Abstract
There has been a rise in authoritarian populism (AP)—authoritarian values cloaked in populist rhetoric—in many advanced Western countries including not only the UK and the US. However, there is no consensus about the causes. A survey of recent writings suggests that the phenomenon has both cultural and economic drivers, but that an important contributory factor has been the inability of the democratic party system to cope with the demands made on it since the late-1970s. This chapter is in two parts. The first part introduces recent theories about the meaning of populism. The second discusses some recent explanations for the rise of AP with particular reference to the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump (both 2016).
The policy reversals that began in the 1970s and intensified in the 1980s restored classical economic liberalism via globalization, at great cost to political liberalism (Kuttner, 2018: 266, original author’s emphases).
Populism is an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism (Mudde, 2015).
The basic idea behind populism … is that democracy has been stolen from the people by the elites (Runciman, 2019: 65).
Trump … has tapped into America’s deep historical mistrust of unchecked markets, and poisoned it with racial and sexist appeals, to create the mirage of a better future—for some. The concrete results are tax cuts for the rich, increased precarity for workers, and aggressive policing for the rest (Konczal, 2021: 186).
The United States remains threatened by plutocratic populism, a toxic combination of culture war on the ground and the ultrawealthy trying to capture the political system at the top (Mueller, 2021b).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The term ‘fictional’ refers to Benedict Anderson’s classic (2006) argument that ‘nations’ are essentially cultural constructs.
- 2.
- 3.
However, we shall note in Chap. 7 evidence that the Covid crisis may be leading to some cooling of support for populist parties and leaders.
- 4.
Bill Bishop (2009) argues that increased physical mobility since the 1960s is enabling more of us to live in like-minded clusters, and that this in turn is contributing to increased polarisation simply because we have little regular contact with those who may disagree with us.
- 5.
For a similar view, see Economist (2016). Reporting on a survey of Leavers’ and Remainers’ attitudes conducted by UK in a Changing Europe and the independent social research agency NatCen, Simon Kuper (2020b) found that Leavers’ chief bogey wasn’t the EU or Remainers but benefits scroungers, not only immigrants but home-grown ones as well.
- 6.
However, an unpublished 2020 paper by Adam Wheeler and the author analysing current ONS data on multiple deprivation cautions against simply equating deprivation with any one part of the country. Contrary to what is often supposed, deprivation can be found across all regions, and it is just more visible in the North. So ‘levelling-up’ shouldn’t be confined to the Red Wall areas, but requires a well thought through, targeted approach to deprivation across the whole country. A 2020 analysis by Calvert Jump and Mitchell also cautions against a simple equation of deprivation with Leave.
- 7.
It is incidentally hard to see how Covid will help here, let alone Brexit. Virtually every independent study has found that in view of the likely effect on public revenues and welfare spending, middle- and low-income households are likely to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of Brexit (e.g., Hantzsche and Young 2019; McGrade, 2020). Similarly, poorer areas have been more heavily hit by Covid than wealthier ones: Barr and Halliday (2020), Boseley (2020), Covid Recovery Commission (2020), Blundell et al. (2022), Gregory (2022). In many cases this is because they have a long history of poor housing and health conditions. They also have low rates of vaccination (as in the US, where there is a strong correlation between counties that voted for Trump and those with the highest levels of infection: Charter 2021).
- 8.
Bernard Abramson (personal communication) comments that in their resentment, desperation and anger, such groups will vote for anyone who promises—possibly in code, and even quite unbelievably—to return matters to the earlier state. The promisers are usually conservative, right-wing parties. What happens when the return to the status quo ante inevitably fails to be realised? Trump’s policies have not reversed the economic decline of the Rust Belt, Johnson’s policies will almost certainly fail to ‘level up’ the ‘left behind’ areas. If anything, the AP’s supporters then become even more fervent (underlining the value of loyalty). They can’t admit that they were wrong and are in part the authors of their own misery. But by this time many of the democratic norms and institutions that might have enabled a more balanced solution to their problems may have been destroyed.
- 9.
