Via Andrew comes this interesting essay from Frank Furedi about the arrival of the populist movement. In the US it has left Democrat leaders wondering how on earth it’s possible that blue-collar voters can support the Republicans, while on the old continent the Eurocrats are baffled as to why citizens are able to vote against a project that they should know “is best for them”. On both sides of the ocean the populist movement is deeply despised because it is creating electoral shockwaves that complacent elites failed to foresee and which are hard for them to counter in a creative and constructive way:

One reason why the political class so dislikes populist movements is that it experiences them as a direct challenge to its values and worldview. This clash of values became evident during the recent referendums in Europe, where it was obvious that the 'No' campaigns were speaking a language that was morally and emotionally incomprehensible to the political class. The political class talked of subsidiarity, transparency, efficiency, human rights and protocols, while their opponents were discussing the problems of everyday life. By their very existence, the 'No' campaign calls into question the values of an increasingly technocratic and managerial oligarchy.

The entrenched political classes and their supporters in the media and academe have too much at stake - their credibility for one thing – to hastily adapt to new political realities and absent sound arguments they will often hastily embark on ill-defined counter attacks. A good example is the late Pim Fortuyn who was smeared as a fascist and more recently the right-of-center blogosphere received the honorable distinction of “digital brownshirts” from a former presidential candidate.

It’s hardly new and it will be used again and again. Comparisons to Nazi Germany may seem frivolous on this side of the ocean, but in Europe they are a very potent tool to help alter the dynamics of a political debate. Let me give you a recent example. The well-known Dutch writer Geert Mak produced a little booklet called “Doomed to Vulnerability” earlier this year, in which he tried to put the Dutch nation’s reaction to the horrendous Van Gogh murder into perspective. While it’s an interesting read, it doesn’t take Mak very long to arrive at the crux of his argument when he describes the anger of the unsettled Dutch populace:

History never repeats itself. What we do know from our bitter experiences as Europeans, is that processes of radicalization can go in any given direction. The disdain for the “soft” parliament, for intellectuals that ‘do not understand the people’, for justice and rationality; the leaders that promise a new unity and a liberalization of their fears; the existing political parties who in their silence and opportunism help create a vacuum in which these types of movements originate: we have see it all before. What people say here and there, what a few columnists write, it can all become reality, proper government policy, packaged in formal policies and civil throne speeches.

In popular language this phenomenon of describing your political opponent has been given a name, “demonizing”, and by painting current populist sentiments and politicians who play to these sentiments as a re-emergence of fascism, Mak too easily steps away from bringing up solid political arguments to counter what he sees as the populist threat. After the Dutch and French ‘no’ the fraught yes-camp equally tried to disqualify the electoral outcome as cheap and uninformed sentiments that could spell a deep and dark danger to Europe's society.

Now that years of correct political thinking and unquestioningly accepting that what is “good for us” are under sustained and critical attack, expect the vested elites to fight back vehemently using whatever means possible. It will create a very poor debate destined to steer society away from finding creative and new solutions to old problems. That in turn will indeed lead to more radicalization as Mak argues, but rather than applying that to the populists it will become the hallmark of those desperate to cling to power. North Americans, but especially Europeans, will be in for a very bumpy ride with some very nasty politics until hopefully some new equilibrium is achieved. The current populist movement has told us clearly that the old one is broken beyond repair.

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