Eric Kaufmann Time for Populism to Grow Up It’s an important check on undemocratic liberalism, but its practitioners must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship and toward a vision of national unity.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/liberal-democracy-trump-populism-conservatives
The Trump administration is hitting its allies with tariffs, pulling out of international agreements, withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine, pardoning January 6 rioters who attacked police, and going after the Department of Justice. At the precise moment when liberal elites are lamenting their overreach on wokeness and mass immigration, these actions risk discrediting national conservatism across the western world.
Populism, which Trump has embodied, is an important check on what Yascha Mounk has termed undemocratic liberalism. However, national populists must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship to construct a new, mainstream vision of national unity. The negative impulses of populism need to be reined in: we need a rational populism. Liberal institutions must learn from the populist moment, and populists need a vision for the institutions.
As progressivism has triumphed in the culture, its irrational and illiberal strands have come to the fore. This has pushed classical-liberal rationalists to the right, and convinced traditional conservatives to back free speech and Enlightenment truth.
The Right was not always amenable to the idea of evidence-based policy. James Burnham’s conservatism of the early 1960s, for example, still opposed Enlightenment reason and free speech, preferring tradition to planning and accumulated habit to consistent principle. That has changed, with free speech and science’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos now associated with the right. The new marriage is symbolized by Silicon-Valley tech elites throwing their lot in with national-populist conservatives like J. D. Vance.
Liberals have also been stunned into self-reflection by Trump’s convincing comeback. Whatever they think of Trump or the European populist Right, the lesson is clear: institutions must change if they are to regain the trust they have clearly lost.
For many, rational populism is a contradiction in terms. Surely populism is defined by a highly emotive style of argument, in which photo ops and catchphrases–“America First,” “take back control”—substitute for patient reasoning. Isn’t populism antithetical to rationality? However, as Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us, we cannot reason without emotion. We always attach an affective score to substantive alternatives, reasoning between these emotions to arrive at a rational decision.
For decades, progressive emotions have shaped many institutions, steering their reasoning. Those institutions have come to revolve around what Jonathan Haidt terms the moral foundations of “equality” and “care/harm.” Patriotic, libertarian, and religious mores that might have moderated left-liberal excesses have fallen by the wayside. The values of the majority have been sidelined.
While progressive activism has made some great contributions in the past such as advancing black, women’s, or gay rights, the shift from equal opportunities to equal outcomes, and from physical safety to emotional safety, has resulted in moralistic overreach. The change occurred first with race. In the late 1960s, affirmative action shifted from an emphasis on preventing discrimination to a “goals and timetables” approach that led to quotas. This was a mistake, and Trump was right to abolish DEI in government.
Progressives spearheaded the campaign for gay rights, but many have been unwilling to compromise on gender identity, which involves a clash of interests between trans women and women. Trump’s restoration of female-only spaces makes sense, though he has failed to devise a solution for trans people in prisons and the military. Had elites offered sensible pushback on trans activist claims, as in Britain, the grievances driving this overcorrection would be shallower.
Likewise, those who voice concerns about the rapid pace of immigration-led cultural change or the negative portrayal of the nation’s past by cultural elites have been dismissed as racist. But in a democracy, these are legitimate issues for debate. Accusations of racism often oversimplify complex realities, ignoring the well-established distinction in psychology between attachment to one’s own group and hatred of, or feeling of superiority toward, others.
The indiscriminate use of a moralistic epithet—applied to everything from incarceration and aptitude tests to the deporting of illegal immigrants—has led to multiple policy failures. It has justified racial discrimination against whites and Asians and enabled medical authorities to excuse Black Lives Matter protests that violated Covid-19 restrictions. This, in turn, eroded public trust in scientific experts.
For all their flaws, elites, institutions, and norms are essential. While liberal democracies are more resilient than alarmists suggest, their quality declines when participants refuse to negotiate and compromise in a spirit of accommodation. This is especially true in international relations, where cooperation on trade, infectious diseases, the environment, and other cross-border challenges benefits everyone. Trump was right to pressure Colombia to take back its illegal migrants. But scrapping certain forms of foreign aid and limiting international trade could worsen the migration pressure that Trump and European populists worry about and make it harder to achieve positive-sum global progress.
A better approach would be to reform international bodies to ensure that cosmopolitan idealists don’t dominate hiring, decision-making, policy, and international law. In my experience, these institutions often view national publics as obstacles to be bypassed in pursuit of universalist goals like the right to migrate. Leftist NGOs, which permeate these organizations, present themselves as neutral technocratic experts, laundering their radical ideological agendas.
A similar problem afflicts domestic institutions, from bureaucratic agencies and foundations to professional bodies and universities. DEI-driven priorities, framed as concerns for equality and harm reduction, permeate mission statements, branding, and HR policies—often without acknowledgment that these are inherently political. Rather than addressing their lack of ideological diversity, these institutions embrace and reinforce their biases.
Our civilization stands at a crossroads, where classical liberal reason and national conservatism have an opportunity to converge and redefine the political mainstream. To preserve liberal democracy, we need a rational populism committed to deep but deliberate institutional reform.
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