Understanding why right-wing populism succeeds

I have just been rereading “Populism and the People” by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books (May 2019). It is the most concise and I think perceptive account of the most worrying political development of our time: the rise of the right wing populist. This is Trump and Farage, but also Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Kaczyński in Poland,  Modi in India and Bolsonaro in Brazil. What they have in common is a

“populist art of governance ... based on nationalism (often with racist overtones), on hijacking the state for the ends of partisan loyalists and, less obviously, on weaponising the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism.”

But there is one standout paragraph for me, and so I will reproduce it in full.

“But have so many people really been converted to the views of the far right? Contrary to the domino theory propounded by pundits, and by the populists themselves – first Brexit, then Trump, then Le Pen etc – the fact remains that no right-wing populist has yet come to power anywhere in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites. Farage did not bring Brexit about by himself; he needed Michael Gove, Boris Johnson et al to assure voters that it was a jolly good idea. Trump wasn’t elected as the leader of a spontaneous grassroots movement of – as the cliché has it – angry white working-class males; he was the candidate of the ultimate party of the establishment and needed the support of Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich – all of whom vouched for him. What happened on 8 November 2016 can in one sense be explained in the most banal terms. Citizens who identify with the Republican Party came out and did what voters do on election day: they cast a ballot for their party. What took place was utterly normal, except that the candidate himself wasn’t quite so normal.”

This process can seem perfectly normal if you take it for granted that the right has to sell out to the far right if it is to survive, and the right has no other choice. But it is not inevitable that the Conservative party sat back and allowed its ranks to be swelled by ex-UKIP members, who promptly started trying to deselect candidates who spoke out against No Deal. It was not inevitable that Cameron pledged to have a referendum on EU membership where he allowed the Leave side not to specify what kind of Brexit they were proposing. And in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Tory opposition and their backers in the right wing press did not have to start using immigration is a political weapon. It was not inevitable that Osborne chose austerity, which helped create the conditions for Brexit.

As ever, this is about going for short term gains that have the risk of far greater longer term costs. No doubt someone at Conservative party HQ thought that increasing membership had its advantages. The Conservative focus on immigration lead to the rise in UKIP, and in 2010 setting up immigration targets that were never going to be hit strengthened UKIP even further. It was that strength that led Cameron to make his ill-fated pledge. Osborne’s austerity might have embarrassed Labour and shrunk the state but it intensified anti-immigration attitudes.

But I think, in the UK at least, there is something more, and that is the normalisation of the far right by the BBC, coupled with a demonisation of the left by the centre more widely. That the BBC has been pressured by the government and its press into adopting a more favourable stance towards the Conservatives than Labour is well known and beyond dispute, except of course at the BBC. But I think that has also led to the normalisation of the far right, which is equally dangerous. It is made up of a lot of little things: unchallenged coverage of the Brexit party launch, not bothering to highlight links between Bannon and Johnson (here is ITV’s coverage), inviting a far right representative on Newsnight straight after the Christchurch terrorist attack, and so on. It is worse at the BBC, but other broadcasters are not totally innocent. The Brexit party is not a party but an organisation where no one can challenge the leader, a leader who is well versed in 1930s fascist imagery.

Coupled with the centre’s normalisation of the far right is a demonisation of the main opposition to the Conservative party. To quote Gary Young:

“Throughout this time media elites, drawn from the same class as their financial and political counterparts, have mostly been obsessed by the crisis in leadership in an ostensibly “unelectable” Labour party, which has had the same leader for four years – and gained seats and vote share in the last general election. Those media elites have called pretty much every major political event, from Brexit to the last two elections, incorrectly.”

When the democratically elected leader of a party of half a million is considered beyond the pale, you get an environment that inevitably enables the rightward drift of the other main party. Every news organisation worth its salt should be hounding Johnson about his failure to rule out proroguing parliament as a direct attack on democracy. Just as it makes no sense to balance truth with lies, it makes no sense to tolerate attacks on our democracy. Without that kind of defence from our media and politicians, it becomes an easy slide to the populism that Jan-Werner Müller talks so incisively about.