Studying the evolution of American regional cultures, David Hallett Fischer (1989) argued that the origins of slavery in the US were as much cultural and social as economic:
In an effort to preserve a cultural hegemony … the gentry of Virginia would develop a novel type of race slavery on a large scale – a radical innovation with profound consequences for the future … these new forms of slavery did not create the culture of the tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery. (Fischer, 1989: 255–6)
Fischer showed how many of the early Virginian families came from parts of England (broadly, Wessex) that had had serfs in earlier times. Moreover, the social composition of Virginia was unusual because a high proportion of settlers came as indentured servants and wanted/needed someone to look down on. In a December 2021 review of Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman: A Personal History of White Supremacy (Farrar et al., 2021), Colin Grant quotes (a typically cynical) Lyndon Johnson as saying in the late-1960s, ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you’.
- 10.
The present Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove became famous for his comment, during a Sky News interview at the height of the Brexit campaign in which he declined to name any Brexit-backing economists, that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ (Mance, 2016). In Tim Shipman’s (jaw-drop**) account of the Brexit campaigns, the author quotes Ryan Coetzee, Stronger Leave’s Head of Strategy, as to what lay behind this comment:
More than any specific ideological vision he has, Gove is an ideologue. You do get the whiff of burning witches. The thing about ideologues … none of them need experts because they’re the expert; because the ideology has the answer. Ideologues force the world to conform to their theory instead of having their theory conform to the world. That, to my mind, explains Michael Gove. (Shipman, 2016: 326, original author’s emphases)
- 11.
It is therefore interesting that even the wealthy Donald Trump felt the need for Republican nomination for his election bids.
- 12.
- 13.
Clearly, the main means is through money, not only in financing election campaigns but also between them. The elite have been helped by court judgements that have progressively narrowed the definition of corruption and stripped away the limits on private funding. The money power also explains why, whatever their own views, so many candidates have to toe the party line. The bulk of political representatives and officials are also drawn from the ranks of the wealthy (according to Open Secrets, a majority of members of the current Congress are millionaires—Evers-Hillstrom, 2020). At the same time, the very wealthy are reticent about making their views public. This is why accounts of their behind-the-scenes funding and lobbying activities, such as Mayer, J. (2016) and MacLean (2017), are so valuable. The ‘radical rich’ (Frum, 2014) have also been helped by the parallel decline of many mass membership organisations, notably the trade unions, in part because of Neoliberal policies. We shall look at conservative efforts to take control of the courts in Chap. 7.
- 14.
- 15.
For instance, Thomas Piketty (2018) has suggested a new cleavage between a ‘Brahmin left’ (high-education, high-income) and a ‘Merchant right’ (low-education, low-income).
- 16.
Recent research under the aegis of the Institute of Labour Economics (Bertheau et al., 2022) shows how effective Active Labour Management Programmes can be in moderating earnings losses after job displacement. (I owe this reference to Nye Cominetti at the Resolution Foundation.)
References
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities (Revised ed.), Verso.
Antonucci, L., Horvath, L., Kutiyski, Y., & Krouwel, A. (2017). The malaise of the squeezed middle: Challenging the narrative of the “left behind” Brexiter. Competition and Change, 21(3), 211–229.
Arbair, P. (2016, November 23). Brexit, the populist surge and the crisis of complexity. Paul Arbair. Retrieved November 24, 2016, from https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/Brexit-the-populist-surge-and-the-crisis-of-complexity/
Azmanova, A. (2019). Capitalism on edge. Columbia University Press.
Ball, E. (2021). Life of a Klansman: A family history of white supremacy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Barr, C., & Halliday, J. (2020, October 8). Poorest areas of England four times as likely to face lockdown as richest. The Guardian.
Behr, R. (2020, August 26). He was a tonic for the Tories. Now Johnson is turning toxic. The Guardian Opinion.
Bell, T. (2016, June 24). The referendum, living standards and inequality. Retrieved June 28, 2016, from www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/blogs/the-referendum-living-standards-and-inequality/.
