On Populists

As Donald Trump seems sure to emerge as the opposition candidate in the US, Janan Ganesh writes about the fears associated with populists. (The term “populist” refers to a politician who appeals to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups)

 

But many populists have risen across democracies worldover, and the associated fears of “democratic backsliding, liberal retreat and the assorted impact on global economy” have been heard for a long time. Now that we’ve seen enough of them in power now, says Ganesh, shouldn’t we look at the data on how countries have fared under populists, instead of just theorizing over what can happen?

 

Other than the one guy in Turkey, Erdogan, none of the other countries have done badly under populists. America under Trump, Italy under Meloni, Israel  under Netanyahu… none of them did badly economically:

“This is the liberal nightmare: not that populists abolish democracy to remain in power, but that they perform well enough not to have to.”

 

How has that happened, he wonders.

“One view is that, from the beginning, we commentators lost all sense of proportion. These “strongmen”, “autocrats” and “demagogues” are much more pragmatic than such excitable language allows.”

The other possibility, he says, that the theorists are right, just that it takes a longer time than a single election cycle for the economic consequences to come home to roost. But is that really true, or is that a belief since it can never be proven wrong (it allows for endlessly extending the timeframe of one’s prediction)?

 

Then he takes this line of thought to its logical conclusion, not because he agrees with where this line of thought leads to. Was the basic assumption that economic progress and democracy have a cause-and-effect relation wrong? What if the relation between economic growth and democracy was correlation, not causation? After all, China has done very well economically without democratizing. What if existing democracies “become authoritarian without getting poorer”? If people begin to feel that the two (authoritarianism and economic growth) are unrelated, then we’d have all become like Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader from decades back, who famously said:

”It doesn't matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.”