The populist gene is firmly encoded in our transatlantic rightwing parties

The writer is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books

Those hoping the ousting of Boris Johnson as UK prime minister would mark the end of Brexit-era antagonisms will have had a disappointing week. As MPs winnowed their list of candidates to replace him, it was chaotic and obstreperous. Those who in 2016 had opposed Britain’s departure from the EU fared poorly — Jeremy Hunt being the first axed, and Tom Tugendhat looking doomed by the end of the week. The Conservative party is a Brexit party. It turns out to be easier to topple an individual populist than to topple populism. And the same is true of the Republicans across the Atlantic.

The so-called January 6 hearings in the US Congress give a hint of why this might be so. They even offer a sense of what populism is. The House panel is investigating former president Donald Trump’s involvement in bureaucratic and mob attempts to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election. Its revelations may damage Trump, but they are not hurting his party. Polls show a two-point advantage for Republicans heading into November elections, sufficient for a large majority in the House of Representatives. The popularity rating of 2020 victor Joe Biden hovers at around 39 per cent. This week almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Democrats told a New York Times poll they hoped he would not run again.

As readers of Michael Wolff’s masterful book Landslide will recall, the last days of the Trump administration offer a case study in the banality of radicalisation. Trump couldn’t tolerate criticism or contrary advice. When he lost the election, he not only cast about for scapegoats (a common enough political failing) but also exiled such rational actors as attorney-general William Barr, and sought counsel from conspiracy theorists like attorney Sidney Powell. Increasingly, the president was getting outright wrong information. He closed himself off to argument.

That gave him something in common with the demonstrators who showed up at the Capitol on January 6. Many Americans who voted for Trump had reasonable grounds to distrust contrary advice. Across half a dozen presidential administrations, a lot of them had been deprived of their economic birthright because they patiently listened to the pros and cons of public policy from well-educated salesmen of globalisation. They would have been better off if they had been closed-minded. Like Balzac’s peasantry, they have come to despise flowery explanations. They want crude demonstrations that their interlocutor is on their side.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, drew up a rule book of international populism for a Budapest session of the American Conservative Political Action Conference in May. (It was announced this week that Orbán will appear at another CPAC session in Washington next month.) There was nothing sinister about the 12-point list, which stressed such matters as paying attention to the economy, avoiding extremes, and doing more reading. And he was right to put populism in an international context. The Italian Five-Star Movement, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the late Japanese leader Shinzo Abe could all be considered among its representatives.

Populism, when it is not simply a slur, is a reaction to certain political inequalities engendered by globalisation and information technology. Our era has seen the emergence of new institutions that exercise real political power — tech corporations, non-governmental organisations, the EU, rating agencies, multilateral banking institutions and so on.

To invent an institution is not to democratise it. It took centuries to democratise the western institutions that exerted political, religious and cultural control. People old enough to remember how a responsive government behaves can feel the lack.

“It’s just a corrupting influence, basically having Silicon Valley run your election,” the most successful US populist, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, said recently. With only one serious exception — the Tory party as it existed during Dominic Cummings’s time as a Brexit agitator and chief adviser to Johnson — no populist force has managed even to understand the game it was in.

For now, the only people with a clear idea of how Google, say, or the World Trade Organization might be held accountable are its personnel. They seem to form a bloc, an anti-populist governing class. In Westminster, it is sometime called “the Blob”. In Washington DC, in the 2020 elections, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump 92 per cent to 5 per cent of the popular vote.

A study led by King’s College London political scientist Alan Wager has been much tweeted during the Tory leadership contest. It shows Tory voters to be far more “populist” than their leaders on almost everything. The proposition that “there is one law for the rich and one for the poor”, wins the assent of 72 per cent of Tory voters but only 22 per cent of party members and 5 per cent of MPs. Half (50 per cent) of the Tory public supports the death penalty, but barely a fifth (21 per cent) of the party’s MPs do. Six years ago, this kind of difference was the source of rage over Brexit. Today it is the seedbed of populism, which will continue to thrive until our new political institutions are made as accountable as the old ones.