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Landry Ayres: Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist, I’m Landry Ayres.
On today’s episode, Aaron Powell interviews Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a member of the Board of Directors at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a trustee of Freedom House.
She recently authored a piece at The UnPopulist titled, “Right-Wing Populists Are Just as Bad for Business as Left-Wing Ones,” in which she outlines the folly and falsehoods that form the foundation of populist economics.
In today’s discussion, they cover the story populists tell their followers about economics, how that same narrative has taken root in America, and what it takes to resist falling under the populist spell. Enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Aaron Ross Powell: What is the economic story that populists, strongmen, populist candidates, people who are trying to push a populist platform, sell their supporters on?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Populists all over the world, whether they're left or right, tend to try to tell their voters that they're being screwed by the elites and that their lives would be better in all sorts of ways, from having more respect to having more money, if the elites weren't taking it all. Sometimes those elites are portrayed as corrupt. Often they're portrayed as in league with one another, in a conspiracy, but always it's the real people, the good people, versus far away elites who are harming them. The populist leader, while often actually a part of the elite, claims to stand on behalf of the real people and be fighting for them.
Aaron Ross Powell: By way of example, could you tell us about Viktor Orbán? Because you mention in the article that you wrote for The UnPopulist that he began as what we might describe as a classical liberal in terms of his economic policy, and that didn't work and he pivoted. What has Hungary's economics looked like under Orbán?
Rachel Kleinfeld: It's a great question because, of course, Viktor Orbán is the strongman that Trump and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have been most enamored with. Orbán is not a conservative. He started out as one. He started out as a true liberal in his first term as prime minister. He cut taxes and he had pro-business policies and the voters really didn't like it and they threw him out.
Then there was a corruption scandal with the left-wing government and he came back in, reborn as a populist. Another thing that populists have in common is that they really don't care much about ideology. They don't care a lot about values. They care a lot about power and staying in power and doing what it takes. Orbán's classical liberalism was easily sloughed off and what he decided to do was force banks to re-denominate mortgages.
It was after the economic crisis. Most people had their mortgages held by banks in a foreign currency and they were really being squeezed because of the difference between the currencies. He forced the banks to re-denominate and basically cut everyone's mortgage payments. That cost the banks a huge amount of money. The voters loved it, but that wasn't enough. Then he decided to cap the prices that banks, utilities, all sorts of industries could charge. Now, that really squeezed the banking sector so much so that a number of them had to leave Hungary and he had his friends and cronies ready to buy them out.
“What you see is this quick rise in economic growth followed by a drag on GDP of about 1% a year so that after 5, 10 years of these populists … you have, 10 years later, 10% lower GDP overall. Now, that might sound really abstract, but of course when economic growth starts to contract, everyone starts to feel that. You get lots of people out of work, you get lots of businesses crushed.” — Rachel Kleinfeld
He didn't nationalize them with a decree Latin American style. What he did was he made it impossible for them to make profit and he did the same to a number of utilities so that in very short order, he had the love of the people who had just gotten a big cut on their mortgages and he had forced businesses to sell to his friends. That's another part of the populist package—they tend to reward their friends and hurt their enemies, including in the business sector, and nobody's a permanent friend.
The banking sector got nationalized and as Orbán gained more power over different sectors of the economy, it gave him more ability to pressure further sectors because now he controlled more of the credit, he controlled more of the utilities, and these are ways that he could exert pressure on other businesses to follow his will.
Aaron Ross Powell: Given all of that, this doesn't seem to be a great place to be a business owner or to run a bank or to be a wealthy person who makes your money in the market, given the degree of control that gets exercised. Why do we see wealthy business owners, the kinds of people we would just refer to as the big capitalists, often lining up behind these guys?
