There is an irony the ancients understood well and that our own age, distracted by its many urgencies, prefers to overlook. Every movement born against something carries in its cradle the very shape of the thing it fights. Contemporary populism is the living proof of that quiet law. It has won. It polarizes elections from France to Austria, it governs or helps to govern in Italy and Slovakia, it leads the polls in Nigel Farage's Britain, and yet it is still described, by friends and enemies alike, as little more than a long list of negations. Anti-elite, anti-globalist, anti-technocratic, anti-immigration. Everything populism refuses fits neatly on a pamphlet. What it affirms, however, has not yet been written.
And it is precisely here that its deepest weakness lies, because to be against something is still to linger in the antechamber of politics, in the stage of protest, in that adolescent moment when one knows perfectly well what one hates and almost nothing of what one loves. The man who merely reacts does not govern, he only fumes. The adversaries of populism, however decadent they may be, possess something it has not yet earned, namely a worldview. Liberalism answers the question of who man is, declaring him an autonomous individual, society a voluntary association, authority a guardian of rights and property. Socialism answers in the same register with the sign reversed, seeing man as a social being and power as a great redistributor. Both are mistaken, yet they are mistaken with method. Populism, for now, is right only by instinct, and instinct, broadly speaking, is a compass that works only while the weather holds.
The usual answer the movement offers is nationalism, and here one must tread carefully, dear reader, because a conceptual trap lies in wait. Nationalism, essential as it is, amounts not to a worldview but to a vector, a direction, a pronoun that tells us on whose behalf politics is done without ever explaining what politics that might be. The proof is written into history itself, which is generous in supplying it. Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam married nationalism to communism. National Socialism married it to the most abject of racial theories. Liberal nationalism dressed it in civic clothing. Now, if the same word can serve masters so different, then it is master of nothing at all. To call oneself a nationalist is to announce whom one serves, not what one intends to build, and building, after all, has always been harder than swearing allegiance to a flag.
If populism intends to speak on behalf of the people, it must then explain how that people is to rule, or it will simply repeat the very vice it denounces. On this point the critique that Alain de Benoist directs at liberal representative democracy seems to me accurate, even where I distrust some of his remedies. Modern democracy, he argues, tends to hollow itself out from within, preserving the electoral shell while the marrow of power migrates toward a narrow class of operators. The elections remain, the parties remain, the institutions remain, and the citizen, sovereign on paper, is gently demoted to spectator of a play whose script was never shown to him. Real power drains away toward bureaucracies, courts, and central banks that no one elected and no one can remove, which is exactly the question Nigel Farage once flung in the face of the Brussels machine when he asked who had voted for men whose very names Europe did not know. Oligarchy, in this design, need not abolish democracy at all. It is enough to occupy it from inside, the way a hermit crab settles into a shell that was built by someone else.
The alternative de Benoist proposes points toward frequent referenda, local decision, and forms of direct democracy, and new technologies such as blockchain voting promise, in theory, to make that participation easier. I confess, however, that this is where technological euphoria tends to stumble over the old question, the one the Greeks were already asking in the agora and that no application will ever resolve, namely under what criterion, and with what weight, the citizen ought to vote. For to multiply consultations without cultivating virtue in the voter is merely to accelerate the error, and an accelerated error, let us admit, is still an error, only faster.
From there populism slides onto another terrain it will have to learn to walk with more care, that of human rights. When the movement criticizes the language of rights, it usually does so for a concrete reason, sensing that abstract rights discourse tends to tie the hands of communities that wish to defend their borders and preserve their cohesion. The mistake is to confuse the critique of abstraction with the rejection of dignity, when in fact the two are opposites. What must be fought is not the dignified man but the generic one, the rights-bearing subject without a face, without grandparents, without memory, that floating citizen whom international documents adore precisely because he belongs nowhere and therefore inconveniences no one. True dignity is always embodied, it comes with an accent, with soil, with the dead buried in some particular churchyard, and it is this situated dignity, rather than the other, ethereal kind, that a mature politics ought to defend.
