When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  In some democracies disenchantment threatens to tip into authoritarian rule. In Hungary Viktor Orbán openly declares that national needs trump liberal values such as freedom. In France, Marine Le Pen and her nativist Front National denounce a political establishment that she blames for betraying the white people of France. Similar tunes are played by the Danish People’s Party, the Swedish Democrats, the People’s Party of Switzerland and the notoriously Islamophobic Geert Wilders in Holland. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party stands accused of trampling on the country’s constitution to establish an ‘illiberal democracy’ of its own. But the most conspicuous setback for democracy has taken place in Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were high hopes for a democratic order in the old Soviet Union, but these hopes faded in 1999 when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin. Putin, a former KGB operative, has since been both prime minister and president twice. He has muzzled the press, imprisoned opponents and presided over the murder of radical journalists, even as the display of democracy has been preserved.

  The crisis of confidence is fuelled by impatience. Democracy has everywhere been a long time taking root, and it is unreasonable to expect that the transition will be either quick or smooth. The failure of Egypt to emerge as a functioning democracy when Hosni Mubarak’s government fell to popular protest in 2011 was a setback to the hope that democracy might spread across the Middle East. Despair set in when the ensuing elections were won by Muhammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi promptly granted himself almost unlimited powers and created an upper house with a permanent Islamic majority. In July 2013 the army stepped in, Egypt’s first democratically elected president was arrested and leading members of the Brotherhood imprisoned.

  Syria and Libya too have seen incipient democratic revolutions run into the sand. Viewed in the right light, the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 was a series of popular uprisings of oppressed people desirous of the same liberties they witnessed in the developed world. That was certainly the hope and the initial interpretation. Yet it was naive to suppose that democracy was there ready to take wing, like the butterfly in the chrysalis. By the same token, to pretend that no impulse for popular sovereignty was part of the uprising in the first place is simply untrue. The demand for recognition was there; it has just not been met.

  Quite remarkably, given their manifold advantage over other forms of government, the established democracies are losing confidence in their own goodness. Astonishingly, the 2011 World Values Survey found that 34 per cent of Americans approved of ‘having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections’. They might have been more careful what they wished for. A third of voters are at least prepared to say they would like to drop the inconvenient panoply of democracy. The young have been steeped in complacency. When Americans born before the Second World War were asked to say how essential it was to live in a democracy, on a decimal scale, 72 per cent rated it as maximally important. Only 30 per cent of the millennial generation did the same.

  The same spectre stalks Britain. Sixty-four per cent of British people recently told YouGov they thought conventional politics was failing and 38 per cent had at least some sympathy with the statement that ‘Democracy isn’t always the best way to run a country’. Against this sentiment, we need to retort, without hesitation, that it most certainly is. The noble arguments of Cicero, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are not just random fancies. They are making the case for a system of government that is emphatically superior to other forms. If we are ever hapless enough to be cursed with any of the alternatives we will learn to regret our complacency.

  The Populist Utopia

  When people cease to believe in democratic politics they will not find it replaced with better politics. They will find it replaced by populism which, rather than representing the power of the people, arrogates power in their name. Populism is utopia’s dark shadow.

  The term populist derives from the 1890s, when the Populist movement in America set the rural Democrats against the more urban Republicans. The already elastic term then stretched further, across political movements of the fascist Right and the communist Left in Europe, the hearings of Senator McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the Peronistas in Argentina. Contemporary movements that include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the less scrupulous advocates of departure from the European Union and those backing the election of President Trump in late 2016 have a range of natures. They are connected by their claim to be the envoys of the people in adopting the use of the term populist. This is the fraud that utopia can smuggle in along with its promise. It is crucial to comprehend the populist utopia the better to counteract it.

  The populist utopia has no place for politics. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere the House of Commons has been transformed into a storehouse for manure. The literary utopia erases all conflicts, which means that politics, the arbitration system, is redundant. In utopia, all desires have been satisfied and all the virtues miraculously consort in infinite combination in a land of no scarcity and abundant happiness. Individual rights can be revoked as unnecessary. The utopian takes all the complex questions of politics and promises, as if by magic, that they can be solved.

  The idea that all good things can be had at once is a fantasy. The pursuit of a society that can satisfy everyone is a fool’s errand. Robert Nozick put this point colourfully in Anarchy, State, and Utopia when he suggested that no single society can be imagined in which Hugh Hefner, the Buddha and Ludwig Wittgenstein would all be equally happy. The clever statesman is always trying to build a coalition across ideological lines. Cicero is seeking to win the approval of the Senate. Jefferson needs to heal the nation after a bruising election. Lincoln wants the country to unite after civil strife. Kennedy summons the citizen spirit of the American people. Obama makes a direct appeal to people who did not support him. All of them are speaking to the best in the circumstances, not to some absolute best.

