During the dreary England-Andorra match yesterday, English football lovers were singing, to the tune of a popular song I’ve never heard, “Starmer is a c***, Starmer is a w*****!”
Since Sir Keir couldn’t be held personally responsible for England’s woeful performance on the pitch, one has to infer that the fans were venting their dissatisfaction with Labour’s woeful performance in government.
One has to praise the political acumen of our footie-loving masses, free as they seem to be from any partisan bias. Just a few months ago, the very same people were chanting “Tories out!” with the same gusto – and with the same justification.
Throughout the West, similar sentiments are echoed in reference to the mainstream parties taking turns in office. All of them fall short of people’s expectations; none of them seems fit to govern. Electorates are more and more willing to vote for someone different, which increasingly means anyone different.
This explains the rise of what is usually called populism, although the term is a misnomer. The trouble with mainstream parties isn’t that they aren’t populist, but that they are, albeit in less direct ways.
One of our greatest political minds, Edmund Burke, outlined what he saw as a proper democracy, but what was in fact a proper republic. He defined the role of parliamentarians as that of people’s representatives, not their delegates.
Elected officials, wrote Burke, should act according to people’s interests, not people’s wishes. When the two diverged, people’s wishes had to be ignored because they couldn’t always be careful what they wished for.
Burke, of course, lived in the second half of the 18th century, and he fashioned his ideas out of the political fabric available to him. In those days, Britain and most other Western countries were governed by people trained for statesmanship from their cradle. They had a clear idea where the people’s interests lay and how best to serve them.
This doesn’t mean they were always right, far from it. In this world we aren’t blessed with perfection of any kind, only with some approximations thereof. And one doesn’t have to go beyond common sense to accept that intensive and extensive training helps in all sorts of fields of endeavour. And the more complex the field, the more it helps.
That situation has changed. Burke’s wise prescriptions have fallen by the wayside, as has the blueprint he drew for a constitutional (in Britain, monarchic) republic. Once modernity was ushered into history, different ideas took hold – this irrespective of the best-laid plans of the usherers.
In 1806, John Adams, America’s second president, wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.” It didn’t take long, did it? What was in fact Burke’s notion of government was ousted so fast, in just one generation, that one has to think that a button had been pushed for a list of ineluctable begets.
The republican idea can’t coexist with the egalitarian Enlightenment ethos built around the unchallengeable advancement of the common man endowed with inalienable rights. These are bound to be understood sooner or later as the equal rights not just of human beings but also of political beings.
The egalitarian ethos clashes with the republican idea and, since numbers are on its side, wins. Defying Burke’s prescriptions, people’s representatives gradually become people’s delegates, catering to people’s wishes rather than serving their interests.
A new dominant political type evolves, the demagogue driven to assuage his powerlust by telling people not what they should know but what they want to hear. His own hold on power depends on how many people his empty phrases and promises can sway, or rather swindle because little he says bears any resemblance to reality.
Modern politicians’ power depends on how many deadly sins and their derivatives they expiate and glorify. Pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, wrath – take your pick, although you don’t have to. They can all work together as mechanisms sustaining political power.
In that sense, all modern Western politicians are populist. If they weren’t, they would be drummed out of politics. Yet the term is reserved for a particular sub-group within that group, one that steers clear of the mainstream.
The difference is purely tactical: mainstream politicians operate from the base of traditional, if debauched, institutions. ‘Populist’ politicians, on the other hand, go over the head of such institutions to sweettalk the masses without any institutional mediation.
Those politicians are usually described as populist right-wingers, but the adjective is more correct than the noun. Political terms and words in general these days mean whatever we want them to mean but, if we try to introduce some semantic rigour, such politicians aren’t right-wing.
From its inception in the days of the French Revolution, the term has been more or less synonymous with ‘conservatism’, an attempt to retain some core civilisational values in a rapidly evolving world. If we agree on this definition, then I struggle to name a single right-winger or conservative among today’s populist politicians.
This stands to reason for the populace they try to mollycoddle doesn’t want conservative civilisational values. Such values steer people away from the deadly sins they hold dear. They feel entitled to those sins and expect politicians to honour that sense of entitlement.
For example, if we accept Weber’s view of the Protestant work ethic as the propellant of economic prosperity, then there isn’t a single Western politician acting in that spirit. The constituents of that ethic are hard work and thrift, and both are too far outside the cardinal sins for today’s governments to countenance.
Which ‘right-wing populist’ politicians do battle for fiscal conservatism, which is the political expression of the Protestant (in fact, any sensible) work ethic? Not one, meaning that none of them is right-wing, although they are all indeed populist. Centuries of populism have rendered fiscal conservatism unthinkable.
An electorate will instantly vote only for those promising instant gratification, something for nothing. Granted, some voters aren’t like that, but they aren’t the ones who form the critical mass. Once that point has been reached, a countdown button is pushed for global bankruptcy.
Yet people, like pagan deities, are still athirst. Their appetites are translated into wishes, wishes into demands, and demands into inalienable rights. Over a couple of centuries, this has created a certain politico-economic model that any government can challenge only at its peril.
That’s why no Western governments are paying their way, nor is a single politician, however right-wing, populist or conservative, insisting they should. The most right-wing of them all in public perception, Donald Trump, is desperately trying to add trillions to the public debt, a valiant attempt copied everywhere, if in a scaled-down version.
This kind of penny has to drop sooner or later, and it’s only a matter of which country will go bust first. Starmer’s government is doing its level best to make Britain win this race, but several contestants are still neck and neck.
People sense this is the case, hence the tune they sing even at football matches. But how would they exercise their vocal chords should a ‘right-wing populist’ politician suggest that the whole economic model of the welfare state be scrapped?
If he said that we must balance the budget first and then start repaying the national debt, and if that means dismantling the welfare state, then so be it? This is pointless conjecture because such words can no more cross any politician’s lips than a call to slaughter every firstborn son (slaughtering babies before they are born is perfectly all right though).
That’s why His Majesty’s Loyal ‘right-wing populist’, Nigel Farage, is converging in his economic policies not just with Starmer but even with Corbyn. In France, the economic views of their own equivalent, Le Pen, are barely distinguishable from those held by the Trotskyist Mélenchon, or, in Holland, by Geert Wilders, another right-wing populist of modern nightmares.
You’ll notice that I’ve singled out the most obvious aspect of modern politics, economics. The situation in all other aspects is equally dire: culture, social structure, education, manners are all of them populist and none of them conservative. All have been cut to the egalitarian stencil of modernity, created in its vulgar, deracinated image.
So yes, had I been in that stadium yesterday and known the popular tune, I might have joined in. Provided, of course, that Penelope had stayed at home: she has no truck with such swearwords.
P.S. Speaking of modern politicians, I take vicarious delight in the squabbles unfolding within Trump’s administration. Apparently the black eye sported by Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago was caused by a punch thrown by Treasury Secretary Bessent in retaliation to Musk’s rugby tackle on him.
Why can’t today’s politicians settle their disagreements in the manner of Burr and Hamilton or, for that matter, Canning and Castlereagh? It would be so much more dignified and conducive to public good.