Roots of Populism

The populist and nationalist movements that seemed to coalesce following the collapse of the Soviet Union have been portrayed as continuation of long-growing discontent in response to rising inequality over the last fifty years. In Age of Anger, Indian author Pankaj Mishra describes a much longer path, from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to current manifestations of rejection against government authority.

The Age of Enlightenment, lasting roughly from 1620 to 1780, challenged Christianity’s legitimacy as the sole source of tradition and faith in an unchanging natural order ordained by God. The Enlightenment challenged that perspective, introducing scientific thought and reason as means of understanding a world which, through human intellect, could improve the existing order.

As the Enlightenment advanced understanding of natural processes, the industrial revolution changed the way people lived. Mishra describes the period as “one of the most extraordinary events of human history: the advent of a commercial-industrial civilization in the West and then its replication elsewhere… an ethic of individual and collective empowerment spread itself over the world, as much through resentful imitation as coercion, causing severe dislocations, social maladjustment and political upheaval.” Industrialization generated great wealth and great inequality.

A period of revolutions, anarchist bombings and assassinations followed through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russia’s Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. An anarchist attacked investors at the Paris Stock Exchange in 1886. French President Carnot was assassinated by an anarchist in 1894. Italy’s King Umberto was assassinated by an anarchist in 1900. U.S. President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901. And Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, setting the stage for World War I.

The legacy of late 19th and 20th century imperialism set the stage for conflict in the developing world: “the division of the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence, the equally arbitrary creation of unviable nation states, unequal treaties with oil-rich states.” Nationalists in Asia and Africa – Ataturk, Nehru, Mao, Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah – explicitly aimed to “catch-up” with the West. “Socialist as well as capitalist modernists envisaged an exponential increase in the number of people owning cars, houses, electronic goods and gadgets, and driving the tourist and luxury industry worldwide…leading their countries to convergence with the West and attainment of European and American living standards.” These countries experience some of the world’s greatest inequality to this day.

The political resurgence of nationalism “shows that resentment – in this case, of people who feel left behind by the globalized economy or contemptuously ignored – remains the default metaphysics of the modern world…. And its most menacing expression in the age of individualism may well be the violent anarchism of the disinherited and the superfluous.” The inequality that is the rallying cry of progressives worldwide today had its roots established 400 years ago.

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