Populism, part III: Magical thinking

Populists have an affinity for magical thinking.  They love repeating incantations, easy spells, chanted phrases and dramatic flourishes to deal with complex issues.  They like events, rallies, rambunctious crowds, patriotic slogans, pious gestures, repeated and predictable mantras.  They love symbols, and the idea that the success of the nation can be measured by voluble adherence to icons and utterances.  Caesar Augustus, when beset by uncomfortable events, ordered the doors of the temple of Janus in the Forum to be shut—because if they were closed, everyone would know there was peace in the empire.  The symbolic act was taken for truth.  Populists instinctively turn to symbols.  Hoisting a flag or singing a victory anthem is just like a victory.  The parading of symbols also makes it easier to identify internal enemies—those who have shown insufficient deference and loyalty to the rallying symbols.

Populists love simplicity, as do most human beings.  Their solutions to the problems they decry are simple and memorable soundbites.  “It’s easy, just build a wall!”  “I’ll solve it on my first day in office.”  But though the solutions are so beguilingly obvious, it seems no one can accomplish them but the self-appointed leader.  Perfectly easy, but entirely beyond the capacity of all except the chosen one.  Just get the right personality into office and everything else falls into place.  Hard work is for chumps.  Careful and self-critical thought is for losers.

Populism is a backlash against the complexity and time-consuming nature of political negotiation, not to mention the inevitable messiness of the human world.  Populists, being honest decent folk, do not understand why they don’t get their way (which happens to be the right way) more easily and often.  They don’t like being held hostage to complicated trade-offs (which is what a working democracy is inevitably about), or changing global conditions, or complex trading rules between countries that seem to imperil their safe and easy jobs at home.  They don’t like to think that people who have a fancy education or more nuanced thinking might be gaining advantage over them.  In many cases they are reacting against what they perceive as a loss in relative social status.  They blame this on rising and newly-empowered groups (minorities inside their borders, foreigners beyond) whom the perfidious elites are encouraging at the expense of the decent folk.  Populism inevitably arises when a comfortable and familiar way of doing things shows signs of vanishing, when the world gets just a bit more challenging.

And as populists prefer simplicity, they tend to linger in the realm of the superficial.  They prefer loud declarations, bombastic claims, extreme language, emotive slogans and symbolic actions.  Populist politicians avoid substantive issues, preferring easy wins and showy policies.  They need to boast their triumphs, even when this requires the distortion of publicly-available facts.  News must reflect their rhetorical requirements rather than the measurable state of the world.  After all, populists need above all else to be popular.  This means that they must avoid doing things that might prove unpopular—which is what governments that want meaningful improvements inevitably have to do.  So they focus on the easy things, the showy things.  They assume that declaring something to be true is the same as the declared outcome being accomplished, that the beneficial effects have come to pass (as long as it is the right person declaring it).  So populism tends to be long on rhetoric, short on measurable accomplishments.

And just as populists lean heavily on symbols, so also do they depend on distractions.  They must explain how they love their country above all others, yet hate the current state of its national affairs.  They must have an answer for why things have gone so terribly wrong of late.  They know it can’t be their fault and certainly don’t want to blame their loyal followers.  So it must be the work of perfidious insiders—corrupt elites, disloyal minorities, the lying media.  But if populists suddenly find themselves in office, the problem gets worse.  It turns out that governing is harder than it seems.  Extravagant promises do not easily turn into facts on the ground.  Yet this failure cannot be their fault either—since they are the well-meaning and patriotic heroes—nor that of their loyal voters.  So blamecasting becomes an essential skill.  Begin with the art of distraction politics.  Border invaders.  Deep state operatives.  Flag abusers.  Foreign donors.  Media fakers.  Deep state operatives.  Malicious courts and prosecutors.  These distractions will invariably contain moralistic elements.  Elections are never lost fairly, only stolen.  Protestors are not defenders of free speech but violent attackers of the righteous order.  To those wary of the claims of the populist politician, the issues seem ridiculous obsessions or trivial tokens.  But symbols matter, at least to human beings.  And populists have a keen understanding of popular psychology.  This focus on distracting headlines (and memorable memes) is not an accidental feature of populism.  It is the heart of populist strategy.  Successful populist politicians will find a small perceived outrage, give it a memorable label, blow it out of proportion, create a climate of fear, then suggest that this example is typical of the sort of opponents they’re up against, that it will only get worse if we don’t fight back now.  The danger of populism to society at large is that these distraction issues do their job too well, and draw attention away from real problems that are much harder to solve.  The real world is messy and difficult.  Governing is grueling, at best.  People don’t all agree on important issues, even those who love the same country.  Compromise, the essence of democracy, is frequently exhausting and disappointing.  No one will get everything they want.  That’s how you know it’s working.

