The death of Silvio Berlusconi signals a passing of the torch from first-wave populists to second
Dominic Green
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Pimps, prostitutes, party people, and plastic surgeons are in mourning across Italy following the death of preening populist Silvio Berlusconi. The four-time prime minister was 86, though his teeth, hair, and girlfriends were much younger. We shall see his like over and over again.
Berlusconi is credited, if that is the word, with turning politics into a burlesque, a titillating comedy. He was a born entertainer: His first career was as a singer on cruise ships. He made his fortune in the media, but the seed money for TeleMilano, Italy’s first private cable TV company, came from construction, which everyone knows is the most honest business in Italy. His rise as media monopolist was supported by Bettino Craxi, secretary-general of the Socialist Party. Berlusconi died the third-wealthiest person in Italy. Now that’s what I call socialism.
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June is the cruelest month for populists. Berlusconi has gone to the great “bunga bunga” party in the sky. Donald Trump is indicted. Boris Johnson is out of British politics. Benjamin Netanyahu clings on, but he is a professional politician, not a mouthy amateur. Is the age of the right-wing populist over?
Not a bit. From here, it’s populists all the way down, regardless of which wing they’re flapping. Populism is a mood, not a program. The mood in the Western democracies is grim. There is no reason to assume it will improve soon. Since the glory days of Thatcher and Reagan, the Western model of political economy has rested on a three-legged stool: liberal, democratic, and capitalist. In 1990, the three seemed synonymous. The media still recite compound nouns such as “liberal democracy.” The intellectuals still recite the mantra of “democratic capitalism.” Meanwhile, the three legs have decoupled from the stool. Hence the hard landing.
Western capitalism existed before the nation-state. It probably appeared first in the medieval city-states of Berlusconi’s homeland. None of them were democracies. Capital was always international, because capital seeks value. That sets it in tension with democracy, which requires borders. If you want to have “democratic capitalism,” you need a state that will set limits on capital. Americans consider that undemocratic. So did Berlusconi, who liberalized Italy’s economy. He helped himself pretty liberally, too. Like the old American saying goes, “10% for the Big Guy.”
As for liberal democracy, Berlusconi may have won more elections than any other Italian prime minister, but Mussolini held the office for longest. And Il Duce won it as the people’s choice, just like Hitler did in Germany. Anyone who thinks “illiberal democracy” was invented by Erdogan of Turkey, Orban of Hungary, or, if you really want to go there, Trump of Amerikkka, has not been paying attention. Liberal democratic systems frequently produce illiberal outcomes, including ones that, as in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, annul the democracy along with the liberalism.
No one talks about the other two permutations, “liberal capitalism” and “capitalist democracy.” But these might actually be real. The United States is a capitalist democracy where politics is driven by private donations, but the voters have become disenchanted with liberal capitalism. The European Union is a liberal capitalist protectorate, operating behind a Potemkin democratic process.
Berlusconi was a capitalist democrat and a liberal capitalist. We can say the same of Netanyahu and Boris Johnson. We can probably say the same for Trump, too. His tariffs and subsidies were a backstop for capitalist democracy. If they were autarkic, they aspired to turn the internal market of the United States into a liberal capitalist autarky. Only in America!
Populism, the British political philosopher John Gray has written, “is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political blowback from the disruption of society produced by their politics.” If Berlusconi, who rose to office overnight in 1994, was the pioneer of populism, it’s because Italy was the first Western democracy to achieve the managerial incompetence, ideological incoherence, and barefaced corruption that everyone else now enjoys. If populists are what Marshall McLuhan would call “hot” emotionalists, it is because they share their publics’ disgust at the “cool” technocrats as they coolly feather their nests.
The passing of the first-wave populists will not mean an end to populist politics. We are now witnessing a second, reactive phase, an attempt to reset a game that has run beyond control. This takes two forms, suppression and impersonation. Trump, Johnson, and Netanyahu are all entangled in legal troubles of their own making, just as Berlusconi, who claimed to be the victim of “manifest judicial persecution,” spent most of his time in office fending off the courts.
Meanwhile, their opponents, producing the political equivalent of artificial antibodies, mimic the policies that threaten them. This blatant falsity confirms the core populist claim: The powerful will do anything to retain power. And that assures a third phase, even more belligerent and populist than the first. The anti-populists of the Swamp and the Blob see this incoming. When they degrade liberal process in order to save “our democracy,” they hasten the advent of illiberal democracy.