I've been musing on the rise of populism we seem to be witnessing, particularly in "western" society, and I believe it's worth pointing out there's something very simple at the base of it. Be it Brexit, Trump, the FN in France. Be it local, national or global. The basic premise of populism is this:
You can swap "group of people" for many things. Sometimes it's simply the next town or county. Sometimes it's along religious lines: see Donald Trump's simplistic but apparently popular, in the US at least, view on Muslims. Close to home, with Brexit, it shifts depending on who you talk to. For some people it's "Eastern Europeans", for some others you can swap it for "The European Parliament". But it's semantics really. There's a group of people who live somewhere else who are somehow causing all our problems. If we can cut all ties with that group of people, our problems will be more or less solvable, if not actually immediately solved. That's the crux of populism.
The problem with populism is it rarely leads to anything that improves the lives of people in the longer term. Nothing based in hate and anger can. The very idea that the problems of a group of people are entirely based on the behaviour of another group of people is almost never actually true, it's just a device for deflection.
Why do populist politicians feel the need to deflect? Well, two main reasons. On the one hand - as is the case for the Tories in the UK at the moment - it's convenient for hiding the all too real failings of their government. On the other hand - as is the case for totally populist parties simply clinging to a wave of anger, like UKIP in the UK - it stops people asking the real questions, it stops people noticing that behind the rhetoric there are no actual solutions. Keep them scared, keep them angry, stop them thinking.
So in reality, by and large, our problems are entirely of our own making and populism is powerless to do anything about them. It is simply a politician's way of leveraging anger against the mismanagement of institutions over an extended period, either to hide their own shortcomings or leapfrog legitimate politicians and gain power on the back of a stirred up population that's stopped asking "why?" and is simply screaming "change!"
It is my firm opinion, for example - and I believe the evidence supports me, not that anyone cared about the evidence, because you know, "we're tired of experts" - that Brexit is really a protest against successive failures by British governments. It has manifested in exiting the EU, but only because politicians have done what they do - they've cut the cord by deploying populism. On the government side, Brexit supporting Conservative politicians have ducked responsibility by seeding the narrative it's not their fault it's those damned Europeans. And on the purely populist side, the pro-Brexit politicians are cynically riding a wave to power (or so they hope).
It's a wonderful room of smoke and mirrors politicians can deploy to make everyone look the other way. It's the political equivalent of shouting "SQUIRREL!" and pointing out the window. New politicians love it, because it's a foot in the door. Seasoned veterans love it, because it makes everyone forget about all the stupid things they did, like selling off public housing, for example.
Anyway, I digress. While I was mulling this over, a wonderful example of populism popped into my head, which I think perfectly illustrates the politics of it. I lived in Finsbury Park, in the London Borough of Islington, for some years. It was just before local elections, early 2005 I believe, a time where people in my street (and every street around) were getting pretty fed up with a reasonably stagnant local government that wasn't achieving a fat lot.
One of the things Islington was (is?) struggling with was parking. Simple fact: there were (are?) more cars in Islington than parking places. There are a few things you could do:
You could continue with the status quo, parking is an elbows-out free-for-all, the "haves" get planning permission for driveways, the "have nots" who come home at the wrong time have to park a 20 minute walk away in another Borough. But people are already pissed off about the status quo, so that's not working...
You could tell people the hard truth, too many cars in the area, no actual need for most of them, we're going to have to legislate, if you don't need a car for work or medical reasons you have no actual right to park one - we just can't cope. But there's an election approaching, no thanks!
You could buy one of the many brown field development sites in the area and build an eight-storey car park. You could offer free parking to Borough residents and also to people who visit the Borough, as most will spend money with local businesses, whether it's buying a coffee before they jump on the Tube or buying dinner ingredients in a greengrocer before taking the car home. But that's going to be really expensive, plus they don't want to be seen to be encouraging cars in London.
Or, and call me cynical by all means, you can have a win-win by playing the populism card. If you can convince people that there are "others" who are stealing the parking, you can sell them the perfect populist solution - a parking permit scheme, to keep those "other people" from stealing our parking places. This is wonderful, if you're a short-termist politician worrying about immediate popularity and council coffers. With a parking permit scheme, you can:
The reason I would not support the scheme was pretty simple: I'd seen one implementation of a scheme like this already, it was a total con. There were actually very few "other people" parking in the district causing the parking problems. The real parking problem was, and actually is, that each house on each street in Finsbury Park has been divided up into at least four apartments, but each house has just one parking place in front of it. Simple maths, you have an average of way more than one car per street parking place because of this. So a permit scheme means, simply, the people will pay to not have a parking place, whereas before they didn't have a parking place for free. Win-win for local government, lose-lose for residents.
Except the residents didn't see it that way. A couple of things surprised me about the populism of the politics of parking permit schemes. Firstly, it transcended all traditional barriers of class, race, religion, wealth, people were aligned in generally broad support for the scheme. Secondly, it astounded me that no one was seemingly able to do the simple maths and understand they wouldn't be better off. They couldn't possibly be!
It was a populism masterclass. Do something that clearly will not help the people, but convince them it will help them by deftly convincing them the real problem is not that they have too many cars, but that people from other places are stealing their parking spaces. Even though it isn't true, people prefer to believe their woes are down to "the others", rather than question whether they really need their car, given they live in London and only drive it once every month or so, to go to Ikea.
It's mentally easier to blame another group of people who are strangers to you - others, foreigners, faceless people, whether they're just people who live in the next Borough, Polish plumbers or Syrian refugees - than it is to look inward and tackle the real problem.
And that is populism!