Bell, B., & Machin, S. (2016, August 16). Brexit and wage inequality. VoxEU.org. Retrieved August 27, 2020, from https://voxeu.org/article/brexit-and-wage-inequality
Bertheau, A., Acabbi, E., Barcelo, C., Gulyas, A., Lombardi, S., & Saggio, R. (2022). The unequal cost of job loss across countries. IZA Institute of Labor Economics Discussion Paper No. 15033.
Bickerton, C., & Invenizzi Accetti, C. (2015). Populism and technocracy: Opposites or complements? Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 20(2), 186–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2014.995504
Blundell, R., Costa Dias, M., Cribb, J., Joyce, R., Waters, T., Wernham, T., & Xu, X. (2022). Inequality and the Covid crisis in the United Kingdom. Institute for Fiscal Studies Working Paper 22/01. Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Boseley, S. (2020, October 27). ‘Perfect storm’: 30 years of failure on preventable diseases fuels pandemic. The Guardian.
British Election Study. (2016, October 6). Brexit Britain: British election study insights from the post-EU Referendum wave of the BES internet panel. http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/brexit-britain-british-election-study-insights-from-the-post-eu-referendum-wave-of-the-bes-internet-panel/.
Bukodi, E., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (2021). Meritocracy and populism: Is there a connection? UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) Working Paper 01/2021.
Burn-Murdoch, J. (2017, October 18). The six tribes of Brexit revealed. Financial Times. Retrieved October 19, 2017, from https://www.ft.com/content/61c12868-b350-11e7-a398-73d59db9e399.
Busby, R. (2009). Marketing the populist politician: The demotic democrat. Palgrave Macmillan.
Centre for Social Investigation. (2020). Briefing Paper CSI21: Social class mobility in modern Britain: changing structure, constant process. University of Oxford Centre for Social Investigation.
Clarke, S. (2016, October 12). Brexit means…different things to different people. Resolution Foundation. Retrieved October 16, 2016, from https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/Brexit-means-different-things-to-different-people/.
Clinton, J. (2022, January 17). Will the BBC licence fee be scrapped? 17 January. i News. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/bbc-licence-fee-scrapped-will-nadine-dorries-when-abolished-replacement-1405227.
Covid Recovery Commission. (2020). Levelling up communities. Retrieved October 16, 2020, from www.covidrecoverycommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Levelling-up-communities.pdf.
Cultural Dynamics. (2016). Can the UK expect to have less Prospectors in the near future as a result of the Brexit vote? Retrieved October 21, 2016, from http://www.cultdyn.co.uk/ART067736u/ProspPost Brex.html.
Curtice, J. (2016). How deeply does Britain’s Euroscepticism run? Retrieved January 24, 2022, from https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39024/euroscepticism.pdf.
Dalio, F., Kryger, S., Rogers, J., & Davis, G. (2017, March 22). Populism: The phenomenon. Bridgepoint Daily Observations. Retrieved January 19, 2018, from https://www.bridgewater.com/resources/bwam032217.pdf.
Davies, W. (2019, December 4). How Boris Johnson and Brexit are Berlusconifying Britain. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/04/boris-johnson-brexit-britain-politics-media-business.
Davies, W. (2020). This is not normal: The collapse of liberal Britain. Verso.
De Tocqueville, A. (1840). Democracy in America (repr. New York: Vintage 1945).
Dorling, D. (2018). Peak inequality: Britain’s ticking time bomb. Policy Press.
Economist. (2016, July 30). Drawbridges up. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/07/30/drawbridges-up.
Eichengreen, B. (2018). The populist temptation: Economic grievance and political reaction in the modern Era. Oxford University Press.
Engels, F. (1893, July 14). Letter to Franz Mehring. International Publishers. Retrieved October 6, 2018, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm.
Evers-Hillstrom, K. (2020, April 23). Majority of lawmakers in 116th Congress are millionaires. Open Secrets. Retrieved May 25, 2021, from https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires/.
Ferguson, T. (1995). Golden rule: The investment theory of party competition and the logic of money-driven political systems. Chicago University Press.
