When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
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The populist in government has the same status. No sooner has he ejected the hated elite than the populist’s entourage become the elite themselves. He glosses the shift by posing as the tribune of the people. No need for a manifesto: he simply intuits the general will. Populism is a movement with no ideological content beyond its resentment of an elite. It therefore requires a charismatic leader – lately a Trump, a Chávez, an Erdoğan – to glue it together. The movement gathers around the leader as if around a maypole. Its name proclaims allegiance to the people, but in fact populism requires the people to swear allegiance to the leader. The bargain rests on the populist knowing everything, but, of course, the truth is that he knows almost nothing. The populist has a utopian account of political change, which is to say no account at all.
It is no accident that populists such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alexis Tsiprias in Greece have proved to be so hopeless in office. The failure is baked into their arrogance about how easy it will be. President Trump believes that politics is usefully analogous to his dreary and ghostwritten business manual The Art of the Deal. This is not an analogy; it is a fantasy. The populist, devoid of politics, impatient with gathering allies, is bound to fail the test of administrative competence. Gratifyingly for him, the populist can invoke an easy escape clause. He can write off his failure as the conspiracy of the elite class which gave him his energy in the first place. The fact that he can offer no evidence for this absurd proposition only goes to show how clever a conspiracy it really is. Truth is always a casualty of populism.
It is not, alas, the only casualty. The foundation myth of populism – that the true way has been corrupted – means that the populist has to find a scapegoat. In the utopian literature, the leader is constantly marching backwards into battle. The safest refuge from the corrupt present is the blessed past. The promise to turn back the clock is a recurrent motif in utopia. In the Garden of Eden, in Hesiod’s golden age before the decline, the bliss in Atlantis or Virgil’s Kingdom of Saturn, in which all things are good, utopia is sadly discovered to be a paradise lost. The populist has nothing interesting to say about the future. He sets himself against progress and so is projected headlong into the past. Populism is a promise to return to popular wisdom before it was corroded by the Enemy.
This is not ‘the people’ as it is invoked by Lincoln. It is a Gemeinschaft, the binding of a community against outsiders, in a return to a bygone golden age. The outsiders in question are, in every instance of populism, the elite, but they are also often the immigrant. These days, specifically, the Muslim or the Jew, but also sometimes the non-national. The words of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are all designed to bind a nation together. Populist politics, by contrast, needs to construct internal enemies as detached from the people. President Trump has proposed the deportation of undocumented immigrants and wants a wall to keep out the Mexicans. In Holland Geert Wilders wants to repeal hate-speech legislation. In Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński sought to make the use of the term ‘Polish death camps’ illegal.
As the incarnation of truth, the populist is a stranger to the doubts and humility that find expression in the speeches in this chapter. His utopia has none of the pluralism of a liberal democracy. The truth is no longer the upshot of open exchanges among free people; facts are what the populist leader says they are. Karl Popper has cited the Funeral Oration of Pericles as the moment that men began to glimpse the possibilities of an open society. The populist dismisses all that discussion as a waste of time and energy. Better to get things done with his prowess at embodying the popular will.
To live in utopia is to be amidst perfection already achieved. Nothing develops and nobody can change their mind. The populist stands at the top of this chain of certainty, a position, as William Blake said, ‘like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind’. Disenchantment is inevitable, and when it sets in it can be vicious. Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are images of how fatally the vigorous energy can turn to vice. It is never long before the leader tires of the constraints that are built into the constitutional apparatus. It was, after all, the paraphernalia of politics that he believes he was chosen to change. The tiresome mechanisms that we see Jefferson applauding are merely impediments to the populist. He is therefore bound to attack the free press, minority rights and judicial oversight as institutions that are seeking to defy the will of the people.
The era of populism sets the political leaders against their own constitutions. The purpose of political arrangements, most evidently the American constitution, is to curtail power. Politics is the wisest solution to the fact that men cannot always be trusted. It is founded on realism about fallen humans rather than utopian optimism. The balance between elements of the constitution, which Cicero set out and which were borrowed for the drafting of America’s, are designed to hold populist power in check.
Most of the time the constitution holds. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and the Kaczyńskis in Poland have tried largely in vain to undermine other sources of power. It is probable that President Trump will be frustrated by the absence of executive power that, following the liberal principles of Locke and Montesquieu, was deliberately built into his office. Yet we cannot always be so sanguine. Orbán in Hungary, Chávez in Venezuela and Erdoğan in Turkey have rewritten their constitutions to erase the inheritance from liberal democracy. Since the failed coup against Erdoğan in 2016, broadcasters, newspapers and magazines have been shut down and journalists detained. The public realm is now severely censored. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has done as he pleases regardless of constitutional propriety. Institutions that demand neutrality, such as judicial appointments, have been made partisan. The writ of law has been invaded by ideological correctness. The media has been silenced. It is dangerous, and sometimes fatal, for Russian journalists to pry too closely into sensitive subjects such as corruption and organised crime.
Populism begins with recriminations about the governing elite and, to use Donald Trump’s extraordinary allegation, their ‘criminal enterprise’. It ends with recriminations about the constitution. All the while it claims to have special knowledge of the will of the people. It is a fraud from start to finish. Plato hated democracy because he thought it led to populist rulers. There is a risk, if we do not find the words to advertise the virtues of conventional politics, that Plato’s anguished prediction will be proved right. The task for the responsible democrat is therefore to describe what has gone awry and find words for a better future, like the wonderful writing in Jefferson’s 1801 Inaugural Address and the compressed poetic expression of Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg. The solution to disenchanted politics cannot be populism. It has to be better, more enchanted politics.
The Principle of Hope
Enchantment in politics does not mean a sweet lyric coating applied to toxic words. The case for popular power has to be rooted in the capacity of liberal democracies to respond to the three concurrent crises of prosperity, fear and confidence.
The first emotion that needs to be summoned is defiance. Democracy is the great philosophical success story of modern times. There were no democracies anywhere in 1799. Throughout the nineteenth century more than a third of the world’s population lived in countries ruled by imperial powers and almost everyone else lived in countries governed by despots, not many of them enlightened. The first wave of democracy was crushed, in the midst of economic failure, by the malignant populists of the 1930s. The second half of the twentieth century saw the great flourishing. Empires, notably the vast terrain of the Soviet Union, ran out of time. The share of the world’s population that lived under democracy grew quickly. In 1989 41 per cent of the nations on earth were soi-disant democracies. In 2015 it was 64 per cent. Now more than every second person lives in a democracy.
The reason for this is that politics can offer valid answers to the crises of prosperity, fear and confidence. We will see in chapters to come that the liberal democracies have a vastly superior performance in generating prosperity to any of their rivals. We shall see that democracies are very much the safest regimes in which to live. Voltaire said that heaven has given