The damage that right wing populists do

 

History, and events today, tell us the damage that fascism can do. Right wing populism is a milder form of fascism. Right wing populism is not about doing popular things! Instead it is an authoritarian creed that is intolerant of a pluralist democracy (where there are many sources of power), and instead believes that ‘the will of the people’ should always prevail, where that ‘will’ can only be expressed through the wishes of the leader. An intolerance of political opposition means that political opponents are either demonised as dangerous minorities or dismissed as out of touch elites. For this reason, right wing populists have little time for human rights because they believe they (representing ‘the people’) should have ultimate power over everyone else.

In a post a year ago I discussed two developments that could mark out fascism as an extension of populism: abandoning democracy and the use of violence against opponents. I argued at the time that Trump could in those terms be described as fascist, and unfortunately subsequent events have only confirmed that judgement. Trump and his party are doing everything they can to rig the mid-term elections in November, and Trump has used his police force ICE and the justice department to go after domestic political opponents, and has used illegal force to kidnap or kill heads of state overseas who are his enemies.

More recently I wrote about a study that showed the economic damage that populists on average do when they take power. After five years GDP would be lower by around 5% compared to what it would have been if populists had not gained power, and this damage carried on increasing in size if they stayed in government longer. In that post I gave the obvious reasons why right wing populists can do so much economic damage: their nationalism tends to restrict overseas trade and also the entry of people from overseas.

We can now add to that list a military attack on a country that has the ability to restrict global trade. Even if ships started going through the Strait of Hormuz immediately after this post is published, the damage already done would have a significant impact on global GDP. Continuing costs arise not just from the higher price of oil and gas, but also from the higher cost of fertilisers and other goods shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.

This war illustrates a point that I hope is pretty obvious. While some of the costs of right wing populism or fascism come directly from its ideology, others are a more indirect consequence. For example, putting so much unchallengeable power in the hands of one individual is just asking for trouble. It’s a recipe for disaster, like the disaster of the Iran war, if that individual is a very elderly fool.

Equally authoritarian rulers are likely to value loyalty over expertise, so they will pick advisors who become yes men and women. Watching Trump’s court spend so much time praising him, or wearing the wrong size shoes, is just incredible. Is it any wonder a leader with these priorities and with these types of advisors makes some terrible decisions. That attitude then filters down the chain of command. Add to this a common trait among right wing populists to be antagonistic towards expertise, and academics in particular, and making policy based on evidence becomes increasingly unlikely. That all adds to the cost of right wing populism or fascism.

While the focus on the economic costs of right wing populism is understandable, many of the problems outlined above impact on government decisions of all kinds. [1] The publication of the UK’s Covid Inquiry reports make it clear, if it wasn’t already, that tens of thousands of people lost their lives unnecessarily as a result of UK government inaction during the second COVID wave in 2020/1. This substack from Christine Pagel provides an excellent account, so in what follows I want to focus on the key details and relate them to the right wing populist government we had then. It suggests yet another reason why populists and fascists do so much harm.

During the first COVID wave there were plenty of mistakes made by pretty well everyone involved, including the experts advising the government. But the second COVID wave killed more people, and the second wave did not take the experts by surprise. We had learnt from the first wave that strong lockdowns could bring cases (and therefore deaths) down, and that is what experts both inside and outside government recommended when cases started rising over the summer of 2020. This advice was ignored by a right wing populist leader.

By the summer of 2020 it was already clear that a vaccine against COVID was a strong possibility and could be developed quite quickly. A key argument against using lockdowns to isolate people and decrease the speed at which the pandemic spreads is that this just delays infection. But with a vaccine that argument is blown out of the water. The vaccine could provide the ‘herd immunity’ that the disease would otherwise eventually create, but with a fraction of the deaths. So in the autumn and winter of 2020 it made complete sense to use strong lockdowns to isolate people until vaccines became available. By mid-March 2021 over 95% of all adults over 65 years old in the UK had been vaccinated.

It was complete sense that Boris Johnson didn’t accept. He was already having severe misgivings about the first lockdown as the first wave came to an end. Even before the pandemic started in the UK his instincts were libertarian. During the first lockdown these instincts were revived by strong criticism from the right wing press, which had a powerful influence on the former journalist who was now PM. Newspapers were losing a lot of money as a result of the lockdowns.

Once the impact of the pandemic became clear, most people supported lockdowns, including a stronger lockdown in the Autumn of 2020, but for populists the ‘will of the people’ is measured by the preferences of the leader rather than opinion polls. The UK right wing press, in particular, is used to pretending that the wishes of its owners represent popular opinion when they in fact do not.

While it is easy to relate anti-lockdown sentiments among the populist right and its media to ideology or simply money [2], I suspect there is a rather simpler explanation for the harm they did in this case and which will apply to populists more generally. Right wing populist leaders do harm in part because they don’t care very much about other people, and also have extremely elevated opinions of their own self-worth..

Of course that combination of characteristics apply to many politicians, and indeed might be something of a prerequisite for any political leader. But right wing populist leaders seem to take this to another level. They tend to be narcissists. Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another coronavirus lockdown, and it is difficult to imagine previous UK Prime Ministers even thinking let alone saying that.

This is one reason why corruption under right wing populist leaders is so much greater than it would be in their absence. To populist leaders it seems only right that they and their colleagues or friends should profit as much as they can from their position, and their sense of public duty is very small. (The other reason for populist corruption can be the ability of populist governments to curb controls on it, and in particular to control the law.) Of course corruption not only takes money away from everyone else, but it also is likely to reduce the overall size of the economic pie. In the case of Covid, it led to nurses and doctors not getting the projective equipment they needed.

George Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ was never an axis: Iraq and Iran had recently fought a very costly war against each other. In contrast, what Paul Krugman calls the ‘Axis of Autocracy’ is very real. Right now both Russia and America are doing what they can to help Victor Orban’s party in Hungary avoid defeat after being in power since 2010. After a strong recovery from the Global Financial Crisis, the impact of populist government is now very evident in Hungary, and despite controlling the media and tilting the electoral scales Orban may lose power in April. Hungary under Orban, like the US under Trump and the UK under Johnson, is another example of the harm that populists do.

[1] As a key part of right wing populism is to scapegoat minorities, then we should include the damage caused to those minorities in any inventory of the harm this populism creates.

[2] Unfortunately the economic argument against strong lockdowns just does not hold up, because it only applies in the very short run. As long as the health system is limited in its ability to cope with a growing pandemic, then at some point a lockdown will be required to prevent the health service collapsing. The larger the number of cases there are, the longer and/or more strict that lockdown will be. So delaying a lockdown ‘for the sake of the economy’ is just making the eventual economic hit that much bigger. In this post I used an analogy with inflation and the Phillips curve.