Stuck in the Populist Present
It’s clear how we got into it, but not at all clear how we break out
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In my recent thinking, teaching, and writing about the right, I’ve been arguing a point that’s somewhat new for me.
Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement—in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged.
I no longer look at it that way. As I argued in a New York Times op-ed published last month, taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly—one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War. This perspective led me to predict in the column that some form of right-wing populism (or “postliberalism”) would be with us going forward, with the comparatively moderate and internationalist center-right outlook of Reaganism unlikely to reemerge.
I’m not going to rehearse the whole argument here. Rather, I want to expand on it in light of some strong points Ross Douthat makes in his most recent newsletter for the Times. (That’s a gift link, so you’ll be able to read it even if you don’t subscribe to the paper or the newsletter.) It seems to me that Douthat is broadly right that, as his headline puts it, “The Liberal Order Can’t Heal Itself,” and therefore that right-wing populism is going to remain a major factor in our politics, and in the politics of liberal democracies around the world, no matter which Republican ends up on top in the scramble to succeed Donald Trump at the head of the GOP. That’s because there are big, structural reasons for the liberal decline and right-populist potency we see unfolding all around us. But it’s also because of the strange, self-reinforcing dynamics of populist politics as such.
Neoliberalism’s Encouraging Economic Report Card
Douthat begins with economics, arguing that centrist-liberal critics of left- and right-wing populism have a point: We do not live in an economic dystopia in which most people and communities have been immiserated or otherwise left behind by the neoliberal policies that began to prevail in the late 1970s, peaked in the 1990s, and began to be seriously challenged in the middle of the 2010s.
Yes, free-trade agreements, liberal immigration policies, tax cuts, and deregulation have produced pockets of stagnation, but at the aggregate level, we’ve enjoyed solid economic growth, job creation, and wage increases, despite the painful, extended, but still temporary dislocations of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. This is truer in the United States than in Europe, but it’s still the reality on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Of course, solid isn’t great. Would stronger growth, job creation, and wage increases have been preferable? Sure. But the purely economic record for the globalizing policies of the liberal center has been pretty strong overall—and there’s no reason to think any competing approach to economic policy during this period would have produced significantly better results.
Douthat makes this point in order to set up a different one: That “we have entered a world in which having a system that generates more growth than the available alternatives does not adequately address the challenges that are throwing the system into crisis.” Which means that “the crisis of liberalism and the rise of post-liberalism” need to be understood as arising from “problems that economic growth alone does not resolve.”
It’s not the economy, stupid. Or at least not simply the economy.
Non-Economic Sources of Difficulty and Discontent
What is it instead? Douthat points to three sources of deeper discontent.
First, there’s the return of great-power competition in international affairs, which turns the making of foreign and trade policy considerably more complicated than it appeared to be in a world where frictionless globalization was the presumed telos of historical development.
The liberal model of trade and exchange works best in a world of broadly shared values, where governments and peoples are all at least somewhat Lockean in their perspectives and desires. But if that world seems to be defunct or in retreat, then just insisting over and over again that global trade makes everyone richer can be an evasion of national responsibility. It’s a true-enough statement that doesn’t tell you what to do when some of the powers getting richer are using the wealth to prop up authoritarian and totalitarian systems, buy allies across the developing world, and underwrite wars and potential wars against their neighbors.
Second, there’s what Douthat calls “the social costs of liberal individualism.” He admits that this is just an updating of “an old reactionary critique of liberalism,” but that doesn’t make it wrong. Indeed, I’m never more inclined to endorse the reactionary right than in its diagnosis of how “what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie.” That doesn’t mean the reactionaries have anything close to a useful response to the problem of how we’ve ended up inhabiting a world that’s “richer and more technologically proficient,” as well as “seemingly unhappier, more despairing, more addicted, [and] more deranged.” But I agree with Douthat that there’s real value in acknowledging the reality of the problem—one that we have no reason to think can be addressed, let alone solved, by attempting to bring our polities into (even) closer alignment with prescriptions of “John Stuart Mill or Milton Friedman.”
Finally, there’s what I consider the biggest elephant in the room, which Douthat cogently summarizes as follows: “There is simply no obvious liberal answer, in economic policy or otherwise, to the confluence of wealth and technology and individualism leading to lower birthrates, which incentivizes mass migration to keep the economic system running, which leads to native resentment, ethno-religious separatism and roiling social conflict.”
That doesn’t mean any particular form of postliberalism on either the left or right is bound to banish liberalism in any decisive sense. So far, no postliberal configuration has come up with an adequately successful alternative response to these challenges, which is what, so far, has enabled repeated liberal comebacks. The question is whether these comebacks can ever consolidate into something longer-lasting—or if, instead, they always end up amounting to little more than temporary placeholders between repeated populist outbursts provoked by an intolerably sclerotic status quo.
Finding Reason Within the Maelstrom
This sense of indeterminateness or stuckness is what I find especially challenging, in intellectual terms, about the present era.
