Populismand the Third way- how todays politics fails democracy

In the era after the Cold War, the western world had outgrown ideology. Politics had moved beyond the clashes of abstractions between this “ism” and that “ism”. This end of ideology brought about a type of politics that sought not to transform the world through democracy. Instead it sought to manage democracy more efficiently; to allow the status quo to prosper, and thereafter to direct the material benefits into progressive social spending projects. This type of managerialism typified the approach taken by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the era's two most successful politicians, and the 'Third Way' approach.

Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, noted the uncontrollability and interconnectedness of politics in the modern age, as well as the inability of politicians to make change to the world, and coined the term “runaway world” to describe this situation.

In the context of his “runaway world”, politics became almost exclusively about achieving stability. In doing so, and accepting that the structure of society could not be altered, a central tenet of democracy - the ability and desire to give a voice to the voiceless - began to be undermined.
For the last 20 years, no-one in the West has had any idea how to change the world and politicians, who had ceded power to finance, bureaucracy and, latterly, to big tech companies, had lost the desire to do so. For a time the Third Way proved successful, not least at the ballot box, where Clinton cruised to two US Presidential election victories and Blair secured an unprecedented three consecutive victories in 13 years of uninterrupted Labour rule in the UK. Yet, the legitimacy of these technocratic and expert-led Governments hinged on their ability to deliver progress, and quickly proved fragile in the face of diminished returns.

Across the last 200 years, shifts in the nature of global inequality have shaped the development of political struggles. Just as the class politics of the nineteenth century were driven by the sorts of inequality viscerally depicted in the novels of Dickens and Balzac, or the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century reflected the collapse of the imperial mind set of Europeans, the populism we are seeing today reflects the economic dislocation experienced since 2008. The decline of the West has left the lower middle classes of the rich world teetering on the edge of a precipice, and the class-based politics of the political left no longer resonate. Post-2008, the version of reality the ‘managerial’ politicians had presented was no longer believable.Their stories ceased to make sense.
The Financial Crash in 2008 will be seen as an inflection point in world history as it was made clear that globalisation would lead to losers as well as winners, both within and between countries.  Working class people, in the face of declining real incomes, the loss of economic security, the explosion of the ‘gig economy’ and the attack on the welfare state as countries turned to ‘austerity’ to tackle booming deficits, began to feel that their countries were no longer organised for their benefit.

Trump, Sanders, Brexit and Corbyn, with their opposition to free trade and globalisation and their harking back to an era of national economic controls, tell a story that speaks directly to those who feel this sense of loss acutely.

In democracy mere facts aren’t enough and, where the managerial class has failed in this regard, populism on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ has succeeded in making the public feel they are correct. In an age of ‘post-truth’ (an overused cliché which, nonetheless, has some utility) driven by the internet and social media bubbles, Trump, Corbyn, Sanders and the Brexit campaigns resonated with an anti-elite, anti-authority, and specifically anti-politician, mood that has been bubbling since 2008.
In contrast to those ‘managerial’ politicians who, in the UK (with the expenses scandal) and in the US (not least through Hillary’s close ties with Wall Street), have fed into the idea that they are out only to serve themselves, the populists claim to speak for the noble, ‘ordinary’ person against this self-interested elite.

This isn’t, however, just about economics; Brexit and Trump, both count amongst their constituents significant portions of the middle class; they found support in wealthy areas which, despite economic security, feel left behind and culturally alienated.

Politically and culturally huge segments of western societies have felt patronised, ignored and abandoned by the moneyed, cosmopolitan and racially diverse managerial politicians. Anger is the prevailing emotion as politics has become visceral and the personal is very much politicised.  This clash is about two fundamentally different world views that are finding themselves pitted against one another; one is outward looking, socially tolerant and liberal; the other is conservative, fearful and autarkic. These are not battles about how policies of tax and spend can best manage an economy; these are fundamental divides in the way their proponents view the world. They are about ways of thinking, seeing and speaking that, increasingly, have no shared ground. The lack of empathy across this divide is the source driving much of the anger in politics today.

But both these world views are backwards-looking. One harks back to the age of technocratic- expertise managerialism, the other to a mythical age of national determination and ethnic hierarchies. Neither offers a vision for the next century.

