The rise of the populist weakman

Great Debates
1

With the Tory landslide win in Britain yesterday, we have another firmly elected example of what I call the “populist weakman”. As opposed to strongman.

Populist weakmen are people like Trump, Johnson, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro. They openly and unapologetically lie (cites really needed? Trump and claiming to have won the popular vote, Johnson’s various bus lies, Bolsonaro claiming Leonardo DiCaprio paid people to set the Amazon on fire?), and are fragrant cheats (Trump’s “not paying taxes makes me smart”, the Tories renaming a Tory campaign twitter handle as FactCheckUK during a debate, Bolsonaro piggybacking off Evangelical leaders). They have awful policy views (e.g. racism, racism, and racism, respectively).

What’s interesting, though, is that they’re too chickenshit to actually be out-and-out strongmen. Leaders like Putin, Duterte, and Erdogan are genuinely scary, comfortable with violent oppression of segments of their own population, and are fine with starting wars. Trump has a big mouth on this front (“little rocket man”, “lock her up”, 2nd amendment solutions, press “witch hunt”) but is all bark and no bite. Bolsonaro is similar - talks a lot about violence as a solution, but most violence (against indigenous communities, for example) has been a result of his administration’s hands-off approach or its ineffectiveness. Johnson is just a pillock.

So why are people voting for these weakmen? They barely qualify as populist - while they have simple (and wrong) solutions to complex issues that might appeal to some voters, they’re also openly disdainful of majorities of voters (Trump against democrats, while Clinton gained more of the popular vote than he did; Johnson against the non-white, non-Christian, non-rich; Bolsonaro against pretty much everyone who isn’t a fascist longing for the return of the military dictatorship). The media reports on their “charm”, though I don’t see it - and similarly, the same was said of Hitler (e.g. Herbert Richter, cited e.g. Viewpoint: His dark charisma - BBC News - Hitler was reported to be a charismatic leader but plenty of people at the time thought of him as a braying jackass). This is particularly clear in the Bolsonaro case, as he’s openly disdainful of women, the non-white, and LGBTs, in a country with mandatory voting. Mathematically, therefore, significant numbers of people he openly dislikes voted for him in order for him to have gained a majority.

I have a few thoughts: First, the protest vote with institutionalism. Leaders in the US, UK, and Brazil in recent times have all been career politicians or political appointees, and if they had any other careers at all, they were mostly lawyers. Trump and Bolsonaro were the outsiders with no real political background, while Johnson was the most shocking/non-normative choice outside the Monster Raving Loony party. The fact that they’re not strongmen is actually a case of “the system working”, because while the political party and voting systems would accept a Trump, Johnson, or Bolsonaro, they stop short of allowing a Putin or Duterte rising to the top - perhaps because barking is fine, but biting is a step too far. With their parliamentary systems having no real prospect of dramatically changing, the weakmen signature policies (wall, no-deal Brexit, selling off Brazil to multinationals while massacring the urban black poor) aren’t actually being successfully implemented (yet. No-deal Brexit would still happen by default as it currently stands). In the old days of these countries, government was about military/imperial power and influence; economic power; and social control. In modern times in the West, however, only the US is really willing to pull the “War!!” lever, and even then it’s low-scale and undeclared. Only Putin, Erdogan, etc. are more willing and able to declare wars, and do so largely for domestic reasons. In terms of the economy, a great deal of economic powers have been handed over to the private sector, e.g. banks essentially being able to print their own money, and relying on private sector investment to do what historically has been handled by government investment (or didn’t happen at all previously). The fading of nationalism in the West in the globalised modern world also means that the role of government in social control/social engineering has greatly weakened. I think these weakmen gain this protest vote by at least being perceived as willing to upset the social norms, as the last place where the government is still able to disrupt or exert influence. Of course, governments could still be exerting more economic influence (e.g. social spending in Scandinavia is still very high; similarly, the NHS and Medicare spending could be expanded), but voters seem to still be voting for austerity and/or small government. I’d be interested to know why?

