Why populism is so popular with politicians
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We’re in the thick of the campaign and again populism is more popular with politicians than almost any other form of political activity except alliteration. What makes populism popular is that it gives the appearance of responsiveness to the populace while simultaneously making sure the public puts up with policies that are against their own best interests. As with much else that is malign in modern politics, the latest form of populism was largely invented by the Republican Right in the US. Admittedly, populism has been around for as long as voting and rioting. Cicero, Caesar and Andrew Jackson were probably as good at it as Karl Rove, John Howard and Ronald Reagan. But it takes different talents in a modern system with almost universal voting. One of the best guides to how it works is Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with America? (Secker & Warburg 2004), which charts the Republican Right’s 30 year campaign to use populism to create a common man’s revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment and unnatural alliances between blue-collar mid-westerners and bankers and workers and bosses. A logical extension of this is when elites re-define themselves as populists in the vanguard of the revolution. So Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest (The Billionaire Liberation Front, as Lindsay Tanner called them) take to the streets to protect the people from the dangerous elite socialist eastern states establishment. However, for Australians the best example of how it works is John Howard, who deliberately adapted the Reaganite wedge-tactics to prise blue-collar workers away from the ALP. One can expect more of the same from Tony Abbott in forthcoming weeks and, probably, quite a bit from the ALP as well. Part of the difference between the two, of course, will be how it is framed. Already the new Prime Minister has rejected a big Australia policy, framing it within the context of a sustainable Australia. That’s a perfectly legitimate and sensible policy, but it also just so happens to resonate with populist anti-immigration feeling. Good policy, bad reasons. With Abbott, however, it may well be more a case of bad policy for bad reasons. Nevertheless, there are generally some limits to how far they’ll go. Every politician knows that the single most popular issue in Australia is bringing back capital punishment. This is something which, with a few exceptions, even populist politicians have avoided. They edge close to it by not being quite as enthusiastic as they might be about Australian policy of opposing the death penalty for Australian citizens in other countries (drug dealers in particular) and welcome the execution of terrorists by others, but generally they have been restrained and avoided the populist button. It would be almost impossible to imagine even the most died-in-the-wool conservative populist in Australia doing a Bill Clinton or George W. Bush and ordering the execution of an intellectually disabled person in circumstances that could be argued to have been influenced by electoral calculations. Now the populists can put their hand on their heart and swear that they are just following the public and protecting them from undemocratic elites. Elites are, of course, OK if they are in an elite military unit or an elite sporting team — but not when the only qualifications they have got are expertise, experience or knowledge. Like many Crikey readers, for example. This example is not serious by the way, just a demonstration of how flattery is a technique used by elites to persuade listening masses that they are special. The new UK PM, David Cameron, is a member of the English elite in every sense of the word — just as Tony Blair was. But both specialised in using populism to shed their elite status and appear as folks just like you and me interested mainly in football and/or wearing hoodies. In fact, as the maverick UK Tory, George Walden, has argued the key terms of democracy, elites and the masses have all been re-defined to mean something else altogether — something inherently undemocratic. It means giving people what they want, what research says they want and what the populist deems they want — whether it is actually in their interests or not. Now pointing this out, and deploring it, is always dismissed as snobbish or elitist. Yet it is sometimes the sorts of people who would, once upon a time in the past, have railed against the “mob” and the “masses” (except when organising them into the odd pogrom or lynching) who now supposedly treat them as a coalition of demi-gods and hope to keep them scared, ill-informed and misled. Doing so is helped by tabloid media — press and TV — which condemn dodgy salespeople, public servants, refugees and anyone a bit different — while being immensely circumspect about the real power elites. Accusations of elitism and snobbery simply serve to distract attention from this real issue. Walden (New Elites, Gibson Square 2006) says: “In the longer term populist policies are doomed because their promises are a mirage. The public will always ask for more, and will always be disappointed.” He goes on to quote Nietzsche (from another context) that “they think they are leading the people but when they look around they find they are chasing them”. The rise of ultra-right nationalist parties throughout Europe is one result of this failure. As some readers will know I am always keen on thought experiments. Walden provides a very interesting one. He quotes John F. Kennedy as follows: “I look forward to a world that will not only be safe for democracy and diversity but also for distinction”. (emphasis added) Imagine a similar speech in the forthcoming election campaign. An ALP candidate could probably get as far as democracy and diversity. A Coalition candidate might well baulk at diversity and want to insert something about choice. Would either be comfortable about “distinction” — even if they knew they were quoting JFK? |
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12 Comments
did anyone else find Julie Bishop’s appearance in The Chaser painful?
it was like fingers down a blackboard
I wasn’t sure which was worse; Bishop trying to soften her image by showing she has a sense of humour about herself, or the Chaser guys yuk-yucking up to her.
guys, it’s not satire if the pollies use it for their own PR.
I was waiting for the dwarf to explode.
