Populism, Good and Bad

European Diary: Aix-en-Provence

Aix-en-Provence, ‘the city of a thousand fountains,’ is one of the nicest and most pleasant cities in France, and indeed in the whole of Europe. It is quite old, founded in 123 BC, and in the Middle Ages it was the capital of the lovely region of Provence which only became a part of France proper in 1486. The centre is picturesque, with stately buildings, narrow streets and wide squares. The city’s brasseries and outdoors cafés were in late nineteenth century frequented by two famous residents, Paul Cézanne and Émila Zola, who were schoolmates, and subsequently by Ernest Hemingway and his friends. I have greatly enjoyed my numerous visits to Aix. In the second week of July 2024 I found myself yet again in the city, giving a talk at a summer school ably organised by Professor Pierre Garello, Professor of Economics at the University of Aix–Marseille, for two French think tanks, IES Europe and IREF. The theme of the summer school was ‘Restoring Freedom to Move Away from Chaos’. The speakers included French scholars Jean-Philippe Delsol, Nicolas Lecaussin, and Philippe Nemo, British writer Lord Syed Kamal, Argentinian economist Emilio Ocampo, American economist Nikolai Wenzel, and Swedish political theorist Nils Karlson. My talk was about the relevance of Nordic liberalism for this theme.

The Nordic Liberals

I argued that a strong liberal tradition existed in the Nordic countries, as Montesquieu had acknowledged when he wrote in the Spirit of the Law that the Scandinavian nations ‘have been the resource of liberty in Europe, which is to say of almost all there is of it today among men’. But the Nordic countries were successful despite social democracy, not because of it. The three pillars of Nordic success were a tradition of legal certainty, free trade, and social cohesion. These pillars were described by eminent Nordic thinkers. The thirteenth-century Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson, in his history of the Norwegian kings, clearly expressed the idea that kings were not above the law and could be deposed if they violated an implicit contract between them and their subjects and introduced legal uncertainty. The eighteenth-century Swedish pastor and politician Anders Chydenius argued for free trade and a largely self-regulating economy in a 1765 booklet, eleven years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. The nineteenth-century Danish pastor, poet and politician Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig supported the nation state which was for him mainly a venue for spontaneous cooperation in private schools, independent congregations, various clubs, and voluntary associations: it was this that created social cohesion, in a long and slow process.

Immigration and Federalism

In my talk I also discussed the limitations of two venerable liberal ideas, about the free flow of people across borders and federalism. As Friedrich von Hayek pointed out in the Constitution of Liberty, unlimited immigration might lead to resentment and conflicts. There was no problem if a Pole went to England in search of employment, or an Icelander to Denmark. But if people came to Europe from different cultures where violence was not rejected, hard work was not respected, and women and minority groups were oppressed, there might be trouble, as there indeed has been. The second liberal idea, federalism, was certainly desirable if it meant economic integration, an extended free market. But ‘political integration’ was often just a euphemism for centralisation. It was time, I said, to revive the Subsidiarity Principle—that decisions should be taken as close as possible to those whom they affect—which was supposed to be the basis of European law, but which has been disregarded by European institutions such as the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The dream of a European superpower, the United States of Europe, should be abandoned, and replaced by Europe of the nation states. A possible model was the Nordic Council which was a forum for legal integration and political cooperation with only a minimal surrender of sovereignty.

Good Populism

Lively discussions followed the talks at the summer school. When my good friend Nils Karlson argued against populism, about which he has recently published a book, and contrasted it with liberalism, I made some sceptical remarks. What is populism? In the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, it is defined as ‘a type of politics that claims to represent the opinions and wishes of ordinary people’. I cannot see anything wrong with that, at least not in a liberal democracy. Indeed, a distinction could be made between good and bad populism. For example, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were both populists in the good sense: they wanted to restrain the entrenched elites of Washingon DC and London and transfer power from them to ordinary people, taxpayers, consumers and voters. They both interchangeably used the language of hope and fear. They held out the hope for material improvement through economic growth, and they appealed to fear, Reagan of the communist ‘evil empire’, Thatcher of bullying trade union leaders. They were both adroit political entrepreneurs, identifying and organising interest groups which could support them. A case in point was Thatcher’s sale of council houses which created for her a political constituency. This was populism but there was nothing wrong with turning irresponsible tenants into responsible owners (although of course the pricing implemented must not significantly distort the market for housing). Another example would be if government enterprises were privatised by keeping the price of shares in them so low that the buyers (who should be as many as possible) would almost certainly make a gain. Thus, yet another political constituency would be created. Why should the devil have all the best tunes?

Bad Populism

All politicians have to some extent to be populists if they are to keep their jobs. What liberal thinkers have to do is to design policies where the self-interest of voting groups coincide with the public interest. They can only at their own peril ignore ‘the opinions and wishes of ordinary people’, to use the words of the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. But Karlson is surely right that bad populism also exists: when demagogues, in order to get votes, promote those special interests which blatantly go against the public interest, such as protectionism instead of free trade, and when they try to stir up hatred for ‘the others’, the rich according to the far Left, and Jews, or Muslims, according to the far Right (while, amazingly, the far Left has now actually joined the far Right in its anti-semitism). The archetypal populists in this sense might seem to be Lenin and Hitler. In order to gain and keep power in Russia, Lenin promised the peasants land and peace. Hitler promised the Germans that he would renounce the Versailles Treaty, widely seen as being unjust, and he portrayed the Jews as malevolent and dangerous (as he may himself have believed them to be). But perhaps Lenin and Hitler do not really qualify as populists because their ulterior aim was not to give people what the people wanted, but rather what they themselves wanted. Lenin did not really want the peasants to own land, and he desired a world revolution which certainly would not have been peaceful. Hitler also hid his real goals from German voters, in particular the elimination of the Jews.

Demagoguery

The populism Karlson discusses and criticises is much less dramatic than that of Lenin and Hitler. It is basically demagoguery, the anti-immigration and anti-elitism rhetoric which Karlson ascribes to political parties such as Fidesz in Hungary, the National Rally in France, UKIP in Great Britain, AFD in Germany, the Progress Party in Norway, the People’s Party in Denmark, the Swedish Democrats and Trump’s Republican Party. Karlson may be right in many of his strictures against those parties and their leaders, but some of them have however perceived four important truths. I had already mentioned two of them in my talk in Aix. One is that many voters will not accept mass immigration from cultures that do not share the Western emphasis on human rights, gender equality, toleration, self-reliance and hard work. The second truth, relevant to the member states of the European Union, is likewise that many voters will not accept the increasing EU centralisation. A third truth is that the general argument for free trade may be cogent, and in my opinion correct, but that it may not fully apply to China under the communists. It seems to me, as it does to Scottish historian Niall Ferguson and many other scholars, that the Chinese communists are conducting a cold war against the West. They are also engaged in unfair trade practices. The fourth truth is that many voters will not accept the absurdities of cancel culture and rampant wokeism in Western universities and the media.

Those four truths are about what voters will in fact accept. Of course we should make a distinction between this and what is morally defensible. But perhaps ‘ordinary people’ are right on those four issues, not the elites in London, Brussels, and Washington DC.