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Political Populism
The year of the demagogue: how 2016 changed democracy
From Brexit to Donald Trump, this year has seen a thundering repudiation
of the status quo
Lionel Barber
On the morning of June 21, two days before the Brexit referendum, I met David
Cameron (http://next.ft.com/content/7e503fd6-37c4-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7)
in Downing Street. During a 25-minute conversation, the prime minister assured
me that everything would be all right on the night. I wasnt entirely convinced.
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In his memoir Present at the Creation (1969), Dean Acheson, a former US secretary
of state, describes how he and fellow Wise Men helped President Harry Truman
to build a new liberal, rule-based order after the second world war. It was founded
on institutions: the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the Nato alliance.
In 2016, as Trump dismissed Nato as obsolete and his consigliere Newt Gingrich
described Estonia as a suburb (http://next.ft.com/content/9bef31a4-aa57-11e6-a0
bb-97f42551dbf4) of St Petersburg, it felt at times as if we were present at the
destruction.
Acheson epitomised the East Coast establishment. He was a diplomat, lawyer and
scholar an expert, if you like. This year, the establishment was hammered, the
experts humbled. Most missed Brexit. Many declared a Trump victory impossible.
Michael Gove, a leading Brexiter, caught the public mood: People in this country
have had enough of experts.
'Trump won by attacking the Republican party as much as his Democratic opponent' Getty Images
Brexit and the Trump triumph mark a revolutionary moment. Not quite 1789 or
1989, but certainly a thundering repudiation of the status quo. Some detect echoes
of the 1930s, with Trump cast as an incipient fascist.
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It was a good year for strongmen: Vladimir Putin in Russia; Recep Tayyip Erdogan
in Turkey; Xi Jinping, now promoted to core leader in China. It was an even
better year for demagogues, the crowd-pleasers and rabble-rousers who feed on
emotions and prejudice. In the year of the demagogue, several vied for the lead
role: Nigel Farage, then Ukip leader, godfather of Brexit and Trump acolyte;
Rodrigo Duterte, a brutal newcomer to power, who pledged to slaughter millions of
drug addicts to clean up the Philippines; and Trump himself, who constantly
marvelled at the size of his crowds.
Yet the 1930s analogy is in many ways misplaced. We are nowhere near a Great
Depression. The US economy is approaching full employment. The pre-Brexit UK
economy has seen employment rise by just over two million since 2010. Credit is
flowing. Corporate profits are up. The trouble is that swaths of the population,
often those living outside the great cities, have little sense of the economic
recovery.
Real incomes in the UK have not grown for the past decade. In the US, 95 per cent
of households still had incomes last year that were below those in 2007, according
to the Economic Policy Institute think-tank. In Europe, unemployment in the
eurozone, especially in countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy, remains high. Yet
the wealth of the top one per cent (the privileged few, to borrow Theresa Mays
mantra) has continued to rise.
In political terms, Brexit and the Trump triumph highlight the decline of the party
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system and the end of the old left/right divide. The centre-left appears in terminal
decline. This month, Franois Hollande, whose approval rating hit a low of 4 per
cent, ruled out a second run for the Elyse. Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of
the opposition Labour party, had more to say about the death of Fidel Castro than
Britain departing the EU. Matteo Renzi (http://next.ft.com/content/8dd7a2c0-ba9
9-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080), the centre-left reformer in Italy, lost heavily in his
own referendum on constitutional reform and promptly resigned.
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'In the year of the demagogue, several vied for the lead role, including the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte'
AFP/Getty Images
Free trade has become ever harder to sell to a public worried about job security and
the competitive threat from developing countries. Trump denounced the Trans-
Pacific Partnership pact between the US and 11 Pacific Rim countries, and the
North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Hillary Clinton,
once a free trader, caved. No one countered that the US consumer, including many
Trump voters, bought cheap goods at Target and Walmart thanks to efficient global
supply chains and cheap labour in the developing world. Hostility to free trade was
a vote winner. Only last-minute arm-twisting of the Walloon regional government
in Belgium salvaged a Canada-EU trade pact seven years in the making.
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This explains the power of Trumps pledge to build a beautiful wall on the
Mexican border, and Theresa Mays conference jibe about politically correct
multiculturalism: If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of
nowhere. The party faithful in Birmingham cheered but cosmopolitan London,
home to hundreds of thousands of foreigners, including Mark Carney, the
Canadian governor of the Bank of England, was not amused.
