Top of the Pops
The not-so-subtle difference between Populist and Popular
( a free subscription to anyone who can name the two gentlemen in the silly hats without resorting to Google, Perplexity or asking Grandad. Answers in the comments.)
Commerce can operate in well-worn patterns or there can be various levels of discovery involved. The process of active discovery is entrepreneurship. This need not be commercial. It makes perfect sense to talk of political entrepreneurs.
So, if existing politicians and political Parties leave a “gap” in the political market—such as concerns amongst voters that are not being articulated—political entrepreneurs are likely to engage in market entry to target such gaps. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump—and national populism generally—are all examples of political entrepreneurship.2 Such political entrepreneurship can extend to making differences between groups more salient than they previously were.3
~ Lorenzo Warby - ‘Capitalism’ and ‘capitalist’ are analytically dreadful terms (Substack)
What is a populist? Someone dangerous, apparently. A political agitator who appeals to the baser instincts of an (by implication) ignorant mass by promising them improvements to their lives which are unrealistic and therefore illusory. Someone who agitates against certain sections of society, placing the blame for current suffering on this or that sub-group and stigmatising them. A populist is socially divisive, unrealistic, emotional and economically irresponsible. Apparently.
In a commentary yesterday, the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) came to the defence of President Milei of Argentina, who has had more than his share of scorn and opprobrium poured on him by the the chattering and political classes since daring to run for office and even more ludicrously, by winning last year. His crime: being a populist and (worse still) a libertarian one at that. However
“The reforms are starting to take effect, though they demand significant sacrifices from the population. Argentina is enduring a severe recession. Poverty rates are rising, and the public sector—heavily bloated under Peronist rule—has already seen tens of thousands of jobs cut. As a result, unemployment is increasing, and consumer spending has plummeted. Nevertheless, there has been no mass uprising. The population largely supports the austerity measures, and the president’s popularity remains surprisingly high.
This popularity is often mistaken for populism. However, if a populist is a politician who panders to the people, makes unrealistic promises, and downplays problems, then Milei is the anti-populist. He promised voters nothing but “blood, sweat, and tears.” He stated bluntly: “No hay plata”—there is no money. After decades of economic mismanagement, there is nothing left to distribute. During his campaign, Milei prepared Argentina for tough times, yet he was elected with a clear 56% majority.
Another misconception is that Milei is a Latin American Donald Trump. While both share a flair for the dramatic and enjoy basking in each other’s light, they are worlds apart economically. Milei opposes almost everything Trump stands for: tariffs, protectionism, and industrial subsidies. Instead, he champions free trade, competition, and austerity. Unlike Trump, Milei doesn’t hide the fact that these measures are more challenging than state-provided welfare.”
- NZZ 5/12/24 “ Thema des Tages: Der argentinische Präsident ist ein Anti-Populist. Er mutet den Wählern harte Wahrheiten zu” (Translation and emphasis mine)
Currently we are being deluged by Populist leaders and their parties and are to understand that this, as any fule kno, is VERY DANGEROUS. Trump, Milei, Meloni, Orban, Le Pen, Farage, Holland’s Geert Wilders, Germany’s Alice Weidel and others too numerous to mention are all tarred with the same brush of populism and are subject to personal and incessant attacks from the traditional media and relentless defamation by State sponsored broadcasting institutions, our latter day Pravdas.
France’s government collapsed this week when Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale block withdrew their support from Michel Barnier’s fragile government
Barnier is an old-school fiscal hawk and Le Pen is an old-school populist: so while Barnier was desperate to raise taxes and cut spending to get France’s yawning deficits back on a more sustainable track, Le Pen demanded that Barnier (for example) drop a proposed tax hike on electricity, and continue reimbursements for certain types of drugs.
Barnier kept playing ball, making $10.5B or so in concessions, until he drew the line at Le Pen’s last costly demand: keeping pensions in line with inflation. So she withdrew her party’s support, describing Barnier’s budget as “dangerous, unfair, and punitive”.
International Intrigue Daily Newsletter (05/12/24) - which I can’t recommend enough.
Brits will remember that M. Barnier was the odious functionary determined to penalise the UK for having the temerity to want to leave the EU - “old school fiscal hawk” is not an epithet that could reasonably be applied to any French politician let alone one who presided over his own fiefdom in the Kingdom of Brussels (European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services which roughly translated means in charge of competition suppression, oligarchy maintenance and protectionism), but that is for another paper. Marine Le Pen by contrast is an “old school populist” which I understand to mean someone who irresponsibly supports economically unviable programs and makes unkeepable promises. Which is something that traditional, non-populist, responsible and economically literate leaders and parties would never do:
In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.