Rachel Kleinfeld: You're absolutely right. The main way that the business community responds to populists is to want to get on their side. I think it's a couple of things. If you're a successful business person, you've been good at what you do, and you think you'll be good at this too if you can game the system, you can be the one who gets enormously wealthy by being friends with this leader. Boy, isn't it easier to cozy up to one strongman, become friends, and then benefit from cozy government contracts and so on than to have to actually provide a better product and fight it out in the dog-eat-dog capitalist world? But I think they all are slightly overconfident and think they'll win. What we see from these populists is that some people do win. Some people get enormously wealthy by being close to the populist leader, but you never know for how long because these leaders don't like competition. Viktor Orbán, his best childhood friend became enormously wealthy benefiting from all of the government largesse thrown his way. Then Orbán forced him out of the country and forced him to sell all his businesses because he didn't like the fact that the guy had different views.
You see that kind of thing over and over again in India with Modi. The head of a very major bank thought he was on top of the world but criticized Modi's really vehement anti-Muslim rhetoric and just said, “Modi should focus on business and not on this kind of stuff,” and just got cut out, was not in the inner circle anymore. The business leaders, think that they're going to be on top. Then they're sort of forced into this role of toadies sucking up or kissing the ring of these leaders eventually. They don't really want to admit that that's where they're going to end up, but it is where they end up.
Aaron Ross Powell: Just by way of example, I think yesterday, reporting came out that Trump has filed a lawsuit against his business partners at Truth Social, which just had a stock offering that popped up and made a lot of money, claiming that they had mismanaged things and that the stock that they own should be taken from them and presumably transferred to him. Just another example of business owners thinking they can partner with the populist, but he's going to screw them over.
Rachel Kleinfeld: It's sadly a story that gets repeated over and over and over. There's actually an economics paper about business leaders who were asked to partner with Hitler. Hitler had a little meeting with business leaders in Germany. I know you're never supposed to argue ad Hitlerum, but it's such an incredible economics paper because the leaders of these business companies that agreed to work with him actually did see their stock prices rise for a short period of time, which is what you often see. There's a quick help for these business leaders and then a long fall.
I don't have to describe the fall in Germany of what happened, but it's not just that the individual businesses are hurt, although that does happen. You don't stay permanent friends with these leaders. They're incredibly egocentric and mostly what they want to do is enrich themselves ultimately, but they also hurt their economies as a whole. You see a lot more economic volatility, you see a lot more stock crashes, recessions, major economic problems happening in these economies. That's because they're so personalized.
Once a populist gains power, they centralize everything and they personalize it in themselves. That whimsical policymaking, “I'm the leader and I decide this one day and I decide that the next day,” it's just not good for the economy over the long haul. Even if business leaders think they can get close and ride it out, the whole economy starts to suffer and everything becomes very volatile.
Aaron Ross Powell: That was what I was going to ask about: what does this end up looking like as it plays out? You have the populists come to power by making two claims. One is “the current system's not working for you. If you give me authority, I can force the system to change in ways that will make it work better for you, the herrenvolk. Part of the reason it's not working is because these people, the elites, have been hurting you, benefiting from your suffering. They're the problem. I'm going to also punish them by way of helping you.”
“What these populists do to enrich themselves, to feed their egotistical desires, to make policy directly, has real effects on real business people at the high level, the ones that think they can get close and then crash and burn, but also at the mom-and-pop level who just don't care much about politics and want to get by but are being harmed…” — Rachel Kleinfeld
As you said, when they come in, they institute policies that look like help. Your mortgage rate goes down. That seems beneficial. Or we crackdown on the globalists and their trade that's taking jobs out. Or the we crack down on the immigrants who we imagine are taking your jobs. A lot of those policies seem like they would have an effect, at least in the short term. Your mortgage rate does go down. There are fewer immigrants you're competing against, et cetera. What does this end up looking like in the longer term?
Rachel Kleinfeld: The best economics paper on this that looked at populists over, I think, almost a hundred-year time span found that, again, whether of the left or the right, what you tended to get was a quick bump. You got economic growth for the first two or three years because they overheat their economies. They are trying to buy those votes. “Buy” is the relevant word there. They spend too much government money. Because they're spending all this government money, there's inflation, that thing overheats and then everything crashes.