Populists, as with conservatives generally, are obsessed with purity.  And since the real world of human beings is messy and full of conflict, they have no end of things to be obsessed about.  Purity, like simplicity, is a species of perfection.  The world is to be judged by its faithfulness to an ideal state of being.  Purists have little patience with ordinary human failings.  They are reluctant to admit any of their own.  So if something has gone wrong, it must be that an agent of the impure has meant it to go wrong.  Mistakes indicate a want of purity, and are thus unforgiveable.  A slow-working bureaucracy is a broken system.  Incremental improvements are scorned.  Institutions are slow and faceless entities, easy targets for populists.  If short of perfection, they should be torn down.  Whatever we put in their place will necessarily be better.  The rule of law?  Hasn’t worked to our advantage yet.  Might as well get rid of it, put justice into the hands of a trusted leader.  Then depend on him to do the right thing.  Personalities are much more relatable than rules and practices.  Which is to say that institutions don’t really matter.  Institutional practices are the inverse of magical thinking.  So populists tend to badmouth, undermine, then capture them—the civil bureaucracy, the armed forces, the universities, the judiciary, the media.  It is with the last two that they are usually most successful.

Populists tend to be obsessed with entrenched institutions, but especially with the media.  They don’t like a media that contradicts their expectations—anything that might objectively be called news.  They don’t merely wish to embody the voice of the people.  They are determined to control and direct that voice.  To succeed, they must capture a significant part of the media.  Journalism that merely reflects the messiness and complexity of civilized life is of little use to them.  Most populist regimes will try to silence mainstream media not immediately friendly to their message (which is any that values journalistic integrity and factual rigor), or to cast them as enemies of the people (a very useful role to have them play), or eventually to take direct control of media by way of friendly cronies or the administration itself.

Populism is almost never about the actual business of governing, which is boring and slow and unrewarding, at least when done well.  It is about entertainment, creating a good show.  And the easiest way to create a popular show is with spectacle.  Populist leaders love the spotlight, demand attention for its own sake.  The political realm offers them everything they desire—heroes, enemies, life-and-death struggles, dramatic soundbites.  Adulation above all.  Populist leaders are adulation junkies.  It should be easy to spot them.  In truth, it is.  Yet they keep showing up and forcing others to listen to them.  Not the same faces, but the same types.

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Why do they keep getting away with it, when they are easy to see through?  Why does populism work as well and as often as it does?  It works because it represents something that human beings want to be true.  Humans desperately want a world that is simple to understand and easy to fix.  They want a world of easily identifiable heroes and villains.  And human beings who want these things have predictable and exploitable bugs.

One of these bugs is the human tendency to confuse confidence with ability.  This may have been a survival advantage in our small ancestral tribal groups, where life was hard but fairly simple to understand and manage.  Everyone knew everyone else by name and reputation, and understood what they had to do to survive, so didn’t mind a leader that gave them a little extra confidence, especially when up against a rival tribe.  Charisma went a long way, and administrative competence was of little import.  In the modern realm of politics, survival is easy but society is distressingly hard.  Yet charisma still seems to precede all other qualities in the choosing of leaders.  Human beings still like champions who exhibit an unusual degree of self-confidence.  They favor candidates who are not only self-assured but unapologetic.  These are the ones who have no doubt of their own abilities, are confident that any failings belong to others.  And they have charisma to spare, to give away to their faithful, to carry others with them.  And so populist supporters likewise gain confidence, perhaps not in their own small selves, but in their safe and familiar prejudices, in their inherited ways of viewing the world.  They, like most of us, tend to be chauvinists—scornful of strangers, foreigners and unfamiliar cultures.  And they look for someone who says the things they have been waiting to be said aloud, yet with the confidence that the listeners have trouble finding in themselves.  And when their champion suddenly appears—just when they were about to give up hope—they are suddenly energized and vindicated.  These two very different types of self-confidence are mutually reinforcing.  And since the second kind—confidence in one’s familiar prejudices—is wide-spread in any population, there is no shortage of followers for the opportunistic populist voice.

