How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism

ARISTOTLE: Do you not think that all humans are mortal?

POPULIST: Are you interrogating me? Just because we are not citizens like you, but people, we are ignorant, is that it? Maybe we are, but we know about real life.

ARISTOTLE: That is irrelevant.

POPULIST: Of course it’s irrelevant to you. For years you and your kind have ruled this place, saying the people are irrelevant.

ARISTOTLE: Please, answer my question.

POPULIST: The real people of this country think otherwise. Our response is something that cannot be found on any elite papyrus.

ARISTOTLE: (Silence)

POPULIST: Prove it. Prove to me that all humans are mortal.

ARISTOTLE: (Nervous smile)

POPULIST: See? You can’t prove it. (Confident grin, a signature trait that will be exercised constantly to annoy Aristotle.) That’s all right. What we understand from democracy is that all ideas can be represented in the public space, and they are respected equally. The gods say …

ARISTOTLE: This is not an idea, it’s a fact. And we are talking about mortal humans.

POPULIST: If it were left up to you, you’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal, just like your predecessors did.

ARISTOTLE: This is not going anywhere.

POPULIST: Please finish explaining your thinking, because I have important things to say.

ARISTOTLE: (Sigh) All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human …

POPULIST: I have to interrupt you there.

ARISTOTLE: Excuse me?

POPULIST: Well, I have to. These days, thanks to our leader, it is perfectly clear who Socrates is. We know very well who Socrates is! You cannot deceive us any more about that evil guy.

ARISTOTLE: Are you joking?

POPULIST: This is no joke to us, Mr Aristotle, as it may be to you. Socrates is a fascist. My people have finally realised the truth, the real truth. The worm has turned. You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, ‘Therefore Socrates is mortal,’ right? We’re fed up with your lies.

ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic.

POPULIST: I respect your beliefs.

ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic.

POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.

This is a simple example of the basic populist logic that, with variations, is employed in many countries today. However, even in this fictitious conversation there are at least five fallacies according to the general rules of rational debate, the fundamental rules of logic that we have been using for centuries in everyday life, even if we don’t know any Latin:

1. Argumentum ad hominem (rebutting the argument by attacking the character of one’s adversary rather than refuting the substance of the argument) – You and your kind have ruled …

2. Argumentum ad ignorantiam (appealing to ignorance by asserting that a proposition is true because it has not yet been disproven) – See? You can’t prove that all humans are mortal.

3. Argumentum ad populum (assuming that a proposition is true simply because many people believe it) – The real people of this country think otherwise.

4. Reductio ad absurdum (attempting to prove or disprove an argument by trying to show that it leads to an absurd conclusion) – You’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal.

5. Ad-hoc reasoning (explaining why a certain thing may be by substituting an argument for why it is) – Democracy is about respecting ideas, so respect my idea.

Although the fallacies committed in the above conversation seem egregious, they did not appear childish to half of Britain when Boris Johnson and his ilk in the Conservative Party and the Leave campaign exercised them liberally during the Brexit debate. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian on 16 October 2016: ‘You’d hope for consistency and coherence; in its place, the bizarre spectacle of a party claiming to have been against the single market all along, because Michael Gove once said so.’ In other words, argumentum ad ignorantiam. Michael Gove was the man who – bearing a striking resemblance to the populist driving Aristotle crazy above – declared that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. It was comments like this that led the other half of Britain to believe that pro-Brexit arguments were too puerile to take seriously, and that only children could fall for them. Like millions of people in Europe, they also thought that if populist leaders were repeatedly portrayed as being childish, they would never be taken seriously enough to gain actual power.

‘I will tell you one description that everyone [in the White House] gave – that everyone has in common. They all say he is like a child.’

Almost a year after the Brexit referendum, Americans were exercising the same ‘adult strategy’ on the other side of the Atlantic. When Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published in January 2018, its author Michael Wolff repeated this punchline in several TV interviews. The concerned nods of the composed presenters, together with Wolff’s expression of someone bringing bad news, created the impression of a parent–teacher meeting being held to discuss a problem child. Each interview emphasised Trump’s infantile behaviour, providing a comfortable underestimation of the situation for worried adult Americans. He’s just a wayward child, you know, and we are grown-ups. We know better.

For any country experiencing the rise of populism, it’s commonplace for the populist leader to be described as childlike. Reducing a political problem to the level of dealing with a naughty infant has a soothing effect, a comforting belittlement of a large problem. On 5 January 2018, the New York Times published a reader’s letter that included the sentence: ‘Looking at Thursday’s headlines [on the war of words between Trump and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon] makes me wonder whether we have a government or a middle school student council.’ The confidence of being the only adult in the room must have made the letter writer feel somehow secure. Just as the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, must have felt on 15 November 2016, when he said, ‘This is like giving a chainsaw to a child,’ in response to Nigel Farage’s name being put forward as someone who could help boost trade relations with Trump’s America.