What you see is this quick rise in economic growth followed by a drag on GDP of about 1% a year so that after 5, 10 years of these populists—and often they don't want to leave power so you give them for a long time, or if they leave power they put their friends in power after them—you have, 10 years later, 10% lower GDP overall. Now, that might sound really abstract, but of course when economic growth starts to contract, everyone starts to feel that. You get lots of people out of work, you get lots of businesses crushed.
In India with Modi, for instance, he decided to remove a lot of smaller currencies from the system. It would be as if you took all the $5, $10, and $20 bills out of the system overnight and all the businesses that depended on cash, which in India are a lot of businesses, suddenly found themselves squeezed closed to get their cash into the bank so it didn't lose all of its worth. Even if they could do that relatively quickly, their customers were all doing the same thing and so suddenly, they didn't have any customers.
It eventually worked itself out, but in the months that it took to work itself out, hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. If you are a small business owner and your business closes, you might not be able to start a new business. You might not be able to wait for the long run for everything to work its way out. Hungary did similar things. Very different policies, but they played around with the regulations on tobacco so that it basically destroyed the business of thousands of small newspaper shops in small areas that sold some newspapers and magazines but mostly depended on tobacco sales to make up their margins and stay in business. The fooling around with the tobacco regulations drew them out of business.
Eventually, he reinstated a way for tobacco sellers to make money and sold those licenses. By the way, more than a third went to friends of his. It was very much a crony capitalist thing. In the meantime, all these people in small towns where there's not a lot of economic activity lost their business and don't have an easy way to start it up.
What these populists do to enrich themselves, to feed their egotistical desires, to make policy directly, has real effects on real business people at the high level, the ones that think they can get close and then crash and burn, but also at the mom-and-pop level who just don't care much about politics and want to get by but are being harmed by … it reminds me of the Greek gods of Olympus throwing their thunderbolts and the rest of the world has to deal with it.
Aaron Ross Powell: One of the reasons that the wind went out of communism's sails and that we stopped seeing communist revolutions is because people saw that in practice, communism didn't deliver on its promises, that the Soviet Union did not turn into a worker's paradise, that China did not become wealthy, that we saw mass starvations and so on. The evidence became overwhelming.
If the story of populism is as consistent as you've said in its effects, that we get this short burst but then things go south pretty quickly and we're in a world that is information-accessible, everybody has a smartphone, everybody's on the internet, even people in populist countries so that information is out there, why do the populists keep having success telling this story?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Hope springs eternal for people who feel like they're getting a raw deal. It hasn't happened in their country yet—they haven't experienced it. It's also that another element of populism is that they end up controlling the media and controlling the story. Where they've done that, they stay in power.
Now, where they failed to do that—Bolsonaro, for instance, in Brazil, was not a very effective populist; basically, wasn't particularly good at being a populist. He did not control the media and his, not just mismanagement economically, but also the way he targeted business, the way he would say, "You're making excess profits," this idea that there could be excess profits and that the government could determine who deserved to make a profit, who didn't, the business people not only felt it, but they could hear it and they could talk about it because he didn't control the media yet.
What you saw was some of the most conservative business federations in Brazil coming out and actually saying, “This is not democracy, or at least ‘not a liberal capitalist democracy.’ We don't want this.” He got voted out. In Hungary, conversely, that squeezing I was talking about that Hungary did, that Orbán did, of business, it wasn't just banks. It also very much targeted the media first. Poland did the same thing. It's a very common populist technique. I'm not talking just about political media, by the way. I'm talking about ladies' magazines and leisure magazines and so on. People often owned 20 or 30 magazines, of which maybe there'd be one website that was political and then a number of just popular magazines that made money.
“When civil society goes, when people have less access to information and less ability to organize, they're less able to fight back against populism. Unfortunately, the techniques that we've seen to fight civil society and close the space, I think of it like … the famous Star Wars scene where there's a garbage compactor and the heroes are trying to grab garbage and hold back the walls.” — Rachel Kleinfeld
The government would regulate these areas, would come up with specious reasons why some business wasn't allowed to merge or some business wasn't allowed to benefit from the tax policies or would get audited. Then they would make them offers they couldn't refuse. If they refused, suddenly there'd be another audit and another audit. Over time, what happened was about 500 media properties in Hungary got put in a foundation, got given to the government, freely given by their owners who just couldn't think of anything better to do with their once thriving businesses. Those were put in a foundation that was under the leadership of a political friend of Orbán's.