The Brexit referendum exposed an economic gap between winners and losers of
globalisation; but also a cultural divide between those comfortable with the pace of
change, from technology to same-sex marriage, and those wanting to slow down
the clock and rediscover their roots in ethnicity, religion or nationality.
'Brexit and the Trump triumph highlight the decline of the party system' Getty Images
Leaves slogan in the Brexit campaign, Take Back Control, was simple and
brilliantly effective across classes and generations. Constitutionalists liked the idea
of regaining sovereignty from EU institutions. Everyone liked the idea of reclaiming
money from Brussels and diverting the savings to the NHS. Clamping down on
immigration was a vote-winner. No matter that these claims were deeply
misleading (as were Remains claims of imminent economic disaster in the event of
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In the UK, both Leave and Remain regularly lambasted the BBC, which tried to
remain neutral. Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford historian, warned presciently
about the risks of fairness bias. The danger was that the BBC, in seeking to
remain impartial, would fail to be informative, especially on complex economic
issues. You give equal airtime to unequal arguments, without daring to say that,
on this or that point, one side has more evidence, or a significantly larger body of
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The TV networks, especially Rupert Murdochs Fox News, gave Trump far more
airtime than other candidates. It may not be good for America, but its damn good
for CBS, quipped Les Moonves, head of the media group.
Yet Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate at a moment when Americans wanted
change not a continuation of the Obama presidency by other means or a return
to the Bush or Clinton dynasties. She had sky-high negative ratings, just like
Trump. She was not liked, she was not trusted, and she was evasive. Crooked
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In this respect, it is misleading to suggest that the typical Trump supporter was an
angry white man on opioids from West Virginia. Educated people voted for Trump.
Women voted for Trump. As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic, Trumps supporters
took him seriously but not literally. By contrast, liberals, including the media, took
Trump literally but not seriously. What this ignores is the damage the tycoon may
have inflicted on public trust in American democracy. He coarsened civic discourse.
He declared the political system corrupt. He even cast doubt on the legitimacy of
the election not once but twice, declining to confirm he would accept the result if he
lost.
In the late spring of 2016, I travelled to Houston, Texas, to have lunch with James
Baker (http://next.ft.com/content/59b6631c-27de-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89), a
former Treasury secretary, US secretary of state and White House chief of staff
under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. I asked him whether America could
survive a Trump presidency. We are a country of laws, limited by bureaucracy.
Presidents are not unilateral rulers, Baker replied.
This confidence in the power of democratic institutions will be tested in the coming
months. Trump wants to undo Obamas legacy and unleash the animal spirits of
American capitalism. The initial reaction in the stock market bordered on euphoric.
Foreign policy is the bigger risk. Trump wants to pursue an America First foreign
policy, renegotiating trade pacts and obliging allies to pay more for their collective
defence. His world is about money not values: America the selfish superpower (htt
p://next.ft.com/content/782381b6-ad91-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24), as Robert
Kagan has described it.
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The centre-left appears in terminal decline. Marine Le Pen hopes to triumph in next year's French
elections AFP/Getty Images
Trumps foreign policy, assuming action follows words, also leaves the door wide
open for the rising power of China. His abandonment of the TPP a geopolitical
building block as well as a trade pact has unsettled Japan and Pacific neighbours.
His anti-Mexican rhetoric has undermined the peso and left Latin Americans
wondering whether Beijing is a safer bet. Among the Baltic states and Scandinavia,
many are fretting about Natos defence guarantee in the face of Russian
aggrandisement under Putin.
For more than two centuries, the US has served as a beacon for democratic values
such as pluralism, tolerance and the rule of law. For the most part, it has been on
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the right side of history. In 2016, Americans for the first time voted into the White
House a man with no previous government or military experience. Like Brexit, it
was a high-risk gamble with utterly unpredictable consequences.
Trumps winner-takes-all approach and his lack of respect for minority rights
violates a cornerstone of democracy and free society, as set out in the 10th of the
Federalist Papers (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp) written by
James Madison, one of the founding fathers. His position mirrors the more
extreme Brexiter demands that the will of the people be respected at all costs.
Anyone who raises objections the media, the opposition or, indeed, the judiciary
risks being branded enemies of the people.
This is not merely populism run rampant. It is a denial of politics itself, which, as
the late scholar Bernard Crick reminds us, is the only alternative to government by
coercion and the tyranny of the majority.
Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print
more to distribute to others. The Financial Times Ltd.
Simon Kuper
Poor, white and no longer forgotten
Mainstream parties can win these voters back from
populism. But not by pretending their biggest
problem is immigration
The runners-up the former City trader is the face of the populist wave that led to the
Brexit vote
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