Eugyppius - Substack “How the German energy transition has committed taxpayers to paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine” (25.10.24)
President Trump is both an old school populist for supporting tariffs and a new school populist for daring to attack the bloated cost structure and bureaucracy under whose weight his country is currently staggering. Victor Orban (who may or may not be a Russian stooge - who knows anymore) is both an old school populist and an authoritarian and an apostate for daring to challenge the orthodox belief system that the Holy Roman Empire EU is sacrosanct and the only protection against war, pestilence and, well, populism. Nigel Farage is definitely an old school populist because he doesn’t like foreigners, a common trait amongst all populists. Actually what they really do is prefer their own people, national culture and taxpayers over others who don’t like them and don’t contribute. However that distinction gets lost in the urgent effort to conflate a political program of national interest with racism, fascism and all the other derogatory isms which misuse and inflation have rendered all but meaningless by those for whom national boundaries are - to misappropriate a phrase that Keynes used to describe Gold - a “barbarous relic” of more primitive times. The modern progressive concept of society requires a “globalist’ approach to managing the world’s populations and redistributing them more efficiently across the planet. The destruction of parochial mores and paradigms of national culture is, in this view, a feature not a bug.
A recent Substack by Scott Alexander Astral Codex Ten
quoted from Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House on the reception of modernist architecture with its soulless and brutal utility by the people who actually had to live in it as follows:
“And how did the workers like worker housing? Oh, they complained, which was their nature at this stage of history. At Pessac the poor creatures were frantically turning Corbu’s cool cubes inside out trying to make them cozy and colorful. But it was understandable. As Corbu himself said, they had to be "re-educated" to comprehend the beauty of the Radiant City of the future. In matters of taste, the architects acted as the workers’ cultural benefactors. There was no use consulting them directly, since, as Gropius had pointed out, they were as yet "intellectually undeveloped". (emphasis mine)
There we have it - the gross conceit at the heart of every current government. We are too stupid, not intellectually evolved enough to appreciate the beauty , purpose, ultimate objective of all those brutal, ugly, degrading, inhuman, economically destructive and evil policies conceived by - largely but not exclusively -socialist intellectuals pursuing utopian ideals with little to no requirement of themselves having to suffer the consequences of their own idiocies.
Populism now means any coherent set of policies whose primary aim is to address real grievances of a large part of the national demos and which contradict the orthodoxy of the entrenched uniparty. Policies that specifically seek to address grievances the root causes of which can be directly traceable to policies espoused by said entrenched ruling elite are treated as heretical and apostatic. Policies that are not only urgently demanded but actually, dare we say it, popular. The current Top of the Pops of these policies are (with outstanding Substack authors addressing the issues as links embedded in them)
Rampant Immigration and Cultural Degradation;
Green Energy and the Decarbonisation fetish;
,Environmental Mismanagement and Confiscation;
Gender Ideology and the promotion of sexual deviance in Education;
Degradation of Education standards;
Modern Monetary Theory and the Inflationary Debt Spiral;
, ,Medical Coercion and Health Management;
Globalisation and Centralisation of Decision making Authority away from the Demos;
,Warmongering whilst concurrently underinvesting in Defence (https://davidmurrin.co.uk)
Anti Family, anti Small Business, anti Farming, anti Christian Orthodoxy (to many to mention, but here are a few of my favourites:
Alan Pentz
If, as Lorenzo Warby points out in his recent post
existing politicians and political Parties leave a “gap” in the political market—such as concerns amongst voters that are not being articulated—political entrepreneurs are likely to engage in market entry to target such gaps.
then populism is simply the exploitation of unaddressed “gaps” in the market for policies and populists political entrepreneurs ready to take on the challenge of coordinating that unmet demand. Honestly, it appears almost impossible for the new class to make a bigger mess of it than the incumbents.
from
“A bombshell new poll -why Reform is surging”.
Fantastic article!
A big thanks to Margaret Anna Alice for posting this in Notes!
I love the premise and am entirely on board with political entrepreneurs.
Lastly, thanks for listing some of my favourite SS writers and some new ones I will check out!
Noel Edmonds on the left, and Tony Blackburn on the right.