Well, once you control the media, it can become much less easy to tell what's going on with the economy. They also tend to affect the statistical agencies. In India, in Brazil, and in Hungary, what you see is when bad stats come out, they get covered up. In India, quite famously, one of the entire statistical commissions, all the independent commissioners quit because unemployment statistics weren't being released and consumption statistics were being cooked and faked or held back and so on because the government didn't want to admit to bad numbers.
It becomes murky to tell what's going on. It becomes unsafe to talk about it. People get scared about speaking publicly about their views for fear that it will go back to the leader and hurt them. It becomes actually quite hard to tell if what's going on is just you or is something more general. Business leaders don't like to admit that things are going badly in their business if it's just them. Suddenly, everything becomes quite opaque.
Aaron Ross Powell: If we think about the populist movements several decades ago, it feels like they were primarily left-wing; it was leftist populist movements. The movements that we've seen recently—so Trumpism in the U.S., India, Brazil, Hungary, the movements for populism in other countries in Europe—have been largely right-wing populist movements. I guess there's two questions, then. One, what's going on? Is that characterization accurate? If so, what's going on there? Two, are there meaningful distinctions between left and right populism in terms of what they do once they get into power?
Rachel Kleinfeld: This is a hard question to answer without a visual. When I try to answer this, I like to draw a visual. Just picture in your mind, in the 20th century, those of us who came of age in the 20th century, you had left and right that were defined basically by how much government interference should be in the market. The right wanted less government interference and more openness and free market capitalism, and the left wanted more government activity all the way to communism on the far end and more social democracy in the medium era where the government provided more of a safety net.
Your left and right were defined economically by those polls, and then you had more democratic and more authoritarian systems. What we tend to find in those were that the very left-wing systems ended up becoming more authoritarian because you can't control people economically without controlling them politically, and you've got these quite awful forms of totalitarianism that affected the 20th century. I think a lot of business leaders said, “okay, well, I know where my bread is buttered. I want a democratic system, a capitalist system, and that puts me on the center right up in that upper quadrant toward democracy, pro-capitalism, more free market.”
The 21st century is not like that. It's like the kaleidoscope has just been scrambled. People need to get that grid out of their mind because populism… it’s about power. It's not about these ideas of left and right wing. You see a populist who claims to be on the right, like Orbán, putting 5% of the Hungarian people on the government payroll. That is not a free market way of doing things. That's a Peronist way of doing things.
Argentina came up with the exact same system with its left-wing populism because when you have a lot of people on the government payroll, you control a lot of votes. Those people want to keep their jobs, and so you can force them to vote for the ruling party through all sorts of means of figuring out who they voted for. You see this machine-like politics, get people benefiting from the government, either from government handouts, welfare payments, dole, actual jobs, and then you can control them more and force them more to do your bidding. That includes business, by the way.
“In the 20th century … you had left and right that were defined basically by how much government interference should be in the market … and then you had more democratic and more authoritarian systems. … The 21st century is not like that. It's like the kaleidoscope has just been scrambled. People need to get that grid out of their mind because populism … it’s about power. It's not about these ideas of left and right wing. … The left and right with populism don't really matter.” — Rachel Kleinfeld
In Hungary, for instance, it's not just politically connected businesses that require government help. If you're a construction company, it turns out that you need to have a government approved architecture firm to do the construction work. Suddenly, now you need to work with the government. If you're an architect, you need to be one of those approved firms. If you have a street light sales or a billboard sales, you have to deal with the government. The number of businesses affected is much larger than people think because of the ways in which government affects so many parts of business.
The left and right with populism don't really matter. That has more to do with their social positions on issues like immigration and abortion and family matters. On economic matters, populists of the left and populists of the right have the same strategy, which is give away a lot of government money, get a lot of people to be dependent on the government in one way or another, and then use that dependence to manipulate them so that you get the votes and keep the power.
