Has Populism Won? by Daniel Drache

Author:Daniel Drache
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Paranoid Style of Global Politics

Nobody thought the international order would be so vulnerable to the paranoid style that has surfaced in American politics and so many other jurisdictions, to paraphrase Richard Hofstadter’s classic study of domestic extremism.31 Yet, the wave of twenty-first-century populism struck the international system like a battering ram.

In the space of a few short years, the hard right proved themselves electable and capable of governing despite their scandals and lies. For the populists moving fast into retail politics, this transnational trend toward extremist political discourse has paid off on election day. But it is undeniably bad for democracy, bad for our societies especially, and bad for the old compromises that have shored up the foundation of postwar capitalism. That should make all of us very worried.

At the beginning of our narrative, we described the anti-system surge. We have shown how this rising tide of nationalists has reprised the sovereignty project. It has harnessed identity politics to destroy the empire of liberalism by repatriating sovereignty and slashing the constraints of international law. They want to leave the Bretton Woods post–World War II vision far behind and advocate international cooperation only when it clearly benefits them. This motley crew of sovereigntists and chancers has become more than the sum of their parts, if only because once the Americans elected a hard nationalist whose populist rhetoric was off the charts in 2016, the entire insurgency doctrine movement was given an adrenalin shot.

On a trip to France to meet President Emmanuel Macron early in 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared, “We will stand up” to any country that challenges the liberal order.32 But we’ve already seen through Biden’s continuation of Trump’s trade policy that his administration is not fully committed to upholding the values of liberal free-trade internationalism. Even facing a land war in Europe, the nation-centered system is a large step down from the optimism of coopperative interdependence and multilateralism. The nation-centered order’s overarching concern with competitive unilateralism and short-termism will only make the problems of global disharmony painfully worse.

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