Second, of course, the (especially social) media bubble. 21st century government is exponentially more complex than e.g. the interwar period. As such, while government would probably be best left to bureaucrats who have been intricately involved in keeping government running throughout their lives, when voters get involved, the issues are just too complex to expect a voter to fully understand in detail, what with having to juggle their jobs, families, finances, etc. - so the populist weakmen appeal with their simple, clear, and wrong solutions, while the competent opposition (if any exists) offers hard, painful, complex, difficult-to-understand, and possibly still wrong, alternatives. When voters get messages distilled into twitter length, or Facebook posts, or op-ed rants from talking heads from private media owned by only a few individuals, nuance is lost and the complex solutions lose most of the ability to reach voters.

Finally, this is borderline tinfoil-hattery, but: election interference. Russian interference in the US 2016 election is now a matter of record, but it seems clear that they have meddled in UK elections as well - plus the Tories have been slapped down for inappropriate campaign funding. In Brazil, corruption is a consistent factor, plus they use electronic voting which is susceptible to hacking (though, of course, if they were hacked, why would the PMDB or PT allow Bolsonaro to win?). Then there’s also the lower-level interference through influence - Cambridge Analytica and such for super-narrow targeting of individual voters; fake news spread by bots or malicious party operatives; and right-wing parties collaborating with media conglomerates e.g. Fox and Murdoch. Weakman support by the populace might be overstated?

Do you agree that the rise of populist weakmen is real and a trend? Do you agree with my thoughts as to why they succeed, and/or have other reasons to add? How could we reverse this trend and gain competent government?

2

My initial reaction to your theory is that the supporters perceive the leaders as “strongmen”. You make the distinction that Trump / Johnson are not truly strongmen in the mold of Putin or Duarte, but I think that is more a reflection of the societies in the US and UK. For all of his chaotic nature, Trump does seem to respond to some guardrails. Whereas the history, culture, and society, in Russia (for instance) has more of a comfort with actual bad behavior by their leaders. So, again, in the US / UK, these leaders are “our version” of strongmen to their supporters.

3

Along with what **Icarus **said, I think the reason most of these voters vote for populist weakmen simply is because they don’t ***have ***a genuine strongman to vote for. If they could vote for someone who would be even more Trump than Trump, (but much more strongman, savvy and cunning,) they would.

4

No, I can’t say I agree with all of it. Some of what you say is simply false. For example, you claim that Johnson is “openly disdainful” of “the non-white, non-Christian, non-rich”. Part of the campaign to portray Johnson as a racist is based on outright lies. He’s made a few off-color jokes over the years and there’s whining about the fact that he failed to fire a racist columnist while working as editor of a newspaper. In coverage I’ve read the quote that gets people the most worked up is that he referred to women wearing burqas as “letterboxes” (aka. mail boxes). Most people believe it’s wrong for women to be forced to wear burqas, which are both a symbolic and actual manifestation of the inferior treatment of women under Islamic fundamentalism. Why shouldn’t Johnson be opposed to burqas? Why shouldn’t anyone be opposed to burqas? There is zero evidence that Johnson hates the non-white, non-christian, or non-rich. It’s the non-rich who just carried him to victory in the election. London, the city where all the bankers and executives live, voted heavily for the Conservatives in this election, just as London voted Remain in 2016. But the working-class districts in northern England just flipped from Labour to Conservative in enormous numbers, just as they voted Leave. Labour supporters may pretend they’re on the side of the non-rich but the facts say otherwise.

5

The weakman appellation does not add anything.
Populism is an indictment of the current political establishment. Whenever there is a popular position that respectable politicians won’t touch, less respectable politicians rush in to fill the void. In both America and the UK there has been a surge in immigration that has been very unpopular and no popular party support for meaningful restrictions. Thus politicians who despite their myriad of flaws have the reputation for not backing down under elite criticisms were elected.

6

I don’t think they are weak. They are constrained.

I think the appeal comes from economic uncertainty in an age of rising global competition. That’s natural. Further appeal comes from the realization that people communicate on multiple levels. We like to think we are purely, rational creatures. Science proves that’s not the case. We make a decision sub-consciously and then the conscious mind creates an after the fact rationalization/justification for what has already been decided by the brain. It’s fascinating actually. So the emotional appeal and manipulation that certain people successfully employ to gain political power is a not surprising. Reading what these folks say makes many shake their head in the utter ridiculousness and inanity of what’s said. However, you get a crowd of people are a large audience listening to the words and a different type of connection is made.

