Nationalist Populism
It has become commonplace to think of populism as nationalist and racist, as speaking for the supposed real people of a country. In his book What Is Populism?, for example, Jan-Werner Müller takes this approach. But this tenet of right-wing populism is not coextensive with populism itself. The Populist Party in the United States during the late nineteenth century placed their greatest emphasis on issues of economic power and distribution and had an important strand that sought to build bridges across racial lines. Indeed, left-wing populists today follow this alternative tradition. The populism of the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders condemned how the “billionaire class” was rigging the system, even as he supported racial justice efforts. Nationalist populism combines the ethnic, religious, racial, or cultural nationalism of right-wing populism with the economics of left-wing populists. In contemporary politics, the latter agenda includes breaking up the banks and regulating the financial industry, redistributing wealth, expanding jobs through federal programs, and protecting and expanding universal public programs.10
Perhaps the best examples of nationalist populism are Donald Trump, when he was in campaign mode in 2016, and his erstwhile strategist Steve Bannon. During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump offered a mix of right-wing nationalism—from his Make America Great Again slogan to his thinly veiled support for white nationalists—and left-wing economic populism. Trump repeatedly promised not to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and even attacked his fellow Republican candidates for wanting to cut those programs. He argued for Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with pharma companies—a position long held by liberal Democrats. He argued that Wall Street was “getting away with murder” and that elites had “bled our country dry.” He even suggested raising taxes on hedge fund managers. Trump’s administration has not pursued this course, but his campaign combined left and right populism, often to cheers from gigantic crowds.11
Bannon has called his similar approach “economic nationalism.” Bannon supports increased taxes on the rich and a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan to create working-class jobs, and he thinks tech companies like Facebook and Google should be regulated as public utilities. He has argued that over the last few decades, “the globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.” In response, he has advocated for “economic war” with China, starting with a far more aggressive trade policy. For Bannon, economic populism is also a sound political strategy. In a conversation with liberal journalist Robert Kuttner, Bannon said that “the longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”12
Despite being the best example of a national populist, Bannon has been fainthearted in his commitment. His call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” for example, was explicitly made in response to businesses asking for fewer and less stringent regulations. It is unclear why Bannon thinks this is good for working-class people as part of his economic nationalism agenda. A trillion-dollar infrastructure plan requires an administrative state to administer the plan. An economic war with China requires a Commerce Department and US trade representative with the power to engage in investigations and tariff setting. And regulating tech platforms as public utilities requires, unsurprisingly, regulation. When playing to the traditional Republican base of big corporate interests, Bannon’s economic nationalism goes into retreat.13
Taken as an ideal type, however, nationalist populism builds off of the backlash to neoliberalism. Its nationalism rejects neoliberalism’s individualistic tendencies and replaces them with communal identity. Its economic populism rejects neoliberalism’s oligarchic policies and replaces them with redistributionist policies.
Nationalist populism also has the potential to be popular. Scholars have shown that a sizable population is culturally conservative but supports active government. Political scientist Lee Drutman, for example, broke down the 2016 electorate along two dimensions: social/identity issues and economic issues. He found that there were a large number of Americans who are liberal or conservative on both metrics. An extremely small number of people are economically conservative and socially liberal, what we might think of as libertarian, but an enormous number of Americans are economically liberal and socially conservative. Another political scientist, Larry Bartels, found similar dynamics when looking at political attitudes in 2017. Bartels also investigated internal party divisions, and he found that nationalist populists split the parties: “Rank and file Democrats are relatively united in their enthusiasm for an active government, but less united on cultural issues, where a sizable minority cling to the traditional values downplayed or even rejected by most party leaders.” In contrast, he notes, “rank and file Republicans seem to be relatively united and energized by ‘hard-edge nationalism,’ but less united on the role of government, with a sizeable minority expressing rather un-Republican enthusiasm for a strong welfare state.”14
What this means is that both parties are competing to retain and win over Americans who are economically liberal and socially conservative—in other words, national populists. Although this approach might be popular with a significant chunk of the electorate, we should not hold our breath in anticipation of nationalist populism flooding politics like a tidal wave. Nationalist populism simply does not have the support of political elites. Liberal leaders do not agree with the right-wing populist positions on race, gender, and sexual orientation and would not run a government that pursued such policies. Conservative leaders do not support an economically populist agenda, in spite of Trump’s successful 2016 campaign or Bannon’s quotable turns of phrase, and cannot run a government along those lines. This is partly why President Trump has betrayed these voters and shifted away from national populism since he has been in office. Because neither side will embrace nationalist populism wholeheartedly, voters with these intuitions are, for the time being at least, one of the battlegrounds of politics.
