Harris and waning populism

Are we seeing the end of the rise of populism as Kamala Harris takes the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and stops Republican Donald Trump’s return to the White House?

Note, I say the RISE of populism. We will never get rid of it completely.

First to some history. The first success of the most recent rise of populism was the June 2016 Brexit referendum. It was followed by Trump’s November 2016 election. Both were very narrow wins, but they spawned populist advances in Europe and Russia’s President Putin abandoning any pretence of civilised government with his invasion of Ukraine.

The very nature of populism makes it unsustainable. The populist preys on fear and resentment of people who circumstances have changed for the worse. They are fed misinformation and lies and a scapegoat: migrants; China; elites and so on. 

Rust belts in Britain and the US coupled with a perceived rise of the power and wealth of elites in the capitals are good examples. In the US free trade and China were the scapegoats. In Europe, it was the influx of Middle Eastern and African immigrants. In Russia it was the collapse of the security of Soviet welfare and the rise of wealthy oligarchs. NATO was the scapegoat.

In the previous resurgence of populism in the 1930s the resentment was caused by hyper-inflation obliterating savings and the scapegoat was the Treaty of Versailles and then Jewish finance.

But the populists who lever these resentments have either the intention or the wherewithal to fix the causes of resentment when they attain power. Indeed, they make it worse. Their only intention is greater power for themselves.

Brexit ended in falling living standards and more bureaucracy resulting in worse living standards for those with the resentment. The populist gets slowly unmasked and becomes more extreme and more exposed to downfall.

This month Ukraine launched attacks into Russia. Slowly Russians will be more aware of the calamity that Putin has caused.

Sometimes the populist, once in power, manages to cement their position for a long time. Other times, the populist fortunately comes up against institutional, personal, or legal forces that defeat them as Boris Johnson and Trump were. Trump is trying again. They do not give up easily.

But the unsustainability and fragility of Trump’s populism has become more apparent now it is up against Harris not Biden.

Two changes stand out. The first is that the Harris campaign has successfully painted the Trump Republicans as the unAmerican outliers by branding them “weird”. It struck home because they are in fact weird, unAmerican, and not like normal, mainstream conservatives in of the pre-Trump Republican Party.

Harris’s triumph is that the Democrats are now seen as mainstream and normal.

Contrast that with Nixon and Reagan who successfully portrayed the Republicans as the normal and mainstream representatives of the “silent majority” while the Democrats were portrayed as dangerous dope-smoking, demonstrating, dirty, long-haired, traitorous non-Americans who support parole for black criminals like Willy Horton as Michael Dukakis did in 1988.

The second change is in the link between candidate and being President. Earlier, it was almost easier to think of Trump as President than Biden. Biden has not projected presidentiality for a long time, if ever, regardless of his obvious achievements. Moreover, voters could not imagine an 86-year-old (as he would have been at the end of the term) as a President or as presidential.

Harris in a very short time, through speech and body language, has enabled voters to easily see her as President Harris. It helps that she is Vice President, but it is more than that. She looks more like a President than Trump.

It has been so attention-grabbing that it has deprived Trump of his main source of oxygen – attention. This is likely to be a downward spiral and illustrates why his populism is unstainable. His successful attention-seeking has been generated by being beyond controversial into the outrageous. 

But in the new environment his only way to get back attention is to be beyond outrageous, such as his comment that Harris has “become black”. He has moved from outrageous to extremist. And that means not being in the mainstream, not among the silent majority, and weird.

In such a short time Harris has turned the whole election around. Trump and his gutless enablers in the Republican Party have always been weird, but it took Harris and her Vice Presidential running mate Tim Walz to articulate it in an infectious and credible way. It has been a “no-clothes” moment.

And it is driving Trump into a downward spiral of weirdness. He has gone beyond sprinklings of falsehoods to rants that contain more falsehoods than truths. His insults are offending an ever-wider number of people as he is compelled to grasp more desperately for the oxygen of attention.

He can now be more easily seen as unhinged and weird to virtually everyone but his base of supporters who would continue supporting him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.

The US would have and should have been in this position in 2016 after the “pussy” comment but for the Republican enablers who displayed the same level of judgment and independent thought as Putin’s oval table of security advisers who all nodded ascent to the invasion of Ukraine.

But this is now different. His appointment of JD Vance as running mate was perhaps the critical moment that pushed Trump out of the mainstream that the Republican enablers had kept him within for so long, despite criminal convictions and treasonous behaviour on 6 January 2021.

Polls are showing a trend. It is possible that Trump’s vote will slowly contract to little more than his base. In any event, it is likely unidirectional. He cannot suddenly change to becoming a measured, mainstream Republican.

The self-destructive elements of populism have taken hold.

Crispin Hull

This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 13 August 2024.