The limits of political pain: 1

Not particularly fond of Janan Ganesh’s writings, but he does ask an excellent question in the following column that looks at how Trump has had to waver in regard to the shutdown in the US…

Core to populism is a high-minded disdain for material comfort. To prise one’s country from transnational overlords might entail some cost, says the candid demagogue, but it is bearable and perhaps even team-building. Nothing thickens the national stew like shared adversity. This spartan ethos is at work when people claim to prefer a more homogenous but slower-growing society to a diverse and dynamic one.

It is rampant in Britain, where many voters desire the hardest of Brexits, however many cabbages they have to grow themselves. And it lulled the White House in December, which trusted Americans to put up with open-ended inconvenience for the sake of tighter borders and, in time, a more familiar nation.

…

I just wonder whether voters mean a word of it. We can all declare ourselves game for hardship in service of a larger cause. Events rarely oblige us to act on it. When they do, and the costs register, it is not clear that people are any less sensitive to material harm than they were before 2016, or any less ravenous for politicians to blame. Populists are right that lots of voters thirst for an unspecified yesteryear. The question is how much economic and practical disruption they will endure to achieve it. To the extent that populists overrate this tolerance for pain, they are politically vulnerable.

I’ve had similar thoughts. And it strikes me that when one looks at actual political activity in states – and how that functions, the idea of polities bearing much pain seems very very much adrift from reality. One doesn’t have to, though perhaps one should, consider the very real anger expressed during the crisis here when austerity bit deep and hard (and one should never forget how that austerity continues to work its way through the system). No one, I imagine, would argue that that came close to destabilising the state, but it has left Fianna Fáil and Labour shattered in its wake. Even today FF is compared to its previous heights remarkably weak. And Labour may have been dealt a blow that will restrict it to small party status for the foreseeable future. And that’s before we get to the attitude of voters more broadly. Sure, they delivered knock out blows to parties, but their attitude to the structures and to government was one of unwillingness – entirely correctly by the way, to bear economic pain.

Why this would be otherwise in the US or UK is an interesting question – and in the former the broad antagonism to the shutdown suggests that there are limits to the scope of conservatism in attempting to reshape the state or remove services, and in the latter that the manner in which Brexit progresses may in and of itself create massive antagonism if the effects are as bad as quite moderate projections suggest.

The Blitz spirit has always appeared to me to be misleading. My grandmother who was a nurse in Birmingham told me how she and my mother as a baby and her own parents hunkered down under a table in their kitchen during air raids. She worked in a hospital with numerous casualties from the armed forces. There was no rose-tinted spectacles on her part about what that meant, no nostalgia for simpler better times. Those times were awful but they got through them and there was no appetite to return.

I compare and contrast mentally then and now, populations who have (largely) never known that sort of visceral fear, that level of hardship in daily life in regard to food and goods, and I can’t se how that ends well.

And this strikes me as plausible:

The idea that life is more than convenience and gross domestic product is still populism’s emotional edge over arid technocracy. But the point is to keep it as an idea. Test the reality, and populists might find their cherished masses are a terrible disappointment to them.