Within the last decade, a much-misunderstood political revolution has been gathering force across the Western world. It is not a coordinated or ideologically driven movement but, rather, a series of similar developments occurring in disparate countries that, taken together, constitute a profound shift in the political direction of the West. Commonly called “populism,” it also can be described as “nationalism,” or, in the view of some, “patriotism.” Its fundamental tenet is the principle of sovereignty, the idea that the direction and best interests of independent nation-states should be determined by the democratically elected leaders of those countries and not by external doctrines or supra-national organizations led by unelected officials who are essentially unknown to and unaccountable to the people whose destinies they seek to influence.
Some regard populism as alarming, even dangerous. Global elites and their media acolytes routinely denounce it as a “threat to democracy,” when, in fact, what they really fear is the “threat of democracy” and its capacity to independently exercise powers such as taxation, regulation and border controls that can be very inconvenient to multinational entities.
The political revolution that is populism is best seen as a direct reaction to an earlier economic revolution — “globalization” — which, despite the best intentions of its proponents, has over the past quarter-century greatly exacerbated the world’s problems of income inequality, class conflict and political polarization. In old-fashioned language, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. In terms of the globalization sweepstakes, populism is a revolt of the more numerous losers against the more powerful winners.
In the Academy Award-winning 1976 film “Network,” Peter Finch portrayed a frustrated television anchorman who leans out his office window and shouts, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That character could well be seen as the prototype for today’s populists.
Upon being elected president of the United States, Barack Obama famously stated that “Elections have consequences.” Populism has been principally empowered by elections. In smaller countries, such as Hungary, Poland and Sweden, elections have had smaller consequences; in larger countries such as Great Britain, the United States or Italy, elections have had larger consequences. What they all have in common, however, is that they have conferred significant governmental power upon leaders who were seriously committed to addressing the political, economic and cultural anxieties of the mainly working, middle-class voters who elected them.
Three rapidly occurring events propelled populism from being a marginal and regional phenomenon to becoming a central force in most Western countries.
The first was the bold decision by the European Union (EU) in 2015, inspired by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to open its borders to over 2 million migrants, principally refugees from the war-torn Middle East. This decision almost immediately generated controversy and disunity between the Mediterranean EU members, who bore the brunt of the financial and cultural impacts of this exodus, and those further north who did not.
The second event, in the following year, was the highly divisive Brexit election, in which the migration issue evidently made a significant difference in the unexpected and narrowly decided vote that ended Great Britain’s EU membership.
In the third event, just months after Brexit, illegal migration through America’s porous southern border became a significant issue in the divisive and narrowly decided election of Donald Trump as U.S. president.
Critics of globalization, such as Harvard economist Dani Rodrik and French demographer Christophe Guilluy, have demonstrated that its effects damage the world’s poorest nations in the same way that they damage the poorer classes of Western societies. In the past few years, the harms done to these vulnerable peoples, from economic blows to education deficits to food insecurity, have been magnified by the global pandemic and, more recently, the war in Ukraine.
Across the Western world, the political, economic and social trend lines are not encouraging. Perhaps most urgently, we need leaders who can transcend familiar, parochial concerns, acknowledge past policy errors, and demonstrate the strength and courage to mitigate the ills flowing from globalization and ameliorate its combustible conflict with populism. The time available for these daunting tasks is not limitless.
William Moloney is a Senior Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.