Nationalist Oligarchy
Across the political spectrum, a variety of commentators fear the global rise of autocracies and authoritarian governments. They cite Russia, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey as examples. And they fear that the United States is next. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright published a book called Fascism: A Warning. Cass Sunstein gathered a variety of scholars for a collection titled Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America. After the election of Donald Trump, Yale professor Timothy Snyder’s pamphlet On Tyranny was a bestseller for more than a year.15
The authoritarian lens is familiar from the heroic narrative of democracy defeating autocracies in the twentieth century. But as a framework for interpreting—and predicting—the future, it is far too narrow. The rise-of-authoritarianism narrative has little, if anything, to say about economics. Its emphasis is almost exclusively political and constitutional—free speech, an independent judiciary, voting rights, equal treatment for minorities, and the like. In some ways, it makes sense that so many commentators raised in the neoliberal era frame the problem in these terms: neoliberalism seeks to separate politics from economics, to see each as an autonomous sphere. But politics and economics cannot be dissociated from each other. Both have to be considered together. This approach has long been called political economy. Political economy looks at economic and political relationships together, and it is attentive to how power is exercised in both sectors. If authoritarianism is the future, there must be a story of its political economy—how it uses politics and economics to gain and hold power. Yet the rise-of-authoritarianism theorists have less to say about these dynamics.16
The better label for this third possible future is nationalist oligarchy. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book Oligarchy, Jeffrey Winters
calls this “wealth defense.” Elites engage in “property defense,” protecting what they already have, and “income defense,” preserving and extending their ability to hoard more. In the old days, castles and walls were forms of property defense; force and violence could guarantee income defense. Modern oligarchs instead rely on cronyism, corruption, and manipulating legal rules (such as tax rates, property rules, and regulations). Importantly, oligarchy as a governing strategy accounts for both politics and economics. Oligarchs use economic power for political purposes and, in turn, use politics to expand their economic power.17
In even a nominally democratic society, as most countries around the world are today, it should be possible for the majority to overthrow the oligarchic minority with either the ballot or the bullet. So how can oligarchy persist? This is where both populism and authoritarianism come in. Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, by using divide-and-conquer tactics to ensure that a majority doesn’t come into being, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority to overthrow them.18
The divide-and-conquer strategy is an old one, and it works through a combination of coercion and co-optation. Nationalism—whether ethnic, religious, or racial—serves both functions. It aligns a portion of ordinary people with the ruling oligarchy, mobilizing them to support the regime. At the same time, it divides society, ensuring that inspired by nationalism will not join forces with everyone else to overthrow the oligarchs. We therefore see fearmongering about minorities and immigrants and claims that a country belongs only to its so-called true people. Activating these emotional, cultural, and political identities makes it harder for people to unite across these divides to challenge the regime. Rigging the system is, in some ways, more obvious as a tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions, gerrymandering, manipulation of the media—each makes fundamental reform more difficult.
Nationalist oligarchies thus use the politics of nationalism to mobilize (and sometimes divide) the people while delivering oligarchic economic policies to benefit the wealthy and well connected. Not all regimes of this type operate in precisely the same way. Just as there are many variants of liberal democracy—the Swedish model, the French model, the American model—there are many types of nationalist oligarchy. Each country’s approach is unique, but there is a family resemblance that is readily identifiable.
