Populism’s Pulse Today

We're delighted to have you, Frank. Thank you for being here. Thanks very much for inviting me. Joel, would you like to kick us off?

Because much of what you read on the right and the left is this force of sort of grassroots populism is proto-fascist or some sort of threat to Western civilization. Um, what's your counter to that?

And I think ultimately what they are really reacting to and the way they use populism is they know that uh there are there are movements afoot that are expressing a kind of democratic aspiration, uh, an aspiration for voice, an aspiration to be heard, to be taken seriously, to be part of the conversation.

And in my writing, in this book that's coming out, I make a distinction between the uh spirit of populism, which I think is a very positive thing, this uh this shift away from the old parties, this reaction against the legacy institutions, and populist uh parties that they call populist or populist politicians, some of who are good, some of them are not so good. You know, they like politicians in general. But what is really important for me is that um something very interesting has happened.

The old parties all over the West have unraveled. Even in the United States, the Democratic Party isn't like the Democratic Party was, and neither is the Republican Party. Same thing has happened in Europe, and as they've unraveled, there's a certain demand has been created for something that people can identify with that represents them. And I think that's really the movement.

That's that's that's what I call the populist moment, where suddenly, out of nowhere, you have these new movements emerging. So in England, which I know a little about, you have a situation where in six months the reform party, which barely existed, is now leading at the polls. And if there was an election today, they would form the government. And that's really quite incredible. In Portugal, you got the Chaga Party, which six years ago hardly existed.

Today, in the latest opinion polls, it's it's uh evenly it's it's got the same amount of uh support as all the leading parties. So it's it's likely to become the number one party in Portugal. And we're seeing this in many, many places. And um, in many respects, this is it's the movement that's important. And for me, for example, in America, what's important is not Trump, but the fact that there was a movement behind Trump that kind of led to his success. It was this uh movement from below.

about populism, are there two or three requisite uh forces or emerging precipitating events that occur that create a resurgence of populism in a place?

But I think the really important point that I would emphasize is that these movements, although they care about economic issues, what's distinct about them is it's a reaction to what people call the cultural turn of the 1970s. It's a reaction to the rise of identity politics, of environmentalist politics. It's a reaction to the way in which uh sort of uh the sense of nation and community became demonized, where people's place in the world was undermined.

And a lot of people have felt that their communities is now no longer regarded in any kind of positive way. And I think it's a cultural movement primarily. And what's very interesting here, if you look at the experience of the last 15-20 years, is that all the populist movements that are called left-wing, like Podemos, for example, in Spain, or the five-star movement in Italy, um, have disappeared, have lost their vitality.

And that's the reason why I think is because they were mainly interested in economic issues. They were mainly talking about the need for um wage distribution and better resource allocation. Whereas the parties that have stayed and have grown steadily uh have are determined principally by the fact that they have a very strong emphasis on a cultural revolution.

But with the unraveling of the legacy media and the rise of the social media, what you'll find is that um all of a sudden these newcomers could find a voice. And you could really see it step by step how the media, the new media, helped these new movements to kind of get off the ground, because it meant that for the first time the public could hear an alternative version of events, didn't have to simply listen to the oligarchical message anymore.

And that that made a huge difference because it meant that for the first time, a lot of people who couldn't find their voice, who censored themselves, suddenly heard that other people were thinking the way they were thinking. And when you have millions of people suddenly realizing that they're not on their own, and in fact they can say what they feel without the fear of being entirely ostracized, that creates a dynamic which was very important for the forward movement of these uh movements.

MAGA, they're A, uh you're right, they're they're not the poorest people. When you look at who actually watches the conservative media, there actually tend to be uh middle class, small property owners. That seems to be the group. Uh but the other big factor I think is, and this is maybe because I study demographics, uh areas where people have children are tend to be more uh populist in this cultural sense, uh, and areas where people don't have children.

Like, you know, for instance, you know, when you look at how a candidate like Mandami rises in New York, it's not a bunch of working class, you know, lunch bucket families. It's a bunch of you know, single, gay, childless people. Um is that the same in Europe? I mean, are these cities with uh having the same process where they have very low birth rates and middle class families leave so that the populace base is outside the the core of the metropolis?

