Values, interests and populism

The two hands of politics

Politics involves both interests and values. Politicians want the perks of office, industries lobby to maximize their profits, and voters often vote on the basis of their perceived self-interest. Economists build their models on these foundations.

But politics doesn’t look like an auction. It is conducted in expressive, emotive language. Speeches invoke noble ideals and cry down the other side as wicked. Even industry lobbyists cloak what they are doing in high-minded appeals.  You don’t hear talk like that on the stock exchange.

These ideals can’t just be talk either. Activists are volunteers. And even if voters think they are self-interested, we know they aren’t, because no individual vote actually changes the outcome. Someone who proudly tells you “I’m going to vote for low taxes until I’m a pensioner, then vote for higher pensions” is unconsciously following the norm of self-interest.

Social norms are powerful because they coordinate social action. They are rallying points. Politics is ultimately about policy: what nations will do collectively. Norms steer the ship of state, by making sure its crew all have the same goals in mind. Even written law gets interpreted by judges in the light of prevailing values. A norm is a congealed plan: like a plan, it tells us each what we must do. But norms are more abstract and apply to a wider range of situations. This need to coordinate is why political language is rich and expressive, while market language can be reduced to “quotes” of stock prices.

Political parties are compromises between values and self-interest. Nobody without a healthy appetite for power runs, or should run, for national office. And parliamentarians certainly care about their job’s money and status. At the same time, the footsoldiers of election campaigns are not mostly doing it out of self-interest. They are true believers. The same is true, to varying degrees, all the way up the political ladder. Even the most shapeshifting political leader is best thought of not as a crook, but as a person who is very good at convincing himself of ideals which just happen to be an electoral advantage.¹ (That’s how I interpret the notorious episode where Boris Johnson wrote out two newspaper articles, one on each side of the Brexit case! He was just checking which argument he was most convinced by….)

The left nation

The left wing has historically been a coalition of the masses with idealistic members of the elite. The masses supported redistribution and public services out of self-interest; elites, because they were true believers in egalitarian values and left-wing ideologies. As Marx said, a portion of the bourgeoisie comes over to the side of the proletariat.

This compromise leaves its mark on policy. Welfare states do not just serve the median voter, i.e. the poorest fifty per cent who are enough to get an electoral majority. They also have programs targeted at the very poorest. This might be partly motivated by the need for social insurance — even if you’re not very poor, you might lose your job or become disabled. But they also serve identifiable groups, like those born with permanent disabilities. Left wing parties also show more concern for ethnic minorities, which can’t be driven by the social insurance motive.

The rise of populism is this left-wing coalition coming apart. The elite idealists became increasingly globally conscious. They care about the poorest, and people in poor countries are much poorer than the poorest in rich countries. They understood that migration to rich countries vastly increased migrants’ welfare. They were also anti-nationalist because they believed that nationalism was fascism, and pro-diversity because they were anti-racist.

The other half of the coalition, rich-country masses, increasingly perceived immigration as against their self-interest. (Whether they are right about this needn’t concern us here.) To give this perception its political expression, they needed corresponding norms. The mainstream of politics, on left and right, had decisively rejected nationalism. In England, for instance, Enoch Powell had destroyed his career by his Rivers of Blood speech warning against immigration. The far right stepped into the breach. Their anti-immigration ideas had incubated among fascist leftovers, the kind of people who called the Holocaust a detail of history. But self-interest will have its due. As David Frum said, if liberals tell voters that only fascists will enforce borders, voters will hire fascists to do the job that liberals won’t. The far right grew, and to varying degrees mainstreamed itself.

It is this betrayal of their ideals and norms that makes political elites so angry about the new right wing. My first boss, a bookshop owner, went to public school in the 1950s. Back then, he told me, voting for Labour was literally unthinkable among his class, so he voted Liberal instead. He told me this in the 1990s, and I did not understand how voting for a major party could be unthinkable. Now I know! In my social circles, saying you voted for Reform would be like Borat bringing his turd to dinner in a bag.

