Can populism grow up?
Yes, if it becomes embedded in a country's political system
The word used of him, half-admiringly, is disruptor — half-admiringly because we’re supposed to welcome things being shaken up, if not being shaken into little pieces.
Terry Eagleton on Donald Trump
Just the other day, I stumbled on an intriguing commentary on the most important political movement of our time: populism. Its author is Eric Kaufmann, the London-based political scientist who happens to hail from Vancouver B.C. In my view, his intervention deserves to be widely debated.
Kaufmann delivers a succinct critique of the US-administration’s foreign policy. What renders it remarkable is his national-conservative perspective; the fact that he does not allocate to Trump the part of evil dictator hellbent on taking down the liberal kingdom set on a path of moral perfection. In fact, as anyone will know who has read his book on Wokeism, Kaufmann is sympathetic to a good portion of Trump’s agenda. Most of all, he welcomes many of its cultural policies, particularly on DEI, migration, and free speech.
If Kaufmann is still worried, it is because he believes that Trumpism 2.0 is giving populism a bad name, thereby lending a new lease of life to the embattled left-liberal mainstream. In Kaufmann’s view, the US-government’s recent initiatives — above all its stance on Ukraine, Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland and absorb Canada, the imposition of tariffs on countries with real economic weight, but also the intervention by Elon Musk on the election in Germany — are bound to weaken democratic populism worldwide.
There is a broader conceptual underpinning to Kaufmann’s argument. He distinguishes between the political nationalism pursued by Trump and the cultural nationalism favoured by most mainstream populists. Cultural nationalism is primarily about the preservation of identity and therefore defensive. In contrast, political nationalism is about the imposition of an ideological mission and therefore concerned with power for its own sake. According to Kaufmann, most democratic populists are cultural nationalists who value self-determination. Yet what they truly dislike, for various (including historical) reasons, is political nationalism and its imperialist agenda.
The most compelling piece of evidence Kaufmann offers in support of his thesis concerns his own country, Canada, where Trump’s aggressive rhetoric accomplished within weeks what no liberal leader could have accomplished in years: it wiped out the clear lead in the polls enjoyed by the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre, sweeping to power Mark Carney, ultimate globalist insider and darling of the latest orthodoxies trumpeted annually by the great and good of Davos and their hangers-on.
