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Over at Bloomberg Opinion, my colleague Mike Strain argues that today’s wave of populist politics is simply a reflection of the severity of the financial crisis and that it will go away without leaving a deeper imprint on public policy.
Yet, in a number of countries, most prominently in Hungary, populist politics has helped transform political systems into hybrid regimes in which the power of incumbents has become entrenched. Perhaps that is not an immediate risk in countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the considerable alarmism permeating conversations about Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. But Mike’s optimism goes further than that – and rests disproportionately on just one empirical result – from a 2016 paper by Manuel Funke and co-authors who find that the political aftershocks of financial crises in the form of increased support for extremist politics are only temporary.
However, populism is not exclusively a product of financial crises. In Europe, for example, the support for authoritarian populist forces, especially on the political right, has been rising steadily since the early 1980s. The picture on the political left is more complicated due to the initial decline of explicitly communist parties in Western Europe in the 1980s and the 1990s and the more recent surge of eclectic populist left movements such as Syriza in Greece or La France Unsoumise. In the United States, meanwhile, the growth of political polarization, usually seen as a key to its current political malaise, predates the crisis.
To be sure, populist movements can run out of steam, particularly as they are confronted with the rigors of actual governance. Furthermore, as the Western world recovers from a zero-sum economic environment, the sharp edges of some of our bitter cultural fights, including on immigration, might become duller. But even if that means a decline of populism understood as a political technique or a thin ideology pitting “elites” against “ordinary people,” it does not necessarily herald a return to the pre-crisis baseline.
In particular, it seems unlikely that the policy substance that populists have brought to the forefront will go anywhere anytime soon. It seems more plausible, as Steve Davies argues, that populism is catalyzing a political realignment around a new set of political cleavages, most prominently around a conflict between cultural and social parochialism versus cosmopolitanism. The center-right on both sides of the Atlantic is now giving a serious consideration to protectionism, industrial policy, tight immigration restrictions, and “Protecting our European Way of Life.” Even if the Trump and Brexit phenomena are a passing phase, what the GOP, British Tories, or even German Christian Democrats stand for is an increasingly open question.
Judging by the primary race in the Democratic Party and the extremist turn taken on by the UK’s Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, a similar degree of uncertainty surrounds the future of center-left politics. One may not like this widening of the Overton Window, but that does not make the current debates inherently sinister. If indeed voters care about different issues than they did 10 or 15 years ago, it is only natural that political parties in democracies are taking note and adapting, often under pressure from populist challengers. As political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser argued in 2012, populism can thus be not only a threat but also a “corrective to democracy.”
Of course, there is no reason to be completely agnostic about the policy substance offered by today’s populists on the right and on the left either. Many of the proposals on the table are demonstrably bad ideas. Hence, Mike argues, “another argument for populism’s looming expiration date is the failure of its policies to deliver for the American people.”
But the fact that a given policy does not deliver rarely prevents it from being peddled by unscrupulous politicians, either under populist or other banners. In a world in which “people have had enough of experts” and/or “true socialism has not been tried,” evidence gets rarely in the way of ideological zeal and partisanship. As a result, while the political future of today’s populist movements might be uncertain, it seems inevitable that we will spend years if not decades debating border walls, isolationism, industrial policy, wealth taxes, tariffs and many other policy ideas associated with populism – and, in many instances, feel their impact on our lives.
In particular, it seems unlikely that the policy substance that populists have brought to the forefront will go anywhere anytime soon.
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