Perhaps the most obvious example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For example, the Russian constitution allowed a president to serve for no more than two consecutive terms. Putin dutifully followed the constitutional provision, serving two four-year terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, before turning over the office to his ally Dmitry Medvedev and taking the post of prime minister. During Medvedev’s single four-year term, the government put forward a constitutional amendment to extend the presidential term to six years. The amendment passed through the Duma and the Federation Council in less than two months. Putin then retook the presidency in 2012 and was reelected in 2018. When his term finishes in 2024, he will have run Russia for virtually a quarter century. Over time, Putin’s government has also passed new laws that have “increased penalties for participation in unauthorized protests, broadened the definition of treason, [and] required that NGOs receiving foreign money… register as ‘foreign agents.’” The arrest and imprisonment of the band Pussy Riot was perhaps the most famous example of illiberalism in Russia.19
But to focus solely on these political changes misses that Russian politics is also intertwined with economics. As Brian Taylor writes in his book The Code of Putinism, “Putin is both president of the formal political system and boss of the informal clan network system.” Putinomics mixes state capitalism, market capitalism, and informal networks of friends. The origins of this system were the infamous privatization campaigns of the 1990s, in which major state-owned enterprises from the Soviet era were “sold off” to oligarchs for highly “favorable prices.” Taylor argues that Putin understood that he needed to control these new oligarchs rather than let them develop independent power centers. So he pushed media tycoons Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky out of the country, forcing them eventually to divest their media holdings. In their place, and at the helm of virtually all of the major companies in the country, are now Putin allies. Take, for example, the Bank of Russia, whose central figures are a physicist, a dentist, a former KGB agent, and an electrical engineer. Their common connection is that they were all close to Putin in the early 1990s. Taylor notes that the “prime minister, presidential chief of staff, secretary of the Security Council, speakers of the two houses of parliament, and the heads of three of the most important companies in the economy—Gazprom, Rusneft, and Russian Railways—as well as other key economic actors, such as the defense industry conglomerate Rostec and the media giant National Media Group” are all friends of Putin’s. The result of this system is that Russian corporations are intertwined with the state.20
As another example, consider Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. While in office, Orbán and his Fidesz party have embraced nationalist oligarchy, combining ethnic nationalist rhetoric, crony capitalism, and the systematic rigging of the political system to preserve power even when his party falters at the ballot box—and all while cozying up to Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia.
Well before taking office, Orbán commented, “We have only to win once, but then properly.” In 2010, Orbán’s Fidesz party won just over 50 percent of the popular vote but a two-thirds majority of the seats in parliament. Once in office, Fidesz used its power to ensure it would keep it. In 2012, Fidesz used expedited procedures to draft and pass a new constitution in two months, with only nine days of parliamentary consideration. Among other things, the new constitution expanded the size of the constitutional court (so Fidesz could gain a majority) and extended the terms of the justices. Fidesz also expanded the electorate to ethnic Hungarians living abroad (with different voting rules for those in countries adjacent to Hungary compared with expats far away), engaged in gerrymandering, reduced the number of members of parliament, and abolished the two-round system of voting—all of which helped his party stay in power. As a result, the 2014 elections, one observer said, were “free but not fair.”21
Immediately after the 2010 election victory, Orbán announced that June 4 would be deemed a Day of National Solidarity. On that day in 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, giving up its empire as part of the resolution to World War I. Fidesz frames this moment as the Trianon Trauma, blaming the West for stripping Hungary of two-thirds of its territory. Orbán has declared that Hungary should be an “illiberal democracy” and that non-Hungarians, and particularly refugees, are unwelcome. “We do not want to see in our midst any minorities whose cultural background differs from our own,” he said in 2015. “We want to keep Hungary for the Hungarians.”22
But like other nationalist oligarchies, ethnic nationalism has not been coupled with economic populism. Instead, according to Bálint Magyar, the former Hungarian minister of education, Orbán has created a “privatized form of a parasite state, an economic undertaking run by the family of the Godfather exploiting the political and public instruments of power.” Paul Lendvai, former Financial Times reporter and author of a book on Orbán, reports that “leases of state-owned land” and licenses for national tobacco shops are doled out to supporters. The government has used the export-import bank (meant to help businesses exporting goods) to prop up a domestic media company that supports the government and attacks its critics. Orbán’s friends and family also benefit. Orbán’s childhood friend Lorinc Meszaros, for example, went from being a gas fitter to the fifth-richest Hungarian, all because he won a variety of state-building contracts. Worse still, the European Union funds Hungary’s oligarchy, as Orbán draws on EU money to fund about 60 percent of the state projects that support “the new Fidesz-linked business elite.” Nor do Orbán and his allies do much to hide the cou
ntry’s crony capitalist model. András Lánczi, president of a Fidesz-affiliated think tank, has said that “if something is done in the national interest, then it is not corruption.” “The new capitalist ruling class,” one Hungarian banker comments, “make their money from the government.”23
Jan-Werner Müller captures Orbán’s Hungary this way: “Power is secured through wide-ranging control of the judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically.”24
Crony capitalism, coupled with resurgent nationalism and central government control, is also an issue in China. Although some commentators have focused on state capitalism—when government has a significant ownership stake in companies—this phenomenon is not the same as crony capitalism. Some countries with state capitalism, like Norway, are seen as extremely noncorrupt and indeed are often held up as models of democracy. State capitalism also rejects the neoliberal myth that markets are somehow disconnected from politics: it acknowledges the interplay between the two. Crony capitalism, in contrast, is an “instrumental union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power.” In essence, it is a form of oligarchy.25
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