Populism is probably the most misunderstood political concept with the possible exception of Democracy. The press, the political establishment, and even those who brand themselves as populists treat it as a force with its own will. To its detractors, it is a disease spreading across the West, the pressure behind the surge in “Far-Right” and “Far-Left” candidates. To those who use the term, or at least accept it, it is a liberating force, throwing off the vestiges of the ancien régime and bringing people into a new age of self-determination.
What must be accepted is that populism is not its own movement but rather a tool. Furthermore, populism has never once transferred power to the people; rather, it transfers power through the people to whoever mobilizes them. The underlying argument behind this explanation comes from the political theories of Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book On Power, and their modern synthesis by C.A. Bond in Nemesis.
Jouvenel, writing in occupied France, asks only the question: “How does power grow?” He treats power as an organism that seeks only to expand its realm and is indifferent to the carrier. The mechanism by which it does this is by facing subsidiaries, which during the medieval era were minor nobility, the church, and anyone in independent standing between the centre and the people. The whole of political history is a duel between the centre and these subsidiaries, and the weapon in this duel is the people. The monarch, who occupied the centre for most of history, could not subdue barons with his own power, but rather would go over their heads–down to the commoners–by offering them protection from their local lord. This was the high and the low against the middle.
C.A. Bond’s contribution is that he takes Jouvenel’s historical narrative and turns it into a structural model that applies anywhere. The three positions are the centre, subsidiaries, and the periphery (the people). Like Jouvenel, the centre and the subsidiaries are always dueling, and the periphery is the force that both sides bid for. When the centre is insecure or no one securely holds it, then each faction must keep liberating new client groups, leading to increasing radicalization. In this structure, the people never act, but are rather acted through. Empowering language, such as equality, liberation, or indeed populism, are weapons of a centralizing force.
The most obvious example of this is the wave of revolutions across the West in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century. Inheriting a tradition from the English seventeenth-century, they sever the political head from its body, and suddenly the centre is no longer the monarch, but an ever more opaque political body supposedly answering to the people. In more recent history, this fight for the centre took on a global scale as post-war NGOs sought to use the language of human rights to create a series of world governing bodies (UN, etc.), making the nation state itself a subsidiary. This consensus was shattered in 2016 and is the current battle we are in.
2016 brought both Brexit and President Trump. In what has been described as the beginnings of a new populist wave across the West, the people voted to drain the swamp and sever the power of the elite. If the presidency was indeed the centre that would have been the end of the old order. However, as executive, Trump discovered that he commanded almost nothing. Investigations from inside his own intelligence community, groundless impeachments, executive orders leaked and disregarded, even an attempt at the end of his first term to reshape parts of the federal workforce immediately blocked. The populist right attributed this resistance to a “fourth branch” of government, but this is actually just the centre.
By FDR’s death the presidency had been reshaped to become a subsidiary with a regional power base (his voters) attempting to wrangle control of some of this invisible centre. But the centre became increasingly hard to locate as it was dispersed through countless agencies, NGOs, and elite foundations. What this populist wave achieved was that it briefly revealed the extent of this arrangement in both the US and the UK (as they struggled to agree to any meaningful form of Brexit).
By my definition, populism is a mobilization of the periphery by an actor outside the centre against the centre. It is always insurgent, and that is why it almost always fails. Jouvenel wrote that every great revolution ended not by destroying power but renovating it. The revolution accomplished centralizations the monarchy had attempted for centuries and failed. Populism can carry an actor toward the centre but it cannot occupy it as a whole movement. Thus, its most useful purpose is as a tool to make the centre spend its energy defending itself and act in the open. The second and more actionable goal is to build what a real centre would need––men of formation, institutions with their own loyalty, etc. Instead of waiting to occupy the centre we must prepare for the moment we seize power. For as Jouvenel writes:
“Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience.” (On Power, 116)
Populism is not useless, but it must not be misidentified as a lasting political force. And to properly wield it we must prepare for its consequences.
There really hasn’t been a lot of change since the days of Tiberius Gracchus