ANNE APPLEBAUM: So I think this is a really profound insight. And it’s not really an insight about liberalism, per se. It’s an insight into something else, which is economism, which is a word that’s used to talk about one of the directions that liberalism went in the 20th century, but especially after the Second World War, in which — the idea was that all of politics is really about prosperity and wealth. So it’s not quite self interest, it’s about making people wealthier.
And actually, our politics in the last several decades, up until a few years ago, were divided that way. We were divided into a party that wanted a smaller state and a party that wanted a bigger state, one party that wanted more welfare spending, one wanted less. But these were all arguments about economic well-being, one way or the other. And one of the insights, not just of populists — but one of the insights, for example, of George Orwell, was that often those arguments can become trivial to people, or unimportant.
Orwell wrote a famous essay in — I think it was published in 1941. It was at the time that “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s book, was published in Great Britain. And he did a very short review, which is worth reading, in which he describes the book and so on. And then he says at the end, the thing about this horrible book is that I also see its appeal. So here we are in Great Britain — and he was a socialist, of course, and we’re all worried about things like hygiene and water quality, and access to birth control, which was an issue at that time.
And he’s offering people something completely different. And the expression he uses is guns, flags and loyalty parades. So he’s offering people a way of being part of a spectacle. And the rest of us are over here arguing about things that can often seem trivial. And it is, of course, not necessary for liberalism to be about for futile things, or for those to be the main political arguments. But in recent years, they often have been.
I mean, in a way, the height of this was really the era of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. They were both excellent leaders. They were both excellent speakers. And they were both policy wonks who absolutely believed that if they could just get people in the same room and have them talk to one another, they would soon see the light, and rational conversation would solve all problems, and what people really wanted was better policies to deliver better things.
And that worked for a while, until it didn’t. And the insight of Orwell, and the insight of a number of autocrats, and the insight of some — in other parts of the political spectrum, too, actually, I might even include Bernie Sanders in this — is that people also sometimes want something more. They want to be part of a movement. They want to be part of a big change. They want to be on the cutting edge. They want to be marching in the parade. And when liberalism shrinks to being only about economics, that’s what can happen.