The old ideological divides that divided society into the neatly organised ways that produced the old left/right poles have gone. Does, for example, ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ best represent a programmer in Silicon Valley or a sheep farmer in south Wales dependent on European subsidies? The political system, having toyed with the idea of ‘the end of History’ for the 20 years after the end of the Cold War, now lags dramatically behind the complicated social realities of the 21st Century.  That this has led to populism is no coincidence. When the world seems too complicated to change, people naturally look for, and find, simple and simplistic solutions.
Without a vision, an idea, (perhaps even an ‘ideology’) that recognises the complex realities of the 21st century, our politics cannot move beyond the division and anger that currently threatens to absorb the whole political edifice. The managerial politicians of the 1992-2008 period were too timid in their politics and their desire to change the world. Answers to our 21st century problems cannot be found in a revival of the ‘Third Way’ which cultivated them. Nor do our answers lie in a refashioning of the politics of the 60s proposed by some on the reactionary left.

The historian C. Vann Woodward, in 1959, wrote “one must expect and even hope that there will be future upheavals to shock the seats of power and privilege, and furnish the periodic therapy that seems necessary to the health of our democracy.” The political upheavals we’ve experienced in 2016 certainly constitute an upheaval to the seats of power. Whether our generation can rise to the challenge of producing that 'periodic therapy' remains to be seen.

Referendum and the Labour vote

For the second time in just over a year, I find myself sat on an early morning train from Wolverhampton to London, contemplating the results of an election, having spent the previous night watching in horror as hope, after a brief sojourn through uncertainty, turned to dread.

On May 6th 2016, I found myself sat in that train carriage despising my fellow travellers. "How could you do this?" I silently asked. "How could you have voted for another 5 years of austerity, of increasing inequality, of an even more smug Cameron as the leader of our country?"

I thought my fellow travellers were idiots and I despised them for it.

As I sat on that train, I remember thinking that this was as low as any political event could take me. After months of pouring over polls that suggested Ed Miliband would be our PM by Friday morning, the cocktail of shock and despair as we were served a Tory majority was difficult to bear and, I thought, as bad as it gets.

Yet even as I wallowed in my pitiful prostration on that train, at the back of my mind I knew we'd get another shot in 5 years time and then the country would see sense and put it right (obviously this hope was pre the election of Corbyn!) Once voters used their heads, instead of swallowing the headlines of the Tory press, surely 2020 would be different?

But today it's different. This time it's final. This time the vote changes politics forever.

Now better minds than mine will unpick the implications of the vote; how the United Kingdom may unravel, how the EU will collapse, how national politics in England has disintegrated. But right now, I find myself looking at my fellow travellers, many of whom will be Labour voters, and half of whom will have put their cross next to 'Leave' yesterday.

Why did so many of them ignore the pleas of the majority of the Labour movement and put their faith in the the public school Leave crowd?

Unlike 2015, I don't find myself despising those voters. On my cast list of who to blame, the voter comes way behind Cameron, Corbyn, Gove, Farage and a whole host more.

All those Labour voters in the North, in Wales, in the Midlands- you know what, I understand your decision to vote out. I completely get it. I get the disenchantment with the way things are. I get the unease over immigration, housing, jobs, the NHS.

The political classes only realised these concerns too late.

This has been growing for many years, but your politicians continued to take votes for granted. You have been left behind and, until UKIP started posing an electoral threat, your fears dismissed as bigoted by those who claimed to represent you.

In the aftermath of 2015 many spoke about needing to learn the lessons of that election and also of the Scottish referendum. Maybe even then it was too late, but the efforts by the Labour Party have definitely been too little.

The leave campaign spoke to traditional working class Labour voters in a way Labour has failed to do for years. This vote isn't just a rejection of the 'status quo' as the Labour referendum script is briefing this morning. It was explicitly also a rejection of the Labour of the recent past, and to say that Jeremy Corbyn, the same man who was arguing for unrestricted migration just last weekend, understands why Labour voters punted for Leave is either an act of delusion or is laced with irony.

For years Labour has left these voters behind. The Labour leadership, increasingly drawn from the it's metropolitan-London elite, neglected its core and in the UK, like in the rest of the western world, the discontent this has bred has nurtured the rise of the populist right.

It might already be too late, even if it's not Labour is in last chance saloon. It needs to learn to speak to its core fast, or it's all over.

History on the march: 2016, the year tyranny Trumped democracy

“The end of history”. For the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism marked “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” and therefore the “end of history”.

In 2016 we, who have lived our lives knowing no other form of government, are the children of that liberal democracy. We are more enfranchised than any generation before us. We are more free than any of our forebears. And yet, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that our times are marked by an unprecedented sense of frustration, of apathy and, increasingly, of anger.

And so our society is a tinder box and right across the western world we can see match-wielding demagogues prepared to pour petrol onto those flames.