This helps explain why populist voters are attracted to tough talk, to voices who admit no doubt, make no apologies.  It gives them cover to cast blame on others (the object of the tough talk) for their ills, and avoid responsibility for causing or fixing their own misfortunes.  If only we can stop the scheming of others, then all will be made right for us decent folk.  Why do we believe such facile solutions?  Because we’re just a bit lazy and prefer such explanations to reality.  They are a symptom of the human tendency to think that whatever happens to us must have meaning—that these things were deliberate, intended.  So we call routine suffering evil and cast its cause far from ourselves.  We might recognize that those others do such things too but we still want to think that we are different.  Human belief is much more about the things we wish were true than what can be objectively verified.  Populism understands this, if not in such clinical terms.  So it tries to simplify the political world for us, as will any politician that has to reach a large number of people.  One persistent form of oversimplification is the reduction of any public debate to sides (which allows the casting of politics into simple winner-take-all conflicts), and the assumption that these simple binaries represent a coherent view of society.  In truth, there are no two sides to any issue, rather a spectrum of opinions and commitments.  A healthy state of democracy will try to grapple with complexity.  Populism scorns complexity, refuses to settle.

So populists almost always frame ordinary democratic challenges in breathless, moralistic terms, using the language of right and wrong, winners and losers.  Democracy is something they believe must be won.  They begin by drawing attention to what their country has lost in the recent past.  They attract followers by summoning those who feel they have lost out—unfairly!—but promise that they will win again.  Soon.  They will win back their country, win back the democracy from those who have stolen it away.  The stakes are always apocalyptic.  Enemies will be stood up to, beaten, crushed, destroyed (populists love violent metaphors), but never negotiated with.  Populists think they are the will of the people, which is what democracy is to their minds.  But populism is not democracy.  Were it successful, it would be the end of meaningful democracy.  Populists will shrug at this.  They assume that their chosen leader is entirely in agreement with their demands and can be trusted to redress the gap.

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So what do the recent successes of populism tell us?  They tell us about ourselves.  They reveal the needs of voters, which are entirely human needs.  Citizens are easily bored with the hard work and exasperating tradeoffs of democracy.  They would rather be told that it can be easier than that.  And they would rather be entertained than put to work.  They don’t much mind being distracted from more substantial but slow-moving public debates.  More than this, they want to be part of something that matters, something larger than themselves.  Perhaps they would rather not have the trouble and uncertainty of generating meaning and exercising responsible leadership for themselves.  Thus they choose entertaining candidates who behave in ways they wish they could emulate if only they had the nerve.  They will choose those who make them feel important, listened to—in preference even to those who have proven effective at getting practical things done in a collaborative and inclusive manner.  Quiet competence is boring.

These desires are all understandable.  And entirely illusory.  Good government is never easy and requires patient consensus and institution building.  Authentic democracy is hard work.  It is often disappointing.  So why should we do it?  Because the alternatives are so very much worse.  The alternatives to democracy are corruption and inequality—and are you sure you would end up on the advantaged side?—or else brutal authoritarianism.

Experience shows that populist governments usually do not govern well, and frequently go down in disaster.  They seldom accomplish the things they promise (even assuming they were worth doing) and usually make everything else much worse.  But of course those who are most likely to be swayed by populist promises are the same sort who have little awareness of the history of such experiments, and may be willfully ignorant of the easy-to-discover failings of their own chosen leaders.  They always believe that this time will be different, and they are always wrong.  They are wrong because they misunderstand their own human nature and they misunderstand the fundamental character of a democratic society.

For the rest of us, we might consider putting together a checklist to find out if the politician we’re thinking of voting for is really a populist after all.  You would ask yourself if your candidate (or radio-personality) does one or more of the following: Do they lament the current state of politics or pine for a lost state of affairs?  Do they tell you that you’ve been cheated of something that is rightfully yours?  Do they pin the blame for these problems on others—perfidious insiders or foreigners?  Do they always spare you?  Do they promise that solving this wretched state of affairs will be easy, if only the right person is put in charge?  Do they resort to frequent name-calling, insults and personal attacks?  Do they make vague assertions without concern for well-supported and testable evidence?  Do they use a great many superlatives and exaggerations?  Do they know what hyperbole is?  Do they brag endlessly about their accomplishments and abilities?  Do they apologize for any of their own failings?

To answer these questions about a candidate who has captured your admiration may require a bit more soul-searching and self-honesty than you would like to put in.  And you may not be able to rely on your favored candidate for reliable evidence to support his own claims.  You’ll have to do the work using independent sources.  It’s part of being a grownup citizen.  And if your candidate checks some or all of the boxes above, then find someone else to vote for, even a boring one.  You may be tempted to ask yourself, surely things can’t get much worse than they are now?  But if you have the freedom and opportunity to ask such a question, then the answer is, yes they can.  Much worse.  So choose someone else, and learn to make better choices in time.  Or better yet, run for office yourself and find out what it takes.