Never Reelect a Revolutionary: Post-populism in messianic time (Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, 11/08/24, The Point)
[B]eing entrenched is a problem for populism. Populism declares that there is a totalizing antagonism between the people and the establishment. Its raison d’être stems from the claim that elites leading the media, the government and educational and scientific institutions operate in opposition to the interests of the populations they are meant to serve. Some populists cast the difference between the two camps in terms of identity, claiming that “elites” and the “people” are fundamentally different human types. Racism can grow in this environment, but even it can be a secondary tool, a means of stylizing a deeper drive in the populist imaginary: namely, the claim that the oppositions between elites and the people are irreconcilable. For that reason, gradual reform, compromise and moderation will not do. Populism lurches toward revolution and the complete explosion of the establishment.
That’s why political success menaces the populist. How can populists justify managing the very elite institutions they were meant to destroy?Populists may respond to this riddle by painting their enemies in the establishment as residing outside of their reach, such as when Hungarian president Viktor Orbán claims to be fighting against the European Union and Western liberalism. Some, like the Sweden Democrats, may be lucky enough to be kingmakers for a governing administration without being formally a part of it, allowing them to shape policy while posing as outsiders. Enfranchised populists may claim that the forces they fight against are so embedded in institutions that elected politicians can’t (yet) reach them, and thus that the cause of rebellion must continue even after an electoral victory. Narratives about a deep state running the U.S. government during the first presidency of Donald Trump are an example of the latter.
These are attempts at mitigation rather than cures, however. If, for example, a deep state allegedly remains in control even after a revolutionary takeover, populism’s supporters may deem political action futile and disengage. Elected populists are thus forced into a world of gamesmanship, negotiation, compromise and management. They often become conservers, conservative even—not in the palingenetic sense of resurrecting a lost golden age but merely, and more boringly, through their incentive to maintain the world in which they flourish. Max Weber famously argued that bureaucrats will seldom cross the institutions they run, because with time their personal power and prestige depend on those very institutions.
Such is the condition for many populists throughout the world today, in what we might call an era of post-populism—an era during which yesterday’s revolutionaries now cling to the status quo, where radical “Make America Great Again” gives way to paranoid “Keep America Great.” Elected populists (and particularly reelected populists) now find themselves tasked with instilling a durable mythology that will allow supporters to maintain their commitment to the cause even as it changes.