whatever may go wrong.
None of this is to say that there is an unstoppable “wave” (let alone a tsunami) of populism. But smart populists actually interested in governance may still emerge more powerful from the pandemic than before.
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July 19, 2020 at 06:00PM
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The pandemic will strengthen smart populists - Financial Times
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