It Just Won’t Go Away

American liberals and moderates are increasingly of the belief that Donald Trump and his populist mix of disgruntled blue collar workers, angry evangelicals and alt-right sympathizers are a short term phenomenon. Surely as Trump fails to deliver the kinds of seminal changes he promised, as the rich get much richer and those blue collar jobs continue to dry up and blow away, as evangelicals watch a profane-laced bully deal with his womanizing past, as environmental realities rip through farm states and coastal communities alike, populism and its brother Trumpism will lose all credibility, they believe. And while Mr. Trump might indeed be relegated to a single term, as the possibility of a shift of control in either of the two houses of Congress could well be the result of the November mid-terms, if recent history is any judge, populism will hang on like a bad case of herpes… for a very long time.

Modern polarization-driven populism, angry people watching their values and cultural/racial dominance while a younger, tech-savvy and globally-connected “majority of minorities” slowly takes their place at the helm of democracies the world over, is not going to dissipate anytime soon. Regardless of any seeming shift of power, those disenfranchised and displaced populist-millions are very like to continue to lose ground to the “rest.” They are hardly just going to fold their tents, put their tails between their legs, assuming that they do in fact lose political control, and go away. That they are well-armed here in the United States adds another ugly NRA-versus-gun-control dynamic that should give us all pause.

The war between Donald Trump and California is the symbolic epicenter of the American populist struggle today. Trump lost the state by 4.3 million votes in November. California is profoundly diversified, significantly reflective of that power shift Trump’s base fears and hates most, a region that is deeply reflective of that “majority of minorities’” values, with a powerful Latino influence up and down the entire state. Therein lie the 3 million “fraudulent undocumented voters” Trump tells the world that “illegally” cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. California is where those voters live. And California looks like what Trump’s base fears the United States could become.

If Europe is any metric for us, all those recently defeated populist movements are coming back in droves. Alt-right candidates are finding their way into parliaments where they were rejected just a few years ago. You can write that off as Malthusian overpopulation meets global warming meets battles for dwindling resources… or you can just look at the trends as reflective of society’s that just have not figured out how to take of the “casualties of change,” folks progress has simply left behind.

Italy’s Sylvio Berlusconi was a Machiavellian populist leader, like Trump a billionaire business tycoon with a notorious drive for the sexually inappropriate. Berlusconi controlled most of Italy’s broadcast media and, like Trump, loved insulting his opponents and taking outrageous stands on issues that resonated with those left behind in the massive tech-driven socio-economic changes that particularly devastated Italy’s working classes. His political clout seemed to be at an end in November of 2011. Convicted of corruption, Berlusconi was no longer allowed personally to run for political office, but his political leadership behind the scenes was the driving force behind Italy’s recent move-severely-to-the-right election, seizing on his nation’s rising antipathy for those migrant people of color escaping wars and famine in Africa and the Middle East.  Many had hoped that Berlusconi’s demise in 2011 was also the demise of destructive Italian populism.

“Less than seven years on, that hope is demolished. In last weekend’s elections, Berlusconi’s party made an unlikely comeback, taking enough of the vote to make him a kingmaker once again. Worse, during the years of his absence, his style of politics proliferated well beyond his party. In fact, two other populist movements eclipsed him this time: the far-right League, which combines his hostility to democratic institutions with a far more radical brand of xenophobia, and the ideologically amorphous Five Star Movement, which attacks the corruption of mainstream parties and promises a new form of democracy, but is itself run in a highly opaque manner. Between them, these populist movements took nearly two-thirds of the vote.

“Populism, it turns out, has staying power. As Berlusconi’s resurgence shows, the assumption that it somehow leaves the political stage when its most prominent practitioner is repudiated at the polls, or even punished in a court of law (as Berlusconi was), is wrong. The lesson applies outside Italy, too — and that matters for the battle against President Trump, the scandal-plagued billionaire whose brash political rhetoric against elites across the ideological spectrum resembles that of Berlusconi. Recent cases from Poland to Thailand demonstrate that populists often prove more resilient than expected. Even when they appear to be thoroughly discredited, populists can pull off surprising comebacks or pass the baton to relatives and political allies. Even when they lose elections, they can continue to sow chaos and instability. And even when a particular populist movement crumbles, other politicians can build on its success. If Americans want to defend not just against Trump’s attacks on institutions like the FBI and the Justice Department, but also against the larger danger to constitutional government he represents, we first need to understand how populism has survived — and even spread — in other countries.

