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But I did all the right things, Ron DeSantis is entitled to plead. I studied hard. I got married and remained married. I turned down commercial law to serve the republic as a naval advocate. I tormented the cultural left as governor of a major state. The National Rifle Association grade me A+. I offered conservatives the gist of Trumpism, but better-executed. Yet here I stand, forsaken. Why, Republicans, why?
Because lots of voters, right or left, and especially the most engaged, don’t come to politics for ideas. What they crave is belonging. (The belonging that once came from a church, a life-long employer or a homogenous town.) This is why, from a person’s opinion on Israel, you can extrapolate their line on tax, abortion, Ukraine and other miscellany. They have joined a team and taken their beliefs from it as a kind of bundled software. The joy is in the membership, not in the doctrine. No one was going to budge people from Team Trump, not even a purer rightwinger.
The second coming of Trump is a drag. But it is also a chance to pose a question that has been gnawing at me for ages.
Can there be such a thing as a centrist demagogue? That is, a politician who is confrontational and even reckless in manner, but orthodox in content? Is it possible to use the methods of Trump in order to defeat his ends? Or is populist moderation a conceptual non-starter?
I think of Joschka Fischer, the old German green. He anticipated the Trump era in that he was popular because of, not despite, his quotable belligerence (“With all due respect, Mr President, you are an arsehole”) and peccadilloes. His politics, though? Turn-of-the-millennium centre-leftism. He was for Nato, looser visa rules and — quite the facer for his pacifist colleagues — the bombing of Serbia. His gripe with European integration was that there wasn’t more of it.
But then he was the junior in a coalition government. We’ll need another precedent. There is Rahm Emanuel, a middle-of-the-road Democrat with the style of a firebrand. A different Emmanuel — Macron — is even nearer the mark. When the Covid-19 vaccines appeared, he vowed to emmerder those who refused to take them. (The verb translates as something like “upset”, but that doesn’t do justice to its scatological crudeness). He then used a provocative constitutional gambit to force through a pension reform. Ruthless, incendiary methods. Centrist, almost bathetic ends.
Perhaps none of these leaders is quite it. But I sense that liberalism in its present style — apologetic, forever pledging to answer the “very real concerns” about such and such — has run its course.
How might a liberal demagogue act? First of all, he or she would point out, in no coy terms, that big cities foot the bills in their countries. The fiscal transfers these places send to regions that malign them as alien, and that thwart their political preferences at election time, shouldn’t be counted on.
At the same time, there will be no more walking on eggshells around the hard left. Liberalism’s worst error in recent years was to leave the fight against “woke” to the likes of Trump. The pretence that nothing untoward was going on in campuses and offices, that cancel culture was an alarmist fiction, left moderates looking like weasels who were afraid of their own children. (Some Democrats think Defund the Police cost them a larger win in 2020). A liberal demagogue would overcorrect.
If such a person emerges, I will regret ever raising the idea. Civic order depends on at least some leaders observing Marquess of Queensberry rules. I merely ask whether it could, not should, happen. At a time when people are casting around for a tribe (is “family” too Freudian?) this is surely too big an entrepreneurial opening to pass up. Richard Dawkins has mastered confrontational liberalism. Perhaps there aren’t enough centre-ground voters to repeat the trick in the political domain. But Macron won the biggest directly elected office in democratic Europe twice over. And if voters prized their ideas that much, we would be getting ready to say “President DeSantis”.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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