Are shifting attitudes the root of authoritarian populism?

"Revolutions erupt when a variety of often different resentments merge to assault an unsuspecting regime." Kissenger, World Order

When thinking about modern right wing populism, one of the first places to start might be looking at it as an ideology. Part of this might involve analysing the value sets it appeals to, who holds these and why. There is a temptation, therefore, to explain the rise of right wing populist movements in terms of how certain values became more prevalent, and why these might provide ‘fertile ground’ for them. This may well be part of the story. But it also may not.

In the British context, it doesn’t seem clear that the long-term trend of popular attitudes has been in this direction. Attitudes to migration and its salience have fluctuated, but the longer term trend over the last 50 years seems to have been towards greater tolerance. Anecdotally, at least, attitudes towards race seem to have become less essentialised and less tied up with notions of nationality or community. There are of course numerous other areas, particularly criminal justice, which I have not looked into, and it may well be therefore that in important areas this argument turns out to be wrong. The point is rather that it does not have to be wrong in order for successful nativist or right wing populist movements to be possible and have emerged recently.

These movements might, rather, be more symptomatic of the trouble established political parties find themselves in. Here there are long term and short term trends at work. The long term difficulties posed by de-industrialation and the decline of trade unions to social democratic parties is well understood. Indeed as early as 1994 Eric Hobsbawn argued that this would leave a void that might be filled by nativist and separatist movements. Added to this is the ideological crisis of the centre right after the collapse of the Soviet Block. If a large part of the appeal of the centre right was anti-communism, and this unfavourable comparison with the centrally planned socialism was a key justification for policy, these parties would naturally face difficulties when that threat receded.

Moreover, in the shorter term, the financial crisis and its mismanagement have likely profoundly destabilized mainstream political parties. This is partly the familiar story of discontent with low growth and wage stagnation making incumbents unpopular. But its also about the peculiar tendency of banking crises to accentuate the existing idea that powerful institutions are fundamentally corrupt. This both provides an opening for insurgents and deprives the key argument made against them of its saliency: that insurgent movements are incompetent and do not know how to run the machinery of the state. That machinery is itself seen as something corrupt and undesirable, and the competence of established political actors is called into question (often correctly) because of their failure to deliver improvements in living standards. There are also specific difficulties for social democratic parties since the financial crisis. The third way bargain of delivering increases in social expenditure without large scale redistribution was dependent on decent levels of growth. In a lower growth economy, more difficult decisions have to be made about how to deliver the improvements in living standards for the worse off without which the left has little appeal. Had social democratic parties responded to the financial crisis with more robust counter cyclical platforms, this may not have been the case. 

It is against this backdrop that insurgent movements finally have the critical mass of support required to gain traction with the wider electorate as viable political movements. It is unsurprising that those, which are successful, will appeal to popular ideas; some of these may be authoritarian populist. But this does not require that these ideas have become more prevalent, simply that they did not previously find political expression. Indeed, to some extent an animating feature of right wing populism is the fear that certain beliefs are on the decline. The moral panic about left wing student activism, social liberalism on the media and in education provide a sense of urgency of the mission to strike while the iron is hot, precisely because of a perception that in the long term such movements may not be viable.

What would this mean about the long term? This is less clear. Even if the long term trend were against authoritarian populist movements, short term disruptions can change the direction of travel. And perhaps the premises of the argument in this piece are wrong anyway. They certainly go against occum’s razor, the simplest argument being that changes in attitudes go alongside the popularity of movements which espouse them. But at least on an anecdotal level, it seems a thought worth entertaining.