Your neighbor becomes much more important than when you're a single person living in an atomized, fragmented uh uh environment in a big urban area. So that that is very much the case. Um and it's what's also interesting, I really noticed this. Uh I live in a small town called Favresham in Kent. And we became very, very famous recently because we it became the epicenter of the flagging movement. I don't know if you heard about it.

Basically, the flagging movement started off as a as a group of individuals reacting to the flag to the fact that people were making fun of the uh English flag, the flag of St. George and the Union flag as well, calling it racist and xenophobic. So they started putting up flags all over um all over England in a sense. And this went on, it kind of caught on like anything.

And in my town, um the the you know, it was very clear that the flaggers were all essentially what used to be called working people, working class people with children. And the people that were hostile, and they were very hostile to the flaggers, they called them racists, were essentially highly educated middle class people with very, very small families or no families at all.

And when we had a demonstration of these two groups, what was very funny, my wife and I just noticed is that the flaggers uh were carrying babies and had prams that they were pushing in that demonstration. Whereas on the other side, you had basically just a bunch of adults, you know, sort of uh reacting against it. It really kind of very, very interesting.

and the notion of time. So the question I have for you is do you view populism as kind of a long wave cyclical kind of a thing where you have moments where the trend is emerging and then it's peaking and then it's ebbing. And uh so is it cyclical? And if it is cyclical, where are we in the cycle?

The people that run society are lack that kind of self-consciousness. They lack the authority or the legitimacy that was the case in the at in the past. And one of the reasons why populism has really grown uh so fast is because of the loss of trust uh in the in elites all over the place.

You know, they go from one day it's environmentalism, it's the Green Deal, you know, next day it's gender politics, and they're kind of jumping around, trying to find uh some medium through which they can legitimate themselves. And I think that the situation is very, very different in that respect. And uh, we've never seen uh legacy parties fall apart in the way they are doing at the moment. You have to remember that the oldest political party in Europe is the Conservative Party in England.

I mean, that's that's the oldest one. Nobody ever imagined that that party would disintegrate. And that party barely exists now. I mean, you know, you have a bunch of you know politicians here and there, but when you go to and and you look at the membership, you know, who is joining them, you can see that this this party, which was an incredibly powerful party, you know, is now just kind of in in kind of irreversible decline.

For example, um, if you take someone like uh Mam Dani in New York, who's often put forward as this uh face of left-wing populism, I'm sure that if you scratch the surface and you look at his base and who is really supporting it, it's not it's not like uh the reform movement or or the uh uh Rassemblement National in France. It's not a working class base of support, it's essentially a middle class, you know, sort of grouping.

So it's it uh you know, they are, although they call it a populist, their uh sociological um sort of roots is very, very different. And and uh they are the kind of movements that typically typically become centrist in a very short period of time.

And so it seems to me that we're kind of in a frozen world where because we have these pockets of groups that are populist, that are dueling against each other, that there is no ability to get everybody together in some kind of institutional structure that actually works. So that the we've created structural inability to adapt to change because of so many different voices. Uh what do you think of that? Is that is that a reasonable way of interpreting this?

And then is that going to lead to some form of cataclysmic disintegration? Or is there some kind of way out of this?

Uh, and people have been discouraged from coming together by a number of devices, the way that the media has, you know, kind of uh disrupted the sense of watching the same TV programs or there being nationally identified uh moments where people come together. You know, like you know, I remember when as a kid growing up in Canada, everybody watched the Ed Sullivan show in, you know, sort of on Sunday night.

And there'd be like three, four things that everybody watched, that everybody talked about the next day. You know, so you had a common conversation on a whole number of levels. So we don't have any of that at the moment. We have a much more um you know, sort of divided society in that respect. And I think that it's precisely because people recognize that there's something wrong, uh, that that they are beginning to react in a, in a, in a, what I think is a very positive way.

