24 12 february 2018emotional connection is a human fundamental. Donald
trump was liked, admired and trusted by a lot of people who
never read Breitbart but got his message, whole, after seeing
him for two minutes on tV.
here is where the havering politicians of our era, cramped
by risk-averse committee management, lose out to louder,
coarser opponents, whose fusion of cause and character
substitutes for campaign funds and feet on the ground. Word of
mouth is the best review, and populist insurgency uses this to
the full. if you say in public what other people are already say-
ing in private, your messaging is done for you. All you need to
do is sharpen the ideas into stinging sound bites. no further per-
suasion is required—only recognition of the core grievances.
Populist messages are quick out of the traps, off and running
before the mainstream politicians are up and about. the early
bird knows where the worms are. But two major disadvantages
come along too.
first, empathic simplicity is a campaign tool, not a plan
for governing. reforms are frequently complicated and slow;
political compromises must be brokered and navigated. All
this can be overlooked on the hustings but not in government. if
the pace of change is too slow or too imperceptible, disappoint-
ment can easily grow. the great populists of South Asia were all
haunted by disillusionment, including Solomon Bandaranaike,
the regional pioneer, and all were dead before their time. enthu-
siasm peaks around the point that a populist leader assumes
office; experience shows that it’s only ever downhill after that.
Secondly, populists in power are always hampered by their
lack of organisation. As insurgents, they vilify the existing
establishment which they claim has failed the people—only to
require its help on the morrow of their victory. the people may
have an indomitable will, unalienable rights and just demands,
but they don’t have a tool kit. What they want is change, and a
change of leadership is the most easily understandable political
change of them all.
T
here hAS ScArceLY ever been a successful populist
movement that did not have a charismatic leader. in
contemporary US politics, we can compare the consistent
failure of the tea Party over most of a decade, with its pale cadre
of moaners and wailers, and the trump bandwagon, which
rolled triumphantly into power within months.
this underscores the general point that successful popu-
lists are not usually ideologues. At best they are dreamers, at
worst opportunists or cynics. they create alluring visions of
a better day, but they usually neglect to supply details. this
is partly because details are never as inspiring as generalities,
and entrancement—catching the listener’s attention—is
more important than issuing orders or proffering detailed
explanations. ‘take Back control’ or ‘Make America great
Again’ are brilliant slogans, despite the fact that they have no
positive content and raise far more questions than they answer.
consider ‘garibi hatao’ or ‘roti, Kapda aur Makaan’. And this
mixture of optimism, inexperience and sly generality read-
ily combines in fatal ways. Sometimes things don’t change
enough—which will likely prove to be trump’s undoing—but
it is just as easy to go too far too fast, as was the case with Juan
Perón in post-war Argentina or hugo chávez more recently in
Venezuela. the goldilocks amount of progress is hard to define,
and always remains at the mercy of national and international
contingencies.
Most successful populists are rebels by natural disposition.
they have stood aside from the mainstream, cocking snooks at
the sincerity and competence of their incumbent opponents.
even when buoyed with fresh-found popularity, they must
eventually face a moment when their wish lists no longer pass
unexamined, as in the heated passion of a rally. this happened
to trump early on when his ill-drafted travel ban was struck
down in court, and it is happening in the UK at the moment,
particularly with regard to ireland, where ‘hard Brexit’ fantasies
are unravelling faster than a cardboard gearbox in a Jaguar.
Populist leaders end up marooned between dreams and
practicalities. they over-promise and under-deliver, if, that is,
they ever get nearer to power than a tV studio. But their core
message remains seductively simple: “You can trust me. i love
you and understand your concerns. others have abused the
power they held over you, but i will not.”
Populism is the cult of leadership, with the leader’s
character and outlook directly coupled to the life and health of
the nation—india becomes indira—while, impervious to any
irony, privileged voices—trump, farage, Le Pen, Moseley—
claim to speak for the common man. But scarcely any of the
charismatic pied pipers who claim to embody the nation ever
turn out to be gifted administrators or sober governors.
it is very difficult for populism to limit itself to a positive
agenda—it is driven by hidden negatives, implicit moral
dichotomies of good and bad. enemies of the leader and the
cause become irredeemable, and we can detect this in all
populist programmes. After the Brexit vote, the Daily Mail
actually called high court judges ‘enemies of the people’. Popu-
list causes tip into crisis and repression far too easily. Witness
Peron and chavez again, not to mention indira’s emergency.
trump is so much the classic populist that all the above
applies to him in full force. there is a sense of permanent
warfare just below the surface. how many headlines have we
seen that begin with ‘trump threatens...’? And he seems grimly
determined to personalise all his diplomatic dealings, from
his derision of Kim Jong-un to his refusal to come to London
because of ‘slights’ from British politicians.
Populism turns inexperience into a qualification for govern-
ment office, which virtually ensures that populist movements
will either fail in power, or tame themselves into something
less than they originally promise to be.
none of the South Asian populists transformed their societ-
ies to any appreciable degree. hitler’s 1,000-year reich only
lasted twelve years and left germany devastated and divided.
Meticulous research has shown that Mussolini didn’t eveno pe n e s say