Now that populism is on a roll, it has been recategorized as inevitable. Any idiot, apparently, could have seen it coming. If Nigel Farage is hammering Keir Starmer in the polls, if even the oligarchs are falling at Donald Trump’s feet, if one European center-right party after another is being eaten alive by its nearest evolutionary rival, that is only what you should expect. Condescend to the people whose votes you are demanding, and you’ll be punished. You simply cannot ignore the legitimate concerns of the electorate.Except when you can. Yes, the first lesson of the last decade is that mass immigration is unpopular enough to reshape politics. The second lesson is that grinding economic injustice is also wildly unpopular, and that politics can carry on regardless.
“Grinding economic injustice is also wildly unpopular.”
Voters for Farage’s Reform party are almost four times more likely to say that “big business has made life in Britain worse” as opposed to better. About three quarters agree that “big businesses in the UK take advantage of ordinary people” and that “Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth.” They are also far likelier than Tory voters to believe that “rich people in the UK are able to get around the law or get off more easily than poorer people.” Most would happily accept higher prices in return for prioritizing UK firms.
They are, in other words, a natural constituency for a firm but non-fanatical economic populism, tough on exploitation, extraction, and monopoly power. The median Reform voter doesn’t worship the state (though he would bring energy, water, and rail into public ownership); nor does he want to shrink it. On tax-and-spend, he couldn’t be more moderate. He just has a suspicion that the wealthy are getting away with murder.
But Reform’s leaders are instinctive Thatcherites, who still fall back on the language of tax cuts, spending reductions, “slashing red tape,” and backing “risk takers and wealth creators.” This month the Trades Union Congress interviewed voters in Farage’s seat, noting that he has voted against Labour’s expansion of workers’ rights. “Nigel?” asks one pensioner. “I thought he was working more for the public.” “That is a surprise,” says another constituent. “I did think he was more for the people,” says a mum pushing a pram.
You would. But populism is not, as people seem to imagine, just a channeling of popular emotion. Figures like Farage and Trump are—and no doubt they have their reasons—carefully selective. The electoral phenomenon of the last 10 years might be described as arrested populism. Populism, interrupted.
Immigration is the big vote-winner, yes, and the reason for the populist surge in last year’s European elections. But the voters in those elections were even more exercised about “poverty and the cost of living crisis and social exclusion.”
Trumpism, once upon a time, capitalized on resentment of the average Republican politician—“a libertarian zealot controlled by the banks, yammering on about entrepreneurship,” in Tucker Carlson’s words. Carlson’s electrifying 2019 video describing how a hedge fund “destroyed” an American town might have heralded a new era of popular journalism, and of right-wing politics. With all due respect to such Carlson episodes as “JFK Assassination Expert Reacts to Trump’s Effort to Declassify Files, and What You Should Expect,” it did not.
Part of the reason is generational. Farage, for instance, grew up in 1970s Britain, amid strikes, exchange controls and a post-war consensus of full employment. After becoming a commodities trader and reaping the rewards of financial deregulation, he joined the anti-EU movement and became the biggest troublemaker in Brussels. Of course he struggles to adapt to a world of disempowered workers, tech feudalism, rent extraction, asset inequality, Warren Buffett-funded monopolization, and governments begging BlackRock for investment. He makes the occasional intriguing gesture—Reform has proposed an “online delivery tax” on multinationals to fund tax breaks for small businesses—but no more than that.
Recently I attended ARC, a conference in London assembling much of the British right and not a little of the American right too. The big names, Farage included, tended towards the Reaganite. But every time a speaker dared to challenge the free market, they got a round of applause. The eloquent anti-capitalist Lord Glasman was visibly surprised by his warm reception: “You’re supposed to boo,” he told us.
At the nearby tube station you found yourself looking into the eyes of the ex-trader Gary Stevenson, whose recent bestseller, advertised on billboards everywhere, argues that finance and politics are geared towards increasing inequality. And no British political figure has sounded more commanding in recent years than Mick Lynch, the union leader who found a way to argue for “the rebalancing of our economy” on breakfast TV. Steve Bannon says that when he preaches his anti-monopoly, tax-the-rich message in “Denton, Texas, or places like that” he gets a standing ovation.
The anger is out there if the populists ever feel like tapping into it. All they need to do is break the habit of a lifetime.