IF THEY WERE THE MAJORITY THEY’D NOT NEED AUTHORITARIANISM:

Why Populism and Authoritarianism Go Hand in Hand: Populism is not anti-elitism, it is raw majoritarianism exercised via a strongman (Shikha Dalmia, Aug 08, 2024, The UnPopulist)

Populism is one of the few concepts that can help us make sense of the “current tectonic shifts in the political landscape and public opinion almost everywhere in the West and beyond,” notes Karen Horn, a classical liberal scholar at Germany’s University of Erfurt. To understand what populism is, it is useful to understand what it is not since the literature on it often lumps many disparate figures and phenomena, some good, some bad, obscuring the core concept. But if we lose clarity on the term, we will risk “defining away a pervasive phenomenon,” Horn notes, undercutting our ability to comprehend the danger it poses.

For starters, populist movements are not popular uprisings like the one Mahatma Gandhi led against British colonial rule in India and Nelson Mandela against white apartheid in South Africa. There are surface similarities, for example both are led by charismatic figures commanding a mass following. But that does not make these uprisings the same as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).

One big difference is that a popular uprising is a resistance movement against an illicit power that is ruling in explicit violation of the will of those it governs. Populist movements, on the other hand, are aimed at a domestic “establishment” which was formed with the consent of the people but over time has become corrupt—genuinely or allegedly.

Gandhi’s Quit India movement targeted a small—and alien—ruling power denying self-rule (and franchise) to an entire people. Some separatist movements, such as the one in Catalonia in Spain or the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, are dubbed populist uprisings. Regardless of what one thinks of the justice of their demands, they are, however, more in the vein of anti-colonial struggles like Quit India given that they are directed against an “enemy without.”

Populist movements, by contrast, are a pathology specifically of established democracies where the people already have self-rule. However, the dominant majority feels that this rule no longer works for it because the establishment in control no longer cares for its wishes, or, worse, is actively hostile to it. So these movements are oriented against the “enemy within.” For example, Modi’s populist nationalism is directed against a secular elite that regards the majority Hindu population’s desire for a homogeneously Hindu India as anathema.

This last is a good example of why Populists turn to Authoritarianism: Indians generally do not support such homogeneity.

THE ROAD DID LEAD HIM SOMEWHERE:

Evil and Good in Cormac McCarthy: a review of The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
By Vereen M. Bell (Reviewed by Michael Yost, University Bookman)

Another such asterisk—one that seems to counteract Bell’s thesis of McCarthy the nihilist, the ironic Diogenes of literature—is McCarthy’s novella/play The Stonemason. The play is set in the Louisville, Kentucky of the 1970s. Its action follows the Telfair family as they cope with the death and legacy of their patriarch, affectionately referred to as “Papaw,” a master stonemason. Papaw’s grandson, Ben Telfair, narrates. He is the only member of the family who has carried the fire. His own father abandoned the family trade, but Ben had a close relationship with his dying grandfather. As the play progresses, McCarthy allows Papaw to become an ideal figure, an image of a good man in a world that often lacks integrity. Papaw’s goodness and integrity come from his trade. Ben comments: “for true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch pressed in place by the thumb of God.” This relationship between the “truth” found in masonry and the cosmos alike is reiterated throughout the play. Indeed, masonry sets the moral standard of the play, and the various character’s proximity to or distance from the craft determines their fate. Ben’s nephew, Soldier, joins a gang and becomes a drug addict. His father commits suicide. Ben occupies the center of the story as leader of his sorrowing family and heir to his grandfather’s wisdom. That wisdom is particular, but also cosmic. Ben speaks of his grandfather:

I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness unknown and unknowable both in truth and in principle where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and let the rain carve them if it can.

McCarthy allows, in a rare moment, for the possibility of a connection between the principle of existence and the phenomena of existence. He sees it incarnate in knowledge of the world, in the logic of human craft. Even if the principal cause of the world is “unknown and unknowable,” it is still “silent nowhere in the universe.” From the creator of the demonic Judge Holden, this is an astonishing sentence. It echoes St. Bonaventure, who wrote that “the entire world is like a mirror full of lights presenting the divine wisdom . . . ” But of course, just as we cannot attribute the Judge’s words to McCarthy, neither can we do the same with Ben. However, this sentence is significant precisely because it runs so much against the grain of McCarthy’s broader work. It is as if, having presented his witness to the reality of evil and steeled himself against it. He felt compelled to quietly testify to the primary existence of goodness and its possibility for human beings. It is primarily because of The Stonemason that I believe McCarthy was not simply an ironist. Bell’s thesis may be true as far as it goes, but it still has to contend with the fact that McCarthy chose to represent both evil and good, both demonic vice and human goodness, both life and death in his work.

And ultimately chose light.