Has populism won the cultural battle?
Politique & Société
Populism is a form of political rhetoric that divides society into a small elite and a homogeneous mass, casts the elite as deceiving the masses, and promises a savior who will quickly restore the people’s rightful interests. It traces grievances to short causal chains, typically by scapegoating a minority (immigrants, cultural minorities). Economists describe populism as myopic, favoring high discount rates on future benefits and offering simplistic, deceptive and ineffective solutions to complex problems.
Competing populist visions in western democracies
Populist rhetoric is a vessel without fixed content. Different political appeals fill it, and its victories or defeats depend on that content. Today there are distinct right- and left-wing populisms, fighting different “Culture Wars.”
Right-wing populism, most vocal in Western democracies, stresses national cultural homogeneity and a sharp boundary between natives and outsiders (aliens, migrants, and minorities), along with nostalgia for the paternalist family women under male authority, excluded from labor markets and fixed hierarchies that prioritize conformity over individual liberties. It is split on economics: favoring private property, low taxes, and limitations on state activity, yet defending welfare programs like pensions that mainly benefit older natives.
Left-wing populism instead emphasizes closing the gap between the “1” and everyone else, demanding high income and wealth taxes to fund universal services, basic incomes, and social housing. On governance, it calls for protecting distinct identities and communities through affirmative action in rights, jobs, and support.
Structural challenges beyond the reach of populist politics
Both right-wing and left-wing populism, however, have no answers to any of the critical challenges of 21st century Western democracies. These challenges are:
- Artificial Intelligence’s effects on work, corporate governance, and property rights;
- The demographic strain of raising children amid rising financial, time, and emotional demands;
- Social media’s atomizing effect on relationships, especially among the young;
- Climate change mitigation;
- The military threat of a new global “International of Autocrats” uniting Christian nationalist, Orthodox, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian regimes around paternalist gender hierarchies and the denial of civil liberties as building blocks of an authoritarian social order.
Neither left-wing nor right wing populisms have answers and strategies coping with any of these challenges or do not even recognize them as such, as is the case with right-wing populism and global climate change as well as the military threat of the new global International of Autocrats. Tackling the challenges runs directly against the grain of both left-wing and right-wing populist impulses:
- All challenges involve complex causal processes, whereas populists pretend that there are simple, short causal chains that resolve them, typically by scapegoating a social or economic group.
- All challenges entail long-term investments, whereas populists promise quick relief from grievances.
- All challenges (but possibly the demographic) require international cooperation and global solutions, while populists claim that grievances can be removed within national frameworks of policymaking.
- All challenges call for lateral negotiations among multiple stakeholders and cannot be resolved with simple majoritarian-plebiscitarian one-time collective decisions.
- All challenges necessitate the deployment of tremendous economic and social resources, but in an environment of slow economic growth and an already broad scope of state economic involvement. They will demand painful sacrifices from many social groups, whereas populists believe that the pain will be relieved by making a single group pay for relief (immigrants or business owners).
The Populist Paradox: Electoral Appeal and Governing Limitations
Populists thus cannot win the “culture wars” because they have no answers to pressing societal challenges. Nevertheless, populisms are the expression of actual material grievances and socio-cultural anxieties caused by the multiplicity of challenges. In this complex environment, liberal democratic political forces are unable to offer simple, quick and effective solutions to those grievances.
Western countries are thereby caught in the paradox of a weakened social liberalism, but also a failure of populist alternatives to impose their hegemony. Much hinges on how right-wing populist governance performs in practice, in Hungary and the United States especially, with Europe’s populist trajectory likely tied to America’s.