The right wing partisan media is the elephant in the room in discussions of mainstream politics and far right extremism

Treason used to be a word associated with spies or assassins. Crimes against the state of the utmost severity. Yet, to take just two recent examples, here is an article in the Sun describing how “Treacherous Theresa” has surrendered our freedom. “May's name will rank alongside those of the worst eels in Western history - and she deserves it”. Cross the Atlantic, and here is a presenter at Fox News calling for the "the traitorous treasonous group that accused Donald Trump" to be locked up. “True justice” she calls it.

It seems that the word treason is now being used to describe the actions of a Prime Minister the writer disagrees with, or to describe a legal inquiry that successfully prosecuted a number of individuals who were once close to the President of the United States. How does this escalation of language happen, and does it matter? To understand both questions we need to start with what links these two examples. The are both from media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch.

As a detailed analysis of the Murdoch dynasty by Mahler and Rutenberg of the New York Times shows, Rupert Murdoch created, and runs with the help of his sons, a supremely successful media empire. Media businesses in particular are subject to regulations, and part of Murdoch’s success has been to get round those regulations. As Mahler and Rutenberg write: “Murdoch’s news empire is a monument to decades’ worth of transactional relationships with elected officials.” These are not always right wing politicians, as his support for Tony Blair showed, but they tend to be, reflecting Murdoch’s own situation and views.

Murdoch is not part of a long-standing establishment but rather the opposite. In that sense he is a particularly influential example of what we could call the neoliberal elite that Aeron Davis describes so well in his book ‘Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment’. But why would someone like Murdoch, and the UK’s other press barons, be happy with people employed by their media organisations using inflammatory language like ‘treasonous’ in their papers?

The standard response of many people in the media to a question like this is that it sells newspapers. Newspapers or radio stations or TV channels like Fox are just expressing the views of their readers. There is no doubt that is partly true, but the reality is that this is a two-way relationship. The media reflects the views of those that read or see it, but it also shapes those views. The excuse that media just reflects their audience’s opinions cannot be used to absolve those media outlets of responsibility for what is said or written there.

There is now overwhelming academic evidence that the media can have a potentially powerful influence on what those who consume it think and do. A particularly interesting and powerful recent study by two economists looked at US cable channels, which remain the main source of news on political campaigns even in the digital age. They isolate viewers who view these channels just because of their place in the channel ordering, rather than because their political preferences seek out particular channels, in order to look at how influential the channel was.

They find that the existence of Fox News boosted the Republican vote share in 2000 by about 0.5%, which fits with another study that used a different method to isolate the influence of Fox. However the growing viewership and increasingly right wing stance of Fox increased its impact on the Republican vote share in 2008 to a huge 6%, which was far bigger than the influence of any other channel. An equally interesting finding is that the political stance of Fox is far to the right of where it should be to maximise viewers. In other words Fox is broadcasting material that maximises its ability to shift its audience to the right, rather than to maximise its profits.

Unfortunately there are no studies yet of Trump’s election, but it seems very likely that the influence of Fox was crucial in his victory over Clinton. In the primaries Fox had a more critical view of Trump, perhaps because Murdoch did not think he was up to the job. Mahler and Rutenberg found three sources who reported Murdoch saying “He’s a [expletive] idiot” about Trump, although Murdoch’s spokesman denies this. It was ironically other broadcasters that gave Trump much more coverage than his opponents, because he was “good TV”. Reporters then talked favourably about Trump, simply because he was gaining vote share. After it was clear he would win, Murdoch saw his chance to form a close relationship to a US President. That influence is now so strong that one recent article in the New Yorker was entitled “The Making of the Fox News White House” (HT @rupertww).

Would this level of influence also apply to the UK press? There is every reason to think so. For example this study found that when Murdoch’s Sun switched support to Labour, it increased Labour’s vote in 1997 by 2%. That was not enough to influence the result, but when the Sun switched back to the Conservatives in 2010 that had a similar impact in the opposite direction, which was enough to influence that result. Newspapers influence attitudes towards austerity, and the best predictor of attitudes on immigration is newspaper readership. I note other studies with a similar message here.

There is no doubt that both Trump and Brexit reflect deep underlying causes. What the media is able to do is help direct those causes in particular ways. To again quote Mahler and Rutenberg: “The Murdoch empire did not cause this [populist] wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it.” Given the narrowness of Trump’s victory and the Brexit majority, it is extremely likely that Fox News and the Brexit press were respectively the difference between defeat and victory.