I think that the appeal has to be understood in different terms than what is comfortable to accept superficially.

7

Look no further than posts #3, #4, #5, #6, for the answer to the OP.

Carefully phrased reasoning and disclaimers aside, the common theme is that nativism is on the rise worldwide, and it’s reflected in election after election. It’s being fed by a vicious and determined campaign by nation states (i.e. Russia and China, primarily) that stand to benefit from the chaos of destabilized democracies.

Evidence suggests that things will continue to get worse. Especially if leading world powers like US, UK, EU, don’t find ways to effectively reverse/limit the kinds of populism that has been described as appealing to the more base instincts of unthinking mobs.

8

Meant to say London voted Labour, obviously. Almost everywhere else in England voted Conservative.

9

Disagree with the OP on almost every aspect.

The OP mirrors the bewilderment of the losing opposition to the electorate voting the way the ‘should have’ voted.

The problem is that the opposition position simply does not coincide with the electorate - the opposition have somehow convinced themselves of the rightness of their positions and developed a logical construct that excludes the possibility of voting any other way than that they believe is the one true way.

That logical construct is largely based upon perceived truths developed by the opposition which are frequently fed by their own interpretation of moral and ethical concerns - hence their view is that any thinking person could not vote any other way.

In the UK Labour frequently used images and stories of hospital waiting times, homelessness, racism and wealth jealousy - the 1% top rich and wealth share.

In the end the losing opposition became self-entitled to those votes but the reality is they have become so polarised they did not actually get into the heads of the electorate - probably through hate.

Now we have plenty of Labour activists who are blaming the electorate for ‘voting the wrong way’ when the fact is it is the political party who left the centre ground and dumped their own advisers who expressed concern.

This was not an election that was about racism, it was simply a party that aimed at a target of its own choosing without ever once looking down the sights.

10

Thank you all for your input!

casdave, I’m not in or from the US, UK, or Brazil, so I’m not in the opposition of any of these elections. I’ll happily concede that the opposition in the elections of Trump, Johnson, and Bolsonaro all ran poor campaigns with terrible leadership. I can also see how voters can identify with the platforms of the Republicans or the Tories compared with the alternatives - Trump’s proposed (and subsequently ignored) infrastructure plan for example, and Tory budgeting over Labour’s for example. (Brazilian political parties are more about personalities than party policies, so I’ll leave out Bolsonaro here) What I don’t get is why, of everyone in the running, people like T, J, and B got the final nod. In UK terms, Rory Stewart for example seemed to have traditional Tory beliefs but in a sane package and an apparent desire to unify, and if there’s anything to the strongman appeal, Stewart’s life story is more impressive than most fiction. If T, J, and B came to power by default through the opposition actively losing, rather than by the winners winning, then that trend itself is worth looking closer at, surely?

**Quicksilver, octopus, ** and puddleglum, the rise of nativism and emotion-based voting may very well be it. I left Rio de Janeiro just before the governor sent in the army against the favelas and put a general temporarily in charge of state security, and a bunch of my local friends were firmly in favour because the security situation was just so bad that they felt extreme solutions were worth trying. One of the less level-headed entered politics as a Bolsonaro cheerleader. In Bolsonaro’s election all the major party candidates were discussing policy and (if applicable) continuing party legacies, while Bolsonaro was all about extreme solutions to public safety and economic decline, which wouldn’t hold up in rational debate but which caught headlines and might appeal to the frustrated.

If nativism and economic insecurity are the cause, what would be a way forward? T, J, and B are hardly likely to reduce the problems. Right-wing policies have been good for the stock market but not the masses, with wages stagnant and inequality rising. Perhaps the Overton Window currently only allows for right-wing populists.

