Populism

My summary of the discussion prior to the Brexit vote:

Why?

Why not?

Consequences be damned.

How very British.

Let’s all remind ourselves of how this came about: the referendum was scheduled as a sop to the far right and traditionally anti-EU wing of the ruling Conservative party in order to shore up support going into the last general election. It was a cynical move. It was a short term move. It was a monstrous mistake that will stain the Conservatives for all time.

When you compress your political maneuvering into such short term spaces you are likely to be bitten by history. Thus it is with David Cameron, the Conservative leader, whose legacy is now limited to his stupid and feckless attempt to buy off his anti-EU supporters with what, I can only assume, he meant to be an empty promise. For he must surely have calculated that any referendum vote would go his way and that the anti-EU wing would be soundly thrashed.

I think we can all agree that Cameron’s miscalculation will rank very near the top of all time screw-ups.

The disbelief amongst the establishment elite when the votes started being counted was, itself, an indictment of its total disengagement with the voters to whom such a huge decision had been entrusted.

And this is my argument. Indeed it has been my argument for decades now: if we assume that, in modern Western democracies, the elite has a special responsibility to supply both the leadership and the ideas that enable society as a whole to flourish, it behooves that elite to keep in contact with society and not become enthralled with itself.

In other words the elite needs to govern humbly and not either arrogantly or complacently.

Unfortunately in both Europe and here in America our elites have fallen into the arrogant and complacent trap. As a result they have ignored any and all trends and information that might have given cause for a re-think of policy.

In Europe this has produced the massively failed and attritional austerity policy that, since 2008, has deprived millions of ordinary Europeans of their prosperity, opportunity, and optimism. Couple this deprivation with a pre-existing sense of separation from the elite’s experience of the consequences of its own policies, and we have an easy explanation of why it is the ordinary voters despise the EU.

The entire EU project was half-assed from the beginning.

Was it a trading bloc? Was it the precursor to a full political union? What was it? Who benefitted from all that trade? Business? Or the people? And why didn’t anyone figure out that opening up borders to free movement of workers would inevitably encourage people to flood into countries that represented better opportunities? Immigration was always going to be an issue, I can only assume that the bureaucrats, most of whom are presumably favorable to multicultural lifestyles, thought that their respective fellow citizens were equally predisposed to the arrival of foreigners on their doorsteps.

Maybe not.

Now I am vehemently opposed to nativist thinking, xenophobia, racism, and any other like phenomenon, but in a set of nations that are both ancient and fairly homogenous, and none with a longstanding tradition of immigration, it doesn’t take too much thought to figure out that large-scale movement of people will cause upset.

But that upset can be ameliorated by sensible policy. In particular the upset can be ameliorated by sensible economic policy that assures those whose lives could be most upended by the arrival of large numbers of enthusiastic low wage workers that their prosperity is unharmed.

This didn’t happen.

On the contrary. In Britain the endless austerity of the Conservatives penny-pinched the exact set of services most likely disrupted by immigration and thus frayed the very bulwark needed to mitigate anti-immigration sentiment. It became too easy for those citizens on the front line to divert their anger away from the cost cutting and onto their new neighbors. It became too easy to blame immigrants for the diminution in service instead of the real cause which was the needless reductions imposed by the government in its hopeless and misguided efforts to balance the budget.

So it is that the elite twitters on about the horrible intolerance of its underclass, thus eliding its own culpability in (a) not foreseeing the social pressures open borders produce; (b) acting to mitigate this social pressures; and (c) not understanding that its foolhardy austerity aggravated those social pressures at the exact moment they needed soothing.

So: in my view we ought not take the easy road and fulminate about the base instincts of our fellow citizens. Such baseness always lurks in the darkest corners. It is dealt with normally by ensuring that society as a whole prospers and/or suffers together. For decades now that has not been true. Our societies have been ever more divided into distinct winners and losers.

Our elites, those who take on the responsibility to govern on our behalf, succumbed to the allure of oligarchy. They foreswore democracy. They cannot now, in the hour of their comeuppance, try to sneer or denigrate the upwelling of popular reaction.

It is not this populist moment that is the threat to democracy across the western world. It is what came before. It is the intellectual and ethical bankruptcy of our elite. It is the deep divide created by false economic and political promises. And above all it is the severance of the basic social contract between the elite and the rest of society. That contract demands that the elite governs on behalf of all, not just on behalf of a few. And it is hard to govern on behalf of all if you seal yourself off in gated communities, executive suites, tenured professorships, exclusive retreats, and other assorted centers of privilege.

The social contract was torn up not by the people, but by the leaders. Its time for a new one. We need a new center in politics that accounts for, and offsets, the forces unleashed by the last four decades of neoliberal nonsense. Getting to that new center will take time and will most likely be bumpy. But that’s what populism is for: to re-center politics on a vision for all of us, not just for a few of us.