How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism. Ece Temelkuran

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СКАЧАТЬ based on its own merit; the undecided, as well as many an adversary, can furnish the movement with confidence through their own hesitations. After all, there’s nothing wrong with saying the establishment is corrupt, right? By keeping its ideological goals vague and its words sweet, the movement seduces many by allowing them to attribute their own varying ideals or disappointments to it. What is wrong with being decent and real anyway? The vagueness of the narrative and the all-embracing we allow the movement’s leader to create contradictory, previously impossible alliances to both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The leader, thanks to the ideological shapelessness of the movement, can also attract finance from opposite ends of the social strata, drawing from the poorest to the richest. Most importantly, as the leader speaks of exploitation, inequality, injustice and consciousness, borrowing terminology and references from both right- and left-wing politics, growing numbers of desperate, self-doubting people, and a fair few prominent opinion-makers besides, find themselves saying: ‘He actually speaks a lot of sense. Nobody can say that a large part of society wasn’t neglected and dismissed, right?’

      ‘I don’t understand how they won. I’m telling you, lady, not a single passenger said they were voting for them. So who did vote for these guys?’

      This was the standard chat of taxi drivers in Turkey after the AKP’s second election victory. As a consequence, ‘So who did vote for these guys?’ became a popular intro to many a newspaper column. Clearly neither taxi drivers nor the majority of opinion-piece writers could make sense of the unceasing success of the movement, despite rising concerns about it. After hearing the same question several times, I eventually answered one of the taxi drivers with a line that became the intro to one of my own columns: ‘Evidently they all catch the bus.’

      After the Brexit referendum, many people in London doubtless asked themselves a similar question. If I’d been a British columnist, the title for my column might have been ‘The Angry Cod Beats European Ideals’. Among the groups who voted Leave in the referendum were Scottish fishermen, who have obsessed for many years over the fact that European fishermen were allowed to fish in Scottish waters, as well as pissed off about an array of other European things that are of next to no consequence to Scotland. Similarly, in countries such as Hungary and Poland where right-wing populism is in control of the political discourse there has always been a ‘condescending Brussels elite’, or ‘the damn Germans’, who stand in the way of better lives for ordinary men, as well as the nation’s ‘greatness’.

I am aware that what I have written above might seem like the condescending remarks of a cosmopolitan, unreal person, and that there is, of course, a real and solid sense of victimhood behind all of these new movements: many of their members are indeed the people who catch the bus, and who have seen the price of their fish and chips rise. It would therefore, as Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says, be inconsequential mental gymnastics for intellectuals to analyse these movements only ‘psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics’.** And I agree with him on the fact that ‘the unceasing class war that has been waged against the poor since the late 1970s’ has been intentionally omitted from the narrative, and carefully kept outside the mainstream global discussion. Moreover, these right-wing populist movements can, in fact, also be seen as newly-built, fast-moving vehicles for the rich, a means for the ruling class to get rid of the regulations that restrain the free-market economy by throwing the entire field of politics into disarray. After all, there is certainly real suffering, genuine victimhood behind these movements.

      However, they do not only emerge from real suffering, but also from manufactured victimhood. In fact, it is the latter that provides the movement with most of its energy and creates its unique characteristics.

      In Turkey, the manufactured victimhood was that religious people were oppressed and humiliated by the secular elite of the establishment. For Brexiteers it is that they have been deprived of Britain’s greatness. For Trump voters it is that Mexicans are stealing their jobs. For Polish right-wing populists it is Nazis committing crimes against humanity on their soil without their participation and the global dismissal of the nation’s fierce resistance to the German invasion in 1939. For Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) it is the ‘lazy Greeks’ who benefit from hard-working real Europeans, etc. The content really doesn’t matter, because in the later stages it changes constantly, transforms and is replaced in relation to emerging needs and the aims of the movement.

      And every time the masses adapt to the new narrative, regardless of the fact that it often contradicts how the movement began in the first place. In Turkey, the Gülen movement, a supranational religious network led by an imam who currently lives in Pennsylvania, was an integral part of Erdoğan’s movement, until it was labelled terrorist overnight. The same AKP ministers and party members who had knelt to kiss the imam Fethullah Gülen’s hand were, less than twenty-four hours later, falling over themselves to curse him, and none of Erdoğan’s supporters questioned this shift. Doubtless Trump voters did not find it odd when the FBI, Trump’s very best friend during the probing of Hillary Clinton’s emails scandal, all of a sudden became ‘disgraceful’ after it started questioning whether Trump’s election campaign had colluded with the Russian government. Instead, Fox News called the FBI a ‘criminal cabal’ and started talking about a possible coup, confident that Trump’s supporters would follow the new lead, feeling, as their leader did, victimised by the disrespectful establishment. Once the identification of the masses and the movement with the leader begins, the ever-changing nature of the content of the manufactured victimhood becomes insignificant. And when the leader is a master of ‘truthful hyperbole’, the content even becomes irrelevant.

      But how, one might ask, did the masses, dismissing the entirety of world history, start moving against their own interests, and against what are so obviously the wrong targets? Not the cheap-labour-chasing giant corporations, but poor Mexicans; not the cruelty of free-market economics, but French fishermen; not the causes of poverty, but the media. How did they become so vindictive towards such irrelevant groups? Why do they demand respect from the educated elite, but not from the owners of multinational companies? And why did they do this by believing in a man just because he was seemingly ‘one of them’? ‘This is almost childish,’ one might think. ‘It seems infantile.’ And it is. That’s why, first and foremost, such leaders need to infantilise the people.

      Infantilisation of the masses through infantilisation of the political language is crucial, as we shall see in the next chapter. Otherwise you cannot make them believe that they can all climb into an imaginary car and travel across continents together. Besides, once you infantilise the common political narrative, it becomes easier to mobilise the masses, and from then on you can promise them anything.

      Sezi promises Leylosh an ‘evening surprise’ to persuade her to go to school. I ask what the surprise is. ‘There is no surprise, but she won’t remember probably,’ Sezi says, before laughing devilishly. ‘And if she does, I’ll just make something up.’

* Karl Jaspers, Preface to Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken, 1951).

† Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987).

‡ Megan McArdle, ‘“Deplorables” and the Myth of the Single-Issue Voter’, Bloomberg, 19 September 2016.

§ Fiona Hill, ‘This is What Putin Really Wants’, Brookings, 24 February 2015.

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