(that’s not a sentence I get to write very often)
Its patently obvious that Conservative populism is all about manipulating and pandering to the fear and ignorance of less politically/economically literate sections of society classes in the hope that enough of them can be duped into voting for the kind of supply side voodoo economic policies that generally play out to the detriment of those voters
It’s no coincidence Census data shows most outer suburban marginal seats exhibiting a strong correlation with the areas of lowest average levels of educational attainment in the country. This kind of politics is not only uglier than hatful off ass holes, but specifically designed to further polarise our society over time in exactly the same way it has the USA
I haven’t dubbed Toxic Tony’s Coalition henchmen the Turramurra Tea Party for nothing.
Populism is an attempt to reach the holy grail of fooling all of the people all of the time.
Well said Noel … although the glue that keeps an unwieldy coalition of unemployed under-employed, workers, contractors, petty businessfolk and bankers together is really the cultural claim in which “elites” are simultaneously specified and delegitimated by being spatially remote and/or intellectually or culturally empowered. If you can “other” enough people, you have a constituency that will vote against their own interests.
So of course the tactic involves calling people “boffins” or “bureaucrats” or “latte-sipping urbanistas” or “chardonnay socialists” keen on big taxing big government or something similar. Oddly, in the US, post 9/11 when those elites got attacked they stopped being urban dwellers or rich bankers or elites and became Americans, precisely so the people the right was courting could turn their rage outward at “t*w*lheads” and their leftwing fellow travellers in the Democrats .
It’s all-purpose.
Populism in politics is exactly the process of reverse snobbism.
By lowering himself to the same level as Oink the Woink the politician aspires to elevate himself.
To be thoroughly despicable the candidate should have an educated voice-none of this Haitch crap here-be reasonably well dressed and possessed of a ‘who-me?’ expression.
The killer stroke comes when the politician will immediately get onto a diminutive variant of the yokel’s first name. “Hello there Billy ‘mate’, call me Heinrich, or Rich for short. Ha ha!!”
ACIDIC MUSE: What’s an ‘ass hole?’
In Oz we use the words arse hole.
Two words - lumpen proletariat.
@Malcolm
Education is the answer but no one on the right seems even vaguely interested in asking the question .. so much for the Revolution
I fear we are fast devolving into a mushroom culture, in no small due part to Toadstool Tony’s lifelong fixation with defunding public education. He subscribe to that Orwellian ideal that if you can keep the proles in darkness long enough, the bullshit will start to taste like french truffles
Acidic Muse - I can only explain the ferocity of the attacks from the Right on the BER program as coming from outrage at the Commonwealth spending money some of which goes to public education.
@Malcolm
It’s purely political opportunism. What matters most to them is whether their message is likely the resonate with the brain-dead bogans in marginal seats, who will decide this election. Carping on about the wasteful ways of government will always pack a punch in Struggle Street where cynicism has already taken root amidst the fertile wastelands of perceived social exclusion. They were betting thatLabour would stumble on fumble over selling the fact that the many positive outcomes of the BER massively outweighed the waste that is to some extent necessarily always a component of any large Federal government programs filtered through the myriad bureaucracy we call state government.
As American Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said to Kerry O’Brien earlier this week, the waste would have been almost unimaginably greater had we taken the Opposition’s voodoo economics supply-side solution to the problem. Just look at how dismally the United States approach of cutting taxes, mostly for the wealthy and handing out hundreds of billions of dollars to financial institutions and other large corporations, has failed to turn their economy around in the way. ours has. Instead of providing liquidity to their customers,the banks either use those funds to retire their own debts or took the opportunity to simply invest in more risky complex securities is at the bottom of the market in the hope of making huge profits- something that worked out very well for Wall Street I did little to help those on Main Street.
Joseph Stiglitz called Kevin Rudd stimulus package the best designed economic policy he has ever seen. For the life of me, I don’t understand why those morons down at Sussex Street are not doing a better job of leveraging the many glowing endorsements the right stimulus package has received from leading economists all over the world. But please don’t get me started on what I think of the quality of Labour’s communications campaign thus far ..lol
ACIDIC MUSE: Yes, I saw that program. It was excellent. WTF don’t the Labor Party use this as PR?
Or would the message be lost on the MacMansionites? I can’t imagine these leeches voting any other way than for the Liberal Party. It takes the mediocre to fall for the mediocrity of the likes of Tony Abbott. Mediocrity and a deep and abiding lack of knowledge of recent Oz history.
If they were to do a tiny bit of research they would know Tony Abbott’s history of strong arm Catholicism, his racism, and his anti-feminist stance, the intrusion of his religious beliefs into a secular society. He is anti-abortion, anti-the right of a woman to choose what she wants to do with her body, and anti-euthanasia.
Under our Constitution the Oz citizen has the right to choose his own belief. And not have an alien religion arbitrarily thrust down our throats.
BTW: It’s the L A B O R Party. I have been told that early on in Labor history an
American became involved in it. And as Americans spell phonetically, he wrote it as Labor.
Noel - I don’t know if you were punning in the comment re capital punishment the most died-in-the-wool conservative populist but perhaps you meant “dyed”.
The way even the most unscrupulous populist (eg the Rodent) will use the term “mob” when the lumpen go against them, viz his comments on ‘mob rule’ when referring to the Harbour Bridge match in favour of reconcilliation or against the Iraq invasion.