Once we accept that the media can have an influence on mainstream politics, it would be very surprising if it did not also influence the political fringe. We should be shocked at soldiers using a photograph of the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition for target practice, but we cannot just put this down to soldiers expressing their personal views about Corbyn’s attitude to Nato and his past associations. What legitimises in soldiers’ eyes doing this is the constant demonisation of him in the press. The press both reflects and influences.

More serious than target practice, Corbyn was the intended target of the man responsible for the terrorist attack at Finsbury Park mosque. A Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered during the Brexit campaign, and a member of a far right organisation plotted to kill another, and many MPs have received credible death threats. According to Britain’s counter-terrorism chief, the man responsible for the Finsbury Park attack was “driven to an act of terror by far-right messaging he found mostly on mainstream media”. As Gary Younge writes, the threat from far right terrorism is growing alarmingly and while “the violence may come from the fringes, the encouragement comes from the centre.”

If you think the idea of terrorists being inspired by the mainstream media is fanciful, just listen to the extract from Fox I linked to in the first paragraph above. Of course this is an unintended effect of the extreme language the partisan media uses. Whether the rise of far right parties and groups is an unintended consequence is less clear, particularly when the BBC chooses to broadcast an interview with a far right leader straight after 49 people had been murdered in New Zealand. There is academic evidence that media coverage of far right groups like UKIP does increase support for these groups, and as I have already noted this is partly why Trump became the Republican candidate for President.

But the main reason for the language the partisan media is now using is to ‘fire up the base’, who in turn will influence politicians to do what the owners of this media want. This route of influence is well established in the US, which is why David Frum, former George W Bush speechwriter, says “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. And now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” We are now seeing it happen over Brexit, as candidates who oppose No Deal are deselected and would-be leaders play to a base which is heavily influenced by the partisan press it reads.

There is one important difference between the UK and US, however. The US retains a widely read independent press that can discuss the influence of the media. In the UK, independent broadcasters would find that more difficult and in any case they mostly do not try. UK journalists tend not to talk about the partisan press as a key political player that can influence a party, perhaps in part because they would be talking about colleagues who work for that press. The myth that the media just reflects and does not influence is too convenient for many, so the media remains the elephant in the room in discussions about politics and political extremism in the UK.

The economic cost of the Brexit decision that Leaver voters do not get to see

Those promoting Brexit are fond of saying that it’s not about economics. Gary Younge in the Guardian tells us that there is nothing wrong with poorer people voting to be worse off, and of course he is right if that is what they knowingly do. But polling evidence suggests that only a small proportion of Leavers think the economy will be worse because of Brexit. Here are the results from three consecutive ORB polls (via here) where the respondents are only Leave voters.

As a result of leaving the EU, the UK’s economy will be
Date of poll	Better	Same	Worse
May 2018	42%	41%	16%
Nov 2018	39%	43%	18%
Jan 2019	26%	47%	27%

In May of last year, only 16% of Leave voters thought the economy would be worse off after Brexit, and incredibly 42% thought it would be better. As the table shows this view has only begun to shift in the last few months, and as John Curtice points out this has coincided for the first time with more Leavers than Remainers changing their minds about Brexit.

This tells us two important things. First, the Project Fear mantra worked. The Leave campaign, with the essential help of the Brexit press, managed to convince people that all this talk that the economy would be worse off after Brexit was false. Second, when the small percentage who think Brexit will damage the economy increases, support for Leave falls. Correlation does not prove causation, but this evidence suggests we should be sceptical about claims that Brexit is all about values and not about the economy.

So why are some Leave voters only now realising that Brexit will have a negative impact on the economy, and three quarters still think otherwise? After all, everyone was made worse off as inflation increased following the collapse in sterling immediately after the vote. According to one study, by the third quarter of 2017 the average consumer was worse off by £400 as a direct result of paying higher prices for imported goods following that depreciation.

The problem of course is that those price rises didn’t have a ‘made by Brexit’ tag attached to them. If you read the Financial Times of course you understood the connection, but if you read a Brexit newspaper and watched the 10 o’clock news those connections will not have been made, or if they were they would be muddled by Brexiters claiming the depreciation would be great for exports. It wasn’t great for exports, for straightforward reasons. I suspect some Leavers are only now changing their mind about Project Fear because they are seeing on the news iconic UK companies either cancelling investment projects or threatening to leave because of Brexit.

