_The Wealth Report: Historian Niall Ferguson discusses the dynamics behind populism
To find out what else is worrying Professor Ferguson read my full interview with him in the The Wealth Report. We will also be publishing more video content over the coming weeks.
Transcript
Knight Frank: One of the big achievements of the social network has been its perceived ability to help the rise of populist movements around the world. I would like to discuss populism in a little bit more detail, because it’s everywhere at the moment, but the interpretation of what it actually means varies hugely. Last night, I was watching Steve Hilton’s show on Fox News. His interpretation, it was quite folksy, it was about the common man rising up against the elite, it was about family values and working together. At Heathrow yesterday, I bought a book by a chap from Princeton University called Jan-Werner Müeller. To him, populism is almost the opposite, it’s anti-plurality, it’s anti-debate, often dangerous and largely based on false premise, he says, and its proponents of a sole voice of the people. Almost like the will of the people is often used when people are talking about Brexit. I mean, which view is right, and should people, especially those who might be labelled an elite, be worried about it? Is it part of the war on wealth?
Niall Ferguson: I think both of these views are in fact consistently each other, it’s just that one is the view of somebody sympathetic to populism, and the other is a view of somebody hostile to it. Populism is essentially a revolt against elites. It comes in two flavours though, and this is often the source of the confusion. The populism of the right, and the populism of the left. (TC: 00:10:00) It wasn’t just Donald Trump who sprung into political prominence in 2016, so did Bernie Sanders, who, had the rules been the same for the Democratic party, would have been their nominee for the presidency. So, first of all, I think we need to recognise that these are two different things. The populists of the right tend to say, ‘Your problems are all due to immigration, the free trade and corrupt financial elite.’ The populists of the left tend to say, ‘Your problems are all the fault of corrupt financial elite.’ The populists of the right say, ‘If you could restrict immigration and impose tariffs on imported goods, and imprison the corrupt financial elite, everything would be better.’ The populists of the left say, ‘Just tax the corrupt financial elite.’ So, the policy programmes are quite different, and that means that populism can look more or less alarming, depending on where you sit. Most people who write for the liberal media are much more scared of the populism of the right, and they often confuse it with fascism, even though it’s actually quite different.
If you are a member of the corrupt financial elite, you’re probably more worried about the populism of the left, because it’s much more single-mindedly focussed on you. I think when you look at the cultural dimension of right-winded populism, it’s about more than just economic policy. It is about the sense of cultural change that is averse to the interests of the populist. Populists at the UK at the time of Brexit, in the US at the time of the Trump vote often said things like, ‘We increasingly feel like strangers in our own country.’ So, like populism on the right last year was a backlash against immigration, but it was also a backlash against multiculturalism. The populism of the left tends not to go in those directions. It is much more a derivative of socialism, you might say it’s a, kind of, folksy socialism. So, when people like Steve Hilton say that populism is about family values, or traditional values, in some ways that is how the populists feel, that they’re harking back to the good old days when America was great again, or the good old days when Britain was great. You can do that either in a right-wing way, or a left-wing way, depending what you feel nostalgic for. If you’re nostalgic for Britain before 1973, Britain before it joined the European Economic Community, actually you’re nostalgic for socialism, because Britain was extraordinarily socialist in the 1960s. I remember it well.
Nostalgia for the past in the American context is a more right-leaning nostalgia often, a nostalgia for a, kind of, Reagan era of greatness, unless you’re a Bernie Sanders democrat, in which case you’re nostalgic for the New Deal, or the Great Society.
KF You talked about Donald Trump there, I mean, as a British person living and working in the US, you probably an interest in domestic and international viewpoint. Do you feel his election has been as bad as some people predicted? Should the rest of the world be so worried? I mean, reading your column in The Sunday Times, you seem slightly split. Sometimes you imply that the sceptics aren’t giving him enough credit, and ultimately, he’s just rude, not bad. Then this weekend, you said his tax reforms, which will probably be his main achievement so far this year, actually have disastrous consequences.
NF: Well, I don’t think my commentary has been inconsistent, it’s just ambivalent. I think there has to be room in a complicated world for ambivalence. I was not a Trump supporter, there were other candidates I would have preferred as the Republican nominee, but you couldn’t really argue with the success of Trump’s campaign in channelling the grievances and frustrations of many Americans, enough in fact, to win the election. You couldn’t really pretend that Hilary Clinton was some kind of angel in human form, who deserved by right of birth, or at least marriage, the presidency. I think ambivalence is warranted here. I can’t say I have a high regard for Trump as an individual, but I can see why Trump voters went for him. Last year I said it was a choice between Snafu and Fubar. If you voted for Clinton, you got the situation normal, all effed up. If you voted for Trump, you ran the risk that you could get effed up beyond all recognition, and many people voted for Trump as a gamble, to disrupt a status quo that they felt was fundamentally inimical to their interests and their values. I sympathise with that impulse.
There is a huge amount wrong with the political establishment in this country. I also sympathise with the British voters who decided to vote for Brexit, because I think the European Union performed really dismally in the last ten years or so. It screwed up its handling of the financial crisis, it screwed up its handling of the Arab revolutions, and it’s screwed up the refugee crisis. I think many English voters and Welsh voters, not so much Scottish voters, took the view that the way it was going was rapidly downhill, and it would be better to get off. That wasn’t my position, but I sympathise with that reaction. I think the European Union in some ways deserved it. So, my commentary on the events of the last couple of years has been ambivalent. I get why people are frustrated. The status quo sucked in a great many ways. I think it’s unfortunate that a, kind of, bait-and-switch has happened. They’ve voted for one thing, and they’ve ended up with Donald Trump and sundry alumni of Goldman Sachs. They voted for taking back control in Britain, and now they find themselves in a negotiation about whether Britain should be Switzerland or Norway, you know, in what way should Britain accept European regulations.
So, there is an element of disillusionment inevitable in any populist backlash, it’s always disappointing because you can never really get what you want with populism. More or less anything that’s promised is going to fall short. If you restricted immigration to the United States completely, if you impose tariffs on Chinese imports to punitive levels, the effect on the ordinary American household would be to make them worse off, not better. That’s the problem with populism. In the same way, I think we’ve just more or less calculated this week that the cost of Brexit so far, per week, is roughly the same amount that the leave campaign said Brexit would make available to spend on the National Health Service. So, once again, bait, switch.