“Poland is a good example. When the Law and Justice party under the leadership of twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski first took power in 2005, observers were alarmed by its extreme rhetoric and apparent hostility to the country’s core political institutions. But the government proved to be chaotic and ineffective. After losing its main coalition partner less than two years after taking office, the party had to face new elections — and was banished into opposition.

“For eight years, Poland went back to being relatively stable. Thanks to a highly competent government, the country barely suffered during the Great Recession. But many voters were frustrated with the prominent role that some former communists continued to play, afraid of rapid cultural change in a country long dominated by Catholicism and livid at a series of corruption scandals. In 2015, they gave Law and Justice another chance, and the party used it to full effect: Having learned from its previous mistakes, it has, this time around, proved much more effective both at delivering big handouts to its core supporters and in undermining democratic institutions. The party has given many Polish families a monthly subsidy of $150 per child, after the first one; turned Poland’s state broadcasters into purveyors of government propaganda; and crippled the independence of the country’s courts.” Washington Post, March 9^th.

As the Post suggests, you can see it in Thailand, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Austria, Denmark, Germany and Hungary. As well as the United States. Even as Marine Le Pen was soundly defeated by France’s Emmanuel Macron in the recent election, she continues to lead an effort to reconfigure her own party, even to the extent of ousting her own father (Jean-Marie) to make her platform more palatable to more voters. Her “far-right National Front definitively severed its ties to firebrand founder Jean-Marie Le Pen on Sunday [3/11], as the nationalist party completes a makeover designed to revive its fortunes after his daughter failed to win the presidency last year.

“Despite her troubles, Marine Le Pen was reelected to a new term as party president at a congress where she was the only candidate for the post. A new leadership structure and 100-member governing council were also named.

“The anti-immigrant party won a boost from a guest appearance at the congress Saturday [3/10] by former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon. He told National Front members that ‘history is on our side.’

“Party members approved new bylaws aimed at restructuring after internal divisions. One of the changes would abolish Jean-Marie Le Pen’s position of party president for life. The party tweeted that more than 79% of participants approved the new statutes… Jean-Marie Le Pen didn’t attend the congress.” Los Angeles Times, March 12^th. Populism has terrifying staying power, even if its ugly “tear it all down” mantra threatens the very people it purports to represent.

“[Why] do so many citizens give populists a second chance, even when their flaws are well-known? One answer has to do with the depth of disenchantment with democratic institutions that usually precedes the populists. Since some populists experience a meteoric rise, breaking onto the political scene suddenly, it is tempting to think of the causes of their success as ephemeral. Yet populists in virtually every country have exploited deep social divisions (such as fears about immigration in Europe) and long-standing economic frustrations (such as the vast differences in prosperity between town and country in Thailand). Since these underlying causes are rarely remedied after populists are deposed, it’s not surprising that the same kind of politics can live on.

“Another answer has to do with the way populists destroy the most basic rules and norms of the political system. Leaders’ willingness to signal that their adversaries are legitimate participants in the system, and to respect the sanctity of institutions instead of pressing their partisan advantage to the limit, is largely dependent on the premise that voters would punish them for such transgressions. Italians before Berlusconi and Americans before 2015 assumed that a candidate who attacked the independent judiciary or called for his opponent to be jailed could never garner mass support. Once a ruthless and talented political leader demonstrates that this assumption is mistaken, it becomes more tempting for future politicians to break norms with abandon.” Washington Post.

All the assumptions that modern democracies abhor demagogues have turned out to be false. And unless we address the legitimate complaints of all those “natives” who believe they have lost the political, cultural and economic battles, they will continue to press their populist goals, one way or another, to the detriment of everyone else. Increasingly angry. Increasingly desperate. Increasingly with less to lose. We can address these issues… or continue to watch diehard populists continue to try and tear down the whole structure they believe responsible for their fall from power.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the short-term “I won the last election” gloat from both sides of the aisle does not remotely result in a going-forward sustainable democratic government.