Trump really did manage to make some impressive gains in 2024 that pointed in the direction of a working-class realignment. But he may have already frittered a lot of that away with his administration’s malicious and shambolic performance over the past year. If so, we’d expect Democrats to do quite well in next year’s midterm elections, winning the House and maybe the Senate, too, and then to win back the presidency in 2028.
But do we have any reason to think that will settle things in any kind of long-lasting way? I don’t think so. Whether the Democrats act boldly or cautiously, the right will be waiting to pounce on every mistake or act of overreaching, the better to enhance its chances in 2030 and 2032. And what will have happened abroad in the meantime? Will the UK be led by Reform, France by the RN, and Germany by the AfD? Or will one or more of these right-populist parties have already gained and lost power by then, thereby setting up the next round of indeterminate outcomes?
Readers know that, like many liberals, I spend a good amount of time thinking about whether our fate lies in the direction of some form of authoritarianism. At other times, I worry about the country descending into widespread civil unrest. But it’s also possible we’re living through something less clearly defined: a growing incapacity to govern ourselves in any particular, consistent, productive way. Maybe that’s the sense in which this really is a populist era—no matter who we elevate to high office or the leadership of establishment institutions, we quickly become discontented with their performance and committed to booting them out and trying someone else, even if, in the case of Trump, that someone else is the exact same someone we booted out the last time.
Douthat makes this sound sort of reasonable, or at least a sincere response to real problems no one seems capable of addressing or solving in a serious way. There’s something worthwhile about such an exercise—an effort to discern reason at work within the maelstrom.
But it’s also possible something else is going on.
Interminable Indeterminate Negations
I’ve had several occasions down through the years to make reference to a little book I brought out at Penn Press in 2014 by the brilliant Bulgarian writer and intellectual Ivan Krastev. The book was called Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. It’s important for several reasons, but in retrospect mostly because it shows that Krastev noticed a distinctive trend very early, more than two years before the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign—namely, that democratic publics in a wide range of countries around the world had become deeply discontented with those running the show but had little sense of what they wanted as an alternative. To invoke Hegel, this was an expression of an indeterminate negation.
The problem with an indeterminate negation is that it undermines the possibility of dialectical progress. Rather than identifying a problem or mistake committed by the people in positions of authority, kicking them out, and elevating an alternative set of elites to course correct, we end up with, instead, one spasm of disgusted rejectionism followed by another, and then another, as if the very fact of being ruled by anyone at all who must make choices and trade-offs under conditions of constraint is itself a fatal flaw or defect demanding punishment.
Those on the populist right may well respond to this account by asking what I could possibly mean by this when the core problem of our time is that, actually, voters do want something in particular to happen—they want to halt immigration, but political and economic elites simply refuse to respond to this democratically legitimate demand. Even leaving aside Douthat’s valid point about the need for immigrants to make up economically and fiscally for shrinking native populations, the fact is that in most places public opinion isn’t close to unified in either direction on immigration.
That’s one reason why what we’re seeing over and over again in a range of countries is parties and politicians favoring immigration restrictionism gaining sufficient support to win pluralities over divided opposition but not enough to consolidate these victories into a new majority consensus. The second Trump administration is the exception that proves the rule in that the American president came within just two tenths of a percentage point of winning an actual majority for his anti-immigration agenda but has quickly frittered away that support by vastly overplaying his hand with gratuitous acts of cruelty and overreach.
So is our problem fickle and grumpy electorates? Or incompetent and malign officials?
I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the likely answer is: Both/and.
Round and Round We Go
Where does that leave us? In a mess, I’m afraid.
Parties and politicians of the liberal center, along with the institutions they’ve used to govern over the last several decades, are no longer trusted. But neither are those who win power when those centrist parties and politicians get booted out. That renewed discontent is enough to give some of those old parties and people a new lease on life—but only because they’re the only available alternative to the last, discredited set of officials. And so the cycle repeats: Populists ousting institutionalists, followed by the populists becoming a new and often even worse establishment that then gets ousted by the old institutionalists cosplaying as populists, who remain vulnerable to the old/new populists who have once again reverted to the electorally potent role of outsiders.
Who or what can stop the cycle? That’s the real $64,000 question.
Markets are imperfect, but they're less imperfect than command economies tend to be. For a few decades in the mid-20th century, the U.S. benefited from the fact that 1) our chief economic competitors were too war ravaged to compete against American industry, 2) the developing world hadn't yet supplanted American manufacturing, and 3) technology hadn't yet reached a stage at which human obsolescence seemed a threatening possibility. It was nice while it lasted- if you happened to be a white middle class American during that time- but it was never going to be more than a temporary array of essentially accidental circumstances. Neither the center left nor the center right have been able to effectively deal with the erosion of that temporary order of things, not because of a lack of brainpower or ideas but because of the pace of market and technological change combined with the short term pressures that tend to impede longer term strategic thinking within liberal democratic societies. So yeah, we'll keep stumbling along until the next largely accidental period of stability materializes, foe better or for worse.
"I’m never more inclined to endorse the reactionary right than in its diagnosis of how 'what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie.'"
Somewhere, Marx is smiling, however ruefully.