We Are the People, Who Are You?

What explains the swaggering, illiberal populists that bestride the world stage today? A crisis of liberalism or the coming of age of modern majoritarianism?

- Mukul Kesavan

After Brexit and Trump, 2016 is widely seen as an annus horribilis for liberalism. If you define the liberal ideal, as The Economist does, as “…open economies and open societies, where the free exchange of goods, capital, people and ideas is encouraged and where universal freedoms are protected from state abuse by the rule of law…”, this has been a bad year. John Gray, an English philosopher who foretold both Brexit and Trump, agrees with the definition but unlike the house magazine of laissez faire liberalism, he welcomes its decline. Gray sees the liberal faith in progress as a dangerous delusion and he welcomes disenchantment with the pieties of neo-liberalism as a necessary first step towards a new realism.

It’s hard, though, to find a generalisation that fits all the illiberal populisms that rule the world today. How to reconcile the alleged causes of Brexit or Trump’s triumph (and possibly Marine Le Pen’s next year) with the ascendancy of far-right politicians in central and eastern Europe, figures like the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, in Hungary, or the Polish PM, Andrzej Duda? Even more problematically, what do Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan, Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and their electorates have in common with their western counterparts?