Ferguson, T. (2013). Review of Affluence and Influence: Economic inequality and political power in America by Martin Gilens. Princeton University Press. Perspectives on Politics, 11(1), 252–254.
Ferguson, T., Jorgensen, P., & Chen, J. (2019, September). How money drives US congressional elections: Linear models of money and outcomes. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2019.09.005
Ferguson, T., Jorgensen, P., & Chen, J. (2020). How much can the U.S. congress resist political money? A quantitative assessment. Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper No. 109.
Fetzer, T., Sasche, O. B., & Novy, D. (2018). Austerity, immigration or globalisation: Was Brexit predictable? Social Market Foundation and Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.
Finch, D. (2016). Hanging on. The stresses and strains of Britain’s just managing families. Resolution Foundation.
Fischer, D. H. (1989). Albion’s seed: Four British folkways in America. Oxford University Press.
Foroohar, R. (2022, January 17). What Biden’s competition crusade tells us about globalisation. Financial Times. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.ft.com/content/e0692dca-cdd7-4ae1-87d7-e8310d501ef8.
Frank, T. (2004). What’s the matter with Kansas? How Conservatives won the heart of America. Picador.
Frank, R. H., & Cook, P. J. (2010). The winner-take-all-society: Why the few at the top get so much more. Virgin.
Frum, D. (2014, January 9). Crashing the party. Retrieved January 9, 2021, from https://davidfrum.com/article/crashing-the-party.
Giger, N., Rosset, J., & Bernauer, J. (2012). The poor political representation of the poor in a comparative perspective. Journal of Representative Democracy, 48, 47–61.
Goodhart, D. (2020). Head, hand, heart: The struggle for dignity and status in the 21st Century. Penguin.
Goodwin, M., & Heath, O. (2016, July 26). Brexit and the left behind: A tale of two countries. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexitvote/2016/07/22/brexit-and-the-left-behind-a-tale-of-two-countries.
Grant, C. (2021). Sins of the Fathers. Review of Life of a Klansman: A family history of white supremacy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York Review of Books 18 November, pp. 4–7.
Gray, A. (2021, December 14). UK government vetoes reappointment of another two Channel 4 directors. Financial Times. Retrieved December 15, 2022, from https://www.ft.com/content/9be74f15-8ba7-45a9-9cc7-98ae7960a204.
Gregory, A. (2022, February 16) Covid-19 impact deadlier for poor areas than first thought. The Guardian.
Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2020). Let Them eat tweets: How the right rules in an age of extreme inequality. Liveright.
Haidt, J. (2013). The righteous mind: Why people are divided by politics and religion. Penguin.
Hantzsche, A., & Young, G. (2019, November). UK general election briefing: The economic and fiscal impact of Brexit. National Institute of Economic and Social Research and Nuffield Foundation.
Holmwood, J. (2014). Beyond capital? The challenge for sociology in Britain. The British Journal of Sociology, 65(4), 607–618.
Jennings, W. (2016, June 3). North v South, young v old – the new faultlines of UK’s political map. The Observer.
Jennings, W. (2020, November 8). Educated urban voters were key to success in deeply divided electorate. The Observer.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation. (2016). Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities.https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities.
Konczal, M. (2021). Freedom from the market: America’s fight to liberate itself from the grip of the invisible hand. The New Press.
Kuper, S. (2020a, February 15–16). The revenge of the middle-class anti-elitist. Financial Times Magazine.
Kuper, S. (2020b, October 17–18). What Leavers and Remainers really think now. Financial Times Magazine.
Kuttner, R. (2018). Can democracy survive global capitalism? W.W.Norton.
Luce, E. (2017). The retreat of western liberalism. Abacus.
MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Scribe.
Mair, P. (2013). Ruling the void: The hollowing of western democracy. Verso.
Malik, N. (2020, August 31). The right’s culture war is no sideshow. It’s our politics now. The Guardian Opinion.
Mance, H. (2016, June 3). Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove. Financial Times.
Mayer, J. (2016). Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Scribe.