The problem is that there is no mirror image of the UK economy that didn’t vote for Brexit that voters can easily look at and see how much they are currently worse off. People cannot easily see that they are already paying a price for Brexit because firms and markets are anticipating what will happen after we leave. But it is possible to do the next best thing, and try to create a synthetic UK economy that didn’t vote for Brexit by looking at how other similar economies are doing. We know the UK has moved from around the top to around the bottom of the international growth league, but what does that actually mean for individual households?

That is the exercise that John Springfield at the Centre for European Reform is regularly doing, and he calculates that GDP was 2.3% lower in September 2018 as a result of the Brexit vote. That roughly translates into the average household losing almost £2000 worth of resources (mainly lower private consumption, but also lost public spending and investment). This number is broadly consistent with estimates the Governor of the Bank of England gave in May, using a different method.

To get a handle on how much public resources we are currently losing as a result of Brexit, Springfield calculates that GDP loss would amount to taxes being lower by £17 billion a year. Given the way this government runs its fiscal policy, that means we could have had tens of thousands more police officers and nurses if Brexit had not happened. This isn’t a forecast, but an estimate of what Brexit has already cost us.

Why has Brexit slowed the economy by enough to lose the average household resources worth almost £2,000 before we have even left? The answer is down to anticipation and uncertainty over what Brexit will mean. The foreign exchange markets had to anticipate the impact Brexit would have on future UK trade, and that was a major reason why there was an immediate collapse in sterling after the vote. Uncertainty about which kind of Brexit the UK would choose has mainly affected investment. In the chart below the Bank of England show how business investment has flatlined since the referendum, when the evidence from previous recoveries suggest it should have shown strong growth.

In addition the number of foreign direct investment projects coming to the UK, which was on a rising trend until 2015, has been falling since the 2015 election when it became clear there would be a referendum.

Will investment bounce back once Brexit uncertainty has been resolved? Certainly not if we leave with no deal, because industry's worst fears will have been realised. Even if we leave on the terms of the current Withdrawal Agreement there are two reasons to think the investment bounce back will be small. First uncertainty does not disappear. Will the government manage to agree a new trade relationship before the transition period runs out, or will we go over another No Deal cliff edge? Second, the decline in investment involves some anticipation as well as uncertainty, with a lot of service sector investment diverted towards investment in the remaining EU economies. All the time investment in the UK remains depressed this eats away at our ability to produce, at our productivity and therefore future living standards. As austerity showed, prolonged periods where the economy is depressed will have permanent negative effects.

Imagine if someone came to every Leavers door demanding nearly £2,000 for their household’s current contribution to Brexit. The evidence suggests that Brexit would quite quickly become about the economics. One of the reasons Brexit can happen is that its economic costs are not immediately visible. It is experienced but not isolated as a Brexit effect. It can be estimated to a reasonable degree of accuracy by experts, but the Brexit press keeps going on about the pre-referendum Treasury forecast and the broadcast media prefers a quiet life to routinely quoting these expert assessments. Brexit is not about the economy only because Leave voters are being kept in the dark about the impact Brexit is already having.

The media cannot reform itself until it acknowledges its power

As regular readers know, I have for the last few years been banging on about the importance of the media in influencing public opinion. (It formed a key part of my SPERI/News Statesman prize lecture.) It is not a partisan point about whether the media is politically biased in a particular direction. Instead it is a claim that the media can and sometimes is profoundly important in influencing major political events. I think it is fair to say that such claims are often dismissed, particularly by the media themselves.

Take the Brexit vote, for example. A general view is that it is down to a dislike of immigration, but few people ask whether the concern about immigration was to a considerable extent manufactured. The left has decided that Brexit reflects the revolt of those left behind by trade and technical innovation, largely ignoring the evidence that this was only part of the story. You will find extensive studies of why the UK voted to leave the EU, some of which I reviewed here, but none to my knowledge look at the influence of the tabloid press. Although my own immediate reaction to the vote put the press at centre stage, I faced a problem that anyone who blames the media faces. How do you prove that the media are not simply reflecting opinion rather than molding it?

We are now seeing studies that attempt to get around that problem by looking at what economists call natural experiments. The most well known found that “Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News”. Here is another that argues that the media has combined with special interests to misinform voters about climate change. The evidence that the media does not just reflect but also influences voter opinion is mounting up.

