A prophetic turn in populist politics
Back in 2022 Peter Levine – whose thought blog posts are amongst my favourite reads on a regular basis – wrote the following:
The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting political objective.
When the class-distribution turns upside down, the left will no longer advocate impressive social reforms, because its base will be privileged. And the right will no longer favor limited government, because tax cuts don’t help the poor much. The right will instead embrace government activism in the interests of traditional national, racial or religious hierarchies. The left will frustrate change, while the right–now eager to use the government for its objectives–will become genuinely dangerous
I’m not as sophisticated a political observer as Peter is, but in general i’ve noticed a trend in the political spectrum away from left and right and towards policy focussed versus populism. Although at the moment I think the right generally align to populous politics, I see it on the left as well and to me is concerning. The pandemic showed us that populist governments struggle when confronted with a real crisis. Humanity faces several existential crisis currently, and in the near future, rooted in war, climate change, economic, inequality, mass migrations, and technological issues such as AI and overreliance on algorithms and social media to shape our thinking.
Peter has reflected on these observations on this inversion in a recent blog post in which he looks at recent election results in Europe and thinks about the current election campaigns in the United States. Of course it’s not simple and there are many dynamics that affect American politics that don’t affect European politics or even politics in Canada. But his observations remind me that the political spectrum is changing and for anybody working to get things done at any level in government attending to the shifts provides very useful situation awareness.
