Henry Olsen argues intelligently and plausibly that populist parties and ideas are on a march toward dominance eerily similar to the one taken by social-democratic and Labour parties more than a century ago, from the margins of our politics to the dominating center.
Populist parties, like twentieth-century social democrats, tend to draw from similar demographic groups regardless of country. It’s not as obvious with them, as there are no formal labor unions providing the social and organizational muscle that powered social democrats. The socioeconomic foundation for populism nonetheless exists.
Populist parties tend to draw from less educated, poorer men. These are not society’s dregs: they work rather than draw benefits. But the same trend persists regardless of nation. Populist support drops as income and education rise, and it is almost always higher among men than among women. Populism also tends to draw support from those who identify as Christians but do not regularly attend services. This tendency is less often measured, in part because many western nations are so thoroughly secular that pollsters tend not to ask about religious belief and observance. A statistical study I commissioned, however, found that 2017 support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland rose in Bavaria in direct relationship to Catholic church membership, even after controlling for other factors. This would explain why many populist parties and leaders extol Christian values even as they do not pursue explicitly theological policies.
The demographic solidarity among populists means they have a shared identity that fuels their political activity. They are not, as elites have commonly assumed, motivated solely by transitory anger focused on discrete — hence ameliorable — concerns. They have a worldview based on their experience and framework that encompasses the whole of society. This means they can weather the periodic storms that always beset politics and remain firmly on course.
The great animating idea of populism, according to Olsen, is national solidarity. And he frames it in a way that would appeal to many but not all conservatives. In his book The Demon in Democracy, the Polish social critic Ryszard Legutko has said that the liberal elites in democracies have a softly Marxist historical vision. They believe that liberal government and society will gradually liberate people from the duties and oppressions imposed on them by religious, national, ethnic, and familial identity.
If that is the elite side of the conflict, the way that Olsen frames populist opposition holds up: “This means populism is essentially driven by a conflict of values,” he writes, “not by concern over specific policies and agendas. Unlike the dominant elite consensus, it favors the particular over the global, the communal over the individual, and the traditional over the novel.”
If this framing were stable, the political and ideological realignment we should expect would be a gradual exodus of the most doggedly individualist and libertarian conservatives to the side of liberal elites, and the return of some Laschian community-oriented leftists to the populist side. For those to whom patriotism and individualism are two sides of the coin, this new alignment will be peculiarly painful or disorienting.