This leads to the deepest question of all, which is anthropological before it is political. Sooner or later populism will have to define what it means by the human person, instead of borrowing the definition from its adversaries. Liberals and socialists answer the question of man with variations on a single horizontal reply, seeing in him an individual, a consumer, an economic unit, a bearer of rights. They are not entirely wrong, merely mediocre in ambition, since they picture man lying down when he was made to stand upright. A loftier answer would describe the human being as a historical and inherited creature, formed by family, memory, nation, and civilisation, and oriented toward something that surpasses him. In the European case this means the Graeco-Roman and Christian inheritance set atop the nearer matter of the village and the baptismal name, and whoever ignores that verticality ends up, without noticing, offering the people a soul the size of a spreadsheet.
The same verticality applies to our relation with nature, and here the dominant environmentalism offers the perfect example of what is to be avoided. The ecology in fashion is managerial and accountancy-minded, crowded with acronyms and metrics, treating the river as an asset and the forest as a carbon sink to be optimised by some consultant in a necktie. Ludwig Klages warned long ago that modern man destroys nature first within himself, reducing it mentally to quantity before reducing it to rubble. A rooted ecology would walk the opposite road, remembering that the forest of Brocéliande belongs to the myths of King Arthur and that Mount Pelion keeps the centaurs, and that a lake inhabited by a Lady of the Waters is no longer the same lake of a sustainability audit. Roger Scruton gave this affection a name, calling it oikophilia, the love of home, and the simple truth behind the erudite word is that nobody defends with tooth and nail what he loves only in the form of a report. Here, I suspect, Chesterton would have smiled, for he held that a thing must be loved before it is loveable, which is the whole of conservatism compressed into a paradox.
There remains the temptation that haunts every doctrine that discovers its own roots, the temptation to turn rootedness into nostalgia. Populism cannot promise the voter a return ticket to the 1950s, first because the past has no entrance, and second because the world of today is made of artificial intelligence, cryptography, and a technological acceleration that no nostalgic decree will reverse. Guillaume Faye christened the fusion of ancient values with new technology archeofuturism, and the formula has its merit, provided one remembers that the future is not the enemy of tradition but the very ground on which tradition will have to prove it still breathes. A right that loves the past yet fears the machine is condemned to lose both at once.
And so I arrive, dear reader, at the point that interests me most and that, for that reason, I have saved for last. If populism ever builds its theory, it will have to keep a virtue that nearly all its rivals lack, which is flexibility. Liberalism still prays to the global free market while multipolarity laughs in its face. The Greens still embrace an abstract environmentalism that suffocates the very Europeans they claim to protect. The socialists still defend the welfare state while geopolitics forces Europe to spend on defence what it once spent on comfort. Each of these creeds died of loyalty, clinging to its dogma the way a drowning man clings to an anchor. Populism, if it wishes to last, will have to be firm in its principles and light in its certainties, which is, I admit, the most difficult balance in all of politics, and perhaps in life as well.
There is, however, an objection that no honesty of mine permits me to hide, and it came from the very readers of the essay I am rewriting here. This entire vertical architecture, built of myth, civilisation, and inheritance, runs the risk of committing the exact sin it denounces, by concentrating power and decision within a small circle of the enlightened who speak on the people's behalf without ever explaining through which concrete mechanisms the people would actually decide. One criticises technocracy only to propose, in the following paragraph, a vanguard of sages who, seen from a distance, look rather like another technocracy, merely better dressed in antiquity. The institutional question, that tedious and indispensable matter of who decides what and how one replaces whoever decides, remains unanswered. And a worldview that answers everything except this is not yet a political theory. It is a beautiful liturgy waiting to become one.
Perhaps that is the fate of every young movement, to discover that winning was the easy part. Populism has force, it has numbers, it has the wind of the age at its back. It lacks only what hurried victors throughout history have always lacked, namely the knowledge of what to do on the morning after the triumph. For defeat carries the consolation of clarity, since one knows against whom one has lost, whereas victory without doctrine is the loneliest of conditions, the one in which the throne has been won before anyone decided what the throne is for. And the people, that patient sovereign in whose name so many give speeches, will in the end ask the only question that matters, wishing to know whether it was invited to govern or merely to applaud, on its feet, while others govern in its place.
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