In this episode of Trigonology, we discuss the rise of National Populism and its relationship to the economic crash of 2008, and why it has grown in popularity in the past 15 years. We are joined by Professor Jeff Knorko, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck University in London, Eric Kaffman, the Spike columnist, and the author of What Women Want, Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism, Ella Whelan, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Kent, and Matt Goodwin, a Senior Fellow at Chatham House.
00:01:04.680But if you lean leftwards, you tend to say all of this is about economic scarcity, right?
00:01:10.100It's the old Marxist line that effectively anybody who votes for nationalist movements
00:01:14.680or movements that express unease about mass immigration,
00:01:17.440that they are driven by their worries over basically income, wages, and scarce economic goods.
00:01:26.960And usually an extension of that argument is that the people are being manipulated by ruthless elites in society,
00:01:35.000whether it's the media, whether it's these conspiratorial right-wingers trying to divide and rule.
00:01:42.180The evidence, I would argue, and certainly we argue in the book, is pretty overwhelming in pointing in a different direction,
00:01:48.680which is that if you think, for example, about some of the most successful national populists that we've had in the Western world
00:01:54.800coming in places like Switzerland, in Austria, the Netherlands, they broke through amid very low unemployment rates,
00:02:03.120some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, very strong growing economies.
00:02:06.760look at law and justice in Poland, really came into power on the back of a rapid economic
00:02:13.080expansion. Take Britain, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party first really broke through in
00:02:18.8202004 after 48 consecutive periods of growth. And then when we drill down to the individual level
00:02:25.000and we look at who's actually supporting these movements, and I'm sure we'll come back to it,
00:02:28.300they tend to be working full time, they tend to often be on not amazing wages, but standard,
00:02:33.980average wages. And so the unemployed, the kind of real losers of globalization in a sort of
00:02:42.060visceral sense, they are not generally providing the bulk of support to national populism. I mean,
00:02:48.140it's worth remembering even in the 1930s, many people on the left like that comparison at the
00:02:53.020moment. A lot of the unemployed and those who are out of work are actually voting for the communists,
00:02:57.560not for the national socialists. And national socialism, national populism are two very
00:03:03.500different movements. But the idea that the left pushes that this is all about economic scarcity,
00:03:09.680I'm afraid is not actually very convincing when you look at the evidence.
00:03:13.840One of the interesting points in the book is that one of the interesting facts you cite in the book
00:03:17.540is that Donald Trump voters had the average highest income of the three available candidates.
00:03:22.260So if you take Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, his voters actually had a higher
00:03:27.140average income than any of the other two. And I wanted to come back to the fact that you've been
00:03:32.420talking about this for a long time actually you've been predicting this unlike most people who
00:03:36.700predicted Brexit and Trump very confidently after it happened right you actually predicted it many
00:03:42.080years before you've been talking about this since like 2010 at least from what I've seen
00:03:45.920in interviewed with economists for example where you were talking actually about Anders Breivik I
00:03:50.200think in the context of this and that is not a time in which we were having these conversations
00:03:55.140at all so can you take us back through that period if it's not the economic crash that Francis asked
00:04:00.600you about what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years that has caused this movement to emerge
00:04:05.800in this way? Yeah, well, one of my pet frustrations about the public debate is that we focus on the
00:04:12.940short-term factors, right? And we're obsessed about what happens during campaigns. I mean,
00:04:18.100I just finished reading Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened? And I realized she still doesn't
00:04:22.340know what happened, largely because she's obsessed with what happened during that campaign period.
00:04:28.500Now, I would say actually if you look not at the last 10 to 15 years, but actually at the last 30 to 40 years, you can really see a number of deep currents begin to come forward and start to reshape democracies in the West quietly, but in a powerful way from below, creating the conditions that have allowed national populism today to get to the levels of support that we're seeing.
00:04:55.720And this is partly about a backlash to the rise of what you might call the new left in the 60s and the 70s, which pushed a very liberal agenda, the expansion of rights for minorities, the support, if not celebration, of mass immigration, the shift towards supranational institutions like the European Union.
00:05:17.500And in the 80s and the 90s, and particularly in countries like France and Austria, you began to see the beginnings of a backlash to that new liberal consensus.
00:05:28.360Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, who used to run on the slogan, Le Pen, the people, or the Austrian Freedom Party and Jörg Haider, an earlier generation of populists that we now tend to forget because we like to think everything is unique to our era.
00:05:43.400Jörg Haider used to say, I say what the people think, right?
00:05:47.880And it was that notion that he's tapping into a concern,
00:05:51.900particularly among an alliance of social conservatives that were often quite affluent
00:05:56.520and blue-collar workers who together felt very uncomfortable
00:06:02.140with both the scale and the pace of change that was happening within the broader nation.
00:06:07.400And that was partly about immigration.
00:06:08.900It was also about, in some countries, increasingly a political establishment that seemed to be holding the people in contempt, certainly neglecting them.
00:06:20.200And also increasingly, in more recent years, the specific issue of Islam in Europe and the refugee crisis that followed.