Aaron Ross Powell: The populist experience in the U.S., with the rise of Trump and the near total takeover of the right and of the Republican Party by populism is odd in the sense that you just set out, which is that America's never had a strong leftist economics movement. The Communist Party never gained much traction even at its height in the '30s, '40s, and maybe '50s. We never had a strong socialist movement. We'd occasionally have socialist candidates get some attention, but we never elected a socialist to the presidency.
The notion of free enterprise is baked into American culture in a way that even people in the U.S. who are on the left, even our progressives, are radically more pro-capitalism, pro-markets, than leftists in other countries. The right has long made free enterprise really central to its rhetoric and sense of self, and yet Trump seems to have just flipped that in a handful of years in a way that makes less sense in the U.S. than it would seem to make in a lot of other places.
Do you have a story for that? For why so many people who made free enterprise central to their identity and why so many Americans who forever opposed—the right still imagines itself as if we're fighting back against communism and socialism, but we're doing it while embracing policies that are indistinguishable, as you said, from leftist populist movements. Is there a story for why this happened in America? Because America seems to be the place that was most inoculated against this happening.
Rachel Kleinfeld: There's a famous political scientist, [Larry] Bartels, who talks about folk wisdom of democracy and then real democracy, and I'm very much someone who believes in the way he lays it out. There's a lot of empirical research behind it. People say they believe in policies, and they might think they believe in policies, but much deeper than that is our identity as a member of a group. For most people, their attachment to whatever policies they claim to believe in has more to do with their attachment to other group members. When that group shifts, they will shift very quickly. It's a small number of people who actually turn out to care more about the policies.
You see this with Russia policy. The Republican Party also had as a bedrock of its foundation that it was strong on national security, pro-freedom, and now suddenly there's many people who are willing to give Russia what they want. It's not just on economics. When the group identity shifts, the shift for most people moves very quickly away from policies that they claim to care about.
There's all sorts of rationalizations about that. You can see the NatCons and the different flavors of the MAGA movement coming up with various rationalizations about how they need the government now to fight because nothing else worked well enough. It's really about group membership. Now, to get to “Why did the group membership shift so much?,” this is a real warning sign for people who think that the Trump economy in Trump 2.0 will look like the Trump economy in Trump 1.0. Because what we've seen with the Republican Party was that in Trump 1.0, you had a Republican Party, you had the normal leaders who were there, and there were great tax cuts for folks who liked that.
“Well, once you control the media, it can become much less easy to tell what's going on with the economy. … It becomes unsafe to talk about it. People get scared about speaking publicly about their views for fear that it will go back to the leader and hurt them. It becomes actually quite hard to tell if what's going on is just you or is something more general. Business leaders don't like to admit that things are going badly in their business if it's just them. Suddenly, everything becomes quite opaque.” — Rachel Kleinfeld
It was somewhat business as usual, plus some policies that people had differing opinions on, but what we're seeing now is that it's not that Republican Party. The old leaders, your Mitch McConnells and your Rob Portmans and Jeff Flakes, people who are very conservative in different ways, are all gone. What you're getting is family members—quite literally in the case of the RNC—and that is also something that we see with populists. Huey Long famously was one of the great populists of America. He ran Louisiana and Huey Long's descendants continued to run Louisiana into the '80s.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, his descendants had a handle on all sorts of positions of political power in Louisiana. You see the same in Argentina with the Peróns who just keep coming back in different—the Kirchners, in different parts of the family, pass themselves on. Part of that is because there's often a lot of corruption and family members keep it in the family as it were in these populist economies. It's also about control.
While Trump 1.0 was kind of normal Republican economic policies and a normal Republican Party with this new leader, what you're now seeing is the consolidation of power. This is what we saw in Hungary and in other populist countries. It starts with the party and it's left or right, by the way. It's Chavez, it's Indira Gandhi, it's this kind of populist authoritarianism. First, you consolidate your power, then you exert that power, and so we'll see a very different economy, I think, in a second term.
