This Substack's Appearance in the Financial Times (and the Populist Decade, Revisited)

Thank you, Edward Luce

Industrial Scene, LS Lowry, 1951

This little Substack–the very one you subscribe to–got a shout out in the Financial Times yesterday. Edward Luce, whose work I’ve always liked and read regularly–called me a “respected pundit” in his newsletter. It is always nice to see the word “respected” attached to one’s name, particularly in the most respected newspaper in the world! It’s especially nice to be described that way as a woman. We are used to being called insulting things like “hard working”. So thank you to Edward Luce for that. The word “pundit” naturally carries some negative connotations, but I will shoulder them with dignity.

All of that said, Luce mentioned me and linked to this Substack because he disagreed with my latest post here about the end of the right-wing populist decade. He believes that it’s premature to recite a funeral oration for right-wing populism now.

I think Luce makes some good points. For one, he writes that populism could have just as easily been declared dead in 2020, when Trump was defeated by Joe Biden and Covid was raging. He reminds his readers that some people asserted that Covid would spell the end of populism. Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, the pandemic gave right-wing populism new life. Right-wing populists depicted vaccine mandates and lockdowns as the social engineering work of corrupt medical-pharma elites (or some such thing).

However, I do think there are some significant differences between the first and second Trump administrations that warrant examination. First, Trump’s polling numbers have never been as low as they are now. They are historically abysmal. This means that he’s being more thoroughly discredited in his second administration than he was just six years ago. Further, his supposedly “populist” policies now read as a litany of failures. The spectacle of cruelty and violence that was the first year of ICE raids has been dialed back following mass public backlash. Tariffs–the cornerstone of Trumpian economic populism–were determined to be largely illegal by the Supreme Court. (As the Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent Patrick Wintour wrote last year, “this is the time to declare economic populism, and not free trade, dead”).

The same goes for this administration’s conduct of foreign policy, which many opponents were far too quick to label “isolationist”. On Iran, that generational fixation of boomer neoconservatives, Trump has demonstrated a conventional hawkishness. “Operation Epic Fury” sent the swamp into fits of ecstasy. On Ukraine, he has also been far more conventional than his detractors feared, or as last year’s confrontation with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office appeared to portend. (Ross Douthat even described Trump’s Ukraine policy as a success in the New York Times last week). According to MAGA populists’ own criteria, then, Trump’s second administration has been a resounding failure. MAGA’s internal dynamics also track with this interpretation. Steve Bannon and others associated with the movement’s more traditionally populist wing have been sidelined, while those in the more neocon and Silicon Valley crowd have gotten much closer to the inner circle. Those in the neocon and Tech Right camps are closer to conventional conservatives or overt elitism than they are populist. (Have you heard all the Silicon Valley gloating about AI creating a “permanent underclass” lately?)

Luce also writes that Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform has been leading the polls in the UK for the past year. While this is certainly true, there are also signs that the party’s momentum is already slowing down. First, one analysis from yesterday’s regional and municipal elections indicated that Reform’s vote share was 27%. While this was still enough to defeat Labor, the result also represents a drop of five percentage points from last year’s local elections, when Reform secured a full 32 percent of the vote.

Indeed, there is already fatigue about Farage on the far-right. If you follow discussions on the political fringe as I do, you’ll see that Farage is now viewed by many as an establishment stooge. Part of this is the toxicity of the Trump brand, surely–Farage is an ally of the US president. But some on the far-right now depict him as pro-immigration. The emergence of an even more far-right outfit, Restore, is symptomatic of this. You may be tempted to conclude that the founding of another far-right party indicates that right-wing populism is alive and well, but I actually think it could go either way. When Restore published its first big video a few months ago, the admiring response from supporters was how “un-MAGA” it was; rather than clownish, personality-driven populism of the Farage variety, its message was delivered with a grim seriousness. It did not feel the need to justify itself in terms of opposition to the libs or Brussels; its somber mood drew on the British virtue of the stiff upper lip, of a simple “doing what needs to be done” (in this case, the mass deportations of human beings). I was struck by the tonal shift, which is why I concluded my last post by saying that whatever right-wing politics come next could prove even worse: less buffoonish and more effective.

To be sure, the aforementioned video is not entirely devoid of populist features. In it, party leader Rupert Lowe speaks directly to the camera, promising that candidates for Restore would come “from outside the political establishment”. But then, he takes a decidedly un-Trumpian turn. The candidates, he says, “will be from science, from the military, from medicine, from business, from education.” This is not your crackpot MAGA uncle’s populism; this is something more sober, more formal, and, potentially at least, more lethal.

Luce also makes an important point about immigration. There is no question that immigration will continue to produce a backlash on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly in Britain. As long as right-wing politicians continue to blame “liberal elites” or “globalists” for immigration policies, then that backlash will have a populist character and speak in a populist vernacular. But once again, I think there has been a subtle shift in the way Muslim immigration in particular has been talked about and even opposed since October 7th. Prior to October 2023, opponents of immigration invoked “globalist” elites (and the implication was often that they were Jewish, with George Soros as the ultimate villain). Now, right-wing commentators are just as likely to invoke a supposed crisis of anti-semitism as a reason to stop Muslim immigration. Many will claim there is no distinction here. They will say that all of it is anti-immigration, and for many commentators, that’s all that really matters. But I detect in these slight shifts a growing rhetorical foregrounding of elite foreign policy concerns over those of the “masses”–and a downgrading of “the people”.

Finally, Luce notes correctly that the conditions that proved fertile ground for the millennium’s first populist backlash, like the diminished middle class and new technologies that fueled polarization, are worse now than they were at the onset of the populist decade. AI, he writes, is poised to intensify the ongoing destruction of the public square. I think this is possibly true, but there are also some other terrifying trends that point in different directions. Earlier I mentioned the Silicon Valley elites who now boast of AI’s creation of a “permanent underclass”. Their project is one not of populism but unabashed elitism, and in some cases, even monarchism. There is no pretense to caring about “the people” or even the nation (as I have written before, the Silicon Valley tech right abhors the nation state). Rather, they envision a world that is rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, stratified according to IQ, and sustained by permanent war, social atomization, internet pacification, and mass surveillance. Of course, this still sounds fanciful, but it is what the Silicon Valley right wants. And this means there are still new and nightmarish directions for right-wing politics to go. Declaring the populist decade dead may not be the optimistic prognosis some might think.

Finally, I think it’s important to recall that populism is cyclical. It comes and goes. It goes into hiding for years or even decades, and then reemerges at a moment of crisis. The right-wing populism of the last decade had a very particular set of features, affects, and aesthetics, and I do think that it has already reached its peak and is dying a slow but steady death–albeit on slightly different time tables in different countries. Whether right-wing populism mutates to survive in a new form–which it certainly could–or disappears altogether remains to be seen. But the 2016 MAGA-style right-wing populism of Trump and Brexit has never looked more geriatric and feeble.