I argued in a post immediately after the 2017 election that this event also showed how powerful the media’s impact was in the UK. Since the second Labour party contest in 2016 until shortly before the 2017 general election, the public’s view of both Corbyn and the Labour Party was largely intermediated by political journalists. The polls showed that labour was unpopular and Corbyn even more so. During the general election campaign, both Corbyn and Labour gained direct access to voters. The popularity of both surged.

Now it is possible that both Corbyn and the party underwent some huge transformation in those election weeks: the manifesto surprised everyone by including popular measures, and the party surprised everyone by being totally united behind it. I just do not believe this can account for the extent of the surge we saw. A much more likely explanation is that Corbyn and Labour had been portrayed by the media in a negative light until the election.

It might be tempting to suggest exactly the opposite: that the Labour surge shows the diminishing power of the Tory press. However, as Roy Greenslade notes, these papers are mainly read by the old not the young. Furthermore, among those aged 65%+, the share of Labour voters between 2015 and 2017 was unchanged. Instead the Labour surge showed not only the importance of social media, but also how the broadcast media can have considerable independent influence when it does not follow the Tory press.

The Corbyn surge need not reflect any deliberate anti-left bias, but just a self-reinforcing process. The disunity within Labour until the second leadership election had a large negative impact on the polls. Political reporters took these polls as evidence that Labour and especially Corbyn could not win, and this influenced the way both were reported until the general election. Pretty well everyone, including myself [1], took the pre-election unpopularity as reflecting informed voter opinion rather than an impression largely manufactured by media coverage.

The Labour surge was also a reflection of May’s awful election campaign. But exactly the same points can be made here. May did not suddenly become robotic and unresponsive during the campaign. The serious faults that were portrayed then were also clearly evident in the year before, and during her time at the Home Office. But rather than investigate these, political reporters chose to focus on the polls and believe that her position was impregnable.

Gary Younge has described the failure to at least investigate the possibility that Corbyn might gain in popularity during the election as “the most egregious professional malpractice”, but as far as I can see he is virtually alone among journalists in thinking how the Labour surge might reflect on their own reporting. Instead the tendency has been to focus on the inadequacy of the polls (which is quite unfair because the differences in the polls largely reflected quite understandable different views about expected turnout among younger voters) and more generally journalists failure to predict the result.

Indeed I think Younge understates the lessons of the surge. If the media was able to convey a largely false impression of Labour, Corbyn and May before this election, it seems reasonable to suppose that there have been other episodes where the media has had a large influence. The list in my lecture cited above could just be scratching the surface. This potential power often used without awareness or responsibility breeds mistrust, as Andrew Harrison relates here.

One of the unacknowledged problems in the broadcast media is the perpetual focus on Westminster, which was one of the factors that led to discounting Corbyn. Which naturally leads us to Brexit. I’m constantly told that any challenge to the referendum has to wait until public opinion turns. And looking at all the facts available it should turn: real wages are falling and output is stagnant as a direct result of the Brexit decisions, there will be less rather than more money for the NHS, and so on. But we should have learnt from the 2015 general election that this kind of simple economic determinism does not always work. Then real wages had fallen by much more, we had the worst recovery from any recession for at least a century, and the Conservatives won on the basis of economic competence.

The Westminster focus means that on Brexit the 48% get largely ignored. The right wing media that gave us Brexit are continuing to mislead as they always have. On the broadcast media that most people watch, there is no one championing a second referendum. Instead the presumption is that Brexit has to go ahead because ‘democracy’ demands it. There is the danger the media that created Brexit will sustain Brexit, just as the media sustained a view that Corbyn was hopeless and May was masterful until people had direct access to both. As a result, those pushing the idea that a second referendum should only be held if the public demand it are in danger of being as naive about the power of the media as those who wrote off Corbyn’s chances

[1] To some extent this was, I’m afraid to say, a classic example of not having faith in my own ideas. But I was also surprised at how quickly the broadcast media was able to swing from Corbyn bashing to focusing on May’s inadequacies. The problem the Conservatives and their press backers had was that scare stories about Corbyn were ‘old news’, whereas seeing the Conservative election machine fall over itself was a new experience, and therefore far more newsworthy. But, once again, this poor performance was also very clear from various decision taken in Downing Street in the year before.