The collapse in August of Italy’s latest
governing coalition underscores once more the unexpected power of
populism across the nations of the West. Central to this latest roiling
is the desire to sideline Matteo Salvini, leader of right-wing populism,
and to replace the latest government with a new coalition of
anti-populists and left-wing populists led by Prime Minister Guiseppe
Conte. Left or right, in Italy—as in Britain and elsewhere—populism of
some kind continues to write history’s script in one unexpected country
after another.
Immigration, economic inequality, and
out-of-touch elites are among the most commonly cited engines of this
transformative force. But what if there’s another common denominator
that’s gone unnoticed?
In every case, the signature of the new
populism is a particular kind of masculine authority figure who makes a
series of characteristic promises: to clean up the messes left by
others; to take care of “his” people by protecting them; and to call off
the bullies in any form they appear—illegal immigrants, rapacious
elites, menacing foreign nations, and so on. Such has been true of
Salvini, for starters, who ran on a protection platform promising
safeguards against criminals, especially criminal immigrants. And such
is also true of other new populists—among them Donald Trump.
The polarized reactions that Trump
elicits amount to one kind of evidence that something new is afoot in
today’s populism. Since Inauguration Day, the “resistance” has treated
Trump more like an abusive stepfather than an elected head of state.
Then there’s his base, whose loyalty in the face of one transgression
after another is famously unflagging. Both facts, and others, point to
the truth that for many Americans, Trump—like Salvini and others—is
obviously a placeholder for something else.
A few pundits have recognized as much. As Ralph Nader told a writer for Politico
in the run-up to the 2016 election, “Trump says: ‘Anyone who attacks
us, I will blow them out of water.’ People want this reassurance, this
father figure.” George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science at the
University of California, Berkeley, noted similarly:
“Trump is the ultimate strict father. It’s in everything he does. It’s
in his body language.” Or as “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams remarked about Trump
to CNN: “The thing about Dad is that Dad is kind of an a-hole, but if
you need Dad to take care of some trouble, he’s going to be the one you
call.”
Trump, in sum, is not just any populist,
but one who appears to supporters as a paternal authority. This
overlooked truth also explains their unflagging loyalty to him. Trump,
to them, is no mere president, but a protector who has their best
interests at heart—which is why perpetual attempts to unseat him by
denouncing his transgressions will never rock his base.
Nor is Trump alone in functioning as a
super-daddy in a world where more and more children and former children
grow up without an ordinary father in the home. Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orban, to name another, is ubiquitously referred to in the press
as a “father figure” by admirers and detractors alike. An essay in Politico once called “Hungary’s Freudian Political Fight” a contest between two “father figures”—Orban and George Soros.
Like Trump, Salvini, and Orban, other
figureheads of the new populism also emphasize control and
tradition—“daddy” issues. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the Law and
Justice Party in Poland, pledges to restore “moral order.” As two critics observed in The Washington Post, that party, too, promised a “father of the nation figure.”
Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil likewise projects “the image of a stern and austere father figure ready to bring order to the house,” as NBC News put it. “Brazil needs an angry father figure to teach everyone a lesson,” explained a lawyer to The Wall Street Journal. Like others riding the masculinist wave, Bolsonaro was elected on promises of restoring order across the board.
Then there is the most obvious example:
Russia. In Vladimir Putin’s case, too, popularity has more than a little
to do with the blasted domestic landscape shared by many millions of
people post-1960s—especially young people.
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