  The populist pretends that politics is easy. The only reason that the obvious solutions have not been arrived at is that the prevailing elite is venally self-regarding. This is why the defining trait of the populist is an anti-political division of the nation into rival tribes; the elite cast against the people. The only factor that unites populist movements of the nativist right and the socialist left is hostility to the governing elite. The 2016 campaign for Britain to leave the European Union was populated by advocates, some of them, bizarrely, government ministers, who agreed on nothing except hostility to views they caricatured as those of the establishment. The American historian Richard Hofstadter called populism ‘the paranoid style of politics’ because it is always based on a supposed betrayal. If only the elite weren’t in it for themselves, the people would have been served.

  In a notable speech in October 2016 Donald Trump hit all the discordant populist notes. ‘This’, he said portentously, ‘is a crossroads in the history of our civilisation that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.’ There has rarely been a clearer exposition of the paranoid style than this. All those warnings about the fragility of democracy that were aired at Gettysburg sounded prophetic, and so did the alarms about the demagogue when Trump said: ‘this election will determine whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of Democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system. This is not just conspiracy but reality, and you and I know it.’

  The agents of this treachery, in the mind of the paranoid populist, are usually the media, and so it was in this case. ‘The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media’ – which, he went on to say, is now part of the conspiracy. The suspicion of the free press that is common to all populists is exactly the paranoia that Plato exhibits when he banishes the poets from his utopia in The Republic. We hear this argument in the social media echo-chamber today. According to this critique, the ideological prejudi
ce of the media lackeys, who are themselves puppets of unscrupulous proprietors, enters unfiltered into the empty heads of the people. The minds of the people are so many tabula rasa on which the fiendish thoughts of the elite speaker will be imprinted. Conspiracy theories are always based on a credulous people and the populist is a full-bore conspiracist. ‘This is a conspiracy against you, the American people,’ said Trump. Utopia has always been just around the corner if only the corrupt elite had cared to venture there. ‘We will rise above’ said the candidate Trump, ‘the lies, the smears, and the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous reporters.’

  This is why the utopian’s account is so fatuously inadequate about how change will come about. In More’s Utopia a traveller, a speaker of nonsense, finds the perfect society in full working order in the ocean. The title of H. G. Wells’s utopia accurately captures the lack of seriousness of the genre: When the Sleeper Wakes. These books are nothing more than grown-up fairytales. In the place where an account of change should be, the utopian populist substitutes the supreme leader. The paradox of populism is that it has a rhetoric of a movement but the practice of a cult. Camus once said that democracy is the system for people who know that they don’t know everything. The populist utopian has all the answers. The omniscient figures are, variously, the priests, the philosophers, the intellectuals, the scientists, the process of history or the party. Plato believed in the rule of the sages, the Stoics in the power of reason, the seventeenth-century rationalists in metaphysical insight and the eighteenth-century empiricists in science.

  The populist in government has the same status. No sooner has he ejected the hated elite than the populist’s entourage become the elite themselves. He glosses the shift by posing as the tribune of the people. No need for a manifesto: he simply intuits the general will. Populism is a movement with no ideological content beyond its resentment of an elite. It therefore requires a charismatic leader – lately a Trump, a Chávez, an Erdoğan – to glue it together. The movement gathers around the leader as if around a maypole. Its name proclaims allegiance to the people, but in fact populism requires the people to swear allegiance to the leader. The bargain rests on the populist knowing everything, but, of course, the truth is that he knows almost nothing. The populist has a utopian account of political change, which is to say no account at all.

  It is no accident that populists such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alexis Tsiprias in Greece have proved to be so hopeless in office. The failure is baked into their arrogance about how easy it will be. President Trump believes that politics is usefully analogous to his dreary and ghostwritten business manual The Art of the Deal. This is not an analogy; it is a fantasy. The populist, devoid of politics, impatient with gathering allies, is bound to fail the test of administrative competence. Gratifyingly for him, the populist can invoke an easy escape clause. He can write off his failure as the conspiracy of the elite class which gave him his energy in the first place. The fact that he can offer no evidence for this absurd proposition only goes to show how clever a conspiracy it really is. Truth is always a casualty of populism.

  It is not, alas, the only casualty. The foundation myth of populism – that the true way has been corrupted – means that the populist has to find a scapegoat. In the utopian literature, the leader is constantly marching backwards into battle. The safest refuge from the corrupt present is the blessed past. The promise to turn back the clock is a recurrent motif in utopia. In the Garden of Eden, in Hesiod’s golden age before the decline, the bliss in Atlantis or Virgil’s Kingdom of Saturn, in which all things are good, utopia is sadly discovered to be a paradise lost. The populist has nothing interesting to say about the future. He sets himself against progress and so is projected headlong into the past. Populism is a promise to return to popular wisdom before it was corroded by the Enemy.

