Losing Alignment: Why have establishment politics become so destructive, immoderate and self-defeating?

Western liberal democracies long preempted popular discontent via careful political management and the manipulation of popular opinion. For some reason they can't do that anymore.

I want to write speculatively about a big problem that has been bothering me for a while.

Consider the dual shock of Trump’s electoral victory and Brexit in 2016, the triumph of Trump’s reelection just last month, and the repressive, authoritarian turn politics have taken in Germany specifically and in Europe more generally. All these things are an expression of or a reaction to rising political discontent among ordinary people. This discontent is fuelling populist political movements across the West that our governing elite are increasingly unable to control.

My radical thesis is that this should not be happening. Our rulers ought to appease the restless masses by preempting their political demands – not because they are happy benevolent paternalistic overseers with our best interests at heart, because it is in their interests to do so.

In the United States they should’ve dialled back the racial egalitarianism and the transgender nonsense as soon as it started to generate serious pushback, and they should’ve taken steps to restrict migration before Trump ever came within reach of the Oval Office. Here in Europe, they should be winding down climatism and also taking any number of steps to close the borders. Yet they are either not doing these things, or they are not doing them hard enough.

As popular sentiment drifts away from them, the elite here in Germany if anything have grown more radicalised. The United States witnessed a similar dynamic well through Biden’s presidency – one that ultimately cost the American establishment not only the presidency and the legislature, but also all initiative for the next two years at least. In older and more pacified Europe, our rulers mostly retain command of their governments, but they are losing control of the political dynamics nonetheless.

“eugyppius,” my critics will say, “you are being very naive.” (My critics love to call me naive.) “The elites want to deindustrialise Europe. They don’t care if it makes people mad. They want to import a new client class. They don’t care if it inflames the populist opposition.”

Even were I to grant these arguments, I would find them insufficient. It’s no good to pursue a programme of deindustrialisation (assuming that that goal makes sense for anyone) if you end up getting thrown out of office before it can be realised. It’s no good to import clients from the developing world if you create a populist opposition that disempowers you before these clients can yield any meaningful political dividends.

At the end of the day, we must remember that the ruling elite and their political parties adopt policies as a means of staying in power and winning elections. The content of these policies is strictly secondary. Yes, enriching oneself and one’s allies also matters; appeasing important factions and constituencies is important. If you lose control of the political apparatus, though, there’s no point. The advantages that climatism and migrationism once promised our rulers are no more; these lunacies now merely inflame the political opposition and attenuate elite control. That is a great problem.

In what follows, I want to explore why our rulers cannot moderate their programme sufficiently to silence the opposition. I’ve aired some of these theses before in the context of specific political irrationalities, but here I want to sketch a more general theory of what is going on. Understanding this phenomenon is very important, because it is at the core of what is wrong with our countries.