Western liberal democracy is under threat. If it indeed ever had ended, history is about to be kick started into life once again.

The proliferation of democracy experienced in the western world since the Second World War in itself now poses a fundamental threat to our democratic system. This idea that democracies die when they become too democratic is not a new one. It originates with Plato, who saw tyranny emerging “out of no other regime than democracy”.

Writing of the ancient world, he argued that democracies are the perfect breeding ground for despots; that democracy leads to freedom, freedom gradually undermines order, and this creates a chaotic vacuum, preparing the ground for an opportunistic despot to emerge. The tyrant seizes power to maintain order and, he claims, to make things great again.

In the 21st Century, as our democracy has matured, our freedoms have multiplied. Culturally, economically, politically, sexually; whichever way you cut it our liberal democracy now grants us greater freedoms than at perhaps any point in human history. Our democracy is no longer confined to the ballot box. In every aspect of our lives, we now demand the freedom to choose, to shape, to define.

The freedoms we have all become accustomed to have an impact on society:

As societies become more free, traditional deference to authority withers.
As we become more free, the views within our society grow increasingly disparate.
As we have become more free, our collective comprehension has dissolved, our ability to empathise with those of a different disposition has diminished, and the consensus that previously bound our political culture has been lost.

What we’re see across the western world right now is that this excess of freedom leads to the destabilization of society.

The first manifestation of this has been the crumbling of the political center ground. In the 1951 General Election, 97% of voters cast their ballot for Clement Attlee’s Labour or Winston Churchill’s Conservatives. In last month’s local elections the two parties that have ruled this country for over 100 years could barely muster 60% of the popular vote.


Another sign that we’ve rejected the old way of politics is the rising popularity of political extremes, be that Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Syriza on the radical left, or Front Nationale, Pegida, and, of course, Donald Trump on the political right.


What we’re seeing is the rise of a type of populist politics fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy.

The passions of the mob have always been seen as a threat to democratic rule. As James Madison, the 4th President of the United States, acknowledged, democracies, “have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” But today the democratization of the media adds a lethal new ingredient into this cocktail of historical risks.
By bypassing the traditional media, the internet makes everyone with a smart phone a potential journalist and removes any editorial moderation from the discourse- a fact to which anyone here who has been on Twitter can testify.

Digital media gives each of us the power to create for ourselves a personalised news stream. But the self-selection this entails means these have a tendency to act as an echo chamber; they play to our existing prejudices, they exacerbate the polarization of opinions, and they remove all nuance from the discussion. This undermines the critical function hitherto played by a free-press in a democracy.

When we factor in the increasing fuzziness between the entertainment industry and politics we begin to see trends that threaten our democracy; the triumph of emotion over reason, of narcissism over empiricism, and of extremism over compromise.

Reasoned deliberation is at the very heart of a functioning democracy, it’s indispensable to democratic debate, and it is crumbling before our eyes.

Our hyper-democracy has made this a more emotional and a more chaotic age. And the historian within me cannot ignore the lessons of the past, which show, as Plato predicted, that chaos is fertile ground for an opportunistic tyrant.

The tumult of the English Civil War gave us the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. [Out of the embers of] revolutionary France [grew] Napoleon Bonaparte. A flailing democratic experiment in Russia [saw] the rise of Vladimir Putin. And a brief flirtation with democracy laid the ground for General Sisi’s coup in Egypt.

Into today’s political chaos, right-wing populism has entered the fray. And for the first time since the Second World War, mainstream politicians in Europe are openly flirting with authoritarianism and racism, and it’s paying electoral dividends.

So, to Mr Trump. As his challengers have fallen, one by one, to his brash, incoherent, and hate-filled rhetoric, it is increasingly hard not to see a reflection of Plato’s tyrant seizing his moment and taking control of the obedient mob.

For all its flaws and setbacks, in the second half of the 20th Century liberal democracy, allied with liberal capitalism has by-and-large brought stability and prosperity to the world. My generation is too young to remember a time when Fascism or Communism presented a genuine alternative form of government. Maybe we’re complacent? Maybe we’re ignorant of the horrors people experienced under those systems? Maybe we need reminding that our world order is not immortal?

We cannot assume the forces that have undermined democracy throughout history no longer apply.

Whatever the result across the Atlantic in November, the paradigms that have governed politics for my entire life are under threat. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, we are facing the radical possibility that this is the end of politics as we know it. Fukuyama was wrong. This is an extinction level event for the liberal world. History is once again on the march, and the death knell is sounding for democracy as we know it.