I guess there’s nothing to do about my reluctance to write this post other than to write my way through it.
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Across the West, the political elites have become estranged from their native populations. This process began in the years after the demise of Communism, and it accelerated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The causes are manifold: Cheap money during a long period of low interest rates, ideological radicalization, the lack of clear political alternatives, the cancerous growth of state bureaucratic systems, and the social consequences of globalization within the political classes all played a role. Probably we have yet to understand the causes fully, but the upshot is that our elites have been pursuing crazy policies that are obviously detrimental to their own populations for decades now. They had a head start in wreaking their destruction because the West had accumulated a lot of prosperity they could burn through before anyone began to feel the pain of their idiocy, and also because of various structural advantages, including their control of broadcast media.
As postwar television democracy succumbs to the internet and as it is increasingly clear that the fat years are behind us and the future portends nothing but ever leaner years as far as the eye can see, an organic opposition has taken shape. This is the populist backlash, and in each national context it has had different political consequences, although the movement itself is broadly similar everywhere. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz spent 16 years attempting to establish “illiberal democracy” before they were voted out in May. In the United States, where Trump has succeeded in loosely aligning all three branches of government behind his agenda, the MAGA movement is at the height of its influence. In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage’s Reform and more recently, Rupert Lowe’s Restore have all but eclipsed the Tories. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) continues to accumulate support despite withering opposition from the cartel parties and the state itself.
The establishment has reacted to the backlash very strangely. We would expect elites to adjust their politics and adopt elements of the populist program to defang their opponents. Instead, they have ceded incredible ground by doubling down on the very policies that caused the backlash in the first place. Part of this is because we are governed by stupid and parochial elites who don’t understand what is happening to them and why. Another part, however, is probably that elites have assessed the new opposition and decided that this is a passing moment that they can either manage or outlast.
I’m not sure they’re right, but more and more I’m also not sure they’re wrong. Since sometime last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the limitations that beset populist political movements everywhere they have arisen. These limitations aren’t anyone’s fault; for the most part, they’re expressions of where these new politics come from and what they are. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t real and potentially also very bad for those who want to live in reasonable, sensible countries with reasonable, sensible politics.
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First, a brief Eugyppius primer on how politics works so we can understand what is happening: All states, whether nominal dictatorships or nominal democracies, are managed by some kind of oligarchy. In openly autocratic systems, the oligarchy ideally aims to depoliticize the populace. The business of running the state (the “politics”) happens out of sight, while the rabble see to things like the harvest, factory production, and buying cheap plastic garbage from Temu. This works only so long as the oligarchy can ensure basic prosperity, but even then the danger of a depoliticized populace is always that a counter-elite will arise and begin filling the great vacuum in people’s heads with their own political ideas. In Western democracies, ruling oligarchs pursue a contrary strategy of mass politicization, whereby the people are bombarded all the time with the most obnoxious political slop for the purpose of recruiting them into useful formulaic ideologies intended to motivate optimal voting behavior.
As we’ve become less prosperous and the internet has made the informational environment harder to control, popular sentiment in Western democracies has gone off-reservation. Millions have been politicized in ways contrary to oligarchical preferences. That’s what the populist backlash is, and that’s all that the populist backlash is. I typed that in bold because it is very important to understand: We are talking about people using the democratic processes available to them to confound oligarchical control of the state—mostly by voting for measures, politicians, and parties that the oligarchs don’t want. Populist protest voters don’t have armed militias; they lack robust activist cadres; their organization is heavily dependent on social media; and in most cases outside the United States, they are also still in search of elite backers. (One major purpose of the feverishly manufactured political hysteria directed against “the extreme Right” in Germany is precisely to scare away economic and other elites who might otherwise feel tempted to support the AfD.)
The populist backlash is an extremely eclectic movement, consisting of everyone whom the establishment has alienated. There are some leftist and old-school progressive types; in Germany, there are some nostalgic former SED supporters; there are libertarians and anarcho-capitalists; there are hard-line nationalists; there are tradesmen and prosperous middle-class businessmen; there are religious values people; there are Gen-Z nihilists who want to see everything burn; and that is just the beginning. What emerges from this colorful blend is generally some kind of classical liberal political message combined with a rejection of the most hated elite policies of the past generation, particularly climatism and mass migration. Crucially, the populist backlash consists of residual elements of everything and everyone that our urbanite, prosperous, upper-middle-class establishment has left behind. The average morally hysterical Green voter can be a pretty obnoxious person, but her opposite in the populist opposition has abundant capacity to be a problem in his own way (the specific ways of which I will leave my readers to imagine for themselves).
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The eclectic nature of the organic populist movement causes two major problems: First, once populist parties emerge, they have to remain open to all comers. It’s basically impossible for them to target their messaging or to moderate their program in any way at all, however advisable that might be. There is no real control from the top, and any efforts by party leadership to impose strategy or direction threaten merely to feed rival parties or split the movement. Second, it’s pretty clear that populist political candidates cannot govern without sooner or later alienating significant constituencies, because these very different people don’t all want the same thing and no single set of policies will satisfy everybody. Even governing effectively will alienate the nihilist chaos voters. Present elites clearly believe that if the AfD ever does get into government, they will succeed primarily in cutting themselves down to size, and this is why they are more relaxed about a potential AfD victory in Sachsen-Anhalt than we might’ve expected them to be.