One point I should emphasize is that our cultural elites, the political oligarchy, actually flatters society and thinks this is a good thing. And you know, they've actually turned uh diversity into this uh sacred value. So from their standpoint, diversity is a good in and of itself. And not realizing that what they've done is they've set in motion a dynamic where the more diversity you have, you know, the more it's become so difficult to speak the same language.

In Europe, is there anything like what we're seeing in this country, which is uh you know the rise of free press, the the uh uh the takeover of Paramount uh with and CBS by people who are more or less right of center or centrist at most? Um is there any pushback like that? Because I mean in Europe you have state-owned media, same thing in in Canada. I mean, who could who can compete with CBC or who can compete with Australian broadcasting?

Is there some counter-movement like we see here in the US on the cultural side?

is because of the growing population of the Reform Party and and uh uh uh uh the the cult of personality around Nigel Farage.

But GB News began, you know, and the guy that you know uh owns GB News also owns Unheard, for example, um, the same person is spent role as a contributor to Unheard.

So this it's happening, but at the same time, there's a very strident fight back against it. I mean, the attempt to close down discussion and close down competing media is frightening, particularly in Germany, where it's gone furthest in terms of just uh criminalizing uh attempts to give alternative views. So it is a very kind of interesting uh development.

And it's you know the future of Europe will depend upon the extent to which the media landscape can be transformed, like in the United States.

It's the one identity that has really become weak compared to other kinds of identities. So in terms of social and economic conflict, it exists in a very diffuse kind of a way. Uh we have we don't have any movements that got you know that have any long history, like in the past, you'd have a certain organic relationship to what has gone on beforehand.

And in many respects, you know, when you strip away the the uh the outward manifestation of what's happening, this is you know, this is a very new situation. You know, we've never had this before. You know, I mean, if you look at something like the MAGA movement, you know, I mean obviously it's it's it's very heterogeneous and it's dividing all the time, as most movements do. But when you have a situation where the movement becomes more important than the party, right?

So the movement becomes more important than the Republican Party, uh, then something fantastically interesting has occurred. And we have very similar developments in Europe where suddenly uh very new um uh sort of developments have kind of come to the surface. But what all of them have in common is that all none of these movements have yet found their role in the world. They're still in the process of becoming, they haven't got, for example, an ideology or a set of policies that is consistent.

And in the book that I that I've I've just wrote, the point that I make is that the one thing that binds them together, that's quite distinct, is that they all speak the language of common sense. Right? Um and that's very important because common sense is uh is looked down upon by academics and by intellectuals as being pure prejudice. But what's important about common sense are two things.

Number one is that people are finding that there are certain things that they take for granted that they want to preserve. So if you take for granted that there's a man and a woman, but there isn't millions of other genders, right? Then that it's important for you, that that that sensibility, the common sense tells you is protected. So there's a taken for granted side. But the other side that's important in common sense is the common, right?

The common, you know, that which kind of binds people together. And I think that's we're at that stage yet. It's a pre-ideological.

And the upper opposite trend is to try to protect that civilization, to almost re-civilize the world. And I think the populists are unconsciously moving in that kind of direction. That's what they're trying to do, is to hold on to certain values, not in a in a desperate, you know, entirely conservative way, just kind of hold on to it, but in a way that's appropriate for their own communities and for their own circumstances.

And I think that's what's really positive about this, what I call the populist moment, the populist spirit, is that it's encouraging people to take their roots seriously, their communities, the organic relationship to previous generations seriously. And I think that um that is our best hope, in a sense, our only hope in in the kind of world we live in.

that you're feeling as though this wet clay that still has not been molded one way or the other will end up being molded in a positive direction. Uh, and I hope that's that's kind of where you're coming out.

We're finding that in many parts of Europe, a lot of young people are moving away from the identity politicians and from environmentalists, moving towards uh uh at the moment what they call right wing, but it isn't really right wing, but they're trying to almost kind of find an alternative. Being subversive in their eyes is not being like being subversive in the 1960s, right? It's being subversive against a cultural lead uh that uh claims to be left-wing and radical.

Um, so it's a very interesting uh sort of period. And I wish myself that I was much, much younger so that you could kind of um play play a role in this in uh in a way that only young people can do.