Icarus and Velocity, I was curious why we haven’t been seeing western strongmen like the eastern ones, so I looked up Gen. MacArthur as he would have seemed to be a more appropriate strongman leader than Eisenhower. But in the Wikipedia article for the 1948 election it says that MacArthur “was especially popular among conservatives” although he didn’t get the party nomination, so maybe there’s something to it? OTOH while I lived in Brazil there was a movement to start a genuine Military political party, but it failed (creating a new party in Brazil requires a minimum number of signatures in IIRC at least half the states - a hard bar to clear). While there are votes for the halfwit with nostalgia for the dictatorship period, apparently there weren’t votes for voting the ex-military in general in.

ITR champion, that link was paywalled for me. Here’s some links with some of Johnson’s offensive statements in the past:

For disdain for the poor, see cutting funds for firemen while buying water cannons that couldn’t be used and spending millions on a bridge nobody wanted while mayor, as example, while I would say that saying single mothers are the cause of criminal youth is a coded attack on the poor as well. Still, if you want me to find a cite of Johnson flat-out saying “I don’t care for black people”, I don’t have one. Denigrating stereotypes as in the cites above dehumanise people the same way, if not degree, as Trump’s treatment of latinos and immigrants of “shithole countries”.

11

The answer seems to lie in the definition of the Overton Window theory itself:

The masses seem to think that a rising stock market is an accurate reflection of people’s confidence in the economy. It’s no longer the case. The stock marker reacts to news through algorithms and automated trading. Good news about a possible trade agreement with China today sends the stock markets into positive territory without so much as an iota of what the speculated trade agreement will look like and who it will favor. The way the stock market reacts is artifice that most people don’t understand and a lucky handful manipulate and profit from.

The solution seems to be, as is so often the case, to educate the masses. Which is never easy and always takes longer than we thought because people prefer a comfortable easy lie rather than an inconvenient and complex truth.

12

Do you have any evidence that the bankers and executives in London voted Labour? There are also a lot of working class people in London.

13

I’m reminded of the (oft-misunderstood) quote by Henry Ford, “The customer is always right.” By which, Ford did not mean that a business should always cave in when a customer is abusive or wrong, but rather, that* businesses must adapt to what customers want, rather than trying to cajole customers into adapting to what businesses want.* In other words, if a customer wants to buy a red automobile because that’s his favorite color, then you should sell him a red automobile, rather than try to nag him into buying a blue automobile. If you keep trying to sell him a blue automobile when he’s already made clear that he wants a red automobile, then he’ll get irritated and simply go buy a red one from a competitor instead of from you.

By what you said, Labour essentially committed the same error (and, to some extent, some Democrats in the USA.) Rather than giving voters what they wanted, they tried to cajole voters into voting according to what ***they ***(the political party) wanted or felt was right. And then they were surprised that the voters did not do as told.

14

Except you can’t simply give voters what they want when what they want isn’t based on objective fact. casdave doesn’t seem to get that. He seems to think if enough people believe a thing, then that thing becomes true.

We’ve both gone over this before so I’m not going to say anything more elaborate, but yeah, that’s pretty much it. The public could have voted that the Sun and planets move round the earth, and casdave would say that we have to respect that. Evidence of retrograde motion of planets is dismissed as elite arrogance. Planets revolve around us because the people have declared it so.

15

Yes, the reason they can’t do most of the actual horrible things real “strongmen” do is that our government has a complex series of “checks and balances” to prevent it.

Like when I hear people complaining about politicians “not getting anything done”, that’s a feature of our modern democracy. Not a bug. You know who “got a lot of stuff done”? The Nazis under Hitler. So did Stalin.

Simpleminded people like the idea of a “strongman” as someone who “knows the answer” and can just make everything right if only so and so can get out of his way.