McCurdy, C., Gardiner, L., Gustafsson, M., & Handscomb, K. (2020). Painting the towns blue: Demography, economy and living standards in the political geographies emerging from the 2019 General Election. Resolution Foundation.
McGrade, P. (2020). Manufacturing in the marginals. Retrieved October 22, 2020, from https://lexreports.readz.com/manufacturing-report-final-for-web.pdf.
McGuire, S. K., & Delahunt, C. B. (2020). Predicting United States policy outcomes with random forests. Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper 138.
Monbiot, G. (2020, November 25). There is a civil war in capitalism and we’re the collateral damage. The Guardian Journal.
Mudde, C. (2015, February 17). The problem with populism. The Guardian. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-side-europe.
Mueller, J.-W. (2016). What is populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mueller, J.-W. (2021a). Democracy rules. Allen Lane.
Mueller, J.-W. (2021b, December 9). Biden is selling democracy short. The New York Times. Retrieved December 9, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/opinion/biden-democracy-summit.html.
Niven, A. (2020, September 20). England’s new divide: not north v south but town v city. The Guardian Journal.
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.
O’Toole, F. (2020, December 3). Democracy’s afterlife. The New York Review of Books.
Parker, S. (Ed.). (2013). The squeezed middle: The pressure on ordinary workers in America and Britain. Policy Press.
Payne, S. (2021). Broken heartlands: A journey through Labour’s lost England. Macmillan.
Peters, Y., & Ensink, S. J. (2015). Differential responsiveness in Europe: The effects of preference difference and electoral participation. West European Politics, 38(3), 577–600. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2014.973260
Piketty, T. (2018). Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising inequality and the changing structure of political conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948–2017). Retrieved August 28, 2020, from http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018.pdf.
Pissarides, C., Skordi, J., Tomas, A., Atwell, S., & De Lyons, J. (2019). Automation, politics and the future of work: A discussion paper. Institute for the Future of Work. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aa269bbd274cb0df1e696c8/t/5de4d89235fa141ad0cd1679/1575278743066/Automation%2C+politics+and+the+future+of+work+.pdf.
Rocheleau, M. (2016, December 20). Trump’s Cabinet picks so far worth a combined $13b. The Boston Globe. Retrieved February 15, 2022, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/12/20/trump-cabint-picks-far-are-worth-combined/XvAJmHCgkHhO31SxgIKvRM/story.html.
Rosenbaum, M. (2017, February 6). Local voting figures shed new light on EU referendum. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38762034.
Ruggie, J. (1982). International regimes, transactions, and change: Embedded Liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization, 36, 379–415.
Runciman, D. (2019). How democracy ends. Profile.
Sandel, M. J. (2020). The tyranny of merit: What’s become of the common good? Allen Lane.
Shipman, T. (2016). All out war: The full story of how Brexit Sank Britain’s political class. William Collins.
Shipman, T. (2022, January 2). A sticky situation. The Sunday Times
Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexitland: Identity, diversity and the resha** of British politics. Cambridge University Press.
Stoller, M. (2016, October 24). How democrats killed their populist soul. The Atlantic. Retrieved November 12, 2016, from http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/.
Techau, P. (2016 April 19). Sophisticated states are failing – politicians need to take risks. Financial Times. Retrieved August 27, 2020, from https://www.ft.com/content/f519492e-022b-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.
Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis. Harper Collins.
Walker, P. (2018, October 27). Divided Britain: Polling study finds huge chasm in attitudes. The Guardian.
Westlake, S. (2016, July 1). U can’t touch this: Why the intangible economy makes people vote for Brexit. Retrieved January 18, 2019, from http://www.theintangibleeconomy.com/?p=83.
Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House.
Wright, O. (2019, February 4). Experts blame Brexit on coalition austerity. The Times.
Younge, G. (2020, November 17). The unfinished business of American democracy. The Guardian Long Read.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, R. (2022). Authoritarian Populism and its Sources. In: The Conservative Counter-Revolution in Britain and America 1980-2020. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09142-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09142-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-09141-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-09142-1
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)