Is Populism Reached Its Peak in the West?
Leon Hadar
During the US presidential election campaign in 2020 a television crew interviewed an American citizen who was supposed to represent the “average voter” and asked him if he would enjoy drinking beer with the Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
“Beer I enjoy drinking with my pals in the bar,” he provided an intelligent answer to a silly question. “As president I elect someone that I hope would be more qualified to the job than my buddy who like me knows nothing about nuclear strategy.”
The populist wave that has swept the public in the West in recent years and according to which your crazy uncle would have more successful in leading the landing in Normandy in World War II than General Dwight Eisenhower, amounted to a dangerous phenomenon. But now it may be getting worst: It’s starting to bore us.
It was possible to understand how in the aftermath of the global financial collapse in 2008 and a serious of political corruption scandals, not to mention the failed response the COVID-19 pandemic, many voters in Western democratic countries lost their confidence in the politicians who had promised them social stability and economic prosperity.
Moreover, the accelerated process of democratization in the West that started in the US in the form of the election primaries and weakened the bosses of the political parties shifted power from the elites and allowed more and more citizens to take part in the election of their nations’ leaderships.
And that was fine until it became obvious that there are limits to the people’s ability to choose the best men and women to lead their countries.
The political bosses gave American John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, not bad choices all things considered. The power-to-the-people system did give us Barack Obama, but it also elected Donald Trump. And in two years, American may be forced to choose as presidents between two elderly men that in any midsize company would have retired ten years ago.
It’s true that the experts, including medical doctors and renowned scientists are now always right. But at the end of the day your grandma’s chicken soup isn’t going to help you recover from a nasty flu, and you’ll probably be better off asking a financial advisor as opposed to your brother-in-law to manage your money. And trust us, a professional mechanic would do a better job fixing your car than your best buddy.
The good news is that the process of democratization in the West has been accompanied with by the creation of more checks and balances, including a free judiciary and open press, that set constraints on the power of even the most corrupt politician.
But like the way is happens with every political and social changes, there is a tendency to shift from one extreme to another, from respect to public figures and trusted experts to a populist hysteria with its bundles to conspiracy theories and demagogues who like parrots on crack, insist on the need to battle the “globalist elites.”
But then many of these demagogues are themselves flashy billionaires and graduates of Ivy League universities who exploit legitimate public discontent to promote their respective agenda, turning the fight against so-called elites into clashes between elites whose main concern is not the plight of the “people” but their own political and economic interests.