Chris Johns
Populism is, perhaps, an overused word these days. Trump personifies it, Johnson practises it every day with each stoking of the culture war now raging in the UK. Many of us use that phrase - culture war - together with populism when talking about the same thing. What do these words mean? Is there any prospect of a return to a ‘normal’ politics? Is any country immune? Ireland, with its historically allergic response to anything remotely resembling ‘sectarianism’, at least within the mainstream body politic, might have the best immune system. But with Sinn Fein looking like a shoe-in for the next general election even that defence system looks like being overwhelmed.
Think about it for five minutes and populism is hard to define. It’s commonly supposed to be a political creed that asserts the existence of an ‘elite’ that seeks to do down ‘the people’. There are many varieties: but it’s always about ‘us versus them’. Where ‘them’ are always described in tribal terms, with one tribe set in permanent opposition to the other. The clever populist seeks to force people to make that tribal choice. Which one do you belong to?
Once you know your tribe you are obliged to oppose the other. The trick then is to turn that opposition into hatred. Think modern US politics. Republicans and Democrats used to disagree but, by and large, were still able to have a drink with each other after work. They even married each other. No longer.
(Institute for family studies, 2020)
My generation of Brits still have people in their social circle who have very different political views. In a very unscientific poll of people in the generation behind me, I discovered a common refrain: ‘we don’t know anybody who thinks differently to us.’
This, I think, is one of the key features of the modern culture war: we have been forced into bubbles of opinion - those famous echo chambers of Twitter - and tribes where engagement with others of a different persuasion, if it happens at all, takes the form of combat rather than even just shouting at each other.
Anthropologists and other social scientists have long noticed our susceptibility to tribalism. All that running around the Savannah in prehistoric times has hard-wired us to fear the stranger. If prodded firmly enough we respond to threats in a primitive way. If convinced - rightly or wrongly - of the size of the threat, we instinctively reach for our clubs. Sometimes actual weapons or just howls of atavistic rage. If a politician can convince us that our backs are against the wall it’s hard to resist the urge to come out swinging.
Think about the Brexit debate in the UK: it was never about economics, never about cold calculation of both sides of the debate. It was, from the start, about ‘othering’. The demonising of the EU, the constant disparagement of ‘Remoaners’. The torrent of lies that eventually scared enough of us.
The tribal sports fan is a familiar trope. Once a United fan, always a United fan. And one that must always hate City. This can be almost humorous: at The Emirates, the crowd often breaks into their favourite one-line song, ‘Stand up if you hate Tottenham’ and 60,000 people, in pre-Covid times, duly take to their feet. Or it can be truly nasty: think Celtic and Rangers with their religious and political divisions.
The political populist trick is to turn as many of us as possible into culture warriors impervious to argument, utterly resistant to changing our minds. Darth Vader eventually resisted the Dark Side but this was George Lucas’s fatal conceit. True populists know that once achieved, tribalism is akin to knotweed, impossible to eradicate.
Examples are legion. In a brilliant piece, Nick Cohen takes us through some of the more recent ones. Johnson and his ‘cabinet of mercenaries’ wading into the booing of English footballers taking the knee. The sinister practice of trawling through and pronouncing on the teenage Tweets of international cricketers. Student politics should never be worthy of comment but Cabinet ministers can’t resist the temptation.
That student thing is interesting. A key feature (but not the only one) of all of the populist identification of the ‘elite’ is to use the word ‘graduate’. Another is ‘Londoner’. Another is ‘Liberal’.
David Goodhart is an author who has taken a lot of stick (rightly in my view) for his many attempts to criticise liberal, elite Londoners. In a recent review of books by former Labour leader Ed Milliband and former PM Gordon Brown, Goodhart wrote:
I am a former Labour member and voted for both [Milliband and Brown]. It is hard to disagree with much of what they say, but neither has grasped the deeper reasons for the failure of the modern left — essentially that it has become a vehicle for the interests of the liberal graduate class. [My emphasis]
Goodhart really doesn’t like graduates. They are at the sharp end of of a group he famously labelled as ‘Anywheres’, people who are educated, mobile, who value fluidity and autonomy. That’s his old tribe. His new one is called the ‘Somewheres’, people who are rooted in a place, are less well-educated and prioritise group attachments and security. All this from someone educated at Eton - now there is a tribe that has caused a lot of trouble. The liberal graduate class has done the other tribe down? Tell that to the Leave campaign; tell it to the 88-seat majority Tory government.
It’s an old trick, practised by management consultants, opinion pollsters and astrologers: categorise people into a small number of neat, simple, well-defined boxes.
The denial of human complexity is staggering. There is no cohesive tribe of liberal graduates: I wouldn’t advise it, but just sit in on one of their dinner parties.
The disavowal of his old tribe allowed Goodhart to become a fully paid-up member of the culture warrior gang. To express sympathy for Nigel Farage’s lament that he no longer hears English spoken on tube trains. And to bemoan the fact that his children accuse him of racism.
All great lies come wrapped in a kernel of truth. Lefty liberals are often sanctimonious pains in the arse. But they are not evil. They are not wrong about everything. The sleight of hand so skilfully pulled off by the populists is to convince enough of us that North London ‘elites’ are there to be despised and have nothing to say that bears any resemblance to objective fact.
The populist success has been to convince and cohere a tribe who believes that there is another group opposed to their interests. It doesn’t matter that the existence of that other tribe is a fantasy: the belief is enough to garner the votes for Trump, Orban, Le Pen and Johnson.
That Cohen piece mentioned earlier on is worth reading in full. He suggests, referring to two of Johnson’s team:
As an allegory for today’s moronic furies, the picture of a former revolutionary communist and a raddled old swinger fuelling raging click-bait campaigns to divert the masses is hard to better. Johnson and his cabinet make no secret of their admiration. “When it comes to culture wars,” one senior minister told [Matt] d’Ancona, “we win. Keir Starmer has no answer to this stuff, because his party is so crazily woke.”
Cohen is gloomy but uncertain about where all this ends. The suggestion is that the ‘war on woke’ has two main objectives: fun and power. The old-Etonian class can’t believe their luck in winning power by waging war on the ‘elite’.
Is any country immune to this heady strategy that is so obviously a winning one? Many aspects of populism bear more than a passing resemblance to ‘sectarianism’, something that even Sinn Fein professes to abhor. Watch what they do, not what they say. The majority of Irish people who currently say that they will vote for the Shinners in the next general election should know that the entire strategy is designed around ‘othering’ non-Sinn Fein voters. These are usually rich people who live in houses and have private medical insurance. Another trick to over-simplify complexity.
Populism amounts to convincing enough people that a bad tribe of others has rigged the system. The populist feels your pain and promises to ease it. But they rely on that pain existing forever. Without it, what’s the point of the populist? So the fear of pain is stoked. Forever. Will we ever learn? Levelling up? Give me a break.