The departure of the masses increasingly faces the other half of the left-wing coalition, elite idealists, with a problem. Their ideals are still largely based on the claim that they are working for ordinary people in their country. (A really consistent effective altruist should want to abolish rich-country welfare, and use the money to help people in Bihar or Chad. Surprisingly few people think that way.) What happens when the ordinary people don’t want to know?

One answer is to claim that the masses are deluded. This is perennially popular and is probably the modal political narrative among left wing activists. It comes in infinite versions. They get bitter, they cling to guns and religion! There are complex political economy models which are essentially this idea written down in maths. It has a long history. “The British people deserved better”, said Neil Kinnock after his surprise 1992 defeat. This narrative is easy to mock: it shades into the attitude of the East German apparatchik who wrote after workers’ protests that “the people must work doubly hard to regain the trust of the government”, prompting Brecht’s retort “wouldn’t it be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” But there is no reason in principle why ordinary people should always be right. Then again, “vote for me, I know better than you” is not a slogan that wins many elections.

Left responses

In practice, left-wing politicians’ responses to the loss of their base depends a lot on their exact place on the political spectrum.

Centre-left parties, which are organized to win power and which attract candidates with corresponding motivations, tend to go where the votes are. In effect, this means they are gradually becoming genuinely more like old-fashioned conservative parties. Think of Keir Starmer’s Labour. Growth and wealth creation is the top priority; rock solid on defence. There is not much here that would have offended a 20^th century Tory. The agenda is more statist than Margaret Thatcher would have liked, but that is arguably because we live in a more centralized, statist era, which is a fact about modern technology and the economic base, not about the political superstructure.

Far left parties are less pragmatic. This means that they need to find a new base to support their dreams. One option is to get paid by dictators. This brings in the cash for a smart new website and posters. Nobody is cheaper to buy than a broke idealist. Like most ideological contradictions, it’s also surprisingly easy to ignore with enough self-delusion and waffle. Just repeat the magic word “NATO”.

A more plausible approach is to ally with Islamists. This lets you tap not only funds, but votes. And your ideals are probably slightly more easily reconciled with becoming a Hamas supporter than a Putin supporter. 🤷‍♂️.

But the most interesting approach from this background is Sara Wagenknecht. Originally from Die Linke, the German extreme left, she broke off to form her own party, the Bündnis Sara Wagenknecht, which combines hard-left economic policies with nationalism and populism. It’s true that this is not, strictly speaking, a new idea in Germany, but it is a new idea recently. And it may have wings, since populist parties do better when they have more left wing economic policies:

Source: FT via this tweet

What about the old mainstream right wing? On a simple view they have a bright future. If the electorate has moved to the right, they should now be in the middle, where elections are traditionally won. This year’s electoral disaster for the UK Conservatives is a warning of the limits of this view: they got squashed between a newly centrist Labour and a surging Reform. But in the long run, it is easier for them to steal the populists’ clothes, because nationalism and patriotism are not so far from their traditional values. You might then expect them to become more economically left-wing, shifting around the policy arena to stay opposite the old centre-left. That is possible, though so far it’s more reflected in the ideas of right-wing thinktanks than in actual policy platforms.

Dragging norms with them

Values and interests are both political realities. But are values an independent reality, in the long run? One point of view is that a group’s values, its congealed plans, are ultimately a reflection of its collective interests. The changes in party platforms, driven by the changing preferences of poor people in rich countries, seem to fit that view. The centre left and centre right are slowly changing their norms to maximize their appeal to voters. But the fact that it took new parties, coming from deeply despised ideological roots, to catalyze this change, suggests that norms exert a kind of drag which may hold existing parties back from maximizing electoral advantage. That is what you would expect if norms are tools for political coordination. Coordination games have multiple equilibria, and it is famously hard for a group to get out of an equilibrium that is bad for it.

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If you liked this, you might enjoy my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.

I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.

1. Nixon might be an exception. Trump I think, don’t @ me, is a genuine idealist.