When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
alarms about the demagogue when Trump said: ‘this election will determine whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of Democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system. This is not just conspiracy but reality, and you and I know it.’
The agents of this treachery, in the mind of the paranoid populist, are usually the media, and so it was in this case. ‘The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media’ – which, he went on to say, is now part of the conspiracy. The suspicion of the free press that is common to all populists is exactly the paranoia that Plato exhibits when he banishes the poets from his utopia in The Republic. We hear this argument in the social media echo-chamber today. According to this critique, the ideological prejudice of the media lackeys, who are themselves puppets of unscrupulous proprietors, enters unfiltered into the empty heads of the people. The minds of the people are so many tabula rasa on which the fiendish thoughts of the elite speaker will be imprinted. Conspiracy theories are always based on a credulous people and the populist is a full-bore conspiracist. ‘This is a conspiracy against you, the American people,’ said Trump. Utopia has always been just around the corner if only the corrupt elite had cared to venture there. ‘We will rise above’ said the candidate Trump, ‘the lies, the smears, and the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous reporters.’
This is why the utopian’s account is so fatuously inadequate about how change will come about. In More’s Utopia a traveller, a speaker of nonsense, finds the perfect society in full working order in the ocean. The title of H. G. Wells’s utopia accurately captures the lack of seriousness of the genre: When the Sleeper Wakes. These books are nothing more than grown-up fairytales. In the place where an account of change should be, the utopian populist substitutes the supreme leader. The paradox of populism is that it has a rhetoric of a movement but the practice of a cult. Camus once said that democracy is the system for people who know that they don’t know everything. The populist utopian has all the answers. The omniscient figures are, variously, the priests, the philosophers, the intellectuals, the scientists, the process of history or the party. Plato believed in the rule of the sages, the Stoics in the power of reason, the seventeenth-century rationalists in metaphysical insight and the eighteenth-century empiricists in science.
The populist in government has the same status. No sooner has he ejected the hated elite than the populist’s entourage become the elite themselves. He glosses the shift by posing as the tribune of the people. No need for a manifesto: he simply intuits the general will. Populism is a movement with no ideological content beyond its resentment of an elite. It therefore requires a charismatic leader – lately a Trump, a Chávez, an Erdoğan – to glue it together. The movement gathers around the leader as if around a maypole. Its name proclaims allegiance to the people, but in fact populism requires the people to swear allegiance to the leader. The bargain rests on the populist knowing everything, but, of course, the truth is that he knows almost nothing. The populist has a utopian account of political change, which is to say no account at all.
It is no accident that populists such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alexis Tsiprias in Greece have proved to be so hopeless in office. The failure is baked into their arrogance about how easy it will be. President Trump believes that politics is usefully analogous to his dreary and ghostwritten business manual The Art of the Deal. This is not an analogy; it is a fantasy. The populist, devoid of politics, impatient with gathering allies, is bound to fail the test of administrative competence. Gratifyingly for him, the populist can invoke an easy escape clause. He can write off his failure as the conspiracy of the elite class which gave him his energy in the first place. The fact that he can offer no evidence for this absurd proposition only goes to show how clever a conspiracy it really is. Truth is always a casualty of populism.
It is not, alas, the only casualty. The foundation myth of populism – that the true way has been corrupted – means that the populist has to find a scapegoat. In the utopian literature, the leader is constantly marching backwards into battle. The safest refuge from the corrupt present is the blessed past. The promise to turn back the clock is a recurrent motif in utopia. In the Garden of Eden, in Hesiod’s golden age before the decline, the bliss in Atlantis or Virgil’s Kingdom of Saturn, in which all things are good, utopia is sadly discovered to be a paradise lost. The populist has nothing interesting to say about the future. He sets himself against progress and so is projected headlong into the past. Populism is a promise to return to popular wisdom before it was corroded by the Enemy.
This is not ‘the people’ as it is invoked by Lincoln. It is a Gemeinschaft, the binding of a community against outsiders, in a return to a bygone golden age. The outsiders in question are, in every instance of populism, the elite, but they are also often the immigrant. These days, specifically, the Muslim or the Jew, but also sometimes the non-national. The words of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are all designed to bind a nation together. Populist politics, by contrast, needs to construct internal enemies as detached from the people. President Trump has proposed the deportation of undocumented immigrants and wants a wall to keep out the Mexicans. In Holland Geert Wilders wants to repeal hate-speech legislation. In Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński sought to make the use of the term ‘Polish death camps’ illegal.
As the incarnation of truth, the populist is a stranger to the doubts and humility that find expression in the speeches in this chapter. His utopia has none of the pluralism of a liberal democracy. The truth is no longer the upshot of open exchanges among free people; facts are what the populist leader says they are. Karl Popper has cited the Funeral Oration of Pericles as the moment that men began to glimpse the possibilities of an open society. The populist dismisses all that discussion as a waste of time and energy. Better to get things done with his prowess at embodying the popular will.
To live in utopia is to be amidst perfection already achieved. Nothing develops and nobody can change their mind. The populist stands at the top of this chain of certainty, a position, as William Blake said, ‘like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind’. Disenchantment is inevitable, and when it sets in it can be vicious. Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are images of how fatally the vigorous energy can turn to vice. It is never long before the leader tires of the constraints that are built into the constitutional apparatus. It was, after all, the paraphernalia of politics that he believes he was chosen to change. The tiresome mechanisms that we see Jefferson applauding are merely impediments to the populist. He is therefore bound to attack the free press, minority rights and judicial oversight as institutions that are seeking to defy the will of the people.
The era of populism sets the political leaders against their own constitutions. The purpose of political arrangements, most evidently the American constitution, is to curtail power. Politics is the wisest solution to the fact that men cannot always be trusted. It is founded on realism about fallen humans rather than utopian optimism. The balance between elements of the constitution, which Cicero set out and which were borrowed for the drafting of America’s, are designed to hold populist power in check.
Most of the time the constitution holds. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and the Kaczyńskis in Poland have tried largely in vain to undermine other sources of power. It is probable that President Trump will be frustrated by the absence of executive power that, following the liberal principles of Locke and Montesquieu, was deliberately built into his office. Yet we cannot always be so sanguine. Orbán in Hungary, Chávez in Venezuela and Erdoğan in Turkey have rewritten their constitutions to erase the inheritance from liberal democracy. Since the failed coup against Erdoğan in 2016, broadcasters, newspapers and magazines have been shut down and journalists detained. The public realm is now severely censored. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has done as he pleases regardless of constitutional propriety. Institutions that demand neutrality, such as judicial appointments, have been made partisan. The writ of law has been invaded by ideological correctness. The media has been silenced. It is dangerous, and sometimes fatal, for Russian journalists to pry too closely into sensitive subjects such as corruption and organised crime.
Populism begins with recriminations about the governing elite and, to use Donald Trump’s extraordinary allegation, their ‘criminal enterprise’. It ends with recriminations about the constitution. All the while it claims to