Aaron Ross Powell: What role does political violence play in all of this? Because one of the things that stood out to me in the article that you published for The UnPopulist was you mentioned that populist movements typically come to power in free and fair elections. They are democratic movements in that sense. Then afterwards, they consolidate power and democracy erodes in the ways you've discussed.
We saw that in 2016. Trump won the election, I think, fairly. With the questions of Russian interference and whatnot, but Trump won an election. In 2020, he lost the election and we saw violence as a result that was provoked by Trump. Is that a feature, and is that something that we should worry about looking ahead, that populist movements might arrive peacefully, but then violence becomes part of the system?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Let me just start off by saying Trump won in 2016. There certainly was Russian intent to change people's minds, and that was not good, but voters changed their minds due to all sorts of things. Trump's win in 2016, similar to a lot of populist wins, is because they're popular, they're populist. These are really popular policies.
There's a lot of people in America who are swing voters who pollsters tend to think of as moderate, but they're not moderate at all. When you actually look at their views, they're left-wing economically and they're right-wing on social issues. You see that group of people backing populists all over the world, France's National Front and Italy's Brotherhood, and so on. I call it “the more for me, less for thee” contingent. These are people who want government largesse. They just want it for their group and not for anybody else's groups. They can't get that from the normal left and the normal right, but they can get that from populists.
These populists are really quite popular. Now, you asked about violence, and violence is different in different populist countries. All populists do one thing, which is they polarize their populations. The populist way of gaining power is to say there are people who are against you and who you should hate. They build up that polarization and that hatred and that othering. Those people could be bankers, those people could be Jews, they could be gays, they could be any scapegoat group, but there is another that you should hate. They could be libs. That hatred becomes very visceral.
Then the populist says, “Let me be the leader who solves your problems.” They polarize, they gain this very intense, very loyal base who's loyal to the person, not the party. Then they use that intensity of the base to propel themselves into power. Then they say, "Because I am your spear, I am standing for your values and you are the majority, we won a legitimate election together, nothing should stand in our way. Because if anything stands in our way, any institutions, courts, what have you, then that's against the majority. It's undemocratic."
Now, most of us who believe in democracy and those of us who study democracy think that majoritarianism is not democracy. Majoritarianism is one element. You need to win an election, but you also need rights that are inalienable from property rights to the right to life. That is not what populists claim. Populists claim it's the majority will, and after that, anything goes.
“Once a populist gains power, they centralize everything and they personalize it in themselves. That whimsical policymaking, ‘I'm the leader and I decide this one day and I decide that the next day,’ it's just not good for the economy over the long haul. Even if business leaders think they can get close and ride it out, the whole economy starts to suffer and everything becomes very volatile.” — Rachel Kleinfeld
What happens then is the rule of law tends to erode. What you get is courts that stand for property rights, and the right to your life and limb, and so on, also can't stand in the way of this majority. Those are counter-majoritarian institutions. You start seeing the rule of law give way to the will of the majority and the will of the mob. Now, in some countries, the will of the mob can't do a lot because there's just not a lot of weaponry, and there might not actually be a lot of others.
Hungary, for instance, organized against immigration. That was really a major way that Orbán won his second election, was by organizing against immigration. Hungary has almost no immigrants, and they didn't have an immigrant problem. No immigrant wanted to stop in Hungary. They wanted to get to Germany or places with bigger economies. It was just a completely made-up problem. Well, a made-up problem against people who don't really exist in your country when your country doesn't have much weaponry in private hands, and you don't get much violence, little tiny bits of street fighting, but just not that much.
America, on the other hand, the others are very, very present. We have a lot of diversity, and we have a lot of weapons. We have more weapons in private hands than any other country by a long shot. The next greatest is Yemen, which has been in civil war for many, many years. Now, there's no correlation between the number of guns and the amount of civil war in a country, actually. Otherwise, we would have been in civil war a long time ago. When you have this polarization and othering with a very diverse community, a lot of weaponry and an eroding rule of law, that's a problem.
We see all sorts of the statistics on violence in America right now. Homicide had its largest one-year jump in history, in the history of America, under Trump when he was president last time. It's since gone down. It's now quite low, actually, in most places. We still see hate crimes are at their highest point in the 21st century.
