A schematic account of late modern politics
I have a simple model of how politics worked in the twentieth century. Allow me to briefly sketch it out:
I. In the context of this or that episode of national destabilization, an elite that is relatively progressive1 takes control of the state apparatus in some country.
II. Said elite pushes a project of modernization through. At the earliest stage, the economic plan tends to feature a powerful push for urbanization and industrialization, as well as rationalization and enhancement of state power.
III. While the normal course of economic development soon translates into social liberalization, the ruling elite also carries out directly anti-traditionalist measures.
IV. Projects of economic modernization may or may not be strongly driven by elite preferences,2 but “cultural modernization” measures very much tend to be.
V. Despite important differences in opinion between ruler and ruled, the elite retains power for a host of reasons. These could involve repression, the legitimation of the regime via rising incomes or a particularly strong nationalistic narrative, strong elite ideological discipline, plain voter ignorance, or a combination thereof.
As I said, this is very simple and schematic and does not perfectly fit the experience of any country, but it works reasonably well for many places. Large parts of the recent political histories of countries as different as India, Turkey, and the United States can be understood, more or less accurately, through this lens.
A schematic account of postmodern politics
No regime is eternal. Political organizations take on the forms proper to their era. Thus, with the passage of time, an unraveling of old structures and the transition to new organizing principles materializes. In my telling, the latest iteration goes like this:
I. The high modernist regimes commit mistakes and these start to get noticed by the masses. The most common denominator here is economic crisis. Income growth may also decline because of standard economic theory reasons. In whatever telling, the regime stops delivering (or delivering as much) on bread-and-butter issues.
II. Technological progress makes for a better informed public and, naturally, feeds polarization. The public gradually gets better at telling who is for what.
III. Both of these developments weaken the position of the “traditional” modern elite. Firstly, (I) implies the drying up of “normal” sources of legitimacy. On the other hand, (II) makes it impossible for the unpopular positions of the elite to go unnoticed.
IV. Political entrepeneurs capitalize on (III). The obvious move is to attack the elite on whatever issues its ideology most differs from that of the average voter.3 These politicians don’t have to be particularly radical on the typical issues splitting left and right, but they must question, explicitly or implicitly, some (unpopular) core assumption of the regime. This most often results in right-wing culture war signaling, but it doesn’t have to, at least initially.
V. The conflict between those described in (IV) and the late modern elite constitutes the locus of political activity in the twenty first century.
The Beginning of History and the First Man
Seen under this light, it should be clear that populism represents the irruption of political conflict into areas previously cordoned off public discussion. This makes it a phenomenon of potentially planetary reach, as many polities on Earth have elite consensuses not precisely congenial to the masses. The masses will come to know of them and some slick politician, for better or worse, will profit.
In a broadly high-modernist sense, I mean.
I speak of a project as not being strongly driven by elite preferences when such undertaking polls at similar levels with elites and non-elites. Social security schemes are an example of an economic project with broad cross-section societal backing, while free trade agreements are not.
Average people usually don’t have anything approaching a coherent ideology, but I will ignore this now.