Nils Karlson’s Reviving Classical Liberalism Against Populism, a part of the Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism series, seeks to explain why humanity is tempted to exchange liberalism for populism, why that’s bad, why we’re doing it anyway, and show us how to change course. Karlson, the founder and CEO of Sweden’s Ratio Institute, sets himself an ambitious task for this short book.
Populist dynamic / Karlson’s theory is that populism recurs because ambitious politicians discover that the politics of resentment is a good way to build coalitions and win elections (or wars). Populism is superficially appealing because people are tribal; they seek a “mutual sympathy of sentiments” with high-status members of their tribes rather than logical and moral consistency across tribes. There are few human qualities as universal as the temptation to blame outsiders for one’s tribe’s problems.
Left-wing and right-wing populists develop the politics of resentment by identifying “the people” (the good guys), “the elite” (bad guys), “the others” (more bad guys), and key themes. A left-wing populist narrative, for example, might tell an anti-capitalist story (key theme) about how out-of-touch neoliberals (the elite) are exploiting the working class (the people) on behalf of big business (the others). A right-wing populist narrative might tell a nationalist story (key theme) about how academics (the elite) are betraying “native” citizens (the people) and embracing migrants (the others).
Karlson lays out different permutations of this dynamic in a table early in the book. It occurs to me that it wouldn’t be that hard to create a ChatGPT (or Mad Libs) of the table to generate different versions of the us-versus-them story suitable for publications ranging from Jacobin and Mother Jones to the Claremont Review and American Conservative.
Populism is a winning formula for aspiring autocrats. Karlson outlines this using a “12-step program” borrowed from Larry Diamond’s 2019 book Ill Winds:
- Demonize the opposition as illegitimate and unpatriotic.
- Undermine the independence of the courts.
- Attack the independence of the media.
- Gain control of public broadcasting.
- Impose strict control of the internet.
- Subdue other elements of civil society.
- Intimidate the business community.
- Enrich a new class of crony capitalists.
- Assert political control over the civil service and the security apparatus.
- Gerrymander electoral districts and rig electoral rules.
- Gain control of the body that runs the elections.
- Repeat steps 1–11.
It is a mistake to think populists are anti-democratic. As Karlson explains, “Populists are … usually not against electoral democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy.” They tend to be “ultra-majoritarian,” he writes, seeing constitutional constraints not as checks and balances that safeguard essential liberties and systems but as obstacles to the volonte general (general will) devised and implemented by sinister interests.
Why don’t people learn and avoid falling prey to populism? One reason is that populists shift the blame for their failures onto those who try to clean up the messes populist governments make—for example, international organizations like the International Monetary Fund. We have seen this from the populist left several times: the New Deal and the Bretton Woods System, for example, did not fail because they were structurally unsound but because (in the left’s telling) sinister interests dismantled them.
Karlson traces the modern manifestations of populism to the development of critical theory, a truth-rejecting mode of inquiry rooted in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Critical theory combines the politics of resentment with a hermeneutic of suspicion to create an interpretive framework that has elevated the ad hominem attack from a logical fallacy to a sophisticated method. Where “liberals want the state to be neutral with respect to the good: the interpretation and exploration of what a good life entails are up to the individual, not the state,” populists and other anti-liberals claim to know how everyone else should live and have no qualms about enlisting the state on behalf of their righteous vision.
Liberal response / So, what should liberals do? Reviving Classical Liberalism Against Populism is more than an academic inquiry; Karlson seeks to rally the troops and devotes his final few chapters to this strategy:
- Expose the populist strategies and their consequences.
- Defend and develop liberal institutions.
- Embrace and promote the liberal spirit.
- Develop liberal statecraft.
“Rational arguments,” he explains, “and institutional improvements will not be enough.” Classical liberalism excels in appealing to logos, meaning it is cerebral and abstract rather than emotional and vivid. It does not articulate a specific vision of what a liberal society will look like because we don’t know exactly what free people will figure out and want to do. That isn’t persuasive enough to voters in a democracy. So, classical liberals must do a better job communicating with pathos and ethos, appealing to voters’ sentiments and norms.
Karlson gave a presentation on the book (and his other work) at the 2024 Public Choice Society conference. The framework he develops has much explanatory potential, particularly if scholars bring it into conversation with Douglass North’s 2005 Understanding the Process of Economic Change and Ed Lopez and Wayne Leighton’s 2012 Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers. I expect this book to affect how Phil Magness, Ilia Murtazashvili, and I approach W.H. Hutt’s post-constitutional political economy in a book we are working on.
Like many Springer and Palgrave–Macmillan titles, Karlson’s book could have benefited from more careful copyediting. (For instance, the 12-step program I outlined above is misnumbered in the book.) Still, overall, it is a clear and easy read that will leave the attentive reader with a lot of answers to the “What do we do now?” question.
Unfortunately, autocracy is on the rise. Whether we take the left fork or the right, populist paths lead to serfdom. Books like Reviving Classical Liberalism Against Populism help us understand why and what we can do about it.
