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Roger Kimball: Rise in Populism a Democratic Reaction to Overreaching Managerial State

Brexit supporters
Brexit supporters / Getty Images
June 8, 2017

The rise of populism in the United States is not the result of demagoguery—it's a democratic reaction to an overreaching managerial state, according to the New Criterion editor and publisher Roger Kimball.

In a lecture given at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday, Kimball cited last year's Brexit and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory as positive examples of populist movements that seek to place the independent sovereignty of their state above the establishment of a global society overseen by a managerial system of government that seeks to blur the geographical and social boundaries between nation states.

"The question of sovereignty takes us to the heart of what in recent years has been touted but also tarred as the populist movement," Kimball said.

Kimball said that populism is closely related to democracy. He noted, however, that democracy has almost always been a positive term while populism is often associated with demagoguery and an uninformed voter base.

The charge was leveled against both the populist movements in Britain and the United States by those who favor the idea of global society over that of independent nations. Kimball cited examples of Barack Obama warning British citizens not to leave the European Union and the subsequent labeling of Brexit supporters as "angry, xenophobic, and racist" by those who wished to remain in the E.U. as an attempt to quash democratic reactions to globalism. Similarly, he called Hillary Clinton's labeling of Trump supporters as "deplorables" condescending.

"In the present context, the seemingly unbreakable association between populism and demagoguery has less to do with any natural affinity than it is a cutting rhetorical characterization," he said. "While democracy is a eulogistic word, populism is wielded less as a descriptor than as a delegitimizing term. Successfully charge someone with populist sympathies and you get free and for nothing both the implication of demagoguery and what was famously derided as a 'deplorable' and 'irredeemable' cohort."

Kimball also said that since the rise of the managerial state in the 1940s, bureaucracies in the United States and Europe have become uncountable to the people whom they ostensibly represent.

"This separation of the real power of society from the economy and political life makes the managerial elites all but untouchable," Kimball said.

In his conclusion, Kimball pitted globalism against the view that the world is a collection of independent sovereign countries that although interacting with each other regard the care, safety, and prosperity of their own citizens as their first obligation.

"This is the traditional view of a nation state. It is also Donald Trump's view. It was what licenses his remark of putting 'America first,'" he said.