Threats against judges have doubled since 2016. Threats against members of Congress are up almost tenfold. Local elected officials, about a fifth of them, are getting threatened in any three-month period. State legislators, it's even worse. Urban areas, if you look at San Diego County, 75% of San Diego County officials say they've been threatened. Half of the women are thinking of quitting as a result because the threats are much more severe and frequent for women and minorities. Violence is not a feature everywhere, but in America, it certainly is.
When you have this polarization and othering with a very diverse community, a lot of weaponry and an eroding rule of law, that's a problem. We see all sorts of the statistics on violence in America right now. Homicide had its largest one-year jump in the history of America under Trump when he was president last time. It's since gone down.
We see all sorts of the statistics on violence in America right now. Homicide had its largest one-year jump in history, in the history of America, under Trump when he was president last time. It's since gone down.
Aaron Ross Powell: In closing, then, this is a podcast of The UnPopulist. We are clearly upfront about not being fans of populism. What are the lessons that listeners should draw from this in terms of what we can do either to prevent populists from coming to power in the first place, or if they do, ensuring that their power doesn't consolidate or doesn't last before doing long-term damage?
Rachel Kleinfeld: The best way to stop a populist is to vote against a populist. In Brazil, they managed to do that. In Poland, they just managed to do that. That's the proper and democratic way to keep them out of power. To answer some of the legitimate grievances that people have against elites, in some countries, the elites really are corrupt and rapacious. In other countries, there's a sense of failure to get ahead that does need to be met.
I work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Andrew Carnegie famously realized during the Gilded Age, “Oh my gosh, if we don't find a way to have a different economic system, the people are going to revolt." Some people at that time said, “Okay, we will build an armory on Fifth Avenue and train all our sons to use guns.” If you ever go to the 5th Avenue, I think it might be Park Avenue Armory, it's a very beautiful fancy building in New York City that the rich built so that when there was class warfare, they would be ready.
Other people like Carnegie thought, “Let's let the air out of this balloon a little bit and move from the Gilded Age to a different sort of capitalism that was less cronyistic.” You can do some of those kinds of policies that allow people to be less enamored with what a populist is promising. Then you can protect civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville talks about civil society as one of the keys to America's greatness that all the ways that people form independent organizations from churches to newspapers to businesses to everything that's not the government is really important and an important technology that Americans were particularly good at.
What we see in other countries, democracies as well as authoritarian systems, is that when civil society goes, when people have less access to information and less ability to organize, they're less able to fight back against populism. Unfortunately, the techniques that we've seen to fight civil society and close the space, I think of it like Star Wars, the famous Star Wars scene where there's a garbage compactor and the heroes are trying to grab garbage and hold back the walls.
The civil society, the space closes in through government regulation and tax policy and this and that, all of which sounds quite reasonable when the government does it. Oh, you need to register as a foreign agent because you got some money from a foreign government. That sounds reasonable. Oh, you need to follow the proper procedures to register your nonprofit organization. Or you're a church, you need to follow the proper procedures to register your church. All sounds reasonable.
In the hands of these personalized populist governments, these reasonable policies get twisted to be used against ideas they don't like. The populist who we have not yet found a way to unseat, who controlled their democracy to the point where they're having so many terms that they seem inevitable and ongoing, are the ones who have really curbed their civil society.
We're starting to see that in America. We saw it first with the liberal right, with a lot of folks, the David Frenchs of the world and so on getting incredible threats and harm promised to their family members and then losing their jobs and so on as the space on the right for ideas that weren't part of this MAGA populism got squeezed. We're seeing it on the left for liberals. You really need to stand together across those ideological divides to say, “You need freedom of speech, you need freedom of organization, even for ideas you don't like.” We need to uphold that because populists are going to try to squeeze the information space so that people can't talk, as I discussed earlier. The best way is to vote them out.
Landry Ayres: Thank you for listening to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. For more like this, make sure to subscribe for free at theunpopulist.net. Until next time.
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