Tag: Right-wing populism

Carl Sagan, the astronomer and writer, was absolutely right when he said that to understand the present, you must first understand the past. So whilst Brexit seems in so many respects to be a very modern phenomenon – with the widespread use cutting edge information technology, algorithms and data harvesting – it is taking us down a path that is all-too-well trodden. What has been set in train by the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers is the dismantling of liberal democracy and open international borders. In a decade when we needed to see the rise of responsible bankers, regulators, politicians and economists, we have seen the rise of Trump, Brexit and populism. The world has certainly changed, but not in an ordered, structured or positive way. Right wing populism took hold across the western world after the crash of almost a century ago, and it is something of an under-statement to say that it did not end well. The victims of it were then the poorest and most oppressed in our society. A lot of them – by dint of their religious faith, sexual orientation or whatever – were obviously different. It is by no means inconceivable that the lawyers rather than the legislators will ultimately be the ones who have to take back control in this situation. We are responsible for each other.

The populist uprising in the US, Britain, and Europe is a backlash against elites of the mainstream parties, but its most conspicuous casualties have been liberal and centre-left political parties – the Democratic Party in the US; the Labour Party in Britain; the Social Democratic Party in Germany, whose share of the vote reached a historic low in the last federal election; Italy’s Democratic Party, whose vote share dropped this year to less than 20 per cent; and the Socialist Party in France, whose presidential nominee won only 6 per cent of the vote in the first round of last year’s election. In today’s economy, it is not easy to rise. The dignity of work The loss of jobs to technology and outsourcing has coincided with a sense that society accords less respect to the kind of work the working class does. To think it through, political parties will have to grapple with the meaning of work and its place in a good life. But this principled response, valid though it is, fails to address an important set of questions implicit in the populist complaint. But this strategy of avoidance, this insistence on liberal neutrality, is a mistake. Liberal neutrality flattens questions of meaning, identity and purpose into questions of fairness. And liberal public reason is not a morally neutral way of arriving at principles of justice. Three decades of market-driven globalisation and technocratic liberalism have hollowed out democratic public discourse, disempowered ordinary citizens, and prompted a populist backlash that seeks to clothe the naked public square with an intolerant, vengeful nationalism. It draws upon material from Sandel’s articles “Lessons from the Populist Revolt”, in Project Syndicate, and “Populism, Liberalism, and Democracy”, in Philosophy & Social Criticism (2018).