00:06:28.020So by the time you get to really the 90s or 2000s and you guys start going through things like 9-11, long before the financial crisis, you're beginning to see these movements actually reaching very high levels of support in some countries, joining national governments, often doing well in very prosperous, affluent areas, and really winning over low-skilled service workers, the self-employed blue-collar workers.
00:06:52.180So we talk a lot about the collapse of social democracy today. Actually, you can really trace that to the early to mid 2000s. And now the crisis kicked in and no one's saying the crisis isn't important because it is. It wasn't the underlying driver, but it did exacerbate a number of these emerging value conflicts in the West between kind of culturally liberal middle class professionals and those social conservatives and workers.
00:07:17.880And you begin to see this kind of gradual polarization within a lot of Western democracies.
00:07:24.300And I think what mattered in a big way was the national populists themselves also changed.
00:07:32.380They started to tone down white supremacism.
00:07:34.700They started to basically get a bit more in line with where public opinion really was on these issues.
00:07:40.820People like Gert Wilders started to say, well, let's be pro-LGBT, but also let's be anti-Islam at the same time.
00:07:47.880So you started to see these kind of curious innovations that we didn't really have before.
00:07:52.440And, of course, that then really brought together, you know, the public demand for a sort of a challenge to that liberal consensus with the sort of party supply, with these parties just being a bit more competent, a bit more articulate at how they're bringing these groups into the political system.
00:08:11.860And today where we are, you know, I think the interesting macro question at least is when you look at what's happening in the West.
00:08:17.680Does this signal that we are at the end of a period of great change and volatility,
00:08:22.020or does it instead signal that we are at the beginning of a new period of great change, fragmentation and polarisation?
00:08:29.240My view is that if you look at all the evidence,
00:08:31.760we are very much at the beginning of a new period of great change and volatility.
00:08:42.540When we talk about Brexit, the majority position is the one that's demonised.
00:08:47.040which is quite incredible in and of itself.
00:08:49.200So when you talk about most people think this,
00:08:51.280I think there's so many issues in which most people think something,
00:08:54.180and that is the position that is demonised,
00:08:56.380which is an incredible place to be in, isn't it?
00:08:58.120Yeah, but it shows how completely out of step
00:09:00.660the political establishment and, to a certain degree,
00:17:11.000I actually think we need to open up a conversation about white identity, first of all, and secondly, something I call the white tradition of national identity, and to do so in a fair-minded way.
00:17:23.120So there is a certain kind of toxicity around the subject of white group identity.
00:17:48.560So, for example, I don't think identifying as white or identifying as black or identifying as Hawaiian, you know, we have to look at these things differently.
00:17:57.180I mean, all of those identities can be abused.
00:18:00.040You can go, you can fixate and be extremist about it.
00:18:02.720But just if you think about the world,
00:18:05.92080% of the world's countries have an ethnic majority.
00:18:09.260Persians in Iran, it could be Tswana in Botswana,
00:23:07.080a year, now you think that's not obviously
00:23:08.940that's a big sum of money it could build hospitals and schools would the average punter recognize
00:23:13.360that year in year out i don't know you know but they've been quite successful in creating that
00:23:17.920sort of environment and that sense of fear well actually the stats show that about 70 percent of
00:23:22.640voters would happily sacrifice a chunk of their income yeah and for example reducing immigration
00:23:27.320yes yeah and then taking back well i mean the top thing in the lord ashcroft poll was was
00:23:31.780sovereignty wasn't it right self-determination in a pure sense but that is one thing right and i had
00:23:36.800this chat with the producer of the mash report chris stott who's a really good bloke and he you
00:23:41.260know we just we just accept it's the one thing like he doesn't understand you know and at least
00:23:46.520he's honest about it they just don't get it they just don't get it as a principle and you think
00:23:50.920you in a way you have to respect that there's two years on it if people don't understand sort of
00:23:55.820total the self-determination now they never will and i think that you know they'll say things oh
00:24:01.460but we do say i mean we don't because there's things that we can't do um as a country and i
00:24:06.200I think that immigration was interesting because, like, it's always perceived that if you was against freedom of movement, that's because you wanted really low immigration.
00:24:14.560It's not, for a lot of people, certainly myself, it wasn't that.
00:24:17.420It just seemed quite an absolutism, you know, freedom of movement in perpetuity for all time.
00:24:22.460You think that, you know, any nation state shouldn't be allowed to, you know, sort of appropriate their needs based on what was happening in their country at that point.
00:24:29.320I just thought it was strange that that was decided centrally, you know.
00:24:33.980And also, you know, when it comes to immigration,
00:24:35.880sometimes for a long time now in Britain,
00:24:38.000people have been able to, successive governments have been able to go,
00:24:41.200well, you know, it makes it a negative thing, doesn't it?
00:24:43.920We go, well, you know, the EU is better for us, freedom of movement,
00:24:46.820it's just one of those things that goes with the territory.
00:24:49.700Whereas if you actually take responsibility for the amount of migrants coming here,
00:24:53.460you actually have to sell it to the public in a positive way, you know?
00:24:56.300One of the reasons that the Windrush scandal had broad sort of sympathy from the public
00:25:00.160is that was how that was sold to the British people at the time.