The possibility of Donald Trump being elected again as US president raises the fear that populism, once a minority phenomenon, has moved into the mainstream, suggesting more internal upheavals for American liberal democracy.
While there are signs of a populist moment in many Western democracies, Australia still seems resistant, with populism limited to the fringes, the contrast between the US and Australian experience that seems to grow only stronger.
Populism always demands a leader, charismatic or a celebrity or just a rabble rouser – that the US has Trump and the best Australia can produce is probably Pauline Hanson, now part of the political furniture, testifies to dramatic differences in political culture.
In his appeal Trump mirrors the eternal cycle of populism based on two ideas – grievance against the established order of elites and a claim to speak for the ordinary people as victims of a system in betrayal.
Financial Times economics editor Martin Wolf, in his recent book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, sees populism as driven primarily by economic failures and disappointment.
Wolf said: “People expect the economy to deliver reasonable levels of prosperity and opportunity to themselves and their children.” Sustained failure breeds pent-up hostility that eventually breaks out.
Given the decades-long poor performance of real wages in America, Trump had a rich field of grievance to exploit – deindustrialisation, loss of manufacturing jobs to China, poor wages in the services economy, a flawed social contract, poor health and education delivery for the bottom 40 per cent, rising wealth inequality and the sheer arrogance of the capitalist class. As Wolf said, “To be poorer than expected is bad – to be poorer than expected and despised to boot is worse.”
But Trump is more than a populist. He has created an alternative conservative populist ideology, an ideology for government – this is his real significance and the threat he constitutes.
He operates beyond the central political philosophies of the past century – liberalism, conservative or socialism.
Trump represents the emperor as president. In a time of tribulation he poses as the strongman who can deliver. As such, he is entitled to change his mind whenever he wants – the strong man acts, he doesn’t justify, he doesn’t need to seek approval.
Trump grasps the dilemma of the age – that people feel they no longer control their own lives or their own fate but are hostage to bureaucrats, technology, edicts from elites and rules they never authorised.
Trump invoked the name of the people to take control of the Republican Party. Democracy cannot work without restraint, that is its genius and its flaw – it means acceptance when you lose.
But by rejecting his defeat Trump abandoned the democratic restraint and made his ultimate claim on the will of the people. He therefore constitutes an experiment: whether the democratic norms of the 20th century will endure or will demand revision under 21st-century pressures of technological, cultural and polarising change.
An alternative, not really an opposing view of populism, was advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his book Identity when he argued that human dignity, recognition and identity were more powerful motives for populist grievance than the quest for economic advancement.
Fukuyama says there are many identities based on nation, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender.
But the power of identity politics rests in the tension between the individual’s true inner self and how society and the world fail to honour or respect that identity. Fukuyama says that only now in history has the idea arisen that society and the world are wrong not to recognise the identity of the inner self, which means it is “society itself that needs to change”. Herein lies an unlimited agenda for populist grievance against the new morality of identity politics.
Describing the transition of the modern American left, Fukuyama said: “The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalised – blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees and the like.”
Wolf and Fukuyama both acknowledge the reinforcing power of economics and culture in driving populism.
Fukuyama says “economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect” but our understanding of human motivation transcends the “simple economic model that so dominates much of our discourse”.
The link between Trump and Vladimir Putin is not just personal but rooted in common nationalism. Trump’s “America First” populism is both hostile to the Washington establishment and to what he sees as the transnational elite running agendas of open trade and migrant access.
Populism does not just fall from a clear blue sky. It is far more likely in countries prone to romantic tradition or revolutionary ardour. Westminster systems are a built-in bulwark, with a parliament between the rulers and the people. Island continents can be an advantage for border control. In Australia’s Westminster system there will never be the equivalent of a prime minister Trump because the people don’t elect the PM.
Having a compulsory voting democracy like Australia probably helps. Everybody is a participant in the system. Having a Labor Party tied to the trade union movement also helps – it means while Labor became far more of a high-income progressive party it never forgot its job of delivering better incomes and benefits for unions and workers (not that unionists are a majority of workers).
Populist is always a term of abuse in polite society. The progressive addiction is to brand its opponents as populist, racist or sexist. Was Australia’s rejection of the voice referendum an act of racism or populist backlash? Six months after their defeat many progressives, having blundered in their miscalculation over the voice, insist on blaming others for their own failures.
The voice referendum was a win for constitutional tradition and a rejection of an experiment by Indigenous leaders and elites to put a group rights political body defined by race into the Constitution.
The majority rejected the principle that individuals should be treated differently according to their ancestry.
The result is best seen not as an expression of grievance but an assertion of long accepted liberal principle. Beware people using populist or racist accusations to push their own agendas.
Populism in Western democracies will keep rising. That’s because governments cannot adequately solve the myriad challenges they face: economic, strategic, social, demographic and cultural. The prospect we confront is more tension, divisions and polarisation. Movements such as the teals and the Greens will be part of the more fractured system.
Successful nations will be those with the resilience and resolve to hang together amid deepening pressures and still deliver tangible policy gains for the public. The test is ensuring the model of liberal capitalist democracy keeps functioning despite flaws, frustrations and fragmentation.
Populism is a manifestation of something going wrong and when it appears the best response is not denigration but confronting the source of the problem.
This is an edited version of a recent presentation by the author at a Quadrant Danube Institute event.
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