  This is not ‘the people’ as it is invoked by Lincoln. It is a Gemeinschaft, the binding of a community against outsiders, in a return to a bygone golden age. The outsiders in question are, in every instance of populism, the elite, but they are also often the immigrant. These days, specifically, the Muslim or the Jew, but also sometimes the non-national. The words of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are all designed to bind a nation together. Populist politics, by contrast, needs to construct internal enemies as detached from the people. President Trump has proposed the deportation of undocumented immigrants and wants a wall to keep out the Mexicans. In Holland Geert Wilders wants to repeal hate-speech legislation. In Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński sought to make the use of the term ‘Polish death camps’ illegal.

  As the incarnation of truth, the populist is a stranger to the doubts and humility that find expression in the speeches in this chapter. His utopia has none of the pluralism of a liberal democracy. The truth is no longer the upshot of open exchanges among free people; facts are what the populist leader says they are. Karl Popper has cited the Funeral Oration of Pericles as the moment that men began to glimpse the possibilities of an open society. The populist dismisses all that discussion as a waste of time and energy. Better to get things done with his prowess at embodying the popular will.

  To live in utopia is to be amidst perfection already achieved. Nothing develops and nobody can change their mind. The populist stands at the top of this chain of certainty, a position, as William Blake said, ‘like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind’. Disenchantment is inevitable, and when it sets in it can be vicious. Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are images of how fatally the vigorous energy can turn to vice. It is never long before the leader tires of the constraints that are built into the constitutional apparatus. It was, after all, the paraphernalia of politics that he believes he was chosen to change. The tiresome mechanisms that we see Jefferson applauding are merely impediments to the populist. He is therefore bound to attack the free press, minority rights and judicial oversight as institutions that are seeking to defy the will of the people.

  The era of populism sets the political leaders against their own constitutions. The purpose of political arrangements, most evidently the American constitution, is to curtail power. Politics is the wisest solution to the fact that men cannot always be trusted. It is founded on realism about fallen humans rather than utopian optimism. The balance between elements of the constitution, which Cicero set out and which were borrowed for the drafting of America’s, are designed to hold populist power in check.

  Most of the time the constitution holds. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and the Kaczyńskis in Poland have tried largely in vain to undermine other sources of power. It is probable that President Trump will be frustrated by the absence of executive power that, following the liberal principles of Locke and Montesquieu, was deliberately built into his office. Yet we cannot always be so sanguine. Orbán in Hungary, Chávez in Venezuela and Erdoğan in Turkey have rewritten their constitutions to erase the inheritance from liberal democracy. Since the failed coup against Erdoğan in 2016, broadcasters, newspapers and magazines have been shut down and journalists detained. The public realm is now severely censored. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has done as he pleases regardless of constitutional propriety. Institutions that demand neutrality, such as judicial appointments, have been made partisan. The writ of law has been invaded by ideological correctness. The media has been silenced. It is dangerous, and sometimes fatal, for Russian journalists to pry too closely into sensitive subjects such as corruption and organised crime.

  Populism begins with recriminations about the governing elite and, to use Donald Trump’s extraordinary allegation, their ‘criminal enterprise’. It ends with recriminations about the constitution. All the while it claims to have special knowledge of the will of the people. It is a fraud from start to finish. Plato hated democracy because he thought it led to populist rulers. There is a risk, if we do not find the words to advertise the virtues of conventional politics, that Plato’s anguished prediction will be proved right. The task for the responsible democrat is
therefore to describe what has gone awry and find words for a better future, like the wonderful writing in Jefferson’s 1801 Inaugural Address and the compressed poetic expression of Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg. The solution to disenchanted politics cannot be populism. It has to be better, more enchanted politics.

  The Principle of Hope

  Enchantment in politics does not mean a sweet lyric coating applied to toxic words. The case for popular power has to be rooted in the capacity of liberal democracies to respond to the three concurrent crises of prosperity, fear and confidence.

  The first emotion that needs to be summoned is defiance. Democracy is the great philosophical success story of modern times. There were no democracies anywhere in 1799. Throughout the nineteenth century more than a third of the world’s population lived in countries ruled by imperial powers and almost everyone else lived in countries governed by despots, not many of them enlightened. The first wave of democracy was crushed, in the midst of economic failure, by the malignant populists of the 1930s. The second half of the twentieth century saw the great flourishing. Empires, notably the vast terrain of the Soviet Union, ran out of time. The share of the world’s population that lived under democracy grew quickly. In 1989 41 per cent of the nations on earth were soi-disant democracies. In 2015 it was 64 per cent. Now more than every second person lives in a democracy.

  The reason for this is that politics can offer valid answers to the crises of prosperity, fear and confidence. We will see in chapters to come that the liberal democracies have a vastly superior performance in generating prosperity to any of their rivals. We shall see that democracies are very much the safest regimes in which to live. Voltaire said that heaven has given us two things – hope and sleep – to make up for the many miseries of life. We sleep more soundly in our beds if we know that our politics will keep us safe. Liberal democracies rely on fine articulations of the principle of hope, and we must rediscover our confidence in and our patience with the idea that politics will gradually improve the condition of the people. The short cut signalled by the populist is an illusion.