Western politics is trapped in a vicious cycle of technocratic rule and populist backlash. We seem fated to endlessly oscillate between the forces of establishment and insurgency, leaving our politics and everyday life ever more debased and degraded in the process. Neither technocrats nor populists offer a transformative political economy that can arrest decline, let alone bring about national renewal. American politics has reached the latest turning point in this cycle: the newly announced Trump-Vance ticket has all the rhetoric of radical change and none of the political capacity to deliver it, unless it ditches disruption in favour of building a novel “new deal”.
Populism at its best provides a corrective to the errors of 21st-century governance – the contempt for ordinary people, for democracy and for patriotism, as well as the failure to address rising economic inequality and social atomisation. Technocratic rule has left millions poorer and lonelier. But in power, populists have failed to improve living conditions. Donald Trump’s first presidential term was remarkable for the sheer inertia of the system dominated by the power nexus from Wall Street via the Pentagon to Silicon Valley. Some define this as an unholy alliance of big tech and big finance, but you could call it pluto-populism – the fusion of a reliance on plutocratic power with populist invocations of the “will of the people” that Trump’s 2016 campaign embodied.
Having promised to “drain the swamp”, he did confront the Deep State when it impeded him on a personal level. But that did not stop his administration from handing hefty tax cuts to America’s wealthiest. Nor from stacking the courts with anti-labour judges who rolled back workers’ rights even as big business made it harder for them to organise in trade unions. Trump’s trade and technology tariffs on China notwithstanding, manufacturing hardly recovered while wages barely rose. Radical regime change it was not.
Something similar goes for the Conservatives under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. In 2019 when they won a thumping majority, there was much talk about a new coalition of working-class voters in the Red Wall affixed to the middle-class voters in what became known as the Blue Wall. Johnson’s elite insurgency promised a realignment that would tack “left on the economy and right on culture”. But the Tories governed for years as liberals, not conservatives or radicals. The Conservative governments after 2019 were liberal on mass immigration and wedded to the Thatcherite-Blairite model of market fundamentalism propped up by the state. The Truss interlude followed by the Sunak restoration were just the latest examples. Their dogmatism was their downfall.
When making the case for their defence, populists will bemoan an elite pushback against their insurgency. Up to a point, they have a case: there is always establishment resistance to changing a system that serves its interests. But populists in power are mostly culture warriors whose denunciations of “wokeism” do nothing to materially improve the lives or livelihoods of their voters.
Worse, populist leaders and parties also fail to recognise that the roots of the culture wars lie to a large extent in a broken economic model that doesn’t work for millions of people. The point about “woke capitalism” is that it is as capitalist as it is politicised. It combines corporate crusades on progressive issues with the protection of monopolies in ways that fuse virtue signalling with naked self-interest. That is why the US economic establishment – Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, as well as Ivy League trustees and those in charge of the major sports leagues – supported the global protests against racism and funded Black Lives Matter. Yet the Trump Administration failed to take on monopoly capitalism that concentrates both wealth and power.
Nor have populists rolled back the professional-managerial class that pushes its own HR agenda of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, which in practice means little more than groupthink, to the exclusion of everyone who dares to disagree. Under the rule of Boris Johnson’s government in the UK, for instance, we have seen the heyday of a ruthless cancel culture whose victims included public intellectuals like the gender-critical feminist Kathleen Stock. (The irony of imposing a uniform view about everything in the name of EDI is lost on its advocates.)
After a decade or more of populists winning elections, it’s striking that their only alternative to the failed free-market dogma is effectively a model of state capitalism. Take Victor Orbán in Hungary, who uses his state power to do deals with Germany that involve paying vast subsidies and grants to the German automotive industry while importing cheaper foreign labour. And Orbán and his ilk have struggled to provide non-authoritarian answers to the break with liberalism that so many desire. Quite apart from losing the fundamental institutions that liberalism has advanced, such as an independent judiciary and a free press, they continue to perpetrate some of the most damaging aspects of liberalism.
It is therefore no surprise that Orbán seeks a rapprochement with Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China – not just for geopolitical reasons linked to Ukraine but also on geoeconomic grounds. China and Russia are able to be perfectly relaxed about the extension of the value of “choice” within the bounds of a private life that is ever-more rigorously policed. Accordingly, Chinese and Russian citizens enjoy ever-greater consumer freedoms while the state the deploys its own surveillance state-capitalism to control not only information but personal data too. The range of permitted commercial choice can be endlessly extended, so long as these choices are indifferent as far as the authoritarian state-market is concerned – an extreme intensification of the authoritarian market-state in the liberal West.
Since technocracy and populism fuel each other, Western politics will remain trapped until a governing party builds a new political economy that combines shared prosperity with greater social cohesion. This goes for Britain as it does everywhere else. Can Labour rise to this historic task?
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