Portraying populist leaders as infantile is not the only trap that is all too easy to fall into. Scrutinising their childhoods to search for the traumas that must have turned them into such ruthless adults, and by doing so bandaging the political reality with some medical compassion that the populist leader didn’t actually ask for, is another common ploy used by critics to avoid feeling genuine political anxiety. Poland’s former populist prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński and Turkey’s Erdoğan have both undergone such examinations in absentia by prominent psychiatrists, and have likewise been described as broken children. Elżbieta Sołtys, a Polish social scientist and psychologist, diagnosed Kaczyński as a traumatised child. In one interview she said it was probable that his low emotional intelligence was connected to his loveless and strict upbringing, adding that his current fury was an explosion following years of suppression. Erdoğan’s diagnosis was similar. His father used to hang him by his feet in order to stop him swearing, and as a result an entire country now has to suffer his volatile mood swings.

The primary consequence of calling these leaders infantile, and psychologising their ruthlessness, is simply to make their critics feel more adult and mentally healthy by comparison. It attributes childish politics entirely to the populist leader and his supporters. As if everyone else (including the writer of this book, and its readers) were completely immune to an infantilised perception of the world. Well, it’s not like that. You know that, right?

‘Why do you watch these films? These are just fairy tales for kids. You’re grown men, goddamn it!’

It is 2016, and my friend Zeynep is talking to some Turkish male friends of ours in Istanbul. We are all in our forties, and the men she is reprimanding are all successful, upper-middle-class, well-educated. They have just finished playing fantasy football on the PlayStation, and are now trying to choose which movie to watch. Although they are the same age as the prophets and the revolutionary leaders of the last century, with their backpacks dumped on the sofa they look like adolescents just back from school. Their political activity is limited to voting, mostly because they consider politics beneath them. Of course they are not as infantile as the people who believe a bigot who keeps repeating the fairy tale of ‘making Turkey great again’. However, they do have a soft spot for fairy tales; it’s just that theirs involve vampires, superpowers and Cristiano Ronaldo. As Zeynep refuses to make light of the situation, the men first try to fend off her attack with laughter, just as boys would. But Zeynep insists: ‘I mean, seriously. Why?’ They then choose to watch The Hunger Games, perhaps as an attempt at conciliation, but she’s still waiting for a substantial answer, some sign of self-awareness or self-criticism, as girls do. The men quickly move to hawkish diplomacy. One of them, not jokingly, says, ‘Well, you watch cartoon movies, don’t you? You’re no better than us, Mom!’

Zeynep and I take our adult discussion into another room. She talks about how infantile this generation of men are, as millions of women surely do in countless other countries. And I start going on about Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, the ethical hegemony of ‘That’s the way the world is,’ and the depressive hedonia that comes with it. But then we start talking about how the new Lego movie is actually hilarious. Later that night I think about the question of whether the image of the ‘good’ leaders of our times is more adult than the ‘evil’ ones’, or not.

‘I drive an old Volkswagen because I don’t need a better car.’

It’s November 2015, and the former Uruguayan president José Mujica is speaking on stage. I’m chairing what will come to be remembered as an almost legendary talk to an audience of five thousand people, most of them not actually inside the congress building in Izmir, but outside watching on a giant screen. Mujica wants to talk about how Uruguay needs meat-cutting machines (because in order to be able to export its meat the country needs to be able to cut it in accordance with the regulations of other countries), but the audience seems to prefer the fun stuff: the cute old Beetle, his humble house, and so on. The next day, Mujica is described the same way in all the newspapers: ‘The humblest of presidents who drives a Volkswagen Beetle and lives in a small house …’ There is no mention of him being a socialist, no ideological blah blah, none of the boring adult content. He is like Bernie Sanders, portrayed as the wise, cool old man during the Democratic primaries, or Jeremy Corbyn, whose home-made jam and red bicycle got more attention than his politics. These are the dervishes of our time, reduced to the kindly old men of fairy tales: fairy tales that attract those who see themselves as the adults and mock the ‘infantile’ supporters of populist leaders.

Much of the literature on populism and totalitarianism interprets the infantile narrative of the populists, as well as that of the ‘deceived’ masses who support them and choose to think in their fairy-tale language, as a political reaction that is specific to them. However, it would appear to be neither a reaction, nor specific. Rather, it’s a coherent consequence of the times we live in, and something that contaminates all of us, albeit in different ways. Although it may seem that the current right-wing populist leaders are performing some kind of magic trick to mesmerise the previously rational adult masses and turn them into children, they aren’t the ones who opened the doors to infantilised political language. The process started long before, when, in 1979, a famous handbag hit the political stage and the world changed.

That was the year a woman handbagged an entire nation with her black leather Asprey and said: ‘There is no alternative.’ When Margaret Thatcher ‘rescued’ a nation from the burden of having to think of alternatives, it resonated on the other side of the Atlantic with a man who perfected his presidential smile in cowboy movies. As the decade-long celebration of alternativelessness turned into a triumphalist neo-liberal disco dance on the remains of the Berlin Wall, the mainstream political vocabulary became a glitterball of words like ‘vision’, ‘innovation’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘motivation’, while gradually distancing itself from sepia, adult concepts like ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’. Because ‘That’s the way of the world.’