There's a group of people over there whose behaviour is causing our lives to be rubbish. If we do something about that group of people, our lives will be better.
You can swap "group of people" for many things. Sometimes it's simply the next town or county. Sometimes it's along religious lines: see Donald Trump's simplistic but apparently popular, in the US at least, view on Muslims. Close to home, with Brexit, it shifts depending on who you talk to. For some people it's "Eastern Europeans", for some others you can swap it for "The European Parliament". But it's semantics really. There's a group of people who live somewhere else who are somehow causing all our problems. If we can cut all ties with that group of people, our problems will be more or less solvable, if not actually immediately solved. That's the crux of populism.
The problem with populism is it rarely leads to anything that improves the lives of people in the longer term. Nothing based in hate and anger can. The very idea that the problems of a group of people are entirely based on the behaviour of another group of people is almost never actually true, it's just a device for deflection.
Why do populist politicians feel the need to deflect? Well, two main reasons. On the one hand - as is the case for the Tories in the UK at the moment - it's convenient for hiding the all too real failings of their government. On the other hand - as is the case for totally populist parties simply clinging to a wave of anger, like UKIP in the UK - it stops people asking the real questions, it stops people noticing that behind the rhetoric there are no actual solutions. Keep them scared, keep them angry, stop them thinking.
So in reality, by and large, our problems are entirely of our own making and populism is powerless to do anything about them. It is simply a politician's way of leveraging anger against the mismanagement of institutions over an extended period, either to hide their own shortcomings or leapfrog legitimate politicians and gain power on the back of a stirred up population that's stopped asking "why?" and is simply screaming "change!"
It is my firm opinion, for example - and I believe the evidence supports me, not that anyone cared about the evidence, because you know, "we're tired of experts" - that Brexit is really a protest against successive failures by British governments. It has manifested in exiting the EU, but only because politicians have done what they do - they've cut the cord by deploying populism. On the government side, Brexit supporting Conservative politicians have ducked responsibility by seeding the narrative it's not their fault it's those damned Europeans. And on the purely populist side, the pro-Brexit politicians are cynically riding a wave to power (or so they hope).
It's a wonderful room of smoke and mirrors politicians can deploy to make everyone look the other way. It's the political equivalent of shouting "SQUIRREL!" and pointing out the window. New politicians love it, because it's a foot in the door. Seasoned veterans love it, because it makes everyone forget about all the stupid things they did, like selling off public housing, for example.
Anyway, I digress. While I was mulling this over, a wonderful example of populism popped into my head, which I think perfectly illustrates the politics of it. I lived in Finsbury Park, in the London Borough of Islington, for some years. It was just before local elections, early 2005 I believe, a time where people in my street (and every street around) were getting pretty fed up with a reasonably stagnant local government that wasn't achieving a fat lot.
One of the things Islington was (is?) struggling with was parking. Simple fact: there were (are?) more cars in Islington than parking places. There are a few things you could do:
You could continue with the status quo, parking is an elbows-out free-for-all, the "haves" get planning permission for driveways, the "have nots" who come home at the wrong time have to park a 20 minute walk away in another Borough. But people are already pissed off about the status quo, so that's not working...
You could tell people the hard truth, too many cars in the area, no actual need for most of them, we're going to have to legislate, if you don't need a car for work or medical reasons you have no actual right to park one - we just can't cope. But there's an election approaching, no thanks!
You could buy one of the many brown field development sites in the area and build an eight-storey car park. You could offer free parking to Borough residents and also to people who visit the Borough, as most will spend money with local businesses, whether it's buying a coffee before they jump on the Tube or buying dinner ingredients in a greengrocer before taking the car home. But that's going to be really expensive, plus they don't want to be seen to be encouraging cars in London.
Or, and call me cynical by all means, you can have a win-win by playing the populism card. If you can convince people that there are "others" who are stealing the parking, you can sell them the perfect populist solution - a parking permit scheme, to keep those "other people" from stealing our parking places. This is wonderful, if you're a short-termist politician worrying about immediate popularity and council coffers. With a parking permit scheme, you can:
- Blame someone else for systemic problems;
- Dodge uncomfortable truths;
- Generate additional revenue; and
- Kick the can of the real problem down the road!
The reason I would not support the scheme was pretty simple: I'd seen one implementation of a scheme like this already, it was a total con. There were actually very few "other people" parking in the district causing the parking problems. The real parking problem was, and actually is, that each house on each street in Finsbury Park has been divided up into at least four apartments, but each house has just one parking place in front of it. Simple maths, you have an average of way more than one car per street parking place because of this. So a permit scheme means, simply, the people will pay to not have a parking place, whereas before they didn't have a parking place for free. Win-win for local government, lose-lose for residents.
Except the residents didn't see it that way. A couple of things surprised me about the populism of the politics of parking permit schemes. Firstly, it transcended all traditional barriers of class, race, religion, wealth, people were aligned in generally broad support for the scheme. Secondly, it astounded me that no one was seemingly able to do the simple maths and understand they wouldn't be better off. They couldn't possibly be!
It was a populism masterclass. Do something that clearly will not help the people, but convince them it will help them by deftly convincing them the real problem is not that they have too many cars, but that people from other places are stealing their parking spaces. Even though it isn't true, people prefer to believe their woes are down to "the others", rather than question whether they really need their car, given they live in London and only drive it once every month or so, to go to Ikea.
It's mentally easier to blame another group of people who are strangers to you - others, foreigners, faceless people, whether they're just people who live in the next Borough, Polish plumbers or Syrian refugees - than it is to look inward and tackle the real problem.
And that is populism!
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