16

Yes, I agree with the OP on most points. Johnson and Trump are weak strongmen (don’t know much about Bolsonaro, he’s so nasty that I actively look away - thank Dog he lives where I don’t have to watch him). I believe the paradox is that they would not have won the elections they have if they were strong strongmen. If they had ever been strong they would have accomplished what they wanted long ago by proper means: but what is it that they want? Recognition and adulation, mainly, they do not care about the content of the policies they implement, except the racist and the hateful bits, I believe - which again shows they are and must be weak. They would not have needed lies and cheating and racism (in itself a sign of weakness and insecurity when it comes from a privileged white man) had there been any strength in them.
My worry is that those weak strongmen are strawmen for hidden strongmen, and those might be very strong and powerful indeed. I think Murdoch, Putin, Xi, the Silicon Valley elite, Robert Mercer, some Arab potentates, hard to pin down with precision. They don’t need to shout like Trump & Johnson, so one feels a bit tin-foil-haty when writing those accusations without proof. And if this accusation were true then I would like to know in how much Trump&Johnson know they are strawmen and how much they care. I believe they have a suspition, hence the aggression, but they repress it.

17

I disagree with your premise. I think a lot of nations just got ‘lucky’ in the sense that their wanna be dictators are incompetent.

The law and justice party in Poland is competent. Ergodan is competent. Putin is competent. Orban is competent.

Trump, Johnson, etc. are incompetent.

The GOP will rubber stamp any assault on democracy that the GOP president tries to push. Luckily Trump is too incompetent to truly take advantage of this fact. The next GOP president may not be as incompetent as Trump is. I don’t know enough about whats happening in the UK to comment.

I really think we just ‘lucked’ out. But the person the GOP puts up in 2024 or 2028 may not be nearly as incompetent, but may hate democracy as much as Trump does.

18

This is what I’ve been saying for a while. Democrats like to criticize Trump for being ignorant of things and changing his mind a hundred times, when in fact they ought to be glad about it. They should fear a future Republican who is like Trump, but far more savvy/cunning and has far fewer problems.

19

In the US nearly 70% of voters are either women or non-whites. Its hard to believe that fascism is popular enough to win 51% of the vote in that scenario.

But yeah I agree. Especially with the war on terror, it would be possible to curtail civil rights. Especially if the GOP packs the appellate and supreme court with yes men.

20
  1. I agree there. Which actually includes a lot of uncertainty how much any of them really seek to be strongmen. In which regard among others I find it particular stretch to compare Johnson to Bolsonaro. Johnson wants to set up an ‘illiberal democracy’ like populists in Hungary (where the term was coined) or Poland to take examples closer to home for the UK? That’s just an accusation with nothing much behind it that I can see.

People in executive positions like to get their way. That’s been true of basically every modern US president, and US president is a constitutionally powerful position compared to heads of govt in parliamentary systems, though not necessarily stronger than presidents in all other democratic presidential systems. Anyway, lots of criticism of particular US presidents as power hungry would be ‘kings’ is partisan. It’s a matter of fact that that accusation was often thrown at Obama for example, though one can hold the political opinion that it was a totally unfair accusation against Obama but a totally fair one against Trump.

IOW it’s far less than 100% clear those three guys, and again particularly Johnson, have any more desire to get their own way politically than ‘norm following’ predecessors people accusing them of it happen to be more in sync with politically. And anyway the key question is their ability to undermine checks and balances. Which Trump hasn’t shown himself effective at all in doing even assuming that’s his actual intention, Johnson hasn’t done at all (in a much shorter time) and Brazil with all due respect to it is not a longstanding stable democracy to be compared directly to the US or UK.

What if a future US president had an organized agenda to undermine checks and balances like in Hungary and Poland? Then they might well run into a lot more opposition even in their own party. Or not, but it’s pretty much hypothetical.

  1. I agree with this in general but minus the economic determinism part. I think it’s pretty easy to show in the US and elsewhere that appeal of populist/nationalist parties* doesn’t track that exactly with economic factors. That’s part of it but it’s more complicated. Uncertainty and effects of globalism definitely. That’s it’s so specifically $'s and cents economic, fuzzier I think. Which is a problem left leaning parties run into trying to counter it with a conventional redistributionist, more command economy type agenda.

*or in case of GOP, rise of a more populist/nationalist faction in the party, but it remains to be parsed how much of that is Trump’s idiosyncratic personal appeal, and how much the next group of would be GOP leaders sound like Trump. The elected GOP is afraid of criticizing Trump, not clear if they’ll be afraid of criticizing Trump ism after Trump.