Meanwhile in Turkey, such terms, along with two hundred other ‘leftist words’, were officially banned from the state lexicon, and removed from the state TV channel, after the military coup in 1980. Whether through violence or neoliberalist persuasion, the mainstream vocabulary used globally to talk and think about the world and our place in it – regardless of what language we speak – was transformed into a sandpit for us to play safely in: socialism and fascism on opposite sides as the improbables of politics, religion and philosophy on the other sides as the irrelevants of ethics. Politics was reduced to mere administration, with people who knew about numbers and derivatives put in charge of taking care of us. It became the sort of bitter drink children would instinctively avoid, but if people did insist on having a taste, then bucketfuls of numbers were poured into their glasses to teach them a lesson. It is not surprising that Nigel Farage has said, ‘I am the only politician keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive.’ And although it angered many when Thatcher’s biographer Jonathan Aitken said, ‘I think she would have secretly cheered [Farage]’ for his anti-refugee politics, it is nevertheless easy enough to picture Thatcher living down to her 1970s nickname by snatching milk out of the hands of Syrian children while saying, ‘People must look after themselves first.’ Ronald Reagan was likewise no less childlike when his team came up with the ‘Let’s make America great again’ slogan for his election campaign in 1980.

The infantile political language of today, which seems to be causing a regression across the entire political spectrum, from right to left, is not in fact a reaction against the establishment, but instead something that follows the ideological fault lines of the establishment that was created in the eighties. The only significant difference between the forerunners and their successors – apart from the illusory economic boom that made the former look more upstanding than they actually were, and the response to the flood of refugees that makes the latter look even more unpleasant than they actually are – is that today the voice of populist infantile politics is amplified through social media, multiplying the fairy tales more than ever and allowing the ignorant to claim equality with the informed. They are, therefore, powerful enough this time around for there to be no limits to their attack on our capacity for political thought and basic reasoning. And we all now know that they are definitely less concerned with manners.

‘The use of coarse language stresses that he is in tune with the man on the street. The debunking style, which often slides over the edge into insult, emphasizes his desire to distance himself from the political establishment.’* (#litres_trial_promo)

Although this description would fit Trump, Erdoğan, Wilders and any other populist leader, it actually refers to Beppe Grillo, former comedian and the leader of the Italian Five Star movement. He is just another example of how the populists politicise so-called everyday language in order to establish a direct line of communication to the real people. Once this line is established the leader has lift-off, enabling him to appear not only to fly above politics, but as high as he wants to go: the sky is the limit. The perceived sincerity, or genuineness, of direct communication with the masses, and the image of the leader merging to become one with them, is a common political ritual of populism. Hugo Chávez did it every week on his personal TV show Alo Presidente!, Erdoğan has done it through his own media, Grillo performed the same stunt through his website, and Trump uses his famous tweets to have a heart-to-heart with his people, unfiltered by the media elite. The one important trick the populist leader has to pull off is that of making his supporters believe he is rejecting the elitist snobs and their media. He does so by including the media in his definition of ‘the political elite’, positioning it as an opponent – despite the fact that it is through the media that his connection to those masses is enabled.

This is a new political game that journalists are mostly unprepared for. It is a populist trick that Putin and Trump have both played on several occasions. On 7 July 2017, during the photo op before their one-on-one meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Putin leaned towards Trump, gestured at the journalists in the room and asked, ‘These the ones hurting you?’ Trump did not hesitate to respond, ‘These are the ones. You’re right about that.’ All at once it was as if the bully and the more established bully were preparing to take down some weaker kids in the playground. The journalists at the summit were shocked by this sudden and unprecedented switch of the spotlight. Not only were they themselves the story, they also found themselves portrayed as opponents on the political stage.

The supporters of both leaders no doubt enjoyed the moment, and relished the idea that a good wrestle – in either the American or the Russian style – was about to begin to knock out the spoiled media brats. Meanwhile the bewildered members of the press found themselves helplessly giggling and dancing around the ring in their efforts to avoid the attacks.

The global media probably wouldn’t have been interested in what Thailand’s prime minister, Prayuth Chanocha, had to say at a press conference on 9 January 2018 had he not put a lifesize cardboard cut-out of himself in front of a microphone and told the assembled journalists to ‘Put your questions to this guy.’ He then left the venue with a swagger, the very image of the jolly populist leader who had already achieved a lot, and it wasn’t even midday yet. The journalists were left smiling awkwardly, as if a child had just done something outrageous and there was nothing the adults present could do but hide their embarrassment by laughing. The BBC used the same type of laughter in a trailer that shows Trump heckling a BBC reporter – ‘Here’s another beauty’ – at a press conference while the other journalists present smile with raised eyebrows like intimidated adults in the school playground. Erdoğan does it in a more Middle Eastern macho style, occasionally reprimanding the members of his own media, jokingly treating them like little rascals, but his little rascals, live on air, at which they giggle obediently every time.