Praise for populism, despite everything

Populism has a bad press. Associated with demagogic, irresponsible, outdated, nationalist leaders, contrary to democracy and modernity. And, in fact, there are many figures who have earned the distrust that the word inspires. The problem is that it has become a label that is too constricted to designate a broad and diverse phenomenon that is today painting the world's geography. A description that stops being useful when the same is applied to Trump as to Obama ("If they call me a populist because I care about the people, go ahead, I'm a populist," he once said).

As long as we continue to use this term in such a vague and politically accommodating manner, we deprive ourselves of developing the analytical tools to better understand what is happening. What we call populism today is part of a vast and heterogeneous response to the crisis of a political model, liberal democracy, which for decades constituted the sole reference. But globalization and the excesses of the dominance of financial capitalism, with little long-term consideration of social, ecological or strategic issues for different countries, left a balance of inequality and increasingly meager growth. Globalization generated relative prosperity but it was very poorly distributed among social groups, between regions and between economic branches within countries. In the distribution of winners and losers, huge sectors, sometimes the majority, got the worst of it.

The result is a growing dissatisfaction of the vast majority with respect to their elites, institutions, traditional political parties and even democracy as a practice and as a concept. The so-called richest 1% increased their influence and weight over political power and through lobbying and campaign financing ended up eroding the legitimacy of the rulers. In the West, it is true, individual freedoms, human rights and respect for the press were maintained, but poverty increased among those below and the middle classes became impoverished. In low-income countries the impact was even more deplorable.

Expressions of this discontent have manifested themselves in many ways over the last decade. From Brexit in England, Trump's

America First

or Modi's nationalism in India, to the red wave in Latin America or the emergence of the far right in Europe.

Despite its enormous diversity, the phenomenon shares some common features. Irruptions in politics of new leaders who present themselves as “outsiders” to the establishment, whether true or feigned. Emotional and polarizing discourse that conveys the discontent of the majority (the people) against the elites. Nationalist proposal in the face of the excesses of arbitrary globalization. A distrust of domestic and international institutions (UN and multilateral organizations) that were “complicit” in the implementation of the questioned model.

Some features are more present than others depending on the country in question. Roughly speaking, there are four major variants of this phenomenon. Right-leaning in Europe, where traditional sectors resentful of immigration or trade liberalization take center stage. This is clearly the case at the presidential level in Hungary, Turkey, Poland until recently, and is shown in the resurgence of right-wing and far-right parties, based on these slogans, in practically all of Europe, Scandinavia included.

The phenomenon took on another face in Latin America, where the demand for ancestral poverty is much more present, which social networks and the global village have made more obvious and outrageous in the eyes of its inhabitants. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile among the main ones, and until recently Ecuador and Peru. However, the many differences and nuances between these leaderships are obvious. Not to mention the right-wing version embodied by Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador and, until recently, Bolsonaro in Brazil.

And then there is a third meaning with the decomposition of the so-called mature democracies, as is the case of the United States, England or Italy, in which leaders with some of these characteristics took control of pre-existing political organizations by popular assault.

Finally, a fourth version, more authoritarian than populist, is that of a verticalized and personalized capitalism that has been able to subordinate economic power. China, Russia, Hungary, with different modalities.

As you can see, the expressions are so diverse that putting them in the same box ends up getting in the way more than helping. However, they all have a phenomenon in common that should be assumed with all its consequences. They respond to the search for ways out of something that is not working. There is a crisis of so-called democratic capitalism and a reorganization of the world in geopolitical terms. Regarding the first thing, we have to realize that the premises of the market society will remain in force, globalization itself is irreversible. But we have to do something so that the exit is not the option proposed by China, Russia or India, since it sacrifices rights and freedoms that we take for granted today.

Before demonizing them, it would be necessary to assume that XI Jinping, Putin or Orbán (Hungary) enjoy broad approval beyond the fact that they are authoritarian governments that repress pluralism and freedoms. It should be understood that they have been more effective in subordinating the richest 1% or market forces to a political logic and their national interests. China, Russia and India grew at much higher rates than the West. And, despite everything, today the rate of homicides, child deaths or suicides is lower in Russia than in the United States. China will displace the American Union as the leading economic power and by 2035 it will have more geopolitical influence in the rest of the world, in trade and even in technological development (it already is in clean energy, electric cars, chips and semiconductors). End of Western hegemony as we have known it.

Capitalism will continue to be the universal economic system, there is no doubt. The issue in dispute is with what political and social version. If democratic capitalism is going to be viable, it would have to find forms of defense against the arbitrariness of the masters of the universe, the fund managers and the CEOs of transnational corporations with no other agenda than to maximize the return to their shareholders; a rapacious and arbitrary nihilism that hurts the well-being of the popular sectors.

The only viable solution is the culpable review of what does not work today in our supposed democracies and what would have to be recomposed to respond to the demands of the majorities. There are many of these more than salvageable populisms that are nothing more than a pendulum push in that direction. Democratic capitalism guarantees freedoms but leaves people inert against the effects of the market; The so-called populism prioritizes the latter even to the detriment of those freedoms; We come from a period that prioritized the first, it is not bad now to emphasize the second. A call for attention that does not necessarily have to culminate in an authoritarian drift, far from it. But that requires understanding that they respond to a real problem, to something that did not work at all, and that we could well explore solutions with those who make this claim today.

@jorgezepedap

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