We also have to consider the other side of this question—namely, the kinds of people who end up in the leadership of populist parties, the kinds of people who run for office on populist tickets, and the kinds of people who make their careers in this novel milieu more generally. They, too, have been reverse-selected. The best of them have defected from the establishment for reasons of personal conviction, but in Germany they are joined by others whom the traditional parties excluded or expelled—often for good reason. A great many opportunists who would have had to spend years and decades working their way up the ranks of the Social Democrats or the Union parties used the AfD as an opportunity to skip the line and make it big right away. The populists have been able to recruit a few incredibly talented people, but if we are honest, they have also inevitably filled their ranks with people who are inclined to various sorts of corruption, who don’t have any sincere political beliefs at all, and who are mainly interested in personal advancement. The traditional parties have some of these types too, but they are undeniably more heavily concentrated within the populist backlash.
Media attacks on populist movements are unjust, exaggerated, and malicious, but it is very often these two factors—the eclectic nature of these movements and their reverse-selected leadership—that provide the kernel of truth at the center of many a hyped-up scandal. I could list many specific examples, but I’ll refrain because each such scandal becomes a point of enormous sensitivity for those in the movement, and it’s not worth alienating valued readers over this. To defeat constant press attacks in the absence of any sophisticated media organs of their own, those in the movement construct and defend what are equally absurd inversions of the legacy media line. On state television, the AfD is derided as a fascist party bent on destroying the Federal Republic, and so to supporters, it must be the most democratic party ever and the only political force that has any hope of saving Germany. In these conditions, internal critics are subject to purity tests and ostracized even when they are correct, and the party or its leaders have been guilty of serious missteps. In-group signaling becomes so much more meaningful when it is expressed in favor of the openly inadvisable and the clearly bad.
The populist parties are thus subject to substantial undirected drift, because (summarizing now) they are open to all comers, their leaders cannot control the program without risking splits or spinoffs, and criticism from within is routinely sidelined in favor of undying loyalty. This loyalty is offered to lionized figurehead leaders (as in the case of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) or to a general political brand (as in the case of the AfD), which in turn is so powerful that it eclipses the political candidates themselves. Establishment parties opportunistically vary their image by foregrounding specific political personalities, whether Friedrich Merz or Andy Burnham or Kamala Harris. Many of these people are certainly idiots and liabilities, but if and when they fail to work out, these same parties can pull another rabbit out of the hat and try again. The populist movements, meanwhile, appear frozen and inflexible, locked into their brands and figureheads. I fear this means they have a real expiration date, because while the Greens can f-ck up massively, alienate everybody, and come back in eight years with a different palette of candidates and a different message, the AfD is always going to be the AfD, and I have no idea what MAGA is going to be after Trump.
These movements are hostile to anyone proposing any kind of political strategy, which means that despite their growing popularity, they end up punching substantially below their weight—and not only in Germany. This is not only because they are essentially adrift and incapable of acting strategically in the first place. The main reason is that the populist backlash cultivates a kind of pre-rational myth about their historical inevitability. Many supporters assume that there is on the horizon a turning point, a moment of change, a Wende, which will absolutely come about so long as it is not subverted by insufficient purity and which will coincide with the moment they take power. Then they will expel the malefactors, right the wrongs, re-migrate the migrants, tear down the wind turbines, and turn the clock back to 1996. (This is another inversion of the establishment’s slander that they will enact another kind of change and turn back the clock to 1933). I guess it is unsurprising that what is ultimately a voters’ movement has constructed electoral victory as the end goal, when in fact it can only ever be a very uncertain first step.
Their thinking betrays, among other things, an absolutely incurable underestimation of their left-progressive opponents and a corresponding overestimation of their own strength. They hate the people in charge, and they assume everybody else feels the same way, when in truth they are large but nevertheless still minority movements, the electoral success of which will depend upon their ability to win over outsiders. As soon as they win, they will begin to bleed support, while most of the bureaucracy will remain arrayed against them, and the temporarily disempowered oligarchy will merely have to play a waiting game. Once they win, they will need the one thing they are most congenitally opposed to having—namely, some kind of plan and strategy for the way forward.
Reading this over, it all sounds a little harsh, and I admit I have fallen victim to some pessimism these past months. The best I can do to put a happy face on this is to insist that the populist movements, for all their flaws, nevertheless represent a genuine threat to the establishment—although for the reasons I’ve outlined, it is a threat the establishment still thinks it can manage. Whatever happens, our politics won’t be the same after populism, and even if these early movements are folded into mainstream politics, slowly strangled, or meet some other imponderable fate, further opportunities will open on the other side, and new movements will emerge.
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This article was originally published on June 20, 2026, on Substack.