Season ticket renewal time. Thirty-five years on, I can’t explain why I chose Arsenal. It wasn’t the nearest club (Crystal Palace) or the most successful (Liverpool). Once the decision was made, though, it became self-reinforcing. Attachments deepen with time and habit until their origin is beside the point.
I can tell, though not without fail, which members of the political class follow team sport and which don’t. Those who do are quicker to understand that Boris Johnson is, in truth, Boris Johnson FC. He has “fans” who joined a long time ago and for different reasons. For some, it was Brexit. For others, it was something more instrumental: his vote-winning potential. Yet a third group hoped that he would do something for Britain’s poorer regions.
But whatever the original attraction, it has long since stopped being the point. Once aboard, once associated with the man, there is no climbing down again. Something of their ego and even identity is tied up with him now. Such is the circular process of fandom.
It should now be clear that western populism is not, in the end, about very much. Don’t waste any more time rationalising it as a backlash against inequality, “neoliberalism” and other things that you yourself don’t like. If tangible grievances once spurred this movement, they have since given way to tribal feeling as an end in itself.
Contrast this against what might be called (with journalistic crudity) the “eastern” populists. Whatever else is said of it, Narendra Modi’s political project has some content. So does that of Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. By this I mean that it is possible to think of something these leaders could say or do that would alienate their supporters.
What would it take for Donald Trump to lose his? What heresy? His explicit endorsement of the Covid-19 vaccines cost him little of his often stridently anti-vax following. Enthusiasts for the late Silvio Berlusconi didn’t forsake him after he broke or barely even attempted to keep promises.
Ask yourself, had Johnson governed exactly like Rishi Sunak — the same tax burden, the same immigration numbers, the same retention of EU laws — how much of his supporter base would have deserted him as a sellout? Nowhere near as much as regard Sunak as one. Johnson could set light to £50 banknotes with a Davidoff cigar, and tabloids would still salute him as the worker’s friend. So would, I’m afraid, a large minority of the electorate. Their club captain is their club captain, and that’s that.
To rationalise this raw tribalism is a fool’s errand, and yet it is one undertaken by people of the highest intelligence. Public discourse in Britain is full of proposals to cure populism with devolution of power, five-point growth strategies for “red wall” towns, public and private sectors working in concert with key stakeholders to tackle very real concerns about such and such. It is a sort of McKinsey Global Institute view of how politics works. To be clear, some or all of these ideas are worthwhile on their own terms. The question is whether they have anything to do any longer with why people like Johnson.
In this summer of wall-to-wall Nadine Dorries, of classified federal documents in chandeliered toilets, what stands out about western populism is not its destructiveness (how much has the median citizen’s life changed?) but its emptiness. It has turned out to be a vast, grifting, bombastic nothing. And those voters who foisted it on the rest of the electorate don’t, on the whole, seem to mind the betrayal. If Trump is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, he should win more than 40 per cent of the national vote. If Johnson were to face the Conservative membership again, god help his opponent.
Back in 2016, some of us had to sit through sermons about the need to “listen” to “legitimate grievances” against “broken capitalism”. Perhaps, at one stage, populism really was a howl for a fairer economy. That passed a while ago. It is now a tribalist game.
In retrospect, Johnson and Trump should never have been bunched with Putin and Erdoğan under the “strongman” tag. They converge on tactics — rule-breaking, institutional subversion — but the difference in substance is unbridgeable. The eastern demagogues are nationalists. If the western ones have an -ism, it is nihilism.
And what a mercy that is. Better a chancer than a zealot. Better Johnson than Orbán. Better, in the end, politics as team sport than politics as something all too thoughtful.
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