Elite failures and populist backlash

The impact of elite failures on anti-establishment feelings is complex and indirect.

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

One of the most dramatic political developments in recent decades has been the worldwide surge in support of populist movements. This includes Trump and MAGA, but also Nigel Farage and Brexit supporters in the United Kingdom, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and many others.

Although there are significant differences between these movements, they are united by an angry rejection of “elites” and the “establishment”. This includes career politicians (“drain the swamp”), mainstream media (“fake news media”), public-sector workers (“the deep state”), and the expert class.

“The people in this country,” declared Michael Gove in the UK’s Brexit debate, “have had enough of experts… saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” Trump was characteristically more direct: “The experts are terrible. Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have.”

Condemnatory and Sympathetic Explanations

What underlies this populist backlash and the “crisis of expertise” with which it’s often associated? To simplify greatly, among non-populist pundits and analysts—that is, those who seek to understand populism without endorsing it—one can distinguish two styles of explanation.

One is wholly dismissive and condemnatory. It treats anti-establishment sentiments as pathological, the product of demagogues manipulating and mobilising a half-gullible, half-deplorable public with disinformation, post-truth, and emotional rhetoric.

Another approach is more sympathetic. It views populist sentiments as partly responding to genuine failures by elites and establishment institutions.

There’s a traditional left-wing version of this explanation, which treats right-wing populism as a misguided expression of genuine frustrations created by capitalism or neoliberalism or wealth inequality or austerity or other things socialists dislike.

However, there’s also a broader version which points to failures by technocratic elites and establishment institutions across the board—in areas as diverse as foreign policy (e.g., the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars), the financial crisis and bank bailouts, immigration, and pandemic management and public health. As Nate Silver (linking to Sean Trende) observed in a recent post on how “the experts have got their comeuppance” in Trump’s re-election, “It hasn’t exactly been the best century for the expert class.”

Previously, I’ve endorsed a version of this sympathetic analysis in the context of debates about “misinformation.” Whereas the dominant frame for understanding misinformation treats it as a kind of societal disease infecting a credulous public, I think it’s typically better viewed as a symptom of institutional distrust—i.e., the fact that large segments of society distrust established knowledge-generating institutions—which is partly responsive to the objective flaws and failures of these institutions.

Yglesias’s Alternative

In ‘Have experts really gotten worse?’, Matt Yglesias challenges the sympathetic analysis. He points out an obvious problem with connecting populist backlash to elite failures: the surging popularity of populist sentiments appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, but elite failures are not. In fact, there is little reason to think such failures are worse than in the past. Given this, something else must be driving anti-establishment sentiments. Yglesias suggests it is not the objective failures of elites but their growing embrace of cosmopolitan and socially liberal values that many voters dislike.

He writes,

“The big thing that has turned critical masses of voters against educated elites isn’t the failings of those elites, however real they may be - it’s the elites’ tendency toward cosmopolitan attitudes.”

In some ways, this objection is persuasive. Although it’s difficult to systematically rank the frequency or severity of elite failures across time, they’re not obviously worse than in the past when populist movements were less successful.

Moreover, one could strengthen this critique: not only does populist backlash not seem to track the severity of elite failures across time, but such failures are typically less severe than those of the counter-elites celebrated by populist movements.

For example, there were undoubtedly many problems with policies and messaging throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In many Western countries, this included failures to weigh or in many cases even consider trade-offs, bad and biased epidemiological forecasts, tendencies to peddle “noble” lies, a suspicious overlap between what the “science” said and what progressives wanted, an absurd overconfidence in communicating this “science”, and an excessive willingness to censor or demonise any dissent from establishment orthodoxy.

This was all bad and in some cases appalling. But compared to what? Focusing just on America, where the trend towards anti-establishment attitudes is very pronounced, populist counter-elites like RFK Junior have devoted their lives to peddling preposterous anti-vax falsehoods about humankind’s most benevolent invention. And contrary to much mythologising, it’s at least not obvious that more respectable counter-elites like Jay Bhattacharya were, on average, less wrong during the pandemic.

Similar points could be made about mainstream media. Outlets like the New York Times and the BBC are deeply flawed in many respects. Although even their critics acknowledge that they typically get narrow matters of fact right, they select, omit, frame, package, interpret, and comment on those facts in ways that support establishment narratives. This is bad—but, again, compared to what? The thriving world of alternative media, from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson to Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, can’t even get the narrow matters of fact right.

And then, of course, there are the flaws of populist leaders like Trump or Bolsonaro or Farage themselves. If you are—quite reasonably—bothered about the frequent dishonesty and incompetence of society’s elites, why would you support more incompetent and dishonest demagogues?

In other words, given that elite failures are plausibly no worse than in the past and less severe than those of the counter-elites celebrated by populists, it’s implausible to trace populist backlash to elite failures.

Although superficially tempting, this analysis misrepresents how elite failures impact voter attitudes. The fact that this impact is neither simple nor direct doesn’t mean it is mythical.